Best of all, when a trader died or went bankrupt—both common events on the frontier—Logan could seize his property to make good on the trader’s debts, thus gaining control of the most valuable land in that region. Given his high and varied government offices, Logan was able to brush away any lingering problems with titles or encumbrances such land might have—and thus did still more avenues of gain present themselves.
By the time Croghan arrived, however, the aging Logan had suffered a stroke (though he still kept a hand in Indian affairs), the Susquehanna had been emptied of its furs, and it was being emptied fast of its Indians, too, squeezed out by the rush of settlers. This created, in effect, two frontiers. To immigrants arriving from Europe, such as Jacob Hochstetler and his Amish kin who settled on the northern edge of the Tulpehocken Valley, the frontier was marked by what they called Blue Mountain, the brooding, two-hundred-mile ridge the Lenape named keekachtanemin, “the endless mountains.” To the north was “St. Anthony’s Wilderness,” as the Germans called it, a howling waste of wolves, panthers, and savages.
But traders like Croghan had pushed the frontier into country the German and Scots-Irish farmers had never seen and about which they’d scarcely heard. From his home across the river from Harris’s Ferry, along the lazy meanders of Conodoquinet Creek, Croghan and his men could follow the well-worn Indian trail known as the Allegheny Path, which wound 250 miles to the Forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers met; take other trails to the upper Allegheny River and thence on to Lake Erie; or take still others down the Ohio into Kentucky.
The fifty or so men Croghan employed were constantly coming and going with the seasons—moving through the mountains in autumn, so they could winter with the tribes and get the prime pelts from the cold-weather trapping and hunting, and making another roundtrip to conduct summer trading, exchanging worn-out packhorses at way-station stables in places such as the Penn’s Creek valley. Croghan had a major establishment near the Forks of the Ohio, where he maintained a fortified warehouse, as well as smaller posts downriver at Logstown and Beaver Creek, and even one among the Wyandot on Sandusky Bay.
That Croghan worked practically under the noses of the French at Detroit was a testament to his nerve, especially since the two countries were embroiled in another war—King George’s War (the North American extension of the War of the Austrian Succession), which had begun in 1744. In a significant way, the war helped English traders; they’d always had an edge with superior goods, but the interdiction of French shipping meant their Canadian counterparts had little to offer the Ohio tribes, and what they did have was outrageously expensive. Conrad Weiser passed on a cautionary tale he’d heard from Shikellamy about one French trader’s misfortune: “The French man offering but one charge of Powder & one Bullet for a beaver skin to the Indian; the Indian took up his Hatchet, and knock’d him on the head, and killed him on the Spot.”
With his net spread across so immense an area, Croghan’s traders bartered for winter furs of fox, fisher, marten, beaver, and otter, but as in the Carolinas, deerskins were the bread and butter of the Indian trade. More and more, the value of goods flowing across the frontier was reckoned by everyone, Native and white alike, in “bucks.” And because traders such as Croghan were the only British colonials so deep in the interior, they became vital sources of intelligence about Indian movements and plans, as well as the local mouthpieces and muscle for provincial policy—which often coincided with the traders’ own best interests. While most of the fighting had been restricted to Canada, New England, and Iroquoia, no one knew when King George’s War might spill over into Pennsylvania. Reinforcing the shaky loyalty of the Ohio tribes made good sense, politically and economically.
Croghan had already been conveying provincial gifts, with which the skids of Indian diplomacy were endlessly greased, to the Shawnee and other Ohio bands.14 Because his business took him to places where no other Pennsylvanian ventured, Croghan gradually became the province’s de facto diplomat in those far regions. Weiser, anxious to reinforce the progress Croghan had made in flipping the Lake Erie Indians to the British side, suggested sending them a gift by “some Honest Trader, I think George Coughon is fit to perform it. I always took him for an honest man, and have as yet no Reason to think otherwys of him.”
In a real coup, Croghan convinced a band of “Twightwees”—Miamis from the Wabash River south of Lake Michigan—to move to a village called Pickawillany, along the Great Miami River in what is now western Ohio, where he established a trading post for them. In the summer of 1748, Croghan shepherded a delegation of Miamis, Shawnees, and Mingos to a “treaty” (as such councils were called, whether or not they resulted in formal agreements) with Pennsylvania officials at Lancaster. During the treaty, one of the Miami chiefs took a piece of chalk and traced out a large map—the Wabash River rising just below Lake Erie and flowing south, the villages of the Miami and their allies scattered along its length, the Wabash meeting the Ohio just a few hundred miles from where the Ohio joined the Mississippi. The chief sketched in the locations of two lonely French forts and mentioned that among their towns, the Indians of the Wabash could raise a thousand fighting men.
Laid out like this, it was clear that Croghan had opened a door the British had long sought, and the Pennsylvanians were almost breathless at the thought: “It is manifest that if these Indians and the Allies prove faithful to the English, the French will be depriv’d of the most convenient and nearest communication with their Forts on the Mississippi, the ready Road lying thro’ their Nations, and that there will be nothing to interrupt an Intercourse between this Province and that great River.”
Weiser was translating at Lancaster, as was—for the first time in an official capacity—Andrew Montour, whom Weiser had recommended to the Pennsylvania council just the previous month. No sooner was the treaty concluded than Croghan and the Indians headed back west with gifts for the Ohio tribes, followed a few days later by Weiser, Montour, and Benjamin Franklin’s seventeen-year-old son, William, tagging along at the behest of his father, who had a keen interest in Indian policy and the western lands.
Montour and Weiser, two men split between conflicting worlds, would become partners in the go-between life of interpreters. Montour’s innate conflicts, racial and ethnic, were deeper and more obvious than Weiser’s, whose division was largely spiritual. As a boy, Weiser had envied atheists for their lack of any faith, but as a questing adult, he’d made up for it by throwing himself into the mysticism of Beissel’s Cloister at Ephrata. In 1740, four years after his baptism as Brother Enoch, he’d left Ann Eva to live as a monk at Ephrata—a complete embrace that ultimately proved fatal to his faith, revealing what he saw as its hollow, sinful center. After three years, he could no longer ignore the “loathsome idolatry” bordering on messianism; the “spiritual and physical bondage,” including Beissel’s late-night visits to the quarters of the “Spiritual Virgins”; and the “fulsome self-praise” of Beissel and his cronies. Weiser resigned from Ephrata as emphatically as he had embraced it. “I take leave of your young, but already decrepit sect, and I desire henceforth to be treated as a stranger,” he wrote to the congregation.
Now, in 1748, after sixteen days on the trail to the Ohio—a far easier journey than Weiser’s long-ago winter ordeal with Shikellamy, for which the fifty-one-year-old interpreter must have been grateful—the parties reached the river about fifteen miles below the Forks. Here lay Logstown, the largest Indian town in the Ohio country, where a sharp ear like Weiser’s or Montour’s could pick out almost every Native language and dialect imaginable. Coming into town, Weiser and his companions each pulled a brace of pistols from their belts, firing into the air in salute, and even as the returning volleys from town still echoed, they got to work.
Over the next three weeks, Weiser made the rounds in the laborious, often tedious work of diplomacy at which he excelled—convincing the wavering Wyandot not to return to the French and formally accepting them into Pennsylva
nia’s fold as “brethren”; dispatching Montour to confirm the loyalty of the still angry Lenape; distributing rolls of tobacco, dispensing drams of rum, and punctuating his speeches with gifts of stroud cloth or strings of wampum; and all the while waiting impatiently for the bulk of the gifts, which had been delayed on the trail, to arrive. In each case, Weiser rigorously followed the norms of Native protocol, by which the participants were ritually prepared for the serious work of negotiating. Paramount among these were the “clearing the woods” ceremonies, which, with gifts of wampum, were meant to metaphorically clean a traveler’s eyes to see and open his ears to hear, and the condolence ceremonies, in which the exchange of gifts was meant to “wipe the tears” over deaths that had occurred since the last treaty.
Weiser raised the Union Jack in the middle of town as more and more Indians appeared for the council, each band firing off their muskets as they drew near. He met privately with the Seneca, who had recently carried off English prisoners from the Carolinas. “Brethren, you came a great way to visit us, and many sorts of evil might have befallen you by the way,” Tanaghrisson told Weiser, handing him a belt of wampum before a gathering of Iroquois leaders. “We give you this string of wampum to clear up your eyes and mind, and to remove all bitterness of your spirits, that you might hear us speak in good cheer.” The sachem apologized for the Carolina raid and, offering Weiser a belt of black wampum, said, “We therefore remove our hatchet, which by the Evil Spirit’s order was struck into your body . . . that this thing might be buried into the bottomless pit.”
With Croghan’s help, Weiser stove in an eight-gallon barrel of whiskey that a white man named Nolling had smuggled into town; growing numbers of “back inhabitants” were getting into their own form of Indian trade, making moonshine and transporting it over the mountains to the Ohio villages. During his time in Logstown, Weiser dealt with complaints from some Indians that the liquor was too plentiful, from others that it was too scarce, and from still others that it was too expensive.
At Weiser’s behest, the leaders of each Native band conducted a crude but effective census. For every man of fighting age in their village, they added one twig to a neatly tied bundle. Counting the assembled bundles, Weiser determined that there were almost eight hundred warriors along the Ohio—mostly Lenape, Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandot, with a few hundred Mohawk, Mahican, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Oneida, and even a few Ojibwa from the far lakes. Even without the Miami farther west, it was an impressive total, more than matching the combined manpower of the Iroquois homeland.
Addressing the council as Tarachiawagon, the name he’d been given by the Six Nations, Weiser said:
Brethren, some of you were in Philadelphia last fall, and acquainted us that you had taken up the English hatchet, and that you had already made use of it against the French, and that the Frenchmen had very hard heads, and your country afforded nothing but grass and sticks, which were not sufficient to break them. You desired your brethren would assist you with some weapons sufficient to do it; your brethren the President and council promised you then to send something to you next spring by Tharachiawagon . . . but other affairs prevented his journey to Ohio.
The council had at last sent “a civil and brotherly present,” to which he gestured: five large stacks of goods, one for the Seneca; one to be shared among the Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk; one for the Lenape; one for the Shawnee; and one for the Wyandot, Ojibwa, and Mahican.
Despite a temporary peace with France, Weiser had no illusions. This present, Tarachiawagon concluded, “shall serve to strengthen the chain of friendship between us, the English, and the several nations of Indians to which you belong. A French peace is a very uncertain one . . . Our wise people are of [the] opinion that after their belly is full, they will quarrel again and raise a war.”
The likelihood of war was also on the minds of Tanaghrisson, the Iroquois “half-king” who held nominal authority over the Ohio Indians, and Scarouady, an Oneida who had been sent by the Six Nations to “oversee” the Shawnee. They met privately with Weiser, Montour, and Croghan, and their message was anything but peaceful. “You will have peace,” they told the three men, “but it is certain that the Six Nations and their allies are upon the point of making war against the French.” Handing him a belt of wampum, they said, “Let us keep a true correspondence, and let us hear always of one another.”
In fact, Tanaghrisson and Scarouady were themselves part of the evolving dynamic of frontier statecraft. As representatives of the Iroquois League, they should not have been happy with the outcome of the just-completed council, and not only because of Britain’s temporarily peaceful attitude toward the French. Ever since James Logan and Shikellamy had forged their partnership almost twenty years earlier, Pennsylvania and the Six Nations had sidestepped the “tributary” tribes such as the Shawnee and Lenape. At Logstown, Weiser—and through him, Pennsylvania—had decided to deal directly with allies such as the Wyandot instead of working through Onondaga.
That change would make the leaders of the Six Nations deeply uneasy, but it may not have greatly disturbed Tanaghrisson and Scarouady. They were increasingly independent operators themselves, speaking on behalf of the people they had been sent to oversee. The world was not as it had been. Logan was old and ailing, the aging Shikellamy was in such poor health that he would not live out the year, and the Ohio Indians were a long way from the council fires at Onondaga. The twig-bundle census, as much as anything, showed Weiser that the Native power center had shifted away from Iroquoia.
Weiser wasn’t the only one to see what lay ahead. In 1750, Pennsylvania governor James Hamilton wrote to his counterpart in New York, George Clinton:
You can’t be insensible that many of the six Nations have of late left their old Habitations, and settled on the branches of Mississippi, and are become more numerous there than in the Countrys they left At which both the French & the Council at Onondaga are not a little alarmed. The State of Indian Affairs . . . gives me much concern that the Council at Onondaga should not be able to retain their People among them, but by suffering their young Indians to go and settle in those distant parts, give rise to a new Interest that in a little time must give the Law instead of taking it from them.
Weiser had also seen firsthand what astonishing country “those distant parts” were. The Ohio River was so wide and easily navigable that there was “not the least danger of overseting,” Weiser wrote after returning home. “The land on both Sides are very good and a great deal of it Extraordinary rich,” where “a midling good Hunter among the Indian of Ohio Killes for his Share in one fall 150, 200 dears.” The gifts he had just delivered, Weiser said, made “a good start,” but the province must move quickly to establish better trade to forestall not only the French—“one thinks it a thousand pity that Such a large and good Country Should be unsetled or fall into the hand of the french”—but also Marylanders and Virginians, who were eagerly eyeing the Ohio country.
To Weiser’s mind, the Indians of the Ohio could provide a bulwark against the French, but only if properly courted. That meant leaning on the Iroquois on behalf of the Lenape, persuading “the 6 nations to take off the petticoat from the delewares and give them a Breech Cloath to wear.” More and more, Weiser, so long the proponent of Iroquois domination, was pushing for greater independence for the Ohio towns.
Richard Peters, the Anglican clergyman and provincial land clerk who had taken over for James Logan, not only as council secretary but also as proprietary henchman and Machiavellian sculptor of the colony’s Indian policy, wrinkled his nose at the idea. Except for the Wyandot and Miami, he told Thomas Penn, the Lenape and other Ohio Indians were “ye Scum of the Earth . . . [a] mixd dirty sort of people.” Even Peters had to admit, though, that they “may be made extremely useful to the Trade & security of this Province”—a fact that the French were about to make very, very clear.
Chapter 9
The Long Peace Ends
In the summer of 1749, Captain Pierr
e-Joseph Céloron de Blainville—former commander of Detroit and Fort Niagara, a knight who wore the Cross of the Order of Saint-Louis for his exploits against the Chickasaw—was dispatched to the Ohio, which the French called La Belle Rivière, “the beautiful river.” There he was ordered to cow the Indians and bring them firmly back into the fold of “Father Onontio,” the traditional name of the governor of New France; to rid the backcountry of the English traders who were causing such mischief; and to reestablish the unquestioned rule of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XV across the vital midsection of the continent, linking Canada and Louisiana. Céloron intended to accomplish all this with 213 men, 23 canoes, and half a dozen lead plates.
A year after the Logstown council, during which Conrad Weiser and Andrew Montour shored up the friendship between Pennsylvania and the western Indians, Céloron’s expedition was evidence that the French were finally taking the British threat to the Ohio Valley seriously—although perhaps not seriously enough. Long practiced in the nuances of Indian affairs, the French had lately installed a series of governors who proved singularly ham-handed—stingy with gifts, insensitive to cultural etiquette, tone-deaf to the effect they were having on relations with the Natives inhabiting the pays d’en haut—the “upper country” around the Great Lakes and Ohio River from which the furs (and thus the riches) of New France flowed.
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