Still, it was advantageous for the Five Nations to promote the illusion of a vast Iroquois empire, acquired by conquest and rigidly controlled, and for their European neighbors, especially the English colonies, to acknowledge it. This political mirage bolstered the league’s always tenuous position with the European powers, and it gave colonial negotiators such as James Logan—the Scots-Irish secretary (and later president) of the Pennsylvania provincial council, who grew wealthy from a near monopoly on Indian trading in the province—a back-room avenue to smooth out troublesome Native affairs, especially land sales. Best of all, because the English considered the Iroquois subjects of their own king (a fallacy to which the Iroquois politely acceded in treaties, while ignoring it in practice), New York and Pennsylvania concluded that all the land within the league’s shadow was, by right and law, English as well.
In the early 1700s, Pennsylvania was swelling with immigrants from all directions. As more and more Europeans disembarked at Philadelphia or New Castle, an increasing number of Lenapes forsook their homeland along the lower Delaware and moved north to the land along the fringe of the Appalachian Mountains or west to the Susquehanna Valley. There they mingled with refugees invited by the Iroquois—the Savannah (Shawnee), Tutelo, and Tuscarora from the Carolinas; the Conoy and Nanticoke from the Chesapeake—and by Five Nations members looking to spread south into the good hunting and farming areas along the river. Runaway black slaves from as far away as Virginia found their way to the villages in the Susquehanna Valley, where they were often given sanctuary.
One reason the Long Peace that Pennsylvania enjoyed endured for so many years, even as settlers poured into the province, may be that the Lenape felt they had plenty of room at their backs, especially in the relatively empty country to their north and west. As they sold off tract after tract along the Delaware and lower Schuylkill rivers, they were able to withdraw, especially to two places of extraordinary beauty and fertility.
One was the Forks of the Delaware, about seventy miles upriver from Philadelphia, where the Lehigh River entered the Delaware at the edge of a valley nearly fourteen miles wide and full of deer, elk, and turkeys. The other was about fifty miles southwest of there, along the same valley system—the Great Valley of the Appalachians, which runs from New York to Alabama. On the upper Schuylkill river, several days’ long walk from the Forks through majestic hardwood forests of ancient chestnut and oak, this valley was framed by a line of low, jumbled hills along its southern edge and the long, flat-topped ridges of the Appalachians to the north.
The latter valley, like that of the Forks, was watered with clear-running streams that flowed from the mountains or rose out of springs from the limestone bedrock of the lowlands. The hunting was equally rich, the soil deep and good for raising maize and squash. The Lenape called it tülpewihacki, “the land abounding with turtles,” and shared it with the Conoy, Shawnee, and other exiles. The colonists, mangling the pronunciation, called it the Tulpehocken. That two such idyllic places would soon be snatched from the Indians—one of them through the most infamous land fraud of the colonial era—would become a deep, long-festering wound, with mortal consequences.
The same exodus of Palatines from Germany that brought Christoph von Graffenried’s colonists to Carolina, just in time for the Tuscarora War, also produced one of the most enigmatic and confounding figures in the Middle Colonies. No one was more central to Pennsylvania’s Indian policy during the mid-eighteenth century than Conrad Weiser, and no one exhibited a stranger divide between his public persona—esteemed interpreter and diplomat, “Holder of the Heavens” to the Iroquois—and the intensely personal (and, to modern eyes, bizarre) spiritual path he followed in his private life.
Weiser was born in 1696 in Groß Aspach, a farming village in the duchy of Württemberg, where his father, a former soldier, worked as a baker. Shortly after losing his wife in 1709, Johann (John) Weiser and eight of his children, including twelve-year-old Conrad, joined the fifteen thousand Palatines who accepted Queen Anne’s offer of asylum in England. So many Palatines poured into Rotterdam and from there onto London-bound ships that the British embassy warned its superiors, “You may have half Germany if you please.”
What to do with them all became a pressing issue for the British government. Thousands were shipped to northern Ireland, while some joined Graffenried on his venture to Carolina. Robert Hunter, the newly appointed lieutenant governor of New York, floated another proposal. Why not ship several thousand Palatines to the wilderness of his colony—billing them for their own passage—and let them work off the resulting debt by boiling down pine sap to make tar and raising hemp for rope? The Palatine problem could be eased and Britain’s crucial naval stores increased.
That sounded good to John Weiser, who signed up. He and his family embarked around Christmas 1709 on what must immediately have seemed a dreadful mistake. The voyage took an unbearable six months, with hundreds, especially children, dying en route. Upon landing in June 1710, two of Conrad’s older brothers were trundled off to labor in Long Island, and when the rest finally reached the pine woods where they were to work, winter was coming on fast. Hunter had nothing but tents in which to shelter them, and the man he’d chosen to oversee production was little more than a crook, with no notion of how to make tar. But the undertaking failed for an even more fundamental reason: while upstate New York was full of pine trees, they were mostly white pines—fine for ships’ masts, but a poor source of tar and turpentine. Trapped on land unsuitable for farming and unable to produce enough tar to pay off their debts, the Germans came to loathe Hunter and his English colleagues, while the governor, watching them drain his fortune with no tar to show for it, responded in kind.
After several years, both the Palatines and Hunter had had enough. The governor cut them loose, and John Weiser emerged as a leader of the Germans, meeting in the fall of 1713 with the Mohawk to seek permission to settle along Schoharie Creek, a lovely waterway that flows north out of the Catskills to the Mohawk River. This was good land, ideal for crops, the type of land about which the Palatines had dreamed since arriving in the New World. John found many of the “Maquas,” including a sachem named Quayant, friendly and welcoming—openhanded in a way that must have stood in contrast with the Germans’ treatment by the English—as the Palatines prepared to move the following spring.
The Germans were short on everything. They had to borrow a plow harness and cows, and nine of them pooled their meager cash to buy a horse. Food was so scarce that they dug Indian potatoes and groundnuts, as the Mohawk showed them—mostly with gestures, since neither spoke the other’s language. So Conrad, by then sixteen, was packed off with Quayant to learn Mohawk. Whether or not he had a vote in this decision, Weiser never said, but he seems to have been dry-eyed about leaving his family, which had, to all intents, ceased to exist. His father had remarried, and rather than stay with a stepmother they despised, his surviving brothers and sisters had already fled.
Nevertheless, life among the Mohawk was a challenge. “I suffered much from the excessive cold, for I was but badly clothed, and towards spring also from hunger, for the Indians had nothing to eat,” he recalled. The Mohawk also drank, and when they were in their cups, they “were so barbarous, that I was frequently obliged to hide from drunken Indians.”
Weiser remained with Quayant until July, having “learned the greater part of the Maqua language.” (That he managed so much, so quickly, suggests that Weiser was a linguistics wizard, since Iroquoian languages are notoriously complex.) The nearest of the seven German settlements—named Weiserdorf, in honor of his father—was just a mile or two from the Mohawk village. Over the next few years, “there were always Maquas among us hunting, so that there was always something for me to do in interpreting,” Conrad said. “I gradually became completely master of the language, so far as my years and other circumstances permitted.” Weiser also became so close to the Mohawk that he was adopted—an act that, in their eyes, bound him to them as closely as
a blood relative.
But while the Palatines had carefully cultivated friendship with the Mohawk, there was still Robert Hunter to consider. They had escaped the tar works, but not their obligations to him, nor to the men to whom he sold the title to the Schoharie land. When an agent arrived to collect their rent, the Germans mobbed him, trapping him for a time in a building as they exchanged gunfire. An arrest warrant was issued for John Weiser, but when the sheriff tried to execute it, the women of Weiserdorf thrashed him savagely and rode him out of town on a rail. When John and two companions sailed to England in 1718 to plead their case before the new king, George I, they were waylaid by pirates, robbed, and beaten, and upon reaching London, nearly penniless, they were soon thrown in prison for debt.
By the time the elder Weiser limped home in 1723, many of the Palatines had pulled up stakes in the Schoharie, which in the end proved far less than the paradise they had imagined. Cutting a road through the forest to the north branch of the Susquehanna, some had made rafts or hollowed out tree trunks to make crude dugout canoes and paddled south with their possessions, while others had driven their herds of cattle through the mountains. Their destination was a place in the Pennsylvania hinterlands about which they’d heard, a place with good soil and clear streams, far from Robert Hunter and the New Yorkers—a valley called Tulpehocken.
No one formally invited the Palatines to come to the Tulpehocken Valley—especially not outraged Lenapes such as the sachem Sassoonan, the leader of the Tulpehocken band, who “could not believe the Christians had settled on them, till he came & with his own Eyes saw the Houses and Fields they made there.” Both the Germans and the Lenape seem to have become mixed up, through no fault of their own, in a testy little power struggle between Pennsylvania’s governor, William Keith,13 and its longtime council secretary, James Logan, who was the major architect of the province’s Indian policy.
While visiting Albany, Keith had quietly mentioned the Tulpehocken Valley to a member of the Palatine community, broadly suggesting that the land was free to settle and sparking the migration from the Schoharie. When the furious Sassoonan objected that the land above South Mountain was supposed to be off-limits to whites, Logan first tried to smother the Lenape’s arguments with paper, producing old deeds purporting to show that Pennsylvania had purchased the area. When that failed to budge the Lenape sachems, who knew they’d agreed to no such thing, he shrugged and said that the Germans had come “without the Consent or Knowledge of any of the Commissioners” and threw the blame onto Keith.
Logan’s own hands were scarcely clean. As William Penn’s deputy, he had long since taken to quietly subverting the late founder’s stated principles of fair dealing, furthering his own ends through land speculation and trade. Logan had already cheated the Lenape out of the fertile Brandywine Valley, which was supposed to have been reserved for their use, and for all his protestations to the contrary, he would happily do it again in the Tulpehocken.
The few dozen Palatine families weren’t alone in violating Indian rights in the land abounding with turtles. More and more settlers, including English Quakers and Welsh, were moving up the Schuylkill beyond South Mountain. Violence was breaking out between them and the Indians. When two Welsh brothers went on a short killing spree, a wider war was averted only by a death sentence for the murderers. When it became clear that no one was going to evict the newcomers, Sassoonan grudgingly accepted the fait accompli—neither the first nor the last time the Lenape acquiesced, with astonishing restraint, the usurpation of their land.
When the flotilla of German canoes disappeared down the Susquehanna, bound for the Tulpehocken, Conrad Weiser remained behind in Weiserdorf. In November 1720, a few weeks after his twenty-fourth birthday, he had married a young woman named Ann Eva Feck, and she was pregnant with their first child (of an eventual fourteen) when the Palatines—including her parents—departed for Pennsylvania. Whether it was family ties, restlessness, or a building frustration with the situation in New York, however, Weiser eventually moved his own fast-growing family to the Tulpehocken. In 1729, he marked off two hundred acres on the north side of the South Mountain hills and settled down to a farmer’s life. To his English and Scots-Irish neighbors, he and his kind were “Dutch”—from Deutsche, or German. Unused, Weiser’s Mohawk grew rusty.
But as the first winter snows fell in 1731—after the harvest had been brought in, the potatoes and root crops stored on groaning shelves in the cellar behind the house; the pigs slaughtered, the bacon salting in brine troughs and the hams hanging in the smokehouse; the casks of local cider laid up and the sauerkraut packed in pottery jars; the woodshed filled with split oak; and all the other, seemingly endless chores of autumn farm life attended to—Weiser’s world changed. He appears for the first time in the minutes of the provincial council in Philadelphia, interpreting for “Shikellima, of the five Nations, appointed to reside among the Shawanese.”
Shikellamy was an Oneida sachem, dispatched by the Iroquois League at Onondaga to live at the confluence of the two branches of the Susquehanna and keep an eye on the Shawnee. He may have already known Weiser from the young man’s time in the Schoharie, or perhaps he simply met Weiser on his way to Philadelphia, since the main path from the Susquehanna ran practically past Weiser’s front door.
However it happened, the encounter was a gift to both the Iroquois and colonial officials. Here was a Mohawk by adoption and a Pennsylvanian by choice, a man who understood Iroquois culture in a way few whites did, living halfway between Philadelphia and Shikellamy’s new home along the Susquehanna, and who was happy to serve as a bridge between the two. When the Philadelphia meeting ended, the council voted to pay “forty Shillings to Conrad Weiser the Interpreter.” It was more than the promising start of a new career. James Logan recognized a prodigy, and Weiser was on his way to becoming the indispensable cog in Pennsylvania’s Indian policy.
For the moment, though, Logan and the Pennsylvanians were focused on the belief that they had found a way to make an end run around the Lenape and Shawnee. They considered Shikellamy “a trusty good Man & and a great Lover of the English,” and a go- between “whose Services had been & may yet further be of great advantage to this Government.” Through him, with Weiser as their increasingly reliable link, they could work directly with the Six Nations.
For their part, the Iroquois felt a change in the wind, too. Where they had quietly tried to foment an uprising by the Shawnee and Lenape against the English in 1726 (which fizzled when their supposed tributaries simply ignored the demand), they now saw the advantage of cutting a private deal—the reason Shikellamy had come to Philadelphia in the first place. The Iroquois would claim dominance over the Indians of Pennsylvania based on past military “conquests.” That such conquests were largely fictive didn’t matter, as long as Philadelphia agreed to recognize them. That Pennsylvania’s Indians would be factored out of the equation entirely was bad enough, but there were worse insults to come.
For Conrad Weiser, the hard life he’d endured as a young man was softening. By 1736, Ann Eva had borne ten children, eight of whom lived, and his farm had grown to more than eight hundred prosperous acres. He was active in the community and in the small union church—half the congregation Lutheran, like Weiser, half Reformed. But there were plenty of less traditional avenues for a questioning religious man to follow. It was a time of great Protestant ferment, with pietists who shunned the formal trappings of established churches creating their own denominations, and mystical sects bubbling up in Europe and America.
On the Pennsylvania frontier one might find New Baptists, nicknamed “Dunkers” by their derisive neighbors for their habit of full-body baptism, foot washing, and love feasts; Neugeborene, or New-Borns, a celibate sect that rejected most scripture and sacraments and believed they were free of sin; and Neumondler, or New Mooners, who timed their worship to the lunar cycles and accompanied their services with blaring trombones (in accordance with the book of Numbers: “Also in the day of your
gladness, and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets over your burnt offerings”).
Among the strangest of the lot, well out on the fringe even by Radical Reformation standards, was a Palatine named Johann Conrad Beissel, a short, wild-eyed, self-described prophet, prone to keening an oddly charismatic Rosicrucian philosophy for hours, his eyes closed as though in a trance. Beissel had a magnetic personality, by one account wooing a bride away from her marriage altar, mid-vow. (On a less salacious note, he was also instrumental in publishing a number of important German religious works in America.) He established a hermitage of like-minded followers a dozen miles over the South Mountain hills from Weiser at Ephrata, a community his flock called der Kloster, or the Cloister. For someone like Weiser, who had “at a previous period of my life wished that I had never heard of a God,” a late-blooming faith can burn strongly, and when he met Beissel in 1735, he fell under the preacher’s spell.
While he didn’t—yet—become one of the Solitary Brethren, the self-mortifying monks who starved themselves and slept on hard wooden benches, Weiser accepted baptism into the sect as Brother Enoch and burned his books of Lutheran theology (and any others he could find). He later grew a long beard, fasted to the point of gauntness, donned a biblical robe and sandals to preach the new gospel, and tried to hold himself apart from the temptations of the flesh (i.e., his wife). Ann Eva, good hausfrau that she was, gave it a shot for her husband’s sake, attempting to live with him at Ephrata, but she soon returned to the farm—as did Conrad, from time to time. If his celibate spirit was willing, his flesh was evidently weak, for Ann Eva’s babies kept on coming with regularity.
It’s hard to reconcile the journeyman mystic—proselytizing in German communities in the late 1730s, wearing a robe belted with rope like some Old Testament figure—with the pragmatic, tough-as-nails Indian interpreter on whom James Logan and the Iroquois leaned so heavily. Yet these two Conrad Weisers coexisted for years. In February 1737, for example, despite snow and bone-chilling cold, Weiser left the Tulpehocken Valley and set out for Onondaga, where, at the behest of Logan and the governor of Virginia, he was to negotiate a peace treaty between the Iroquois and their perennial enemies, the Catawba and Cherokee. It would be the first of many such diplomatic missions to Onondaga, and very nearly his last.
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