Essay

Indian-brokered alliances more than Quaker pacifism anchored the “long peace” in the decades that followed Pennsylvania’s founding in 1681. The Iroquois Covenant Chain and the Lenapes’ treaties with William Penn (1644-1718) established the diplomatic parameters that made the long peace possible and allowed Pennsylvania to avoid the kind of destructive frontier warfare that engulfed the Chesapeake and New England during Bacon’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War (1675-76). By the third decade of the eighteenth century, however, the delicate balance between Indians and colonists unraveled as Pennsylvania officials, with Iroquois permission, expropriated native lands in order to accommodate the westward migration of English, German, and Scots-Irish colonists. Few colonists appreciated in 1753 how their dispossession of Indian communities motivated the Lenape and other Indian groups to attack Pennsylvania’s frontier towns during the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763).

In the mid-1600s, upheavals among Indians in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions helped clear the way for the European settlement of the Delaware Valley. The Iroquois, equipped with Dutch (and later English) firearms, struck out against the Huron and other native groups to secure fur trading routes and take captives to replenish their numbers, which had been decimated by European diseases. By the time Charles II (1630-85) granted Penn his colonial charter, Iroquois raids had largely depopulated the Susquehanna Valley of its native inhabitants.

The Lenapes, or Delawares, who lived on both sides of the Delaware River, had been dealing with Dutch and Swedish colonists for decades and in 1675-77 sold lands in what became West New Jersey to English Quakers. Beginning in 1682, the Lenapes ceded lands on the west bank of the Delaware to Penn in exchange for cloth, guns, powder, alcohol, and other trade goods. Lenape chiefs such as Tamanend (Tammany) did not “sell” land as much as grant shared usage rights in the hopes of establishing a relationship with a potentially powerful European ally.

Mutual Benefits

With the Susquehanna Valley open for hunting beaver and other pelts that Europeans prized for Atlantic markets, the Lenapes were disposed to negotiate with Penn, a man they called Miquon (meaning “feather,” or quill pen, a Delaware pun on his last name). Penn, in return, promised he would deal with Indians honestly and fairly. These early treaties cemented Pennsylvania’s reputation as a peaceable colony where love and friendship prevailed between Indians and colonists, as famously portrayed later by the paintings of Benjamin West (1738-1820) and Edward Hicks (1780-1849).

William Penn, the Quaker founder and proprietor, desperately needed Indian partners. New York and Connecticut each claimed territory south of where Pennsylvania fixed its northern border, while Maryland’s Charles Calvert (1637-1715), Lord Baltimore, hotly disputed the location of Pennsylvania’s southern boundary. One reading of Maryland’s charter, in fact, placed that colony’s upper border north of Philadelphia. Penn used Indian titles to legitimate his land claims and ward off rivals. He also coveted Indian lands in the Susquehanna Valley, west of Philadelphia. By the early 1690s, Indians, fleeing warfare and colonization elsewhere, began settling the Susquehanna, including Lenape communities relocating to escape the growing colonial population in the Delaware Valley. They were joined by returning Susquehannocks (the original inhabitants of the region, now known as “Conestogas”), Shawnees, Mahicans, Senecas, Cayugas, Nanticokes, and Conoys, among others. These native settlers formed polyglot, multiethnic communities in Indian towns like Conestoga, Pequea, and, a little later, Shamokin.

Even before Penn consulted with Indian leaders in those communities, he sold colonists subscriptions to lands in the Susquehanna. Penn viewed the lower Susquehanna, with its access to the Chesapeake, as strategically vital to Pennsylvania’s commercial success. By attracting colonists there, he also hoped to redirect the lucrative Indian fur trade away from Albany, New York.

Fortunately for Penn, Indians in the Susquehanna had good reasons to accommodate colonists. The Iroquois claimed the region by right of conquest (owing to their mid-seventeenth-century raids), and through their Covenant Chain alliance with New York, they also claimed to speak on behalf of all Indian groups living there. After Governor Thomas Dongan (1634-1715) of New York sold Penn his claim to the Susquehanna for a meager £100, Shawnee, Conoy, and Conestoga leaders seized the opportunity to recognize Pennsylvania’s authority in 1701. In doing so, they sought political legitimacy (at the expense of the Iroquois) as well as a valuable trading partner. As he did almost two decades earlier, Penn promised his Indian allies that his government would protect them from unruly colonists and dishonest traders.

Peace Preserved by “Go-betweens”

The 1701 treaty ensured Pennsylvania’s “long peace” would continue, although uneasily. It was held together by diplomatic “go-betweens,” Indian and colonial, who smoothed over the inevitable conflicts that arose in a frontier zone of multiple and overlapping native jurisdictions and where Pennsylvania held little authority. In one notable instance, in 1722, the murder of an Indian named Sawantaeny (d. 1722) by an English trader, John Cartlidge (1684-1722), during a drunken brawl touched off a diplomatic crisis that sent Pennsylvania officials to the Susquehanna Indian town of Conestoga (and the governor to Albany because Sawantaeny was a Seneca Iroquois). The willingness of the Iroquois, provincial government, and Susquehanna Indians to overlook the murder and forgive Cartlidge (who eventually was freed after the Iroquois received restitution) demonstrated the value of maintaining good relations on the frontier, where political stability was necessary for peaceful coexistence and the continued profitability of the fur trade. It also demonstrated that the Pennsylvania government understood the importance of observing Indian diplomatic protocols, especially during a political crisis.

The provincial official who led Pennsylvania’s investigation of Sawantaeny’s murder, James Logan (1674-1751), had an interest in maintaining order in the Susquehanna. The son of Scottish Quaker converts, Logan came to Pennsylvania in 1699 to serve as Penn’s provincial secretary. Shortly before leaving the colony in 1701, Penn entrusted Logan to look after his proprietary interests and manage his estate at Pennsbury. Logan remained in Pennsylvania for the rest of his life. During that time, he became a major political figure, serving, among other positions, as provincial councilor, land commissioner, and Pennsylvania’s chief Indian diplomat. He ran a successful merchant business in Philadelphia that supplied Indian customers using a cartel of traders who hauled his dry goods and rum into the Susquehanna on “Conestoga” wagons. By 1720, Logan had monopolized the fur trade and became one of the wealthiest colonists in Philadelphia.

Logan also engineered the “Walking Purchase,” one of the most infamous chapters in the history of Native American-Pennsylvania relations. In 1737, Logan and Thomas Penn (1702-75), then acting as Pennsylvania’s governor, claimed to possess a 1686 deed from the Lenape chief Mechkilikishi granting William Penn all the Indian lands that could be acquired within a day-and-a-half’s walk from Wrightstown in Bucks County. Although the deed was probably forged, the Iroquois sanctioned the “walk,” which took place in September with three of the colony’s fastest runners covering more than sixty miles. Logan used the “running walk,” as the Lenape termed it, to claim over a thousand square miles of Indian territory in the Delaware Forks (or in Lenape, Lechauwitank), where the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers converge (and where Allentown and Bethlehem are now located). Under pressure from the Iroquois, the Lenape in the region, along with their leader, Nutimus, were forced to relocate to the Wyoming Valley (near present-day Wilkes-Barre) and Shamokin.

The Walking Purchase and the colonization of the Susquehanna Valley left a bitter legacy in Pennsylvania-Native American relations. The Lenape chief Teedyuscung (c. 1700-63), who was among those displaced from the Delaware Forks, reemerged in the Wyoming Valley as a warrior who conducted periodic raids on Euroamerican settlements in eastern Pennsylvania during the Seven Years’ War. In a strange twist, he took part in the Treaty of Easton in 1758 as an ally of the Quakers and helped to broker a peace between the Pennsylvania government and Ohio Valley Indians, primarily Lenapes and Shawnees who had been displaced earlier from the Susquehanna. Murdered in 1763 by arsonists who burned his cabin under mysterious circumstances (likely colonists from Connecticut’s Susquehanna Company), Teedyuscung did not live to see many of his people forced to relocate again, under British imperial and Iroquois pressure, west of the Appalachians. His life and death, however, symbolized the entangled and intimate relations of Pennsylvanians and Native Americans through the first half of the eighteenth century.

Michael Goode is an Assistant Professor of Early American History at Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah. (Author information current at time of publication.)

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