American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On the borderland of Canadian settlement southeast of Montreal, the Mohawk woman Coocoochee was born about 1740, grew to maturity, and acquired skill in herbal medicine and the special ability to contact the powerful world of the spirits. Although her childhood was sheltered in territory remote from the North American fighting frontier, her adult years were destined to be spent in a traumatic environment threatened almost perpetually by warfare. Five times over a period of a quarter-century her household was uprooted, forced to move either by a sense of insecurity, by Indian defense strategy, or by direct attack. Following the initial transfer of Coocoochee's family from the hinterland of Montreal to the Ohio country about 1769, subsequent dislocations were brought about by major developments in Indian-White warfare west of the Appalachian mountains. Coocoochee lived during an era that was critical for all Indian people in eastern North America. In the annals of western history, her life spanned the French and Indian War between France and England (1754-1760), Lord Dunmore's War against the Shawnee in Ohio (1774), the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the Indian-White warfare continuing in territory northwest of the Ohio River until 1794. For Indian people, this was a time when the kings of France and England unfairly extended their imperial rivalry into the Indians' country, and when American land speculators and frontiersmen turned Indian land into individual personal property. No matter how these generalized developments on the historic scene may be analyzed today, in the eighteenth century they constituted a series of direct threats to the way of life and very survival of Coocoochee and her family.