The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  With dramatic timing, Pisquetomen arrived in Easton just as the council was about to begin, carrying Post’s journal with word of their success among the Ohio Indians. Pisquetomen pledged, on behalf of his brothers Shingas and Tamaqua, Delaware George, and others on the Ohio, that if the council ended with an agreement, the western tribes would observe it. “When you have settled this Peace and Friendship, and Finished it well,” he said, “and you send it to me, I will send it to all the Nations of my Colour.”

  This was the best possible news. But before anyone could relax, Nichas, the Mohawk, rose to speak, his words coming in a torrent, directed with venomous intensity at Teedyuscung. Weiser blanched. Nichas spoke at length, but no translation followed. “Mr. Weiser was ordered to interpret it, but he desired to be excused, as it was about Matters purely relating to the Indians themselves, and desired Mr. Montour might interpret it.” Montour had no desire to put his foot in that hornets’ nest, however. Weiser suggested that the speech be translated “at a private Conference.”

  In that meeting, Nichas and a parade of Iroquois sachems rose to denounce their “nephew” Teedyuscung. “I tell you we none of us know who has made Teedyuscung such a great Man. Perhaps the French have, or perhaps you have . . . We, for our parts, intirely disown that he has any Authority over us,” said Sagughsuniunt, an Oneida known as Tom King. In front of the Lenapes, Denny answered with a theatrical shrug: “We believe[d] what your Nephew told us, and therefore, made him a Counsellor and Agent for us . . . I can only speak for myself, and do assure you that I never made Teedyuscung this great Man.” In the end, Teedyuscung was humiliated, forced to acknowledge Iroquois supremacy—the very “petticoat” he’d tried for years to throw off.

  Weiser met quietly with the league’s principal chiefs, and what emerged was, from certain angles, a political masterstroke. Pennsylvania would cede back to the Iroquois the land beyond the Allegheny Mountains that had been claimed by Britain at the Albany Congress four years earlier, and the loss of which had been such a bitter pill. That, with a vow never to fortify or settle the upper Ohio and recognition of their independence of Onondaga, mollified Pisquetomen and the western Indians and ended three years of horrific frontier war—no small feat.

  Further, the Pennsylvanians and the Iroquois would cut Teedyuscung’s legs out from under him by appearing to accede to the old Lenape’s demands. A promised investigation of the Walking Purchase was simply shunted into a bureaucratic limbo in London from which it would never emerge. His insistence on “a Certain Country fixed for our own use” resulted not in a legal deed for the eastern Delaware, but the patronizing consent of the league that Teedyuscung’s people might continue to live in the Wyoming Valley under their sufferance.

  When Teedyuscung finally spoke at the end of the Easton conference, it was with the heartsick words of a man who knew he’d been outflanked and hopelessly boxed in. Even so, he refused to give up on a deed for the land in the Wyoming Valley, though he must have known it was fruitless. “I sit here as a Bird upon a Bow [bough]; I look about and do not know where to go; let me therefore come down upon the Ground, and make that my own by a good Deed, and I shall then have a Home for Ever; for if you, my Uncles, or I die, our Brethren, the English, will say they have bought it from you, & so wrong my Posterity out of it.”

  Post and Pisquetomen were on the road from Easton to the Ohio before Halloween, carrying with them news of the peace treaty and a white wampum belt that depicted two people joined by a black line. “If you take the Belts we just now gave you, in which all here join, English and Indians, as we don’t doubt you will,” said a speech Post carried from Denny, “then by this Belt I make a Road for you, and invite you to come to Philadelphia to your first Old Council Fire, which was kindled when we first saw one another, which fire we will kindle up a gain and remove all disputes.”

  Post also carried messages from Forbes to Shingas and the Ohio sachems, even as a strike force of 2,500 hundred men from Forbes’s army left their outermost stronghold, Fort Ligonier, to make an unexpected stab at Fort Duquesne. Guiding them, fresh from Easton, were Croghan, Montour, and fifteen Iroquois scouts. No one expected the British to move so quickly, so close to winter, least of all the beleaguered French commander, François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, who was short on men and supplies. He learned of Forbes’s approach just as his Ohio Indian allies accepted Denny’s wampum and returned to the British fold. His position untenable, Lignery emptied the fort, planted enormous quantities of gunpowder beneath its walls, and on November 25, 1758, blew it sky-high.

  “Honble. Sir,” wrote Colonel George Washington, in command of the Virginia troops, to his province’s new governor. “I have the pleasure to inform you, that Fort du Quesne, or the ground rather on which it stood, was possessed by his Majesty’s troops . . . The enemy, after letting us get within a day’s march of the place, burned the fort, and ran away (by the light of it,) at night, going down the Ohio by water . . . The Delawares are suing for Peace, and I doubt not that other Tribes on the Ohio will follow their example.” From the smoking ruins of Duquesne, a new fort—Fort Pitt—began to rise. Pisquetomen and the Delaware looked on in worry; their still-fresh peace treaty called for trading posts, not British forts.

  Cheers went up throughout the colonies. But as Teedyuscung left Easton, saying goodbye to Israel Pemberton—leader of the Quaker association and the one steadfast friend he had left—he wept like a child.

  Robert Stobo was dying by degrees in his clammy prison cell in Quebec. “His looks grew pale, corroding pensive thought sat brooding on his forehead, and left it all in wrinkles; his long black hair grows, like a badger, grey; his body to a shadow wastes[;] . . . his health was gone,” according to the Memoirs of Major Robert Stobo.

  But again, a woman to the rescue. What the Memoirs calls “a lady fair, of chaste renown, of manners sweet, and gentle soul,” interceded just in time, using her influence to have him moved to better quarters. Stobo himself simply spoke of his “close confinement, only on account of its long duration being reduced to such a bad state of health that my life was despaired of, [that] I was moved from the common jail to a house of an inhabitant.” However it happened, it was a lifesaver.

  There, nursed enthusiastically by the homeowner’s daughter (Stobo, it seems, could have found a willing woman on the moon), he became acquainted with a number of other British soldiers held in Quebec. Late in 1758, as the Easton council was reaching its climax, Stobo began plotting yet another escape attempt, with a Connecticut lieutenant named Simon Stevens, who had been a member of the famed Rogers’ Rangers. One hurdle after another arose. Before they could slip away on snowshoes, brutal winter weather locked Quebec in a vise. Plans to commandeer a French sloop, anchored at the shipyard, were rejected as too risky. Finally, with the connivance of a longtime English captive named Clark, they obtained guns, powder, and a big Montreal cargo canoe. Accompanied by Clark, his wife and their three children, and two other English prisoners, they slipped away.

  It was the night of May 1—the second anniversary of Stobo’s first abortive escape, and nearly five years since his surrender at Fort Necessity. Stevens, in his journal, noted that “about Ten a Clock that Evening we embark’d in our Birch Canoe . . . there being nine in Number, which were Capt. Stobo, Lakin, Clark and his Wife, with three Children, Denbo and myself.”

  Buffeted by storms and soaked by spray, their provisions ruined, they nevertheless made fair progress away from Quebec, until on the fourth day they stumbled upon an Indian man and woman who, mistaking them for French, approached and were captured. “I took hold of the Indian and march’d forward,” Stevens said, but the man “sprang from me with a Design to make his Escape, upon which Clark being the next behind me, shot him dead. I then gave Orders to Denbo to kill the Squaw . . . We scalped each of them.” Out of the cold-blooded murders came half a bushel of dried corn and two hundred pounds of sugar, which the fugitives plundered from the dead Natives’ camp.

  The St.
Lawrence was wide but not empty. They dodged a flotilla of troop transports, but a two-masted shallop approached them, and after a flurry of gunfire Stobo’s party seized the boat—and the elderly gentleman at its helm. “I am Monsieur Chev. la Darante,” the old man said with a bow—Louis-Joseph Morel de La Durantaye, lord of the manor at Kamouraska, ferrying a load of wheat to Quebec with three servants. Durantaye was the soul of civility, but he hoodwinked the English escapees into anchoring near a French guard post that night, and they barely evaded a pursuing sloop (“a lofty frigate,” according to the Memoirs). Durantaye and his crew hauled on the shallop’s oars as they labored to escape, with Stobo threatening to shoot the first one who slacked off even a fraction. Cannonballs slashed the water nearby. “The Tide being against us very strong,” Stevens said, “which gave the Enemy a very great opportunity of firing at us; but by good Fortune no Person was hurt.”

  A rising wind finally carried the shallop out of range, but not out of danger. Days later, having rounded the Gaspé Peninsula, the boat ran aground during a storm, smashing its hull. For more than a week, their food almost gone, Stobo’s party tried to cobble together enough driftwood planks and nails to repair the shallop, stuffing the gaping cracks with handkerchiefs and spruce pitch. About to launch, the party was again spied, this time by an armed but unsuspecting schooner and a sloop. Surprising a three-man shore party from the vessels, whom they left tied up and under the guard of Clark’s wife, the four men opted for a desperate gamble.

  In the middle of the night, and bailing frantically to keep their battered shallop afloat, they quietly approached the schooner, the larger of the two ships. In for a penny, in for a pound, they figured, and if they were successful with the schooner, they would have less to fear from the smaller sloop. Stevens was poised in the bow with a grappling hook, Clark took the helm, and Stobo stood ready, bristling with a cutlass, a pistol, and a musket. They took the ship quickly, though Stevens was later at pains to note that Stobo lost his sword and pistol over the side while boarding and shot a man to whom Stevens had already granted quarter. (“I hope the Reader will excuse my being so particular,” the lieutenant said, “as Capt. Stobo has reported he was the first that boarded the Schooner, and the only Instrument in taking her.”)

  Sailing their new prize alongside the smaller sloop, they fired on it, captured the crew, and burned the ship. Gathering those on the shore, they sailed triumphantly a week later into the harbor at Île-Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), “where we all safe arrived (thank GOD),” according to the otherwise unflappable Stevens. It had been almost a month since they’d fled Quebec.

  After five years, Captain Robert Stobo was free, and for the first time, he learned he was a major. He also learned that Major General James Wolfe had just launched a long-anticipated attack on Quebec. Stobo and Stevens immediately reversed course and joined Wolfe, who had boldly sailed a fleet up the treacherous St. Lawrence (following surveys made by the young but already gifted James Cook), where he disembarked nine thousand men and besieged the city.

  In the two and a half months that followed, a military stalemate in which neither side distinguished itself, Stobo served closely with Wolfe and was injured by the same cannonball that almost killed the general during one French bombardment. One small patrol to seize an arms depot, which Stobo helped lead, resulted instead in more than 150 prisoners—many of them women, many of them familiar faces. “Monsieur Stobo’s name is all that’s heard for half an hour at least,” the Memoirs states. On another occasion, Wolfe entertained a French official under a flag of truce—the Memoirs doesn’t say who, other than that it was one of the judges in Stobo’s trial—and as one of Wolfe’s staff, Stobo felt required to dine with him. “Ill went the victuals down with Major Stobo, and every mouthful offered fair to choke him, nor yet the glass could cheer.”

  And though it’s unproven, it seems likely that this regimental engineer, who once sized up Fort Duquesne so precisely, had observed Quebec City with a similar eye for detail and described to Wolfe a footpath up a steep slope—the route Wolfe used on September 13, 1759, to slip his troops onto the Plains of Abraham just west of the city and at last bring Montcalm to a battle in which both would die. The victory was just one of many that famously marked 1759 as an annus mirabilis for Great Britain, the turning point in its ultimate victory over France. Within a year, Vaudreuil would surrender all of Canada, and while the war would grind on overseas for three more years, it was essentially finished in North America.

  Stobo wasn’t there for the joy or the grief. Wolfe had dispatched him to Boston immediately before the fight, with orders to proceed to Crown Point on Lake Champlain, carrying messages to General Amherst. En route, Stobo’s sloop was taken by a French privateer off Nova Scotia. He barely had time to change into a common soldier’s clothes, sinking his officer’s uniform and documents over the side. Set ashore with the others in Halifax, he begged his way to Boston, where, after hearing his nearly unbelievable story, Massachusetts governor Thomas Pownall loaned the now penniless man a few pounds to continue his mission.

  Before Stobo left, he accepted a letter of Pownall’s for Amherst. It seems unlikely that the major knew it contained one of the great understatements of the war. Stobo, the governor observed to Amherst, was marked “by a fatality that pursues him with repeated misfortunes.”

  Chapter 11

  Endings

  The cold tail of November 1759. Robert Stobo, granted leave by General Jeffery Amherst, had just completed the long journey from Lake Champlain to Virginia, the first time he had been home in five and a half years. In his pocket was a letter from the commander in chief to Governor Francis Fauquier, begging leave to recommend the major “to your particular notice and favor” and promising “as I on my own part, when I have an opportunity, shall be very glad to reward his zeal and services.”

  Fauquier and the House of Burgesses were as good as Amherst’s wishes. They granted Stobo back pay, a bonus of £1,000, and a resolution of thanks “for his steady and inviolable Attachment to the Interest of this Country; for his singular bravery and Courage exerted on all Occasions during this present War, and for the Magnanimity with which he has supported himself during his Confinement in Canada.”

  Robert Stobo was never going back to shopkeeping. He was in the army for life—though his fickle stars scarcely relented. Sailing to London a few months later, he was overtaken again by privateers; again he had to fling his papers over the side of the ship and shed his uniform; again, though, he was able to resume his trip after paying a ransom. He later commanded a company at the surrender of Montreal in 1760; among the liberated prisoners was Jacob van Braam. Beating incalculable odds, which by now must have seemed second nature to him, Stobo even found his old sword, given to his lieutenant at Fort Necessity and plundered from the dead man at the Monongahela.

  But then Stobo’s luck, which had never thrown him a challenge he couldn’t overcome, began to change. From Montreal and Quebec, his company joined a British fleet sailing against the French and Spanish islands of the Caribbean. He survived the taking of Martinique but was seriously wounded during the siege of Havana in 1762, his skull fractured by chunks of masonry falling from the castle walls. His recovery was long; the war was over before he rejoined his company in Quebec, then followed it to England in 1768.

  But his was no longer the life of a celebrated hostage and self-made spy. Stobo was snarled in a complicated legal fight over land along Lake Champlain, and the lot of a peacetime captain of infantry afforded none of the zest to which he’d become accustomed. He was drinking heavily. On June 19, 1770, after a long bout with the bottle, he blew out his brains with his pistol. His sisters blamed it on his old head wounds: “He never afterwards got the better of their banefull effects.”

  Jacob van Braam retired to a farm in Wales before being called to active duty during the American Revolution. He served in Florida and the Caribbean, returned to his farm, and was never heard from again.

  At
almost the same time that Stobo was thanking the Virginia burgesses for his £1,000 bonus, Conrad Weiser was drawing up his will, a long dense document appropriate for a gentleman farmer and county judge: “In the name of God. Amen. I, Conrad Weiser . . . being of perfect health of body and of sound and disposing mind and memory (blessed be God for the same) . . .” In fact, Weiser was in anything but perfect health. He had just turned sixty-three, his constitution had been failing for years, and some days the “lameness” of which he’d often complained so crippled his right hand that he could not write. So he made his preparations.

  To his “beloved wife Ann Eve,” he left their home in Reading, an annuity of twenty pounds a year, “two of my best feather beds of her own choice; all my kitchen utensils and the sum of fifty pounds current money.” His plantation below South Mountain, nearly nine hundred acres, he divided among four of his sons; his land “beyond the Kittochtany Hills, and all my grants or sights to lands lying beyond the same mountains,” were to be split among all seven of his surviving children.

  On July 12, 1760, Weiser left his house in Reading with Sir John St. Clair, still the quartermaster general of the army, although no longer threatening to set the indolent scum of the Pennsylvania backwoods to the sword. Weiser may have been planning to travel to the Ohio country with St. Clair—the frontier grapevine was buzzing, and Weiser had intimations of trouble brewing in the west. But they did not get past the Tulpehocken before the old interpreter was struck with severe pain in his gut, and he barely made it to his farm there. From the symptoms, it seems likely he was suffering from renal failure, and he died the next day.