A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [221]
This Chinese visitor is in fact fictional, a latter-day Gulliver invented by the satirical writer Oliver Goldsmith in his book The Citizen of the World, published in 1762 and designed to show the British how ridiculous their behaviour must seem to the rest of the world. The war was the Seven Years War between Britain and France, a drawn-out battle for trade and territory fought in Europe and Asia, Africa and America. The ‘hideous land’ turns out to be Canada. Goldsmith makes it very clear that Britain and France are despoiling the legitimate inhabitants of the countries they first explore and then exploit.
From Canada the war moved south, and this buckskin map, drawn on the skin of a deer, shows part of the area the British moved into as they captured the line of French forts from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi, as far south as St Louis. It was made around 1774 by a Native American – one of the people who had, in Goldsmith’s words, been in possession from ‘time immemorial’ – and provides insight into the thirteen years between 1763, when the British threw out the French from the American north, and the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776.
The Seven Years War left the British government in charge of the lands to the west of the existing British colonies, from the Great Lakes down to the Mississippi. This is the area shown on the map. But if the French had gone, the British colonial governors now had their own countrymen to contend with. British settlers were eager to move west, disturbing agreements already struck with the Native American leaders, and were negotiating illegal land deals with local tribes – a recipe for future conflict. The map was made for one of these deals. It shows us an encounter not just between different worlds, but between different ways of imagining the world. The frontiers between the lands that were being discussed represent also the frontiers between two cultures which had different conceptual, spiritual and social ways of being. Mapping, for Europeans, was a central technique of control – partly intellectual control, the pursuit of knowledge of the world, partly military. For Native Americans, mapping was about something quite else.
The map is roughly 100 by 126 centimetres (40 by 50 inches), and its shape is defined by the deerskin it is drawn on. The deer itself seems very present, for we can see exactly how it died: there are holes in the skin from a musket ball that passed from the animal’s right shoulder to its rear left flank, almost certainly going through the heart. This deer was killed by a top-class shot, someone who knew how to hunt. The map is only faintly visible on the skin now, but if we compare it with a modern map, we can see we are surveying the vast drainage basin formed by the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, an area of more than 40,000 square miles in a V-shaped region between the rivers. We are just below Lake Michigan, in what will become the states of Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.
It is this area that after 1763 British settler companies wanted to exploit, and the map is the record of one of many conversations between these invasive settlers and the Native Americans. Near the centre of the map is the phrase ‘Piankishwa sold’.
The Piankishwa (or Pinkashaw) were a tribe of Native Americans living in an area that now includes modern Indiana and Ohio. The map was probably made for the Wabash Land Company, which had been set up to buy tracts of territory along the River Wabash from the Piankishwa in 1774–5. G. Malcolm Lewis, an expert on maps and North American Native cultures, elaborates:
It was almost certainly made in connection with an attempt by a Philadelphia firm of merchants to purchase land in the Wabash Valley on what is now the border between Indiana and Illinois. This involved the use of the map, which shows boundaries that were obviously being intended for purchase. In fact, the whole project came to an end because this was the very eve of the Revolutionary War. So it was almost certainly made and