Sitting near Weiser was George Croghan, who was as far from a religious ascetic as one could imagine. A Dubliner of around age thirty who had fled a famine seven years earlier, he was open, boisterous, and willing to bet on a weak hand; he also loved to dip snuff and knock back a tot or two (or three) of rum. Starting with nothing, he had in a few years become so successful a backwoods businessman that he was already known as the “king of the Indian traders,” while the Mingo of the Ohio country fondly called him “the Buck.”
Croghan’s long lines of packhorses, laden with cloth, knives, powder, and shot, picked their careful way through the narrow gaps in the Alleghenies, across swollen rivers and west as far as the Wabash and Great Miami, just shy of the Mississippi itself, trading with tribes whose existence was little more than a rumor to most English colonists. Those horses returned laden with pelts and deerskins, taking more and more business away from the angry French. It was dangerous work, about which Croghan tended to make light. Some years later, having survived a bloody tomahawk attack, he would quip, “So You may see a thick Scull is of Service on some Occasions.” Among his other achievements, Croghan and his traders would be among the first whites to enter the land of “Kantucqui,” at a time when Daniel Boone, with whom Kentucky is most closely linked, was barely out of adolescence.
Facing Weiser and Croghan was an Indian named Tanaghrisson, a leader of the so-called Mingo—Iroquois who had moved to the rich hunting grounds of the upper Ohio country, which they shared with Lenape and Shawnee refugees fleeing the rising tide of settlement farther east. Although he was a respected sachem among the Iroquois, Tanaghrisson had been born a Catawba in the Carolina piedmont, captured as a child, and adopted by the Seneca. His hatred of the French was implacable, because, Tanaghrisson said, they had boiled and eaten his father.
The English called Tanaghrisson “the Half-King” and viewed him as an Iroquois-appointed viceroy over the Ohio Indians. But the idea of Iroquois supervision was a political fiction. In practice, the Ohio Indians went their own way, with little regard for the councils of the Six Nations at Onondaga, hundreds of miles to the northeast—which is why Weiser and Croghan were at Logstown in the first place, anxious to strike an independent deal on behalf of Pennsylvania.
The fourth man around the fire at Logstown was perhaps the most intriguing of all. Andrew Montour was a member of a proud line of interpreters who straddled the uneasy boundaries between Indians and whites, French and English. His uncle, a métis (mixed-blood) fur trader who had abandoned the French to work for the English in New York, had been assassinated by order of the governor-general of New France. His aunt was a go-between for the French-leaning Miami of the lower Ohio country, one of whom she’d married. His mother, the famous interpreter Madame Montour, had been born in New France, captured by the Iroquois, and ransomed back to Canada, then returned to Iroquoia to marry an Oneida war chief, who was killed when Andrew, his son, was young. Stepping into her murdered brother’s shoes, she then became New York’s trusted interpreter.
Andrew Montour was as comfortable in war paint, going to raid the Catawba in Carolina, as he was speaking with provincial officials in Albany or Philadelphia. Several years earlier, a German count, meeting him along the Susquehanna River, had found that his “countenance [was] decidedly European, and had not his face been encircled with a broad band of paint, applied with bear’s fat, I would certainly have taken him for one.” Montour’s English coat, breeches, and scarlet waistcoat were complemented, the count said, by decidedly Iroquois earrings “of brass and other wires plaited together like the handles of a basket.”
In the years to come, the Six Nations, who knew Montour as Sattelihu or Oughsara, would metaphorically “set a Horn on [his] Head,” making him “one of their Counsellors and a great Man among them.” Yet the colonists for whom he long worked would never entirely trust him or his family. His mother was “a French woman,” after all, and his cousin, with whom he was so close many thought they were siblings, went by the name French Margaret. With his kaleidoscopic heritage, he felt free to change names the way some men change clothes. Depending on the place, the audience, or his whim, he answered to Sattelihu, André Montour, Andrew Sattelihu, Henry Montour, French Andrew, and simply Monsieur Montour. Some of these names were guaranteed to raise English hackles, whatever his actions.
At times, he was too French, at other times too Indian. In the early days of the Seven Years’ War, he barely escaped a Pennsylvania mob demanding any Indian’s blood, and he carried a French bounty on his scalp. At still other times, Montour was too white, not wholly accepted by the Indians among whom he lived and moved, suspected (sometimes with reason) of toeing the colonial line to their detriment, despite his ties of blood and marriage to the Six Nations, Lenape, and Conoy, among others.
Unlike Croghan and Weiser, who left bundles of letters and documents written in their own hand, or even Native leaders such as Tanaghrisson, whose words at council meetings and treaty negotiations were transcribed by fast-scribbling secretaries, Montour left almost nothing in his own voice. He was apparently illiterate, and when he spoke in public, it was usually for someone else.
Andrew Montour was a complicated mess. He was, according to the governor of Maryland, “of all the Traders Interpreters or Woodsmen without Comparison the most promising & honest,” but his weakness for drink and his tendency toward debt vexed even his staunchest admirers, including Conrad Weiser. “He abused me very much, Corsed & swore, and asked pardon when he got sober, did the same again when he was drunk, again damned me more than [a] hundred times,” Weiser told a correspondent. Unable to rouse the half-dressed Montour from a sodden coma, Weiser abandoned him—only to have the interpreter meet him later on the trail, clear-eyed and contrite, having ridden two days and two nights to make the rendezvous.
Weiser, who probably knew Montour better than anyone else, on the one hand praised the young man as “faithful, knowing, & prudent,” but on the other hand cautioned that he was “a French man in his heart.” In the end, Weiser could only scratch his head and pronounce himself “at a lost what to say of him.”
In ways that would haunt him all his life, Andrew Montour was the living embodiment of the patchwork human frontier, a shadow of the physical borderlands. And when he tried to create a place where he could find peace—a place for all the other in-betweens and castoffs, half-bloods and immigrants, refugees and wanderers—both of Montour’s worlds, the Indian and the European, conspired to crush his dream. No wonder he drank a lot.
In comparison with the rest of the eastern frontier, the Middle Colonies were oases of relative peace, and none more so than Pennsylvania. This was partly a function of demographics and geography. Through most of the seventeenth century, while New England was bursting at the seams with farmers hungry for land, Virginia was pushing tobacco plantations deeper and deeper into the interior, and Carolina was enslaving Natives left and right, the valleys of the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers were largely devoid of immigrants. The Swedes landed only a few hundred settlers along the lower Delaware, and the Dutch, who wrested away control in 1665, were, as usual, more concerned with creating trading outposts than in colonizing the wider landscape. Too far north to seriously worry Spain and too far south and east to attract much French attention, Pennsylvania was able to avoid involvement in most of the imperial dustups as well.
By the time the Dutch ceded their interest in New Netherland to England and William Penn wrangled a royal grant in 1681 for 45,000 square miles of land he’d never seen, there were perhaps a thousand Europeans along the lower Delaware and its bay. That soon changed. Penn’s savvy promotion of his “holy experiment” brought waves of new colonists, and by 1700 some 21,000 Europeans—English Quakers, Germans, Finns, Swedes, Welsh, Dutch, Scots-Irish, French Huguenots, and black slaves—were living along the Delaware.
Their land had belonged to the Lenape, a collection of loosely related groups living, in small bands of about twenty-five or thirty people, from
the lower Hudson River to the mouth of Delaware Bay. They may never have been numerous, and by the late seventeenth century, the Unami, or “downriver people,” who lived along the lower Delaware, probably numbered fewer than five hundred. Unlike many Algonquian peoples along the eastern seaboard, the Lenape were not serious farmers. Although they planted small maize plots at their summer camps of bark-covered lodges, they lived primarily by hunting, fishing, and foraging.
And unlike the Susquehannock and Five Nations to their west and north, or the Algonquians of the Chesapeake region, the Lenape did not usually fortify their villages with palisades, nor is there much archaeological evidence to suggest frequent warfare in pre-contact days. It’s unlikely the Lenape were innately peace loving; they were just lucky enough to live in a fairly safe neighborhood, and the lack of ready access to northern furs kept them out of the bloodiest conflicts of the seventeenth-century Beaver Wars, which all but obliterated the Susquehannock.
By the time Penn arrived, life was already changing for the Lenape. They had briefly taken up intensive corn production, selling their surplus to the hungry Swedes, and by the 1690s many of the Unalachtigo, the Lenape who lived east of the Delaware in what had become the English province of West Jersey, were moving out to avoid the growing numbers of Quaker immigrants there.
Migrating across the river, they found themselves dealing with still more Quakers, most notably William Penn. Because his behavior stands in such vivid contrast to the freewheeling deceit and chicanery that attended many dealings between colonists and Indians, Penn may get more credit than he deserves for scrupulous honesty. After all, he sold the first 1,250 acres of his new empire, pocketing £25, three days before his charter was even signed by the king. More startling, Penn sold half a million acres before he arrived in the colony and started talking to the local sachems, from whom he still needed to buy the land. That this might be wrong clearly never occurred to him, and he obviously viewed his negotiations with the Lenape as a formality.
William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians
An engraving (reversed from the original) of Benjamin West’s iconic 1771–72 image of William Penn meeting with Lenape sachems along the Delaware River. Although Penn’s religious principles compelled him to deal fairly with the Indians, he never dreamed of treating them as legal equals and never imagined that they would not sell him as much land as he and his heirs wanted. (Library of Congress LC-DIG-pga-01451)
That’s the paradox about William Penn—Quaker visionary, famous friend to the Indians, and brash land speculator. On the one hand, his religious principles compelled him to deal fairly with the Indians, to whom he pledged—in all apparent sincerity—that the English “must live in love, as long as the sun gave light.” Penn instructed his purchasers that “noe man shall in any wayes or meanes in word or Deed, affront or wrong any Indian” and that any grievance between colonists and Natives would be decided by a panel of six of each. One modern historian (normally no fan of European colonizers) called Penn a “unique blend of the practical, the pious, and the decent.” On the other hand, Penn’s sweeping rights under English law were wholly feudal, and he never dreamed of treating the Indians as legal equals or imagined that they would not sell him as much land as he and his heirs wanted.
When Penn finally arrived in the colony in 1682 and sat down to treat with a dozen Lenape “sachemakers,” as he called them, he struck what he considered a very fair deal for the first parcel he bought—tens of thousands of acres below the Falls of the Delaware, where he would build his home. The payment amounted to more than £240 in goods, the equivalent of about $30,000 in today’s currency, including 600 fathoms of wampum (half of it prized black beads); 40 white blankets; 40 fathoms of red and blue stroud cloth; another 40 fathoms of gray duffel; 40 each of muskets, kettles, and woolen coats; 150 pounds of gunpowder; 300 bars of lead; 5 casks of rum, beer, and hard cider; “two handfull ffish hooks”; and shoes, scissors, combs, paint, saws, bottles, hoes, axes, and shirts.
Over the next two years, Penn negotiated a series of additional land deals, acquiring a swath about ten miles deep and running about forty miles along the western shore of the Delaware, as well as parcels on the eastern side of the Susquehanna (land claimed by Maryland, a situation that would later boil over into violence). The venerated sachem Tamanend, exchanging what he undoubtedly thought was the right to use land near Penn’s original purchase, made his mark—a small drawing of a snake—on a deed, accepting “so much Wampum so many guns, Shoes, Stockings Looking-glasses, Blanketts and other goods as he ye said William Penn Shall please to give unto me.” (A receipt attached to the deed specifies what Penn was “pleased” to pay: an assortment of fabric, garments, wampum, tools, clay pipes, and “4 hansfull Bells.”) To the Lenape, Penn became “Brother Onas,” a name that would be handed down to successive colonial leaders who, in Native eyes, embodied Pennsylvania.
When he wrote home to England, Penn could say with a clear conscience that he “bought lands of the natives, [and] treated them largely,” meaning generously. The Lenape, of course, considered the guns and blankets and such to be gifts, and as the use of the land for which they were given continued through the years, they pressed for the gifts to be renewed from time to time, to the annoyance of colonial officials, who believed that paying for land once was quite enough.
Yet in all, the relationship was a fairly harmonious one while Penn remained in control. In 1701, a group of sachems from the lower Susquehanna wrote to King William III, saying they expected to live in harmony with Penn and his colonists “as long as the Sun and Moon shall endure, One head One Mouth, and one Heart.”
But as English ships unloaded dressed lumber from New York and clapboard houses rose along the muddy streets of Penn’s new city of Philadelphia, the Lenape must have realized that the English were a different breed than the Swedes and Dutch who had preceded them. Penn had big plans for Pennsylvania, and like his royal land grant, they extended far beyond the Delaware. In particular, Penn cast his eyes toward the Susquehanna Valley—a focus that would bring his colony into ever closer contact with the Five Nations, the Iroquois from central New York, two hundred miles to the north. In time, these powerful entities—one colonial, one Indian—would recognize the advantages of dealing directly with each other and essentially ignoring the people who actually lived on the land in question.
The League of the Five Nations had come into existence sometime between 1400 and 1600, its origins clouded by a combination of oral history and myth involving the prophetic Great Peacemaker whose message brought the five warring tribes into one: the haudenosaunee, “the people of the longhouse.” Like the fires of extended families running the length of a traditional bark longhouse, the Five Nations ran the width of greater Iroquoia, from the Mohawk guarding “the eastern door,” near the Hudson, to the Seneca in the west. The league’s central council fires burned among the Onondaga in the heart of the Finger Lakes, flanked by the Oneida and Cayuga.
Legend aside, the league’s evolution was a long and torturous process, marked by lingering hostilities and perennial rivalries, although by the late seventeenth century, the Iroquois were able to present a fairly united front when dealing with New France and the English. Even so, the league often functioned more as a marriage of convenience than a political monolith, no more in lockstep on its policies and aims than were the squabbling, intensely competitive English colonies. Some Iroquois leaders favored the French, others the English. Some had strong connections with the government of New York; others worked closely with Pennsylvania. Personal ambition and historical frictions among the league’s members added to the confusion.
Yet despite these handicaps, the League of the Five Nations achieved a level of diplomatic success unmatched anywhere else in colonial North America. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the league had constructed a treaty network, known as the Covenant Chain, which bound the Iroquois, their subsidiary tribes, and the neighboring English colonies into a web
of alliance and responsibility, while offering official Iroquois neutrality to the French. Skillfully playing on their position as the Native buffer between two habitually warring European empires, the Five (later Six) Nations managed for generations to hold off England and France, trading on the threat of wholly committing to one side or the other in order to keep both adversaries at bay.
The Susquehanna Valley had largely been depopulated in the wake of the Beaver Wars between the Iroquois and Susquehannock, as well as further conflicts between the Susquehannock and Maryland and Virginia. A few Susquehannocks had, however, managed to resettle in their old homeland near Conestoga Creek, acquiring the creek’s English name as their own. The Conestoga were one of many tribes under the Five Nations’ “umbrella.” Another was the Shawnee, who settled with the Conestoga in 1692 after wandering east from what is now Illinois.
The colonists saw in such arrangements a simple dynamic: the Iroquois as military overlords who ruled the vanquished with absolute authority. The reality was more complex. The Iroquois called the Conestoga “nephews” or “cousins,” and the latter in turn called the Iroquois “uncles.” At least theoretically subject to Iroquois oversight (with a Five Nations sachem deployed locally to keep an eye on things), the Conestoga, Shawnee, and others were on their own in negotiating treaties and land sales and in deciding whether or not to supply warriors for Iroquois military operations. Although they were not junior members of the league, like the Tuscarora, whom the Iroquois formally adopted around 1723, neither were they defeated slaves, and they enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy.
The First Frontier Page 31
