The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  If Weiser wanted mortification of the flesh, this was far more effective than a hard bed in Ephrata. On the first leg of the journey, Weiser, a German named Stoffel Stump, and a homeward-bound Onondaga named Owisgera rode eighty miles to the Indian village of Shamokin, which they found abandoned. Firing their guns, they finally attracted the attention of a trader on the far shore of the Susquehanna, who ferried them across, “but not without great danger, on account of the smallness of the canoe, and the river being full of floating ice,” Weiser noted in his journal. Forced to abandon their horses, they continued upriver on foot to rendezvous with Shikellamy, who was to join them.

  The Pennsylvania Frontier and the Ohio Country

  By the early eighteenth century, the Pennsylvania backcountry had become a land of refugees, both Indians and Europeans. For the latter, there were, in effect, two frontiers—one marked by the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, which was for years the limit of agricultural settlement, and the other a commercial frontier hundreds of miles to the west, where traders such as George Croghan operated. (Modern boundaries added.)

  What they found was hardly encouraging. Indian hunters said the snow lay waist-deep in the woods, and the rivers were so swollen that two traders, trying to canoe across a nearby stream, had been swept away, one drowning. Weiser intended to resupply at Shikellamy’s village, but the Indians themselves were on short commons, and the best he could get was a little cornmeal and a few beans. Still, they pushed on, coming into the village of Ostuaga, along the west branch of the Susquehanna, where Andrew Montour’s mother lived. Madame Montour was “a French woman by birth, of a good family, but now in mode of life a complete Indian,” Weiser wrote. “She treated us very well according to her means, but had very little to spare, or perhaps dared not let it be seen on account of so many hungry Indians about.” Little wonder he was grateful. It had been twenty-four days since Weiser and his companions had left home, 130 miles of hard travel, and this was their first decent meal in a week and a half.

  The travelers were barely a third of the way to their destination, however, with the most treacherous terrain still ahead—a trail known as the Sheshequin Path, which crossed the divide between the two branches of the Susquehanna, almost fifty miles of rugged, essentially uninhabited mountains. “We came to a thick forest where the snow was three feet deep, but not frozen so hard, which made our journey fatiguing,” Weiser scribbled in his journal. The mountainsides, he said, were “frightful,” nearly vertical rocky walls plunging straight into streams flush with snowmelt, so that there was no dry place to walk.

  “The passage through here seemed to me altogether impossible, and I at once advised to turn back,” Weiser admitted. Shikellamy and the others urged him to push on, all of them clambering on hands and knees over the frozen ground, Weiser using a hatchet to chop footholds in the ice. Their feet were soaked and numb from constantly wading in the frigid water, and after three hours of brutal work, they’d progressed only a mile. Exhausted, they fell into a deep sleep despite the cold, waking stiff and with nothing for breakfast except some boiled meal and beans.

  The way didn’t get any easier. They passed through “terrible mountains,” and in trying to avoid the torture of wading back and forth across icy streams, they attempted to stay high above the creek, inching along the sides of ridges, until a rock shifted under Shikellamy’s feet. Unable to stop his fall, the sachem slid toward a hundred-foot cliff over jagged rocks, saved only when a strap on his pack snagged a sapling, leaving him dangling and badly shaken. After Weiser and the others carefully pulled him to safety, Shikellamy “stood still in astonishment and said, I thank the great Lord and Creator of the world that he had mercy on me, and wished me to continue to live longer.”

  The journey became so harsh that Stump said he wished he were dead, and Weiser admitted that, had he not been so close to his goal, he would have turned back. They bickered among themselves, suffering more floods, more storms, more deep snow, more dangerous mountains, and near-constant hunger. They crossed the plateau to the north branch of the Susquehanna, where there were a few small camps, but the Indians had scant provisions to share. At one point, Weiser used a stash of needles and “Indian shoe strings” to buy freshly made maple sugar, “on which we sustained life, but it did not agree with us; we became quite ill from much drinking to quench the thirst caused by the sweetness of the sugar.”

  In villages that had been rich with corn when he’d last visited in 1726, Weiser found famine stalking the Iroquois: “now their children looked like dead persons and suffered much from hunger.” A shaman explained that the Onondaga had themselves to blame. In a vision, the Creator had told the shaman, “You kill [the game] for the sake of the skins, which you give for strong liquor and drown your senses, and kill one another, and carry on a dreadful debauchery. Therefore I have driven the wild animals out of the country, for they are mine. If you do good . . . I will bring them back. If not, I will destroy you from off the earth.”

  Walking on “through a dreadful thick wilderness, such as I have never seen before,” Weiser simply gave up. “I stepped aside, and sat down under a tree to die, which I hoped would be hastened by the cold approaching night.” Only “the sensible reasoning” of Shikellamy prodded him along. The party covered forty miles on their final day and stumbled into Onondaga like ragged scarecrows on April 10, forty-two days after Weiser had left home. Completing his mission in a week, Weiser turned right around and headed back, floating most of the way down the Susquehanna in a chestnut-bark canoe, a journey of just two relatively easy weeks. Quietly thankful, Weiser wrote the verses to a German hymn on the final page of his journal.

  The Indian policy that Conrad Weiser was helping to shape in the 1730s and 1740s was mostly about land—particularly, how to convey title to vast tracts of it to the proprietors, who could then offer it for sale to settlers free of any lingering legal claims by Natives. The degree to which these niceties were observed was changing, however. As far as a seventeenth-century Englishman’s innate prejudices allowed, William Penn had always tried to deal honorably with the Indians from whom he bought land. But Penn died in 1718, and his sons—whom he had admonished to “let justice have its impartial course” when dealing with colonial matters—cheerfully traded honesty for avarice. The result was the notorious Walking Purchase, which, like the dispossession of the Tulpehocken Valley, would come back to haunt the Pennsylvania frontier.

  Many early Indian land agreements used a simple, direct method of determining the extent of the sale—the amount of land a man could walk across (or in some cases, ride a horse across) in, say, a day. Representatives of the buyer and seller would hike the tract together at an easy pace, having agreed beforehand on the route (usually along a river or stream), breaking for a midday meal and ending when the sun reached a predetermined hour.

  In 1734, Penn’s sons Thomas, John, and Richard, the proprietors of Pennsylvania, were in a bind. They were crushed by debt, and between a boundary dispute with Maryland to the south and land to the north that was yet unbought from the Indians, they had little free property with which they could satisfy their creditors. So they began selling real estate, thousands of acres at a swat, in a place they did not yet own—the Forks of the Delaware, the land between the Delaware and Lehigh rivers, which was, as the Tulpehocken had been, a refuge for displaced Lenapes and Shawnees.

  The Penns’ justification for this was a piece of paper—they called it a deed, although no one knows just what it was, because the original conveniently vanished—dating to 1687, allegedly giving their father rights to the land as far as a man could walk up the Delaware in a day and a half. Old Lenape sachems dismissed the claim, saying they had walked the river with Penn, and the land in question ended at the mouth of Tohickon Creek, where the authority of the signatory chiefs ended. This was about twenty-five miles above the starting point and barely halfway to the Forks. Badgered by Penns’ sons, however, they agreed to allow the boundary to be walked a second time
to settle the matter.

  Whereas the Indians expected a companionable stroll, stopping for a long lunch and a leisurely smoke along the way, the Penn boys had something very different in mind—and they left nothing to chance. They made their preparations in absolute secrecy. A route was mapped out—not zigzagging up the riverside, but arrowing straight through the forest toward the Lehigh Gap, designed to plunge as deep into Lenape territory as possible—surreptitiously surveyed, marked, and cleared. In May 1737, a discreet rehearsal was run to test the course, with supplies placed at intervals and a support team following on horseback with food and water. To provide legal cover, a map of the sale area was sketched out and shown to the Lenape for their approval, with accurate portrayals of streams (which the Indians of course recognized), but with intentionally false labels (which they could not read and which may even have been added after the fact). Stepping into the trap, the sachems made their marks on a legal release.

  On September 19, 1737, a small party of Lenapes met a much more organized assembly of Pennsylvanians beneath a big chestnut tree about ten miles from the mouth of Tohickon Creek. Of the three English walkers, one—Edward Marshall, a young “chain carrier” for the surveyor who had marked the route—probably had participated in the secret rehearsal that spring. The other two, James Yates and Solomon Jennings, were experienced woodsmen who could walk the legs off a horse. All were motivated by the Penns’ offer of five hundred acres of land at the Forks to the man who got there first.

  At sunrise, the three English and three Lenape walkers set off—easily at first, but as the strides lengthened and the pace built, the Indians cried foul, with little effect. Jennings dropped out before lunch—a quick, gulped meal sent on ahead for the colonials—and the two remaining English walkers were off again, following Indian paths or blazed trees marked months earlier by the surveyors. No one ran, exactly, but Jennings’s failure suggests that the pace must have been demanding, even for rugged hunters used to endless foot travel. Two of the Indians quit entirely, complaining of fraud. When the timekeeper called a halt for the night, twelve hours after they’d started, Marshall had to sag against a tree to keep from falling.

  The Lenape knew a scam when they saw one. The next morning, one of the sachems who had signed off on the deal told the Pennsylvanians to go to hell, since they had “all the best of the land” already. They would not continue with what they knew to be a farce. Unencumbered by the need to play-act for the Indians, Marshall and Yates set off again as fast as possible, jogging wearily through the Lehigh Gap in the Kittatinny Ridge, across the river, over Second Mountain, and then another seven or eight miles beyond—almost sixty-five miles from the starting point. Yates collapsed shy of the finish, and Marshall won the land the proprietors had promised.

  But the Pennsylvanians weren’t done. With Marshall nursing his sore and swollen feet, a team of surveyors immediately started marking a second line to determine the northern boundary of the sale—not due east to the Delaware, as the Lenape had expected, but northeast another sixty-five miles, through pine forests so wild and deep it took the team another four days to reach the river. In all, the Penn brothers had snookered the Lenape out of nearly twelve hundred square miles of real estate.

  The Lenape threatened to drive out the colonists by main force, but if they were expecting their “uncles,” the Six Nations, to back them up, they were again disappointed. The league had already sold out the Conestoga and other Susquehanna bands, deeding both sides of that river to Pennsylvania in 1736. At that time, they had declined to wade in on the thornier issue of the Forks of the Delaware, saying it was none of their business. Now they had no such compunction. James Logan had been busy, dispatching Weiser to quietly buy Six Nations assent, aided by ten horse loads of gifts and—most temptingly—a promise to intercede on the league’s behalf in a land dispute with Maryland and Virginia.

  At a dramatic meeting in Philadelphia in July 1742, the Iroquois reinforced Pennsylvania’s demand that the “Fork Indians,” as the Lenape from that area were called, leave their homes along the Lehigh and upper Delaware rivers. With Weiser translating into English and Sassoonan’s nephew Pisquetomen thence into Lenape, the Onondaga chief Canasatego gave a tongue-lashing to Nutimus, the leader of the assembled Delaware, as the Lenape were usually called.

  “The other Day you informed Us of the Misbeaviour of our Cousins the Delawares with respect to their continuing to Claim and refusing to remove from some Land on the River Delaware, notwithstanding their Ancestors had sold it by Deed . . . upwards of fifty Years ago,” Canasatego told the provincial council and the grimly dignified Lenape sachems, who could not let a trace of anger show. “We see with our own Eyes that they have been a very unruly People, and are altogether in the wrong in their Dealings with You. We have concluded to remove them.”

  Holding out a wampum belt, Canasatego turned to Nutimus. “You ought to be taken by the Hair of the Head and shak’d severely till you recover your Senses and become Sober; you don’t know what Ground you stand on, nor what you are doing . . . We conquer’d You, we made Women of you, you know you are Women, and can no more sell Land than Women.”

  The Fork Indians had nowhere else to turn. Swallowing their bile, they gathered their belongings and moved, some to the Wyoming Valley along the north branch of the Susquehanna, others to Shikellamy’s town of Shamokin, at the north branch’s confluence with the west branch. Disgusted and dispossessed, many kept right on moving, up the west branch of the river, across the Allegheny Mountains, and into the heavily forested, deeply eroded plateau drained by the Ohio River.

  The Ohio River valley was another war-vacant land, home to ragtags and exiles of all tribes—Lenapes from the Forks, the Brandywine, and the lower Susquehanna; Shawnees, Nanticokes, and Conestogas; Mingo (Iroquois), mostly Cayugas and Senecas—the flotsam and jetsam of generations of displacement, looking for a spot to hunt and grow their corn, away from the seats of power. In the Ohio country, the influence of Onondaga, Philadelphia, and Albany were muted by many miles of empty land.

  But the Ohio Indians were pleased to find they were not cut off completely. The English traders, on whom they depended for so much, were only too happy to follow them, leading their trains of packhorses carrying bulging, canvas-wrapped panniers. They did a brisk business not only with the Ohio Indians but also with the tribes much farther west—a fact that drew the increasingly jaundiced eye of New France, which saw those Indians as their own and the traders as an understandably direct threat to French sovereignty and profits. France’s policy had been to hem in the English from Canada to Louisiana, holding them east of the Appalachians. Now the English traders—and one especially audacious Irishman in particular—had breached that wall. It was time to deal with them.

  Indian Trails of Pennsylvania

  Far from being a trackless wilderness, the frontier was crisscrossed by hundreds of Native footpaths used for trade and warfare. This map shows only the most significant trails through modern Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission)

  Like so many figures on the eastern frontier, George Croghan simply appeared, fully formed, on the historical stage. Nothing is known about his previous life or what brought him to the Pennsylvania borderlands except speculation. None of the many people he met, in the reams of personal letters and official reports in which they describe his actions, even bothered to note his appearance, although he was present at many of the most decisive moments in the long struggle for the Ohio country.

  We know he was Scots-Irish, one of the wave of emigrants in 1741 escaping widespread famine caused by poor weather in Ireland. There are suggestions that he grew up in Dublin, and in later years, when some questioned his loyalty to England, suggesting he was a French-loving papist, the governor of Pennsylvania assured his nervous counterpart in Maryland that Croghan “has never been deemed a Roman Catholick.” (In fact, Croghan was Episcopalian.) If he had much education, it didn’t stick. A biographer pronounced the spelling
in Croghan’s letters “amusing, provided it is not necessary to decipher many of them,” and offered this as an example: “Youl Excuse boath Writing & peper, and guess at my Maining, fer I have this Minnitt 20 Drunken Indians about me, I shall be Ruin’d if ye Taps are nott stopt, it Dose nott cost me less than £3 a day on ye Indians.”

  Croghan first learned his way around the backwoods by working for an older, experienced trader named Peter Tostee—familiarizing himself with the maze of Indian paths, fords, and mountain gaps that made it possible to reach the hinterlands; coming to understand both the economics of trading and the etiquette of dealing with Indians of many tribal affiliations; starting to build the trust on which he would found his own business. The young Irishman (probably in his early twenties, although his birth date is, like so much else, a mystery) proved a quick study. By 1743 he was pushing out on his own, testing the land speculation waters by buying up more than a thousand acres on the western shore of the Susquehanna, near a popular ferry operated by John Harris. The year after that, Croghan was officially licensed by the province of Pennsylvania as an independent trader.

  For almost forty years, Pennsylvania’s Indian trade had depended on furs and skins provided by Native hunters within a hundred miles of Philadelphia and collected by dozens of boondocks traders, a system at whose nexus sat the provincial secretary, James Logan. There was almost no way for Logan to lose. He imported manufactured goods from England, provided them to the traders on credit, and had them sold to the Indians at an astounding markup. The pelts and deerskins that flowed east from the frontier were sold in England, with Logan taking a cut on storage fees and a commission on sales, making money coming and going. The best Indian land near the posts, meanwhile, was surveyed and parceled into lots for the trader, roads were cut, and access was improved. Suspicious Indians were told it was all for the good of the trade on which they depended, even as white settlers started showing up, driving cattle and hogs ahead of them, their canvas-covered “Deutsch wagons”—which Logan famously dubbed “Conestoga wagons”—crawling with children.