A history of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, from its first beginnings to the present time; including chapters of newly-discovered, Vol. I, Part 36

Author: Harvey, Oscar Jewell, 1851-1922; Smith, Ernest Gray
Publication date: 1909-1930
Publisher: Wilkes-Barre : Raeder Press
Number of Pages: 734

USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Wilkes-Barre > A history of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, from its first beginnings to the present time; including chapters of newly-discovered, Vol. I > Part 36

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

However, when Paxinosa and his retinue departed homeward from Gnadenhütten in the last days of March, they were accompanied thence by the old Mohegan chief Abraham (Schabash)* and his family and two or three other Mohegans, who, upon their arrival at Wyoming, took up their abode in Paxinosa's village, in what is now Plymouth.

April 22, 1753, David Zeisberger set out from Bethlehem for Onon- daga. Arriving at Shamokin he heard of the invasion of the Ohio region by the French, but this did not discourage him from proceeding on his journey. Accompanied by Henry Frey, a Moravian Brother, he proceeded up the North Branch of the Susquehanna in a canoe. Before reaching Wyoming the voyagers learned that the Nanticokes were pre- paring to depart from Wyoming to settle at Chenango .; Under date of May 7, 1753, Zeisberger noted in his diary that he and Frey "learned that the Nanticokes had not yet started. In the afternoon, passing safely the Wajomick Falls,¿ we reached the Nanticoke settlement and found all glad to see us. * Most of them were ready to start, as their canoes stood prepared. They only awaited some of their people,

* See page 236.

+ See last paragraph of foot-note on page 219.

# Nanticoke Falls, described on page 35.

VIEW FROM HANOVER GREEN OF THE LAKE IN HANOVER ( NOW SANS SOUCI) PARK. Warrior Run Gap, in Wilkes-Barré Mountain, is dimly discernible near the center of the picture. From a photograph taken in July, 1904.

239

whom they expected daily from Shamokin."* The Nanticokes urged the missionaries to join them in their journey northward, but the latter declined, and, having spent the night with the Nanticokes, paddled on up the river alone. They "soon reached Hazirokt in the morning, where there is [was] a town of Minising Indians"-according to Zeis- berger's diary.

Upon their return journey the missionaries reached the head of Wyoming Valley Wednesday, October 31, 1753. "In the afternoon," wrote Zeisberger, "we reached Hazirok, where we halted, but found scarcely any one at home. November 1st .- In the morning we reached the Shawanos townt in Wajomik. We entered, but found only a few women at home. They gave us to eat and we went on."

About two weeks after the Nanticokes had departed from Wyoming the Rev. Christian Seidel of Bethlehem visited the valley. From his diary we learn that on May 21st he "dined not far from the old Nanti- coke town, in the lower part of the valley, on the east side of the Sus- quehanna. Found a canoe, in which we crossed to the Shawanese town. Met our convert, old Mohican Abraham, who has his hut here. $ Were cordially welcomed and shown to a hut, but were annoyed by some traders|| who came and lodged with us. Abraham and his wife Sarah told us that a great council would be held here in a few days, to which Indians from all parts of the Susquehanna were expected. Hence we resolved to go down to Shamokin and return after the council. Paxi- nosa, the Shawanese King, and his wife Elizabeth called on us."

At this point in our story we must needs turn aside from Wyoming Valley for awhile, and, directing our attention to a distant and altogether different section of country, consider certain events which occurred in the Colony of Connecticut during 1753 and '54 and earlier years-events which turned the tide of affairs in Wyoming and affected its subsequent history in a very striking manner.

November 3, 1620, a little more than a month before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in New England, King James I of Eng-

* With the departure of these Nanticokes from Wyoming the name of the tribe disappears from the annals of the valley, for, so far as we are able to learn, no Nanticokes were ever afterwards settled here. The removal of the Wyoming band of the tribe to Chenango was formally announced to the Pennsyl- vania authorities by Conrad Weiser in May, 1754, when he reported that they had "gone up the river to live at Olsenencky, a branch of Susquehanna, where formerly some Onondagoes and Shawanese lived." There, together with a number of Conoys, the Nanticokes continued to live for some years.

In May, 1757, an important treaty was held at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, between the Government of Pennsylvania and Six Nation and other Indians. Among the latter were a number of Nanticokes from Chenango. During the progress of the treaty small-pox broke out among the Indians in attendance, and a number of them, including several of the Nanticokes, soon died of the disease. In the latter part of the following July three Nanticokes from Chenango passed through Wyoming on their way to Easton, where a treaty was to be held. Arriving there they desired that the Governor of Pennsylvania would grant them an escort to Lancaster, stating that they had come to remove to their own town for burial the bones of their tribesmen who had died at Lancaster during the treaty of May. On the 23rd of August these Nan- ticokes reached Bethlehem, en route from Lancaster to Chenango, with the bones they had gone after.

In an original, unpublished letter from Heckewelder (mentioned on page 42) to Isaac A. Chapman of Wilkes-Barré, written at Bethlehem, January 12, 1818, and now in possession of the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, the writer states with reference to the Nanticokes : "They have in earlier years been known to go all the way from Wyoming and Shenango to fetch the bones of their deceased friends from the eastern shore of Maryland, * * * and I well remember to have seen them between the years 1750 and 1760 loaded with such bones, which being fresh, caused a disagreeable stench as they passed through this place [Bethlehem]."

In 1768, according to statistics, there were about 100 Nauticokes and 30 Conoys living together at Otsin- ingo, Chaghtnet [Chugnutts, in what is now Broome County] and Owego in New York ; in 1780 there were about 80 Nanticokes and 40 Conoys in the same localities, and in 1816 all the Nanticokes in the country who were known as such were living among "the Delawares, Munsees and Moheakunnuks" on White River in Indiana. By 1822, their lands having been sold, these Indians were scattered, "none can tell where"-as reported by the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, Special Indian Commissioner for the United States. Schoolcraft statesthat a few of the Nanticokes, who lingered within the precincts of New York, probably became absorbed in the "Brothertown" Indians, mentioned in the note on page 193, ante. For many years now the Nanticokes have not figured by name in the Indian censuses and reports of the United States.

+ Asserughney, mentioned on page 187.

# Paxinosa's village in Plymouth.

¿ See page 238. , White men who, in all likelihood, had come down the river from New York.

240

land granted to "The Council established at Plymouth, in the county of Devon [England],"* all that part of America extending in one direction from the fortieth to the forty-eighth parallel of north latitude, and in the other direction "from sea to sea"-that is, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean ! Further, the King directed, in his Letters Patent, that the territory thus granted should thenceforth "be nominated, termed and called by the name of New England in America, and by that name have continuance forever" ; and the grantees-the Council at Plymouth -and their successors were duly authorized to convey and assign, under their common seal, "such particular proportions of lands, tenements and hereditaments" as were granted under the said Letters Patent.

March 19, 1631, Robert, Earl of Warwick, President of the "Coun- cil at Plymouth," granted to Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, Sir Richard Saltonstall and others-from the territory held by the Council under the Letters Patent previously mentioned-a section of country described inany years later by President Clap of Vale College as "all that part of New England which lies west from Narragansett Rivert 120 miles on the sea-coast, and from thence in latitude and breadth aforesaid to the South Sea.} This grant extends from Point Judith to New York, and from thence a west line to the South Sea; and if we take Narragansett River in its whole length, this tract will extend as far north as Worcester [Massachusetts]. It comprehends the whole Colony of Connecticut, and much more." This has been called the "Old Patent" of Connecticut.

"The English sense and mother-wit, sharpened on the Dutch grind- stone, laid the foundation for the future Yankee shrewdness, so proverb- ial in all New England, and particularly so in the 'Land of Steady Habits.'§ This land, 'excellently watered and liberal to the husband- man,' was, up to 1632, chiefly conspicuous for its hemp, beaver, and petty Indian tribes. It lay, almost unknown, fairly between the settle- ments of the Dutch at New Amsterdam and Fort Orange [Albany], and of the English at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, and offered a tempt- ing field for the first quarrel between the kindred nations." !!

Lord Say and Sele and his associates entered upon their grants and appointed John Winthrop their agent, who, in 1635, at the mouth of the river called by the Indians QuonehtacutT ("The Long River"), planted a town which, in honor of two of his patrons, Winthrop named "Say- brook." But, nearly twenty-one years before this time, the Dutch had purchased of the Pequot Indians land where the city of Hartford now stands and erected a small trading fort which they called "The House of Good Hope." Also, in October, 1634, a little party of dissatisfied men from Plymouth Colony had established themselves in a fort on the present site of Windsor, Connecticut, some distance up the river. Some- what later a company of emigrants from Watertown, in the vicinity of Boston, established themselves on the site of the present Wethersfield, while at the same time a party from Dorchester, Massachusetts, joined the Plymouth emigrants previously mentioned, and gave to their new

* A corporation that had been in existence for some time "for the planting, ruling, ordering and gov- erning of New England in America."

+ Comprehending what are now known as Providence River and Narragansett Bay.

# The Pacific Ocean. ¿ A descriptive title early applied to Connecticut.

Charles M. Andrews, in "The River Towns of Connecticut" (1889).

" Corrupted by the early white settlers first into "Conectecotte", and then into the present form of the name.

settlement the name of "Doreliester." Still later (in June, 1636) a company from Newtown, Massachusetts, located on the ground occupied by the "House of Good Hope"-the Dutch having previously been driven thence. The settlers paid little attention to the Dutch, but took possession of the land by right of superior force.

"The most desirable places in Massachusetts were now (1636) set- tled ; and what is strange to tell (if any of the obliquities of human nature can be accounted strange), they who professed to have settled a wilderness for liberty of conscience, in the short space of sixteen [sic] years forgetting their own principles, refused liberty to others and began to fine, banish and disfranchise those who dissented from, or questioned any of, their established modes and doctrines. Those who thought themselves persecuted withdrew chiefly to Rhode Island, to be wholly out of the Massachusetts jurisdiction. Others, who only wanted lands, and some who disliked the immediate scene of those religious confusions, went to Connecticut River, about Hartford, etc., which they at first believed to be within, rather than without, the Massachusetts jurisdiction."*

The truth of the matter is, that a profound dissatisfaction had grown up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony over the general manage- ment of its affairs. Many of the colonists had failed to find in it that field of activity and usefulness they had longed for when they sundered family and social ties in the Old World and sought a new home in America. Probably the real trouble was that there were too many master minds, too many who wanted to govern in Church and in State, and too few who were willing to be governed. The Government was in no sense a democ- racy, but was in the hands of a favored few. This bred discontent and restlessness, and the only remedy was a revolution or an emigration. The latter alternative was chosen, and the Connecticut River region was selected for the new settlements.

In 1636 every effort was made by the Massachusetts Bay Govern- ment either to check the flow of emigration to the Connecticut River region, or to turn its current into more adjacent channels ; but the bent of the emigrants' spirit was towards the Connecticut, and for the time being the Colonial Government was helpless to prevent it. In the year last mentioned "a desire for a more democratic form of government caused a considerable exodus from the mother Colony," and all three of the settlements previously referred to received their chief bodies of in- migrants. In February, 1637, the names of these three settlements, or "plantations," were changed from "Dorchester," "Watertown" and "New- town" to "Windsor," "Wethersfield" and "Hartford," respectively. By the following May the population of the three towns had increased to 800, and a union of the towns into a sort of Commonwealth was then agreed upon and consummated.

January 14, 1639, this little Commonwealth, under the name of the "Colony of Connecticut," adopted for its government a code of "Funda- mental Orders." "This was the first written constitution known to history, with the possible exception of the 'Union of Utrecht,' under which the Netherlanders were then living and which it is permissible to call a constitution ; and it was absolutely the 'first in America to enli-

* From "Pennsylvania Archives," Second Series, XVIII : 132, and supposed to have been written by the Rev. William Smith, D. D., of whom further mention is made hereinafter.

212

body the democratic idea.' -X-

** Herein, at Hartford, was laid down the germinal idea of political liberty for the individual-the begin- ning of democracy and the corner-stone, at least, of that foundation on which the firm fabric of the American Commonwealth was slowly up- reared. Herein was the first practical assertion of the right of the people not only to choose, but to limit the powers of, their rulers."*

In 1638 a company of well-to-do immigrants from London, Eng- land, formed a settlement at "Quinapiack," on Long Island Sound, and in the following year, by the action of the whole body of settlers there, the "Colony of New Haven" was erected and a "Fundamental Agree- ment," or constitution, for its government was adopted.

About that time the Colony of Connecticut purchased of Lord Say and Sele and his associates, for £16,000, their right and title under the deed from Earl Warwick, previously mentioned. In the meantime the "Council at Plymouth" had come to an end and inade a final resigna- tion of its patent of incorporation to the Crown, in order to enable the King to make grants of the "powers of government" to those holding the "right of soil." The only lasting effect of the "Council" was to create confusion by the reckless way in which it had granted the same lands over and over again to different occupants.

In 1661 the Colony of Connecticut sent its Governor, John Win- throp, Jr., to England with a loyal address to King Charles II and a peti- tion for a "Charter of Government," such as the Colony had adopted, with powers equal to those conferred on Massachusetts, or on "the Lords and Gentlemen whose jurisdiction rights had been purchased" by Con- necticut ; and to confirm the Colony's grant or title. Winthrop was successful, and under date of April 20, 1662, Letters Patent were issued incorporating John Winthrop and others into a body politic by the name of "The Governor and Company of the English Colony of Connecticut, in New England, in America," and granting and confirming to them all that part of the King's dominions "in New England, in America, bounded on the east by Narragansett River, commonly called Narragan- sett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea ; and on the north by the line of the Massachusetts Colony, running from east to west-that is to say, from the said Narragansett Bay in the east to the South Seat on the west part."

Under the terms of this royal Charter the regranted, or recreated, Colony of Connecticut embraced within its bounds the rival Colony of New Haven. The people of the latter Colony had been especially zealous in shielding the fugitive regicide judges Goffe and Whalley ; while the Rev. John Davenport, the leading minister of the Colony, "had not only harbored them in his own house, but on the Sunday before their expected arrival he had preached a very bold sermon, openly advising his people to aid and comfort them as far as possible. The Colony, moreover, did not officially recognize the restoration of Charles II to the throne until that event had been commonly known in New England for more than a year. For these reasons the wrath of the King was specially roused against New Haven, when circumstances combined to enable him at once to punish this disloyal Colony and deal a blow at the Confederacy."}

* From "Connecticut Character and Achievement," an address delivered before the Wyoming Com- memorative Association July 3, 1902, by Alfred Mathews.

+ The Pacific Ocean.

John Fiske's "The Beginnings of New England," page 222.

243

"The courtiers of King Charles, who themselves had an eye to possessions in America, suggested no limitations [to the Charter]; and perhaps it was believed that Connecticut would serve to balance thie power of Massachusetts. * * * The Charter, disregarding the hesi- tancy of New Haven, the rights of the Colony of New Belgium and the claims of Spain on the Pacific, connected New Haven with Hart- ford in one Colony, of which the limits were extended from the Narra- gansett River to the Pacific Ocean. How strange is the connection of events ! Winthrop not only secured to his State a peaceful century of colonial existence, but prepared the claim for western lands. * * *

With regard to powers of government the Charter was still more extra- ordinary. It conferred on the colonists unqualified power to govern themselves. X Connecticut was independent except in name. Charles II and Clarendon thought they had created a close corporation, and they had really sanctioned a democracy." *

Never was a Charter so favorable granted to any Colony by an English monarch, and when the Revolutionary War subsequently oc- curred the people of Connecticut were not under the necessity of expel- ling a royal Governor who had been appointed by the Crown and of improvising a system of government. They had a government already provided, together with a patriotic Governort of their own choice. The Charter was democratic in all but name. The Constitution that had been formed by the little Commonwealth at Hartford in January, 1639, as previously mentioned, was not essentially altered by the Charter of 1662-which was practically a royal confirmation of the Constitution ; and it was not until 1818 that the Charter-that is, the Constitution of 1639-was superseded by the present Constitution of Connecticut. "Connecticut was as absolutely a State in 1639 as in 1776."

The Connecticut Charter of 1662, just as the Warwick grant of 1631 (mentioned on page 240), covered a strip of territory stretching across the continent from sea to sea. The northern boundary-line of this grant or claim was nearly coincident with the forty-second parallel of north latitude, while the southern boundary was the forty-first par- allel of north latitude, and thus the Charter took in, as it extended west- ward, not only almost the entire northern half of what is now Pennsyl- vania, but parts of the present States of New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and California ! Connecticut construed her Charter as authoriz- ing her to pass over New Netherland, later New York, and East Jersey, afterwards New Jersey, which were then in possession of Christian princes.

"There were very few other people in the world that had such a strange domain as this, which might have been given by the fairies in- stead of by a king. For hundreds of miles it was a green ocean of tree tops as it rose and fell over the mountains and valleys of what we now call Pennsylvania, and touched the shores of Lake Erie, a great in- land sea. Still onward and westward it went, and soon open spaces and meadows appeared after 500 miles of tree tops, and the buffalo and elk fed in the sunshine and no longer in the shadows of the woods. Soon the meadows became larger, and presently the woods were gone and the vast prairies of Indiana and Illinois appeared with their knee-deep grass

* Bancroft's "History of the United States, " V : 51-55.

+ Jonathan Trumbull.

244

waving to the horizon. The Mississippi is crossed, the long grass is gone and the short, stunted buffalo-grass of the plains spreads to the brim of the sky and the land is drier and the millions of buffaloes raise the dust in clouds as they press towards the passes of the Rocky Moun- tains. But those mighty peaks and ranges with their endless snow and their countless herds of game were still Connecticut, which was pressing on and on across the sage-brush plains of Utah, through the Great Salt Lake and the brown deserts of Nevada up again into the peaks of the Sierras in California, until that Yankee empire ended at last as it had begun, by the breakers of the sea.

"What a wonderland Connecticut was! And as it forged its way through forest and mountain and prairie and plain and dusty desert into mountains again, a narrow band of 3,000 miles from sea to sea, how typical of the restless energies of the handful of English who began life upon its eastern extremity, outnumbered by the animals and the red inen !"*

Such was the ignorance of the Europeans respecting the geography of America, says the Rev. Jedidiah Morse (mentioned on page 239) in his "American Geography"-edition of 1796-that their patents ex- tended they knew not where. Many of them were of doubtful construc- tion, and very often covered each other in part, and thus produced in- numerable disputes and inischiefs in the Colonies. "Almost every State upon the seaboard had had at the first a grant from the Crown which read as if it had been meant to set no boundaries at the west at all except the boundaries of the continent itself, and each [Colony] laid confident claim to its own long western strip of the continent."+

But, for nearly a century after the granting of the Charter of 1662, Connecticut neglected not only to claim but to explore those lands, sup- posed to form a part of her domain, which lay westward and southward of New York. Meanwhile, on the 4th day of March, 1681, the same "Charles II, by the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland," who, nineteen years previously, had set his hand and seal to the Connecticut Charter, granted a Charter to one WILLIAM PENN of London, England. This lengthy and important documents contained the following paragraphs, among many others :

KNOW YEE, therefore, that wee, favouring the petition and good purpose of the said WILLIAM PENN, and haveing regard to the memorie and meritts of his late father, in divers services, and perticulerly to his conduct, courage and discretion under our dearest brother, James, Duke of Yorke, in that signall battell and victorie, fought and obteyned against the Dutch fleete * * in the yeare One thousand six hundred sixtie- five, * * Have Given and Granted, and by this our present Charter, for us, our heirs, and successors, Doe give and grant unto the said WILLIAM PENN, his heirs and assignes, all that tract or parte of land in America, with all the Islands therein conteyned, as the same is bounded on the East by Delaware River, from twelve miles distance Northwarde of New Castle Towne unto the three and fortieth degree of Northern latitude-if the said River dothi extend soe farre Northwards ;

"But if the said River shall not extend so farre Northward, then by the said River soe farr as it doth extend, and from the head of the said River the Easterne bounds are to bee determined by a meridian line to bee drawn from the head of the said River unto the said three and fortieth degree, the said lands to extend Westwards, five degrees in longitude, to bee computed from the said Eastern Bounds, and the said lands to bee bounded on the North by the beginning of the three and fortieth degree of Northern lat- itude, and on the South by a circle drawn at twelve miles distance from New Castle Northwards, and Westwards unto the beginning of the fortieth degree of Northern Lati-

* From an address by Sydney G. Fisher before the Wyoming Commemorative Association, July 3, 1896.

/ Woodrow Wilson's "A History of the American People," III : 46.

# See "Pennsylvania-Colonial and Federal," I : 223.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

A history of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, from its first beginnings to the present time; including chapters of newly-discovered, Vol. I, Part 36

Author: Harvey, Oscar Jewell, 1851-1922; Smith, Ernest Gray Publication date: 1909-1930 Publisher: Wilkes-Barre : Raeder Press Number of Pages: 734

Author: Harvey, Oscar Jewell, 1851-1922; Smith, Ernest Gray
Publication date: 1909-1930
Publisher: Wilkes-Barre : Raeder Press
Number of Pages: 734