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episode indicates, it was not even distinguished by its late chronology. In fact, witch hunts continued to be an important feature of North American life well into the nineteenth century. The complex patterns of interaction between European colonists and Indians that shaped the outbreaks at Salem and Abiquiu also affected the final episodes featured in this volume among the Shawnees, Delawares, and other tribes in the Ohio River Valley and the Senecas in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century (see documents 27–29). These hunts transpired in an important moment of historical transition for the beleaguered people of these regions. In the wake of the American Revolution (1776–1783), the new United States made peace with Great Britain. Most North American Indians who lived east of the Mississippi had allied themselves with the British during the war. Some paid dearly for their loyalty, as the Senecas did during the vicious campaigns of the war years. During the 1779 campaign through New York, American soldiers plundered graves, and some skinned corpses in order to make leggings with the skin.207 The Shawnees of the Ohio River Valley, already in a state of war in the wake of the French and Indian War (1754–1756) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and struggling against Virginian incursions into their territory, also suffered greatly in the final years of the Revolution.

Others paid a high price after the war, punished for their choice of sides by diminished land, dismantled autonomy, and humiliating peace conditions. Since the individual nations had not taken part in the 1783 peace negotiations that produced the Treaty of Paris, they had not been able to make claims for their own territory. Even those who had strived to remain neutral found themselves harmed by the conflict. Fighting continued long after the peace. Several conflicts and humiliating treaties in the 1790s signaled a permanent shift of power toward the new United States, which remained a minor player on the international stage but a bully within the continent.

These accumulated misfortunes—disease, lost land, and the blight of war—produced prophets who preached new messages of revitalization, a common way for indigenous leaders to articulate resistance to European rule and part of the Tepehuan and Pueblo revolts of the seventeenth century (see documents 4 and 5). Several such figures had emerged in North America in the eighteenth century, all exhorting followers to purge their communities of evil influences to restore their gods’ favor. Some, like the Delaware prophet Neolin in 1761–1762, demanded that Indians abstain from alcohol and reliance on European goods.208

Two men emerged as major prophetic leaders. Handsome Lake was a Seneca Indian who experienced a series of apocalyptic visions starting in the summer of 1799 and continuing until his death in 1816. Like Handsome Lake, the Shawnee prophet, an Indian named Lalawethika, had led a somewhat dissolute life. And also like Handsome Lake, Lalawethika died and came back to life. By 1808 he was known as Tenskwatawa (see figure 10), which meant “the open door.” He proclaimed his revelations to other Shawnees and their allies. The prophets’ goals were to rescue—to revitalize—their societies. Their codes (documents 27 and 28) suggest some of the strategies they envisioned. The Shawnee prophet sought separation from white Americans, insisting that Indian women leave white husbands and their children and even part with their cats. He demanded that Indians stop trading with whites, consuming whites’ foods, or donning whites’ fashions. The prophets deplored the use of alcohol. Their codes also reveal considerable anxiety about sexual practices, including divorce, abortion, and polygamy.209

While prophets launched attacks on what they defined as foreign innovations, they also turned on some long-standing indigenous practices. Both prophets, for example, tended to oppose traditional practitioners, such as shamans, and rejected aspects of shamanism as witchcraft. Shamans sought solutions to problems by placating