by Daniel K. Richter

If the Indian peoples who lived in the watersheds of the Susquehanna and upper Ohio rivers had a name for it, that name has not come down to us. But certainly they would not have called this bloody violence “the French and Indian War.” How could they, when few recognized more than an uneasy alliance of convenience with the French king and none could deny deep differences among the many communities that Euro-Americans lumped together as “Indians”? And who was their enemy? Europeans and Euro-Americans in general? The British Crown as represented by the invading army of Major General Edward Braddock? The Virginians usually referred to as Shemockteman or “Long Knives”? The Pennsylvania government, called by the name Miquon or Onas—Algonquian and Iroquoian, respectively, for “quill,” the writing instrument evoked by the proprietary family’s name and by the written documents that so often worked to native disadvantage? The Scots-Irish and German squatters who, without the consent of any government, lived in ever-greater numbers along the Susquehanna and to the west? Or were the real enemies the native people who collaborated with the Europeans, who somehow continued to believe the continent could be shared with the invaders? Few things were simple or clear-cut, at least in 1754, at the beginning of the conflict many historians prefer to call by its European name, “the Seven Years’ War.”

These were, as the Delaware leader Teedyuscung said, “gloomy and dark days.” But at least two things were clear. First, the Indian people who lived on the land utterly rejected the idea that the Penns’ province owned more than the southeast corner of what we today consider Pennsylvania. Particularly galling was the Penn family’s claim to have purchased two large swathes of land in treaties with the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, in 1749 and 1754, purchases that most Indian residents considered invalid. Second, no British government had any pretense to having negotiated a treaty with any native power for the lands at the forks of the Ohio that the French and British crowns (and the Virginia and Pennsylvania governments) were fighting over. Yet in 1755, when a Delaware leader named Shingas—who was more concerned with the French threat than the British—offered his assistance to Braddock’s campaign against Fort Dusquesne, which the French had constructed at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela a year earlier, the general curtly declared that “No Savage Shou[l]d Inherit the Land.”

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“The Land is the cause of our Differences[;] that is our being unhappily turned out of the land is the cause,” Teedyuscung thus concluded. “Thô the first settlers might purchase the lands fairly yet they did not act well nor do the Indians Justice for they ought to have reserved some place for the Indians.” Those denied a place included many more than just Teedyuscung’s people. In the mid to late 17th century, epidemics, migration, and wars among native peoples had virtually emptied what we today call central and western Pennsylvania. In the half century before the outbreak of “the French and Indian War,” a remarkably diverse group of people had resettled the area. Among them were Shawnees, whose ancestral homes were probably in today’s state of Ohio but who had dispersed widely during the 17th-century Indian wars. Also numerous were bands of Munsees and Lenapes—collectively coming to be known as “Delawares”—pushed, like Teedyuscung, out of lands farther east. These groups—their decentralized political traditions accentuated by the stresses of migration—were joined by an array of migrants from almost every point on the compass: Mahicans from the Hudson River valley; Algonquians from southern New England; Nanticokes, Conoys, and others from the Chesapeake region; Tuscaroras from the Carolinas who fled northward to join the Haudenosaunee as its sixth nation in the 1710s; families from other Iroquois nations who moved south- and westward.

Some of these people were returning to lands on which their ancestors had lived. Others, defeated in conflicts with Euro-Americans or deprived of their homes by treaties they considered unjust, sought refuge wherever they could find it. Some came at the invitation of colonial governments; others at the invitation of Iroquois nations who claimed the Susquehanna Valley lands of peoples they had defeated in earlier decades; others at the invitation of the French-allied Wyandots who asserted similar rights to lands farther west; and still others sought no one’s leave. Some settled in ethnically defined villages, others in mixed places that could only be described as “Indian.” Few of them recognized any central authority, native or European, and none were in the mood to sell their lands and move again.

Some were quite willing, however, to grant privileges to traders and individual European families who could profitably share the territory with them. And so by midcentury the complicated landscape was also dotted by the cabins and farmsteads of Euro-Americans, some of whom settled with Indian permission, others who did not. Many of them were at least grudgingly accepted, for the time being.

These Euro-Americans may have been tolerated by Indian neighbors, but not by the Pennsylvania government, which derived no quitrents, taxes, or other revenues from them and—more alarmingly—saw little hope of exerting any of its proprietary and governmental claims west and north of Lancaster should they be allowed to continue their improvised settlement. And it was not just Indian inhabitants and Euro-American squatters who threatened Pennsylvania’s claims. All of the land south of the 40th parallel (including even the city of Philadelphia) remained in dispute with Maryland—a dispute that would not be resolved until the 1760s, when Mason and Dixon surveyed their famous line at 39º 43'. Meantime, roughly the northern third of today’s state was contested with Connecticut, whose royal grant stretched westward to the Pacific. Similarly, as the events that led to Braddock’s defeat demonstrated, Virginia’s expansive charter supposedly gave it the forks of the Ohio, along with much of the rest of the continent. The French Crown, of course, had its own interpretations of how this Indian land should be divided among Europeans.

Since the 1730s, the sons of William Penn had tended to answer all of these challenges with three words: the Six Nations. The strongest European counter to competing imperial land claims was to demonstrate a clear transfer of title from native owners in a negotiated treaty. If no one among the decentralized Indian communities who lived on the land could or would sign the necessary documents, a central authority had to be identified who could speak for them—whether those Indians recognized that authority or not. In Euro-American minds, the Six Nations Iroquois filled the role. For their own reasons, at least some factions among the Haudenosaunee had long been seeking a closer alliance with Pennsylvania as a counterbalance to the diplomatic, military, and economic vise in which their powerful neighbors in the colonies of New France and New York threatened to trap them. Although neither Munsees nor Lenapes had ever been conquered or yielded their sovereignty to the Six Nations, the Penn family nonetheless went over their heads to get the land cessions they needed from the Iroquois—first in a 1736 agreement that paved the way for the infamous “Walking Purchase” of 1737, in which the proprietors used runners to mark boundaries that could be “walked” in a day and a half, and then in the controversial treaties of 1749 and 1754. The extent to which various Iroquois leaders may have fully colluded with the Pennsylvanians, or genuinely thought they were doing the best they could for the native people under their protection, or were duped by what they called the Euro-Americans’ “pen and ink work” remains open to debate. With regard to the 1754 business, at least, they all seemed to agree that nothing more than a down payment had changed hands.

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With so few facts agreed upon, with so many parties contesting for control, with no mutually accepted authority to keep the peace, the territories from the Susquehanna River westward were a powder keg waiting to explode. When fighting between the French and British empires began, we might think the choice would have been plain for most of the Indians of the Susquehanna and Ohio countries. Braddock’s arrogance (and military ineptitude); decades of embittered experiences as the government of Pennsylvania pushed them from homes in the east; distrust of the British-allied Six Nations Iroquois who may or may not have consented to their dispossession—all presented a compelling case for the French as the least distasteful option.

Yet war is seldom simple. The same intrusion of Scots-Irish and German settlers into the west that was such a major grievance also meant that many of the region’s Indians had deep personal ties with Euro-Americans who had settled at their invitation and even paid rent for the spots they occupied. Mutual trading, drinking, and eating occurred in countless cabins. Moreover, many Indians had spent time with missionaries, been baptized, and bore Christian as well as native names. (Teedyuscung, for instance, had once been known as “Gideon.”) Indian and non-Indian people used many of the same material goods, hunted in the same woods with the same kinds of weapons, wore similar clothes, spoke the same German- or Celtic-inflected English tongues. The war, when it came, would be deeply personal—nothing like an abstract battle of “French and Indians” against nameless “British” foes.

And therefore the war would be bloodily brutal. As events in late 20th-century Bosnia and Rwanda would demonstrate, ethnic conflicts can become most ruthless when the parties have long lived side-by-side, know each other well, and accept no mutually legitimated overarching structure of authority. Precisely because the antagonists share personal human histories, and precisely because governmental mechanisms for setting the bounds of acceptable violence are lacking, it apparently becomes necessary to dehumanize the enemy in the starkest ways, to draw clear and uncrossable lines between an us and them that had long been blurred. When Delawares, Shawnees, and others took up arms, therefore, they did not engage in random acts of violence or broad strategic sweeps. Instead, they struck very specific targets, in particular the homesteads of Euro-Americans who had settled on the lands the Six Nations had sold out from under them in the Walking Purchase and in the treaties of 1749 and 1754. Often they attacked people whose names they knew and against whom they had specific grievances. Corpses were not just scalped in accordance with long tradition, but often brutally mutilated in ways that were both morally transgressive expressions of rage and symbolic messages to those who would discover the devastation.

Euro-Americans returned the violence in kind—desecrating the corpses of Indian women and children, venting revenge for what had been done to neighbors and kin—but seemed to do so in less focused ways, finding any Native American an appropriate target. To an extent, the brutality was a perversely unintended by-product of Pennsylvania’s history of Quaker pacifism. Although prominent Quakers had withdrawn from public participation in government in 1755, allowing the provincial assembly for the first time to vote funds to build frontier forts, raise troops, and supply arms—Pennsylvania’s lack of any existing military infrastructure or supervised system of local militia forced western settlers to devise their own cruder, ad hoc means of striking back. So the bloodied frontiers of a colony founded by pacifists became “gloomy and dark” indeed.

A few on either side tried to remain above the general carnage, but those who advocated peace were vilified and pressured to choose. After repeated threats from native kin, for example, the 40 or so Christian Indians who remained within the Walking Purchase at the Moravian mission town of Gnadenhütten had to flee to Bethlehem in late 1755 when Delawares burnt the town to the ground. Similarly, among Euro-Americans, the Moravians became increasingly suspect for their sheltering of Indians and their unwillingness to fight. Quakers, too, became suspect, especially when Israel Pemberton and other prominent Philadelphia Quakers formed a “Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures” that often worked at cross-purposes to the proprietary government and blood-thirsty frontier folk.

Nonetheless, heroic efforts by the Friendly Association, the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post, and the Delaware Pisquetomen patched together a truce by 1758—a truce greatly encouraged by French setbacks on the battlefield. In October of that year, at the Treaty of Easton, the Pennsylvania government agreed to prohibit further Euro-American settlement west of the Appalachians and surrender claims to much of the western land acquired in the 1754 purchase. Significantly, however, those lands were returned to the Six Nations, not to the Delawares and other Indians who lived on them and who had fought so brutally to regain them.

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As a result, the Treaty of Easton was just an hiatus. On both sides, racial hatreds smoldered, and violence was never far from the surface. In 1763 the flame literally burst out anew when persons unknown burnt Teedyuscung’s house down around him as he slept. Soon thereafter, the killing began again, first in the Indian assaults of “Pontiac’s War” and then in the massacre of the Indians of Conestoga by those since called “Paxton Boys.” And so it went for a generation, through and beyond the era of the American Revolution. Some years would be bloodier than others, marked by a few brutal murders on either side rather than all-out carnage, but everywhere in the Susquehanna and Ohio countries, race war became the norm until, at last, white Pennsylvanians had cleansed nearly every Indian from their independent commonwealth. So, in the end, the hard-to-name conflict that confusingly began in 1754, took on a brutal clarity.

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Image:  Tiscohan, by Gustavus Hesselius. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collections, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia.