USA > Pennsylvania > A pioneer outline history of northwestern Pennsylvania > Part 3
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"'To lift the hatchet,' or to begin a war, was always, as they declared, not till just and important causes prompted them to it. Then they assigned as motives that it was necessary to revenge the injuries done to the nation. Perhaps the honor of being distinguished as great warriors may have been an 'ingredient in the cup.'
" But before they entered upon so hazardous an undertaking they care- fully weighed all the proposals made, compared the probable advantages or disadvantages that might accrue. A chief could not begin a war without the consent of his captains, nor could he accept of a war-belt only on the condition of its being considered by the captains.
" The chief was bound to preserve peace to the utmost of his power. But if several captains were unanimous in declaring war, the chief was then obliged to deliver the care of his people, for a time, into the hands of the captains, and to lay down his office. Yet his influence tended greatly either to prevent or encourage the commencement of war, for the Indians believed
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that a war could not be successful without the consent of the chief, and the captains, on that account, strove to be in harmony with him. After war was agreed on, and they wished to secure the assistance of a nation in league with them, they notified that nation by sending a piece of tobacco, or by an embassy. By the first, they intended that the captains were to smoke pipes and consider seriously whether they would take part in the war or not. The embassy was intrusted to a captain, who carried a belt of wampum, upon which the object of the embassy was described by certain figures, and a hatchet with a red handle. After the chief had been informed of his commission, it was laid before a council. The hatchet having been laid on the ground, he delivered a long speech, while holding the war-belt in his hand, always closing the address with the request to take up the hatchet, and then delivering the war- belt. If this was complied with, no more was said, and this act was considered as a solemn promise to lend every assistance; but if neither the hatchet was taken up nor the belt accepted, the ambassador drew the just conclusion that the nation preferred to remain neutral, and without any further ceremony returned home.
" The Delawares and Iroquois were very informal in declaring war. They often sent out small parties, seized the first man they met belonging to the nation they had intended to engage, killed and scalped him, then cleaved his head with a hatchet, which they left sticking in it, or laid a war-club, painted red, upon the body of the victim. This was a formal challenge. In consequence of which, a captain of an insulted party would take up the weapons of the murderers and hasten into their country, to be revenged upon them. If he returned with a scalp, he thought he had avenged the rights of his own nation.
" Among the Delawares and Iroquois it required but little time to make preparations for war. One of the most necessary preparations was to paint themselves red and black, for they held it that the most horrid appearance of war was the greatest ornament. Some captains fasted and attended to their dreams, with the view to gain intelligence of the issue of the war. The night previous to the march of the army was spent in feasting, at which the chiefs were present, when either a hog or some dogs were killed. Dog's flesh, said they, inspired them with the genuine martial spirit. Even women, in some instances, partook of this feast, and ate dog's flesh greedily. Now and then, when a warrior was induced to make a solemn declaration of his war inclina- tion, he held up a piece of dog's flesh in sight of all present and devoured it, and pronounced these words, 'Thus will I devour my enemies!' After the feast the captain and all his people began the war-dance, and continued till daybreak, till they had become quite hoarse and weary. They generally danced all together, and each in his turn took the head of a hog in his hand. As both their friends and the women generally accompanied them to the first night's encampment, they halted about two or three miles from the town, danced the war-dance once more, and the day following began their march.
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Before they made an attack they reconnoitred every part of the country. To this end they dug holes in the ground; if practicable, in a hillock, covered with wood, in which they kept a small charcoal fire, from which they discovered the motions of the enemy undiscovered. When they sought a prisoner or a scalp, they ventured, in many instances, even in daytime, to execute their designs. Effectually to accomplish this, they skulked behind a bulky tree, and crept slyly around the trunk, so as not to be observed by the person or persons for whom they lay in ambush. In this way they slew many. But if they had a family or town in view, they always preferred the night, when their enemies were wrapped in profound sleep, and in this way killed, scalped, and made pris- oners of many of the enemies, set fire to the houses, and retired with all pos- sible haste to the woods or some place of safe retreat. To avoid pursuit, they disguised their footmarks as much as possible. They depended much on stratagem for their success. Even in war they thought it more honorable to distress their enemy more by stratagem than combat. The English, not aware of the artifice of the Indians, lost an army when Braddock was defeated.
" The Indian's cruelty, when victorious, was without bounds; their thirst for blood was almost unquenchable. They never made peace till compelled by necessity. No sooner were terms of peace proposed than the captains laid down their office and delivered the government of the state into the hands of the chiefs. A captain had no more right to conclude a peace than a chief to begin war. When peace had been offered to a captain he could give no other answer than to mention the proposal to the chief, for as a warrior he could not make peace. If the chief inclined to peace, he used all his influence to effect that end, and all hostility ceased, and, in conclusion, the calumet, or peace-pipe, was smoked and belts of wampum exchanged, and a concluding speech made, with the assurance 'that their friendship should last as long as the sun and moon give light, rise and set; as long as the stars shine in the firmament, and the rivers flow with water.'"
The weapons employed by our Indians two hundred years ago were axes, arrows, and knives of stone. Shells were sometimes used to make knives.
The Indian bow was made as follows: the hickory limb was cut with a stone axe, the wood was then heated on both sides near a fire until it was soft enough to scrape down to the proper size and shape.
A good bow measured forty-six inches in length, three-fourths of an inch thick in the centre, and one and a quarter inches in width, narrowing down to the points to five-eighths of an inch. The ends were thinner than the middle. Bow-making was tedious work.
" The bow-string was made of the ligaments obtained from the vertebra of the elk. The ligament was split, scraped, and twisted into a cord by rolling the fibres between the palm of the hand and the thigh. One end of the string was knotted to the bow, but the other end was looped, in order that the bow could be quickly strung."
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Quivers to carry the arrows were made of dressed buckskin, with or without the fur. The squaws did all the tanning.
The arrow-heads were made of flint or other hard stone or bone; they were fastened to the ash or hickory arrows with the sinews of the deer. The arrow was about two feet and a half in length, and a feather was fastened to the butt end to give it a rotary motion in its flight.
Poisoned arrows were made by dipping them into decomposed liver, to which had been added the poison of the rattlesnake. The venom or decom- posed animal matter no doubt caused blood-poisoning and death .*
Bows and arrows were long used by the red men after the introduction of fire-arms, because the Indian could be more sure of his game without revealing his presence. For a long time after the introduction of fire- arms the Indians were more expert with the bow and arrow than with the rifle.
Their tobacco-pipes were made of stone bowls and ash stems. Canoes were made of birch or linn-wood bark, and many wigwam utensils of that bark. This bark was peeled in early spring. The bark canoe was the Ameri- can Indian's invention.
When runners were sent with messages to other tribes the courier took an easy running gait, which he kept up for hours at a time. It was a “ dog- trot," an easy, jogging gait. Of course he had no clothes on except a breech- clout and moccasins. He always carried both arms up beside the chest with the fists clinched and held in front of the breast. He ate but little the day before his departure. A courier could make a hundred miles from sunrise to sunset.
When a young squaw was ready to marry she wore something on her head as a notice.
Then kettles were made of clay, or what was called "pot stone."
The stone hatchets were in the shape of a wedge; they were of no use in felling trees. They did this with a fire around the roots of the tree. Their stone pestles were about twelve inches long and five inches thick. They used bird-claws for " fish-hooks." They made their ropes, bridles, nets, etc., out of a wild weed called Indian hemp.
The twine or cords were manufactured by the squaws, who gathered stalks of this hemp, separating them into filaments, and then taking a number of filaments in one hand, rolled them rapidly upon their bare thighs until twisted, locking, from time to time, the ends with fresh fibres. The cord thus made was finished by dressing with a mixture of grease and wax, and drawn over a smooth groove in a stone.
* It was originally the practice of our Indians, as of all other savage people, to cut off in war the heads of their enemies for trophies, but for convenience in retreat this was changed to scalping.
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Their hominy-mills can be seen yet about a mile north of Samuel Temple's barn, in Warsaw Township, Jefferson County. Corn, potatoes, and tobacco were unknown until the discovery of America. 1135817
All the stone implements of our Indians except arrows were ground and polished. How this was done the reader must imagine. Indians had their mechanics and their workshops or " spots" where implements were made. You must remember that the Indian had no iron or steel tools, only bone, stone, and wood to work with. The flint arrows were made from a stone of uniform density. Large chips were flaked or broken from the rock. These chips were again deftly chipped with bone chisels into arrows, and made straight by pressure. A lever was used on the rock to separate chips,-a bone tied to a heavy stick.
From Jones's " Antiquities of the Southern Indians" the writer has gleaned most of the following facts: They had a limited variety of copper implements, which were of rare occurrence, and which were too soft to be of use in working so hard a material as flint or quartzite. Hence it is believed that they fashioned their spear- and arrow-heads with other implements than those of iron or steel. They must have acquired, by their observation and numerous experiments, a thorough and practical knowledge of cleavage,- that is, " the tendency to split in certain directions, which is characteristic of most of the crystallizable minerals." Captain John Smith, speaking of the Virginia Indians in his sixth voyage, says, " His arrow-head he quickly maketh with a little bone, which he weareth at his bracelet, of a splint of a stone or glasse, in the form of a heart, and these they glue to the ends of the arrows. With the sinews of the deer and the tops of deers' horns boiled to a jelly they make a glue which will not dissolve in cold water." Schoolcraft says, "The skill displayed in this art, as it is exhibited by the tribes of the entire con- tinent, has excited admiration. The material employed is generally some form of horn stone, sometimes passing into flint. No specimens have, how- ever, been observed where the substance is gun-flint. The horn-stone is less hard than common quartz, and can be readily broken by contact with the latter." Catlin, in his "Last Ramble among the Indians," says, "Every tribe has its factory in which these arrow-heads are made, and in these only certain adepts are able or allowed to make them for the use of the tribe. Erratic bowlders of flint are collected and sometimes brought an immense distance, and broken with a sort of sledge-hammer made of a rounded pebble of horn- stone set in a twisted withe, holding the stone and forming a handle. The flint, at the indiscriminate blows of the sledge, is broken into a hundred pieces, and such flakes selected as from the angles of their fracture and thickness will answer as the basis of an arrow-head. The master-workman, seated on the ground, lays one of these flakes on the palm of his hand, holding it firmly down with two or more fingers of the same hand, and with his right hand, between the thumb and two forefingers, places his chisel or punch on the
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point that is to be broken off, and a co-operator-a striker-in front of him, with a mallet of very hard wood, strikes the chisel or punch on the upper end, flaking the flint off on the under side below each projecting point that is struck. The flint is then turned and chipped in the same manner from the opposite side, and that is chipped until required shape and dimensions are obtained, all the fractures being made on the palm of the hand. In selecting the flake for the arrow-head a nice judgment must be used or the attempt will fail. A flake with two opposite parallel, or nearly parallel, planes of cleavage is found, and of the thickness required for the centre of the arrow- point. The first chipping reaches nearly to the centre of these planes, but without quite breaking it away, and each clipping is shorter and shorter, until the shape and edge of the arrow-head is formed. The yielding elasticity of the palm of the hand enables the chip to come off without breaking the body of the flint, which would be the case if they were broken on a hard substance. These people have no metallic instruments to work with, and the punch which they use, I was told, was a piece of bone, but on examining it, I found it to be of substance much harder, made of the tooth-incisor-of the sperm whale, which cetaceans are often stranded on the coast of the Pacific."
" A considerable number of Indians must have returned and settled along the Red Bank as late as 1815-16. James White, of 'Mexico,' informed the writer that three hundred of them, about that time, settled along this stream below Brookville, partly in Armstrong County. Respecting their return to this section, Dr. M. A. Ward wrote to Eben Smith Kelly, at Kittanning, from Pittsburg, January 18, 1817,-
"' I am not at all surprised that the sober, industrious, religious inhabi- tants of Red Bank should be highly incensed at their late accession of emi- grants, not only because by them they will probably be deprived of many fat bucks and delicious turkeys, to which, according to the strict interpretation of all our game laws, they have as good a right, if they have the fortune to find and the address to shoot them, as any " dirty, nasty" Indians whatever, but because the presence and examples of such neighbors must have a very de- praving influence upon the morals. Their insinuating influence will be apt to divert the minds of the farmers from the sober pursuits of agriculture and inspire a propensity for the barbarous pleasures of the chase. . . . But what is worse than all, I have heard that they love whiskey to such an inordinate degree as to get sometimes beastly drunk, and even beat their wives and behave unseemly before their families, which certainly must have a most demoralizing tendency on the minds of the rising generation.'"-History of Armstrong County.
The Delaware Indians styled themselves "Lenni Lenape," the original or unchanged people. The eastern division of their people was divided into three tribes,-the Unamies, or Turtles of the sea-shore; the Unochlactgos, or Turkeys of the woods; and the Minsi-monceys, or Wolves of the mountains.
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A few of the Muncy villages of this latter division were scattered as far west as the valley of the Allegheny.
From Penn's arrival in 1682 the Delawares were subject to the Iroquois, or the confederacy of the Six Nations, who were the most warlike savages in America. The Iroquois were usually known among the English people as the Five Nations. The nations were divided and known as the Mohawks, the fire-striking people, having been the first to procure fire-arms. The Senecas, mountaineers, occupied Western New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania. They were found in great numbers along the Allegheny and its tributaries. Their great chiefs were Cornplanter and Guyasutha. This tribe was the most numerous, powerful, and warlike of the Iroquois nation, and comprised the Indians of Northwestern Pennsylvania.
" But these were Indians pure and uncorrupted. Before many a log fire, at night, old settlers have often recited how clear, distinct, and immutable were their laws and customs; that when fully understood a white man could transact the most important business with as much safety as he can to-day in any commercial centre.
" In this day and age of progress we pride ourselves upon our railroads and telegraph as means of rapid communication, and yet, while it was well known to the early settlers that news and light freight would travel with incomprehensible speed from tribe to tribe, people of the present day fail to understand the complete system by which it was done.
" In many places through the western counties you will find traces of pits, which the early settlers will tell you were dug by white men looking for silver, which, as well as copper, was common among the Indians, and was supposed by first comers to be found in the vicinity; but experience soon proved the copper came, perhaps, from Lake Superior, by this Indian express, as we might term it, and the silver, just as possible, from the far West. Our rail- roads wind along the valleys, almost regardless of length or circuit, if a gradual rise can only be obtained. To travellers on wheels straight distances between points are much less formidable than is generally supposed. We find traces of the example of the Indian in the first white men. The first settlers of 1799 and 1805 took their bags of grain on their backs, walked fifty miles to a mill, and brought home their flour the same way."
" The following is taken from the 'Early Days of Punxsutawney and Western Pennsylvania,' contributed a few years ago to the Punxsutawney Plaindealer by the late John K. Coxson, Esq., who had made considerable research into Indian history, and was an enthusiast on the subject. According to Mr. Coxson, 'More than eighteen hundred years ago the Iroquois held a lodge in Punxsutawney (this town still bears its Indian name, which was their sobriquet for "gnat town"), to which point they could ascend with their canoes, and go still higher up the Mahoning to within a few hours' travel of the summit of the Allegheny Mountains. There were various Indian trails
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traversing the forests, one of which entered Punxsutawney near where Judge Mitchell now ( 1898) resides.
"' These trails were the thoroughfares or roadways of the Indians, over which they journeyed when on the chase or the " war-path," just as the people of the present age travel over their graded roads. " An erroneous impression obtains among many at the present day that the Indian, in travelling the inter- minable forests which once covered our towns and fields, roamed at random, like a modern afternoon hunter, by no fixed paths, or that he was guided in his long journeyings solely by the sun and stars, or by the course of the streams and mountains ; and true it is that these untutored sons of the woods were considerable astronomers and geographers, and relied much upon these unerring guide-marks of nature. Even in the most starless nights they could determine their course by feeling the bark of the oak-trees, which is always smoothest on the south side and roughest on the north. But still they had their trails, or paths, as distinctly marked as are our county and State roads, and often better located. The white traders adopted them, and often stole their names, to be in turn surrendered to the leader of some Anglo-Saxon army, and, finally, obliterated by some costly highway of travel and commerce. They are now almost wholly effaced or forgotten. Hundreds travel along, or plough over them, unconscious that they are in the footsteps of the red men." * It has not taken long to obliterate all these Indian landmarks from our land ; little more than a century ago the Indians roamed over all this western coun- try, and now scarce a vestige of their presence remains. Much has been written and said about their deeds of butchery and cruelty. True, they were cruel, and in many instances fiendish, in their inhuman practices, but they did not meet the first settlers in this spirit. Honest, hospitable, religious in their belief, reverencing their Manitou, or Great Spirit, and willing to do anything to please their white brother,-this is how they met their first white visitors ; but when they had seen nearly all their vast domain appropriated by the invaders, when wicked white men had introduced into their midst the " wicked fire-water," which is to-day the cause of many an act of fiendishness perpe- trated by those who are not untutored savages, then the Indian rebelled, all the savage in his breast was aroused, and he became pitiless and cruel in the extreme.
"'It is true that our broad domains were purchased and secured by treaty, but the odds were always on the side of the whites. The " Colonial Records" give an account of the treaty of 1686, by which a deed for " walking purchase was executed, by which the Indians sold as far as a man could walk in a day. But when the walk was to be made the most active white man was obtained, who ran from daylight until dark, as fast as he was able, without stopping to eat or drink. This much dissatisfied the Indians, who expected to walk leis-
* This paragraph was taken from Judge Veech.
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urely, resting at noon to eat and shoot game, and one old chief expressed his dissatisfaction as follows: 'Lun, lun, lun; no lay down to drink; no stop to shoot squirrel, but lun, lun, lun all day ; me no keep up; lun, lun for land.' That deed, it is said, does not now exist, but was confirmed in 1737."
"' When the white man came the Indians were a temperate people, and their chiefs tried hard to prohibit the sale of intoxicating drinks among their tribes ; and when one Sylvester Garland, in 1701, introduced rum among them and induced them to drink, at a council held in Philadelphia, Shemeken- whol, chief of the Shawnese, complained to Governor William Penn, and at a council held on the 13th of October, 1701, this man was held in the sum of one hundred pounds never to deal rum to the Indians again; and the bond and sentence was approved by Judge Shippen, of Philadelphia. At the chief's suggestion the council enacted a law prohibiting the trade in rum with the Indians. Still later the ruling chiefs of the Six Nations opposed the use of rum, and Red Jacket, in a speech at Buffalo, wished that whiskey would never be less than "a dollar a quart." He answered the missionary's remarks on drunkenness thus: " Go to the white man with that." A council, held on the Allegheny River, deplored the murder of the Wigden family in Butler County by a Seneca Indian while under the influence of whiskey, approved the sen- tence of our law, and again passed their prohibitory resolutions, and implored the white man not to give rum to the Indian.'
" Mr. Coxson claims that the council of the Delawares, Muncys, Shaw- nese, Nanticokes, Tuscorawas, and Mingos, to protest against the sale of their domain by the Six Nations, at Albany, in 1754, was held at Punxsutawney, and cites Joncaire's 'Notes on Indian Warfare,' 'Life of Bezant,' etc. 'It is said they ascended the tributary of La Belle Riviere to the mountain village on the way to Chinklacamoose (Clearfield) to attend the council.' * At that council, though Sheklemas, the Christian king of the Delawares, and other Christian chiefs, tried hard to prevent the war, they were overruled, and the tribes decided to go to war with their French allies against the colony. 'Trav- ellers, as early as 1731, reported to the council of the colony of a town sixty miles from the Susquehanna.' t
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