The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  What Pennsylvania disdained, others appreciated. Croghan accepted an invitation from Johnson, a fellow Irishman with whom he’d been corresponding. He would hold the deputy superintendent’s position for the next fifteen years, always in the thick of Indian diplomacy as he was now with the Easton treaty, acting on behalf of the Crown instead of the province.

  Nor did Pennsylvania retain much appeal for Andrew Montour, who had once dreamed of creating a new kind of world there. Montour found his life on the Susquehanna increasingly awkward; like Croghan, he was deeply in debt, and his second marriage, to an Oneida woman named Sarah Ainse, had ended in divorce. (So had his first, to one of Sassoonan’s granddaughters. Native tradition made such dissolutions relatively simple.) With the coming of war, French Andrew was an object of misgiving and doubt among the colonists. With Scarouady beside him, he left the province and moved to New York, too, in the spring of 1756.

  The war in America—now a formal conflict, having been duly declared by London and Paris—was not going well for the British. John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, had taken control of British forces in the colonies in 1756 at almost the same time the new French commander, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, was capturing Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario. The next spring Loudoun failed in a bid to capture Louisbourg, on Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), shortly before seeing Fort William Henry on Lake George fall to Montcalm. (At the latter, as had happened at Oswego the year before, Montcalm looked the other way when his Indian allies massacred the surrendering garrison.) Canadian militia, skilled in forest warfare, for the most part fought rings around their British counterparts.

  Nor was the situation much better on the Pennsylvania frontier. Although attacks from the eastern Delaware had abated thanks to Teedyuscung’s peace overtures, Shingas and the other Ohio war leaders, as well as dissident eastern Delawares and some French-allied Iroquois, continued to apply pressure.

  “It is now Come so farr that murder is Comited allmost every day,” Conrad Weiser lamented in the fall of 1757. “Five Children have ben carried [off] last Fryday, some days before a sick man killed upon his bed, begged of the Enemy to shoot him through his heart, which the Indian answered, I will, and did so . . . I have neither men nor a sufficient number of officers to defend the Country.” In all, hundreds of Pennsylvanians had been killed, hundreds more carried away, and multitudes of farms abandoned—a thousand in Cumberland County alone.

  Among the victims that autumn were the family of Jacob Hochstetler—the Amish farmer in the Tulpehocken Valley who stood by his nonviolent principles and wouldn’t allow his family to shoot at attacking Indians. His wife, a son, and a daughter dead, Hochstetler and two other boys—Joseph, age thirteen, and Christian, age eleven—were taken away as captives. (Having suffered such a blow, many of the Amish survivors along Northkill Creek decided to move away from the dangerous edge of the frontier, relocating to Lancaster County and forming the nucleus of the modern Amish community there.)

  The Hochstetlers’ experience as captives was both typical and unusual. As in frontier wars dating back to King Philip’s uprising, most of the abductees in the Pennsylvania backcountry were women, children who were old enough to walk, and teens; these were the easiest groups to integrate into village life and added the most to Indian families decimated by war. Christian and Joseph fit this pattern, and once on the upper Ohio, both were quickly adopted and treated as full members of the community.

  Adult men and older boys, by contrast, were often killed on the spot or brought home for torture. Yet for some reason, Jacob Hochstetler was spared. Separated from his sons, he was moved deeper and deeper into the interior, to Presque Isle on Lake Erie, then to Detroit, and eventually to somewhere in what is now northeastern Ohio or northwestern Pennsylvania. His mustacheless beard, the hallmark of a married Amish man, was pulled out—not from cruelty, most likely, but because Native Americans tolerated no facial hair on themselves and considered it grotesque on others. The hair on his head was also yanked out, one painful tuft at a time, until he sported the same four-inch-wide scalp lock, hung with feathers, as any Lenape warrior.

  Held for three years, never adopted but permitted to take a gun to go hunting, Hochstetler hoarded pinches of powder and the occasional lead ball until he had enough ammunition to risk an escape. Unfortunately, he had no clear idea of where he was and no notion of where home lay. One day, he saw a warrior drawing lines in the ashes of a campfire, explaining to some boys how his raiding party had crossed the mountains and followed a river called “Sasquehannah.” That was enough.

  Making his break, Hochstetler traveled by night, wading in streams when he could to throw off tracking dogs, until he came to a river he believed was the Susquehanna. Taking a risk, he kindled a fire and used it to burn a large dead log into six sections, then lashed them together with vines to make a raft. When the river bent to the southwest, he despaired, thinking it must be the Ohio, carrying him farther from home. In fact, however, he was on the north branch of the Susquehanna, floating through the Wyoming Valley. He survived on whatever he could scrounge, mostly nuts and raw crayfish, and once a maggot-filled opossum “that he ate until his hunger was appeased.” When he finally drifted past Harris’s Ferry, he was too weak to reach the shore. Only by good chance did a man watering his horse downriver see Hochstetler feebly waving his arms, and he called for a rescue.

  In prison, Robert Stobo discovered the pleasures of smoking—about the only diversion available to him following his conviction and death sentence. Taken from Montreal, he and Van Braam (who though acquitted of treason was still a hostage) were placed in solitary cells in Quebec. But soon, for reasons they did not fully understand, the conditions of their imprisonment eased somewhat. They were permitted to share a comfortable room in “a common jail, where two stout sentinels were posted at [their] door, and two below [their] window.” Some time after that, they were allowed to walk the corridor and entertain a few visitors. Their cleaning and cooking were seen to by three servants, all female, ages eighteen to twenty. Stobo’s biographer, Robert C. Alberts, hints at “other services that can only be conjectural.”

  Up to this point, it’s hard not to see Stobo as a little bit of a popinjay—with his grandiose notions of military valor, his plumed hat, and his romantic tête-à-têtes—who was too clever by half and got caught for it. But it was now, after he’d been condemned to death and his fortunes appeared most desperate, that Robert Stobo began to show a more remarkable side.

  On the night of May 1, 1757, Stobo and Van Braam made a break for it. Somehow they were able to unlock the corridor door and slip out, climbing out the back of the building and through a manure pile to freedom. It wasn’t until the next morning, when their jailer tried to wake them, that he found the British officers had used that most hackneyed of ruses, the stuffed-clothes-in-the-bed trick.

  “I touched Mr. Stobo,” the jailer later testified, “and I was very much surprised to find, instead of a man, a beaver great-coat in the bed, with a night cap and a shirt, which was made to look like the head of a man.” Van Braam was impersonated by “a valise, likewise a bonnet and cotton shirt.”

  The escape didn’t last long; the men were picked up four or five days later, having crossed the St. Lawrence but gotten no farther. Undeterred, Stobo broke out a second time, in July, by himself, carrying thirty pounds of food he’d carefully dried and squirreled away over the preceding months. This time he used a butter knife to grind away the weak stone around his iron window bars. He was free long enough to make it five or six miles down the north shore of the St. Lawrence, wading neck-deep across the St. Charles River and edging past the thundering cataract at Montmorency Falls, before he was nabbed. Stobo—and Van Braam, too, for good measure—were thrown into harsh confinement, Stobo to await his execution.

  What he did not know was that the French had no intention of actually beheading him. Vaudreuil had apparently been under orders to find Stobo guilty, condemn him to death, and then stay the execution. It may be
that the French felt their own moral standing was questionable, since even some of their own officers agreed with Stobo that the terms of capitulation had been broken.

  As far as Stobo knew, though, he was a dead man unless he did something. He hadn’t given up.

  Teedyuscung’s charge that the Penn family had knowingly cheated the Lenape at the Walking Purchase and other land deals was explosive. Most immediately, it showed that the Delaware had legitimate complaints that had led them to war and strengthened the Quaker push for a negotiated peace. But it also exposed the venality of the Penn family and their associates, including council secretary Richard Peters, and provided powerful ammunition for Benjamin Franklin and those opposed to proprietary power, who were fighting to have Pennsylvania taken away from the Penns and made a royal colony. Nor did it reflect well on the Iroquois League, which had ratified these sweetheart deals. In fact, Teedyuscung had rhetorically stripped off the political “petticoat” that the Iroquois had long imposed on the Delaware and was now insisting that the Lenape would henceforth speak for themselves, not through the Six Nations.

  It was, therefore, in the best interests of almost everyone—the pro-proprietary leaders in Pennsylvania; the Iroquois League and Sir William Johnson in New York, for whom the Iroquois alliance was paramount; Conrad Weiser, whose allegiance lay with the province and his adopted Mohawk, and who saw the Quakers as meddlesome fools who were prolonging the war—to discredit “King Teedyuscung.” Unfortunately, the Lenape’s insatiability for rum and his habit of inflating his own importance, especially when in his cups, gave them handy ammunition. “Mr. Weiser informed the Council that the King and the principle Indians being all yesterday under the Force of Liquor,” Peters noted primly in the council minutes, which already included a report that “the King and his wild Company were perpetually drunk . . . The King was very full of himself.” Even more damaging, the efforts of the Friends to act as intermediaries with the Indians allowed Peters and the rest of the Penn faction to argue that the claims of fraud were all a Quaker fabrication.

  Still, Teedyuscung was able to score some important victories at Easton. In return for peace with the eastern Delaware, he asked for compensation for lost land and for sureties that the Wyoming Valley would remain in Delaware hands. “We would have a Certain Country fixed for our own use & the use of our Children for ever,” he said. When he demanded to see the original deeds on which the Walking Purchase and other frauds were based, Peters threw up his hands and said they couldn’t be produced—only to have the provincial commissioners produce duplicates.

  Teedyuscung kept slogging away, making progress by inches. The second Easton treaty in the fall of 1757 had dramatically reduced attacks by the Susquehanna Indians and returned some of the white captives who had been taken. Now he reached out to the western villages on the upper Ohio, from which most of the remaining violence originated. At Teedyuscung’s request, and with Quaker backing, a pious Moravian cabinetmaker named Christian Frederick Post, who had been married to the sachem’s daughter-in-law, set out in July 1758 for the Ohio country. He was accompanied by Shingas’s older brother Pisquetomen, who had taken extraordinary risks to come to Philadelphia that spring to assess the prospects for a truce.

  Long a go-between for the Christian Indians of the Wyoming Valley, Post was an inspired choice if only for his Lenape name: Wallangundowngen, meaning “making a good blessing” and the Delaware term for peace. He also brought a guileless serenity of purpose to what was undoubtedly a very dangerous mission, even with an influential Lenape like Pisquetomen at his side. “If I died in the undertaking,” Post wrote in his journal, “it would be as much for the Indians as the English.” (Weiser, who daily dealt with the aftermath of the settlement attacks, was infuriated by the whole escapade. “The Quakers submit to Barbarians, to the Murderers and Heathens,” he seethed.)

  Crossing the Allegheny Mountains, Post saw old, dried scalps—one with long white hair—tied to bushes along the path as a warning, as well as the red-painted poles “to which [the Indians] tye the prisoners, when they stop at night, in their return from their excursions.” At one village he was surrounded by angry men with drawn knives, and a few days later he was warned “not to stir from the fire; for that the French had offered a great reward for my scalp, and that there were several parties out on that purpose. Accordingly I stuck constantly as close to the fire, as if I had been chained there.”

  But he also met with Shawnees with whom he had been friends in the Wyoming Valley, who greeted him warmly, and with Delaware (or Dillaway) George, one of the two men who had smuggled copies of Stobo’s map out of Fort Duquesne and whom Post found to be a forceful advocate for peace with the British. The war was taking a harsh toll on the Ohio villages, with food and supplies running low. Pisquetomen’s brothers, Shingas and Tamaqua, both seemed open to peace—though with obvious concerns. Shingas asked “if I did not think, that, if he came to the English, they would hang him, as they had offered a great reward for his head,” Post said. “He spoke in a very soft and easy manner. I told him that was a great while ago, it was all forgotten and wiped clean away; that the English would receive him very kindly.”

  If not kindly, at least grudgingly, if it meant an end to frontier raids and help against the French. After years of defeats, the British effort was turning a corner. With a new administration in London under William Pitt, and with the pitiful James Abercrombie (“Mrs. Nanny Cromby” to his troops) replaced by Jeffery Amherst as commander in chief of North America, the differences were dramatic. Amherst had already taken Louisbourg in Acadia, and he tasked Brigadier General John Forbes with leading a new assault against Fort Duquesne. The hard lessons of the Monongahela had been learned. Forbes embraced the critical importance of scouts and light skirmishers and, unlike Braddock, understood the need to peel away as many of the western Indians as possible.

  To accomplish this, he was authorized to deal directly with the Ohio tribes, and he gave Post’s mission his full support, as well as prodding Governor William Denny and the recalcitrant Pennsylvanians to accede to Teedyuscung’s demands. As autumn 1758 approached and the Pennsylvania mountains began to flame with color, Forbes—so ill with dysentery he was carried in a litter slung between horses—oversaw the completion of a new road and fortified supply posts through the mountains, while a so-called grand council was convening at Easton, under the auspices of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, to finally cement a comprehensive peace.

  Easton was awash in Indians. While the previous treaties had been small affairs, with Teedyuscung and a few followers, this time there were more than five hundred Natives present, representing almost every tribe for hundreds of miles—and a multiplicity of agendas. Besides Teedyuscung and a hundred or so followers from the Delaware and mixed-tribe villages along the upper Susquehanna, there were Mahicans and Shawnees, Wappings from east of the Hudson, and a swollen delegation from the Six Nations proper, including six Tuscaroras. The Nanticoke, Conoy, and Tutelo, all recently adopted as “younger brothers” by the Iroquois, were also represented.

  The Six Nations were anything but united. The Francophile Seneca, led by a sachem named Tagashata, and the Anglophile Mohawk, led by Croghan’s father-in-law, Nichas, were barely civil to each other, although such divisions were papered over for the council. French Margaret, Andrew Montour’s cousin, was there with her husband, a Mohawk known as Peter Quebec. There were more women and children present than sachems and warriors, in fact, which posed its own problems. At an earlier treaty, the angry townspeople of Easton “observed that the Shirts which the Indian Women had on were made of Dutch [German] Table Cloaths, which, it is supposed they took from the People they had murdered on our Frontiers.”

  Conrad Weiser, his health poor, was in attendance. (Easton was to be Tarachiawagon’s last hurrah.) So was George Croghan, Esquire, serving as William Johnson’s eyes and ears, and “Captain Henry Montour” (Andrew using one of his many noms de frontière), “Interpreter in the Six Nations and Del
aware Languages.” One familiar face was missing, however. Scarouady, the Oneida “half-king” who had been central to frontier statecraft for more than a decade, had died that spring, possibly from smallpox.

  Indians Giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet

  This engraving, based on a Benjamin West painting, dates from the end of Pontiac’s War in 1764, but it shows many of the features typical of a frontier treaty—the covered arbor to shelter some members of the large negotiating parties from sun and rain, an Indian orator holding wampum to reinforce his words, and a colonial scribe furiously recording the proceedings for later publication. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-104)

  The formal council sessions took place outdoors, beneath a shed or bower built for the purpose and open on the sides to accommodate the overflow crowd. Governor Denny launched into the “clearing the woods” formalities, saying as he held the wampum, “Brethren: With this String I wipe the Sweat and Dust out of your Eyes, that you may see your Brethren’s Faces and look Cheerful.” But Tarachiawagon was having trouble translating. “Mr. Weiser interpreted the Substance of this Speech, [but] saying his Memory did not serve him to remember the Several Ceremonies in [it] . . . he desired Nihas, a Mohock Chief, to do it for him, which he did,” the council minutes note. Montour, meanwhile, was translating into Delaware, even though Teedyuscung and many of the Lenape were conversant in English.

  Teedyuscung had been ducking the Iroquois for almost a year; he’d stood them up at a treaty in Lancaster the previous spring because the aging Lenape knew what was coming. Almost no one at Easton that autumn had the best interests of his Wyoming Valley followers at heart, and the Six Nations council was determined to get a leash around Teedyuscung’s neck again. His leverage was gone; he’d made peace and was no longer needed. Perhaps that got his back up, because in session and out, drunk and sober, “He Who Makes the Earth Tremble” never missed an opportunity to twist the collective Iroquoian nose.