The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  ***

  Aug. 13, 1762

  To the Hon’ble James Hamilton, Esqr., Lieutent. Governour of Pennsylvania, &c.

  The Humble Petition of Jacob Hockstetler of Berks County.

  Humbly Sheweth:

  That about five Years ago your Petitioner with 2 Children were taken Prisoners, & his Wife and 2 other Children were kill’d by the Indians[,] that one of the said Children who is still Prisoner is named Joseph, is about 18 Years old, and Christian is about 16 years & a half old, That his House & Improvements were totally ruined & destroyed.

  That your Petitioner understands that neither of his Children are brought down, but the Embassadour of King Kastateeloca, who has one of his Children, is now here.

  That your Petitioner most humbly prays your Honour to interpose in this Matter, that his Children may be restored to him, or that he may be put into such a Methods as may be effectual for that Purpose.

  And your Petitioner will ever pray, &c.

  ***

  On August 18, 1762, James Hamilton, once again lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, tidied up some lingering business. “On the proprietaries’ Commissioners producing & reading sundry Writings & papers, Teedyuscung was convinced of his Error, and acknowledged that he had been mistaken with regard to the charge of Forgery,” he said. Actually, it was the payment of £400, a flurry of (probably doctored) papers, and some backroom arm-twisting that “convinced” Teedyuscung to drop his claim that the Walking Purchase was a fraud.

  In fact, Hamilton, the Pennsylvanians, and the Iroquois League were in rare agreement on one pressing issue—the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut, which was again making inroads into the Wyoming Valley. Hamilton may have thought he’d pulled Teedyuscung’s fangs, but the Yankees realized the old Lenape was a still formidable roadblock in the valley—and they may have seen an opportunity to rid themselves of him. On April 16, 1763, as Teedyuscung slept off a bottle of rum, he was burned to death when persons unknown torched his and twenty other Indian cabins in the valley. While some blamed the Iroquois, Teedyuscung’s son, Captain Bull, had no doubt who the perpetrators were, since the murder occurred just as the first wave of Connecticut settlers arrived. That autumn, Captain Bull led a series of bloody raids that destroyed the new colony, with the loss of twenty lives.

  While the ruins of Fort Duquesne were still smoldering in 1758, Shingas’s brother Tamaqua gave Christian Frederick Post—and through him, the British—a pointed message dressed in silk. “Brother,” the sachem said, “I would tell you, in a most soft, loving, and friendly manner, to go back over the mountain, and stay there.” The French were gone, and the Ohio Indians wanted no whites west of the Allegheny hills.

  But the British, having promised nothing but trading posts to the Natives in the upper Ohio, had no intention of leaving. By 1761, there were more than a hundred white households at Pittsburgh, as the growing community by Fort Pitt was known. Anger was again simmering among the western tribes, and then General Amherst, his budget slashed by London, made the worst possible move, cutting off the gifts by which Indian alliances had traditionally been maintained.

  The trouble that Weiser had suspected erupted in May 1763 and became known as Pontiac’s War, named for an Ottawa chief who was among its most visible leaders. But like the Yamasee War half a century earlier, the uprising involved many tribes with many rationales, and the revolt quickly spread across the old pays d’en haut. The Ohio tribes and western Iroquois joined the fight, again ravaging frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia. It was the panic of 1755 all over again. Or worse. Fort Venango (as Machault was now known), Fort LeBoeuf, and Fort Presque Isle all fell to the Seneca and their allies. Fighting raged as far north as Michilimackinac, which was taken by the Ojibwa and Sauk, and south into the buffalo prairies of the Illinois country.

  Pontiac’s War was an ugly affair, violent on all sides but especially notorious for one particular event. Fort Pitt was besieged immediately, crammed with frightened civilians (some of whom had been escorted there by Shingas and Tamaqua, who provided the garrison with intelligence). Conditions inside were vile, and smallpox was spreading. George Croghan’s old business partner William Trent, who ran a trading post at Pitt, was commissioned a captain and put in charge of a militia company.

  On June 23, two Delaware emissaries formally sought the fort’s surrender, which was refused. The commander boasted that he could hold Pitt “against all the Indians in the Woods.” But he also knew that there were other ways to fight than with a musket. “Out of our regard to [the emissaries] we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital,” Trent noted in his diary. “I hope it will have the desired effect.” Ever the businessman, he submitted an invoice for “Sundries got to Replace in kind those which were taken from people in the Hospital to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians.”

  This was the first documented attempt at biological warfare, with uncertain results. Smallpox was already spreading through the Indian ranks, and it’s unclear whether the infectious “gift” spurred the ensuing epidemic.

  Not long afterward, Shingas disappears from the historical record; no one knows what happened to him, but it’s possible he died in the smallpox outbreak. His brother Tamaqua survived and, having converted to Christianity, helped Post’s Moravians establish missions in the Ohio country before his death in 1771.

  Pontiac’s War ended in stages, with the British forcing the repatriation of many white captives, some held for more than a decade. In the fall of 1764 or the spring of 1765, Joseph Hochstetler was brought to Fort Augusta, along the Susquehanna at Sunbury, Pennsylvania. He had been well treated by his adoptive family, and the parting was hard. According to Hochstetler family tradition, in later years he “often visited them and enjoyed himself hunting, fishing, running and jumping.”

  Some of the captives had been taken at such a young age that they had lost their English or German and most recollection of their previous lives. The transition was wrenching, as soldiers forced them from the only families they knew; many had to be physically carried away. Parents, gathering at transfer points such as Carlisle, where the former captives were being brought, searched the unfamiliar and often sullen faces for any sign—the curve of a nose, a dimple, an old scar—of the children they’d last seen years before.

  Indians Delivering Up English Captives

  Children were commonly reluctant to leave their adoptive Indian families, as shown in this engraving based on a Benjamin West painting. Many colonials, even those kidnapped as teenagers or adults, found Native life difficult to leave. Many were returned to their birth families only under great duress, and some remained with their adoptive families for the rest of their lives. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-103)

  One of those who searched the crowds at Carlisle in 1765 was a widow named Leininger, whose family had been attacked in the first massacre at Penn’s Creek a decade earlier. Two of her daughters had been carried off, but none of the young women looked like either of them. In desperation, she began singing an old German hymn her daughters had loved:

  Allein, und doch nicht ganz allein

  bin ich in meiner Einsameit . . .

  (Alone, yet not all alone am I,

  in my loneliness . . . )

  One of the girls gasped and rushed forward, singing the hymn, and embraced the woman she now realized was her mother.

  One day at the Hochstetler farm, as everyone was sitting down to the evening meal, an Indian peered nervously through the front door, muttered a greeting to the family, and sat on a stump in the yard. No one knew what he wanted; food, probably. When dinner was cleared, Jacob Hochstetler walked outside—with decidedly mixed feelings, one imagines. But then, in halting German, the Indian said, “My name is Christian Hochstetler.”

  As with many former captives, the decision to leave the upper Ohio and return to the settlements had been an agonizing one for Christian. He had grown close to his adoptive family, and at first Jacob could barely get h
is son to enter the house to eat. For the longest time, Christian wavered between staying and returning to the west. Then he met a girl, and his eventual marriage settled the matter, although he left the Amish congregation to become a baptizing Dunkard and, with two of his brothers, eventually moved west of the mountains to settle new land.

  As Sir William Johnson’s deputy for Indian affairs, George Croghan held the ultimate inside track on all manner of business ventures in the west, and he pursued them with gusto. Although his ten-year amnesty from prosecution for debt was overturned, it took five years to do so, and in the meantime he was involved (officially or otherwise—mostly otherwise) in everything from a monopoly on whiskey sales to the Ohio forts to farming and mineral exploration. He bought a four-acre estate in Philadelphia that he named Monckton Hall and set about adding to its splendor.

  He also had one of the closest calls of his long, eventful life. In the summer of 1765, he was sent on a mission far down the Ohio to bring peace to the Illinois tribes. His party was attacked by eighty Kickapoo and Mascouten warriors, who killed two of Croghan’s men and three accompanying Shawnees. The survivors were captured, including Croghan, groggy from a tomahawk blow to the head. (He later quipped, “A thick Scull is of Service on some Occasions.”) Thanks to intervention from some of his old Miami customers from the days at Pickawillany, Croghan and his men were soon freed, and with Pontiac’s help, he accomplished his assignment.

  It was land speculation, though, that really set Croghan’s heart aflutter. He held grants, patents, and claims of varying validity on hundreds of thousands of frontier acres, including forty thousand acres in New York he called Croghan’s Forest and partial interest in a breathtaking two-and-a-half-million-acre grant that William Trent and others had obtained in the Ohio country from the Six Nations. Yet the thicket of debts, old and new, grew ever more tangled, and to satisfy them, he began selling off his holdings and even taking multiple mortgages on some parcels before selling them to unsuspecting buyers.

  As the Revolutionary War began, Croghan found himself suspected of Tory tendencies, much as he’d been labeled a French sympathizer twenty years earlier—and with as little cause. He successfully fought a charge of treason, but Monckton Hall was toppled and burned by British troops quartered in Philadelphia. When independence finally came, it ruined him by invalidating most of his remaining land claims. Almost penniless, Croghan died on August 31, 1782, outside Philadelphia, expecting almost to the end to find a last jackpot in the west.

  And what of Andrew Montour, whose very life was, in many ways, the embodiment of the eastern frontier? Because he wrote no letters and filed no reports of his own, Montour left far fewer traces than Croghan and Weiser. He drifts in and out of the historical record—interpreting for Croghan, guiding an unsuccessful midwinter attempt by Major Robert Rogers and his famed Rangers to reach Fort Michilimackinac during the waning days of the Seven Years’ War. He tried to start a trading post at the Forks of the Susquehanna with one of his sons, and during Pontiac’s War he led Indian counterattacks under Johnson’s direction. In one such action in the winter of 1764, he took a war party of nearly 150 men, mostly Oneidas, on a sweep against Delaware towns in southwestern New York and the western Susquehanna Valley. Among their captives was Captain Bull, Teedyuscung’s son.

  When the Indian wars were over, though, there was little need for Montour’s services as a captain or an interpreter. “I shall send Montour off for Fort Pitt in a day or Two,” Johnson informed Croghan in 1766, “where you may dispose of him, or take him with you as you shall judge best. I have done my utmost for these 2 years past to keep him out of Debt, and he goes now pritty clear of ye. World.”

  Two years later, Montour did interpret for a grand council at Fort Stanwix, New York, in which the Iroquois made still more concessions of western territory. After that, Montour’s name shows up in only a few scattered land dealings—for a tract at the mouth of Loyalsock Creek called Montour’s Reserve, where his mother’s old village of Ostuaga stood; for three hundred acres on the Ohio; for fifteen hundred acres on Penn’s Creek. Whether he lived on any of this land, we don’t know. In 1771, he was at Fort Pitt, where he may have been living with his niece Mary.

  That’s also where he died. “Captain Montour the Indian interpreter was killed in his own House the Day before Yesterday by a Seneca Indian who had been intertained by him at his House for some Days,” Major Isaac Hamilton wrote from Fort Pitt on January 22, 1772. “He was buried this Day near the Fort.” The assumption has always been that it was a drunken quarrel that went bad, but like so much of his life, Montour’s death is an unanswered question.

  By the time Montour died, much of the frontier he knew had moved on.

  The years following Pontiac’s War saw great leaps in westward settlement, even as official British policy sought to squelch its advance. In 1763, King George III issued a proclamation that forbade colonial occupation of British land beyond the Appalachians. His ministers drew a meandering line on the map tracing the limit of the eastern seaboard, setting aside “any lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any Rivers that fall into the Atlantick Ocean” and declaring that “the several Nations or Tribes of Indians, with whom We are connected . . . should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such parts of our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to, or purchased by Us, are reserved to them . . . as their Hunting Grounds.”

  The so-called Proclamation Line snaked down the White Mountains of New Hampshire, across the waist of Iroquoia, along the windswept crest of the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge to the Smokies, and then back to bisect Georgia. Like many other treasures the tribes had once held dear, the Susquehanna—the Wyoming Valley where Teedyuscung had plaintively begged for “a Home for Ever,” the rich hunting lands on the west branch for which so many had died—was entirely on the colonial side of the divide.

  Although the Ohio Indians may have been initially reassured by the proclamation, the British military carved out exceptions for themselves, in the form of military bases such as Fort Pitt, and for British subjects on old French land in the buffalo prairies of Illinois. Even civilians such as George Washington, retired from the army for a decade, saw it for what it was: a minor inconvenience. Writing to his surveyor, Washington admitted, “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians.”

  The few Indians who had remained in the now settled parts of Pennsylvania were increasingly isolated and endangered. The attempt to spread smallpox among the western Indians at Fort Pitt was an especially horrific example of an ever more pervasive view among white colonists and the British military that the Natives were little more than animals and deserving of as much consideration. From “back inhabitants” to army officers and politicians, there was less and less attempt to separate Native allies and neighbors from enemies. Increasingly, all Indians were seen as uniformly subhuman threats.

  When the hysteria of Pontiac’s War hit the polyglot settlements along the lower Susquehanna, for example, the result was massacres of those who posed the least threat and were least able to defend themselves. In a snowstorm on December 14, 1763, a mob of fifty-seven settlers from Paxton, near Harris’s Ferry, butchered half a dozen Conestogas who farmed peacefully on one of the remaining reservation-like “manors” among a sea of white neighbors. Two weeks later, these so-called Paxton Boys—armed with long rifles, tomahawks, and scalping knives—slaughtered six adults and eight children who had been confined to the Lancaster workhouse, where they were supposed to be under government protection. It was essentially the end of what had once been the mighty Susquehannock, with only two elderly Conestogas escaping the violence.

  Vigilantes, lynch mobs, and frontier justice ruled in much of the “back parts,” which ranted against what many pioneer families saw as highhandedness by provincial and military leaders. James Smith, captured by Indians at Braddock’s defeat and held f
or five years, led a backwoods uprising in the Alleghenies in the late 1760s. Known as the Black Boys, his men painted their faces with red ocher and charcoal. Claiming the precedence of local magistrates over the distant authority of Philadelphia or London, they waylaid trade caravans (burning the goods, shooting the packhorses, and flogging the wagoners), kidnapped military couriers, captured Fort Bedford, and besieged Fort Loudoun.

  The glimpse of direct, imperial rule that the overbearing Braddock had attempted to impose in 1755 had left a bad taste in the colonies’ mouth, and frontier rebellions were not its only expression. The widening chasm between the primacy of local rule, by which the colonials saw themselves as worthy equals under British law, and the supremacy of a Parliament that viewed them as subjugate to royal command only worsened through such escalating crises as the Stamp Act of 1765 and the hated Townshend Acts beginning two years later. The reaction was so poisonous that British troops occupied Boston in 1768, and many of the wrongs the colonies perceived in these acts—the forced quartering of British troops in times of peace, for example, and taxation without representation—would explode in revolution just a few years later. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin put it best in 1773, when he published a satirical article laying out British missteps titled “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One.”

  Andrew Montour’s unmarked grave is long gone. Perhaps it is lost somewhere beneath the twenty lanes of freeway that now converge directly above the site of old Fort Pitt (where the fort’s two reconstructed bastions peek out from beneath the overpasses), though more likely it lies to the east, farther up the peninsula, in what was once forest and pasture and is now the squared-off blocks of downtown Pittsburgh.