USA > Pennsylvania > Chronicles of Pennsylvania from the English revolution to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1688-1748, Vol. I > Part 9
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stood when they wrote: they also say that another Indian village was on the north side of the west branch near the line of the Society's land, and that there Indian Hannah, last of her race in the County, dwelt for many years. Watson says that she died in 1803, nearly one hundred years old, and that about the time of the Revo- lutionary war she with the rest of her family, Andrew, Sarah, and Nanny, were living in Kennet.
In 1694, when the Onondagas and Senecas sent to the Delawares asking them to be "partners with them" in fighting the French, Hithquoquean, Shakhuppo, Menanzes, Tamanen, and Alemeon (possibly Alaenoh, witness to one of the deeds of June 23, 1683), and also Mohocksey, who may have been a king of the Lenape in New Jersey, came with other Delawares and two Susquehanna chiefs to see Lieutenant-Governor Mark- ham; and Hithquoquean, on behalf of the Delawares, announced their resolve to live as a peaceable people, being but weak and very few in number. The Onon- dagas and Senecas had, in the message, reproached the Delawares with the very thing which tradition says that the Five Nations had long before that time imposed upon them, viz: doing nothing but staying at home and boiling the pots like women. The Lieutenant-Governor commended the visitors for not engaging in war with- out the advice and consent of Governor Fletcher, who, on his visit to Philadelphia for aid against the French, had secured some money, but had permitted the people of the Province to stay at home to defend it. The Delawares were assured that Governor Fletcher would take care that the Senecas should do them no injury on account of their refusal.
In 1697, a considerable body of the Delawares, enu- merated as 300 men,-the small number of persons in any Indian nation must surprise the uninformed,-were tributary to the Susquehannas and Senecas around about Conestoga. Fifty were at Minquannan, men-
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tioned as about nine miles from the head of the Elk River, fifteen miles from Christeen, and thirty miles from Susquehanna, and the rest of the body on Brandy- wine and Upland Creeks. All, as well as the Susque- hannas and Shawnees, were said to be inclined to attach themselves to the government of Maryland, as they hunted between the Susquehanna River and the Potomac. The Delaware "King" offered that his Indians, if permitted to hunt between those rivers, would watch the movements of the Naked Indians, or Twightwees (Miamis). For some time, Owehela, or Ocahale, appears as the most prominent Delaware Indian on the Christiana. On Aug. 29, 1700, he, as "Ocahale, King of the Delaware Indians," joined with the King of the Shawnees, and with Indian Harry, representing the King of the Susquehannocks, in a treaty confirming former peace and amity with Mary- land, making themselves answerable for injuries done by other Indians to the inhabitants of that province, and promising, upon damage done by neighbouring Indians, to assist against them, and pursue, and, if pos- sible, capture and bring them for the government to deal with them.
There were Indians at Lechay, or Lehigh, during Penn's second visit, who were probably Delawares. He consulted Oppemenyhood of that place upon the law prohibiting the sale of rum.
Penn during his second visit to America gave the Delaware chief Heteoquean a belt to carry to the Five Nations. Heteoquean died soon afterwards, and the belt was not exhibited to the great men of those Nations until 1712.
The early travellers from Europe to our Middle States, proceeding into the interior, found a different race of Indians. The Hudson and the Mohawk afforded the Dutch traders access to villages inhabited by those to whom the French were extending the name Iroquois,
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and to whom in time they restricted that word. There were five main tribes, called by themselves respectively by a derivative of "the place of flint," "the rock set up," "top of the mountain," "where locusts were obtained," and "the great mountain." The English of New York and Pennsylvania called them respectively Maquas or Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Sinnondowannes or Senecas. The Marylanders classed all as Cynegoes, or Senecas, or Jonadoes, just as some of the Dutch had confused the various names of these tribes. According to De Denonville (Penna. Archives, 2nd Series, Vol. VI), writing in 1685, the Sonontouans, as he called the Senecas, then outnum- bered the four other tribes combined, the Anie (Mohawks) having 200 fighting men; the Oneyoust (Oneidas), 150; the Onontague, 300; the Goyoguoain (Cayugas), 200: while the Senecas were reported to have 1200.
Although certain of these tribes had continued to make war independently of the others, the five long before that year united in a confederacy, at first a loose one, and are known collectively in English history as the Five Nations, and more properly after 1712, when the Tuscaroras were added, as the Six Nations. The Onondagas had the precedency. At their castle was held the great council, called from the place of meeting "the Long House," in which much of such government as there was among Indians became centralized. Yet some "States rights," and even some conquered lands and vassals belonged to particular tribes.
The use of guns, powder, and shot introduced by the Dutch among the Indians of the Mohawk Valley gave them a great advantage over enemies armed with bows and arrows; and the Five Nations started upon a career of conquest, which their ferocity maintained after other Europeans provided the neighbouring savages with
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weapons, and which ended in the mastery of the interior of New York and Pennsylvania.
The policy of the Dutch at New York of amity and almost mutual aid and comfort with the Five Nations, remained, after the acquisition of that region by the English, the policy of the government there, so largely did the Dutch families control Indian relations, if not other affairs. This policy was necessary while the New Englanders were engaged in crushing the Algonquins in their vicinity; and when it was becoming clear that the Five Nations would dominate the border between the Duke of York's possessions and Canada, it seemed the sharpest politics to ally with the winning side.
Only straggling members of any of the five tribes lived near the parts of Pennsylvania civilized before Penn's death; but the earliest traders who went from the Schuylkill and the Brandywine to the headwaters of the Octorara and the Conestoga associated with certain Indians of the same stock. To these and to all the Iroquois, the Lenni Lenape applied the epithet Mingwe, treacherous. Amandus Johnson, in his book already quoted, gives the various forms "Mingo, Minqua, Min- quaes," &ct., in which this name was used by Swedes and Dutch to denote the interior people with whom the settlers on the Delaware came in contact. There was a tribe called the "White Minquas," and one called the "Black Minquas," probably from their costume or paint. If Sir Edmund Andros was correct as to the relationship of the Susquehanna Indians and the Mo- hawks, the latter would seem to have been the Black Minquas, often no more friendly with the White Min- quas than near blood relations sometimes are. Yet the identity of the Black Minquas remains a puzzle : they were sufficiently numerous in 1681 to be reported as joining the Sindondowannes in war. The White Minquas are supposed to have been those almost in- variably meant by the simple word Minquas or Min-
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goes, viz : the Indians whose chief seat was on the lower Susquehanna during the days of the Swedes and Dutch. On the probability that the occupants of the region had not changed, H. Frank Eshleman in his "Lancaster County Indians-Annals of the Susquehannocks &ct." has traced them from Capt. John Smith's first mention of the Sasquesahanock in his Description of Virginia: in fact, following A. L. Guss's Early Indian History of Susquehanna, from Smith's mention of the Pacough- tronack in his True Relation. As one guess at Indian history is about as good as another, the hypothesis may be here offered, accounting for some items to follow later about the Pascatoways, that, as the syllable "pak" in Algonquian conveys the idea of division or duality, the name embracing it was used in the days of Smith and others to denote the people of a dual empire, com- posed of an Iroquoian and an Algonquian part, the latter being dominant, and continuing after the seces- sion of the former to be called by the name of the whole. The dwellers on the Susquehanna, who were thus the Iroquoian part, and who, Edmund Andros in 1675 said, were "offsprings of the Maques (Mohawks)," were de- scribed as Sasquesahannock, from Sasquesahanna, the Algonquian name of the river, evidently by Algonquian- speaking Indians on the Chesapeake and the Delaware. Smith knew the great enemies of his Sasquesahanock as Massowomekes, a name remarkably like Matta- women, that of a tribe afterwards connected with the Pascatoways: notwithstanding the usual identification with the Five Nations, the Massowomekes may have been the Pascatoways, long alternately lords and ene- mies. The final emancipation from them appears to have been after Lord Baltimore began the settlement of Maryland. The Susquehanna Indians called them- selves, or were called by their Iroquoian kindred Ganes- togas, hence our word Conestoga, and even our word "stogy" for a Pennsylvania cigar. It would seem from
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the creek now called Conestoga being so called in Her- man's map that before its date their chief seat was near there, and may have been that marked "fort de- molished" on Chambers's survey (see George Smith's Hist. of Delaware County). The Susquehannocks by treaty of July 5, 1652, conveyed to the Marylanders the land on the western side of the Chesapeake from the Patuxent to Palmer's Island, and on the eastern side from the Choptank to the North East branch which lies north of the Elk, except Kent and Palmer's Island, be- longing to Capt. Clayborne; both English and Indians being allowed to build a house or fort on Palmer's Island. In 1744, the Six Nations testified to the great- ness of the Susquehannocks' empire by acknowledging that the grantors in this deed of more than ninety years before, had the ownership of the land of which they so undertook to dispose. The printed Maryland Archives and the printed Jesuit Relations mention continuously the Indians living north of the land so conveyed, the Maryland Archives always giving them the same name as the great river, as did also the Duke's Governors of New York, and the Jesuit Relations employing appar- ently the Iroquoian name in the form, which may be a slight modification, "Andasto-eronnons" or "Andasto- genronons." The element "roona" was a suffix for the plural in Iroquoian. The village, or capital, ap- pears in the Relations as "Andastogué." The records of the Province of Pennsylvania use indiscriminately all three names Mingoes (or Minquays), Susquehannas, and Conestogas. For a long period, these Susque- hannocks, often helped by Maryland, were victorious in war against some of the Five Nations, the fortress being moved to where Herman depicted it. Eshleman quotes the Relations, Vol. 59, p. 251, to show that, about 1672, the Iroquois succeeded in subjugating the tribe so much feared, or, in the words of the priest, "the Sonnonlouaies have utterly defeated the Andaste, their
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ancient and most redoubtable foe." The government of Maryland seems to have forsaken them about this time, punishing them for offences of which perhaps none of them were guilty; and thus another Colony than New York contributed to making the Five Nations supreme as far as the Potomac. After a second defeat, called an "extermination," many Susquehannocks were taken to live with their conquerors; the relation before long became that of friends, and the conquered were believed to be stirring up the "Senecas" to depreda- tions upon Maryland. The great war captain Har- ignera, on the other hand, had saved a remnant. He soon died, but his followers and other detachments were for some time strong enough to menace the whites both north and south of the Potomac. A considerable body, revenging the murder of five principal chiefs at a peace parley, raided Virginia, tomahawking the settlers, until defeated by Nathaniel Bacon, whose assumption of authority is called Bacon's Rebellion. A detachment of those who had gone to Virginia and probably some others went back to the old Susquehanna Fort, "sixty miles above Palmer's Island,"-pretty clearly the loca- tion designated for the fort by Herman's map,-and made submission to the "Senecas," but asked for peace with Maryland. After various events, peace was made between Maryland and the Five Nations and the Sus- quehannocks under them; after which the number of Senecas or so-called Senecas within what is now Lan- caster and York Counties in Pennsylvania increased.
The Swedes had bought the claim of certain Minqua chiefs as far as the Susquehanna River. To acquire what had been beyond those chiefs' possessions or the title or good-will of those who were their lords para- mount, Penn in July, 1683 (see his letter to Brockles and West, Penna. Archives, 2nd Series, Vol. VII, p. 3), sent William Haig (called Wm. in the letter), to be accom- panied by James Graham of New York, to treat with the
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Mohawks and Senecas and their allies for the land fronting on the Susquehanna. According to Rev. Jean de Lamberville's letter of Jany. 31 following-the date is Feb. 10, 1684, new style-the white people at Albany worked upon the Indians, and through Oreouahé, the Cayuga, circumvented the sale of the land of the con- quered Andastogues (Penna. Archives, 2nd Series, Vol. VI). The Indians had much contention as to one an- other's rights, but appear to have agreed on one point, and to have delivered sufficient answer, even before the Indian Commissioners received a letter from the new Governor of New York, written on September 18, by the advice of his Council, to stop Penn's negotiations until his boundaries should be adjusted. Thomas Don- gan, who was the Governor, was, in everything con- nected with these lands, guilty of treachery or double dealing or at least vacillation. Canassatego said in 1744 at Lancaster that the Governor of New York had advised the Five Nations to put the land into his hands, instead of Penn's, and promised to keep it for the Five Nations' use, but the Governor went away to England, and sold it to Onas (a quill, the translation of Penn, which they thought meant a goose's quill) for a large sum of money, and, when they were minded to sell Onas some lands, Onas said that he had bought them from that Governor, but, on hearing how the Gov- ernor had deceived the Five Nations, Onas paid them for the lands over again. The Indians, making their marks to a writing since lost, gave the Susquehanna River, i.e. the valley of it, to Dongan, as he mentions to Penn in a letter of October 10, 1683. In a letter of October 22 to the same, Dongan speaks of a second gift of the River from the Indians, adding "about which you and I shall not fall out." What the Five Nations intended, appears in the speech of the Onon- dagas and Cayugas on Aug. 2, 1684, in the Town Hall at Albany to Governor Dongan and Lord Howard of
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Effingham, Governor of Virginia: "You will protect us from the French, which if you do not, we shall lose all our hunting and bevers. We have put all our lands and ourselves under the protection of the great Duke of York we have given the Susquehanne River, which we won with the sword, to this government, and will not that any of your Penn's people shall settle upon the Susquehanne River . · we do give you two white drest deer skins to be sent to the great sachem Charles that he may write upon them and put a great red seal to them that we do put the Susquehanne River above the Washinta or Falls and all the rest of our land under the great Duke of York and to nobody else and we will neither join ourselves nor our land to any other government. .
You, great man of Virginia, we let you know that Great Penn did speak to us here in Corlear's house"-the Governor of New York was called "Corlear"-"by his [Penn's] agents and desired to buy the Susquehanne River, but we would not hearken to him nor come under his government, and therefore desire you to be a wit. ness we are a free people uniting ourselves to what sachem we please." A note in the Documentary History of New York says that the Falls were those in the present Bradford County, Pennsylvania; but it is evident that the claim of sovereignty extended as far south as the Falls near the Conewago.
The fact that the Cayugas were the only nation join- ing the Onondagas in this speech, and that about thirty-five years later the Cayugas claimed the lower Susquehanna, and that, moreover, the Mohawks, were about the middle of the XVIIIth Century deemed to have no share in the land further north sold by the Five Nations, is not easily explained. It may mean that the conquest of the Susquehannocks was chiefly the work of the Cayugas, or in pursuance of their sup- posed early rights.
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After the Duke of York had ascended the throne, and then had fled from it, his friend Dongan, who had become Earl of Limerick, transferred to Penn what title Dongan had to the lands of the Seneca-Susque- hanna Indians. Reciting his purchase from them of land on both sides of the Susquehanna River with the adjacent lakes from the head of the River to Chesa- peake Bay, Dongan conveyed this to William Penn and his heirs and assigns by lease and release dated Jany. 12 and 13, 1696. A few months after this, the Sus- quehannas and Senecas at Carristoga (Conestoga) were reported as forty young men besides women and chil- dren. On 7mo. 13, 1700, Dongan's release to Penn having been shown to Widaagh, alias Orytyagh (Oret- tyagh), and Andaggy-Junkquagh, styled "Kings or Sachemas of the Susquehannagh Indians," they, in con- sideration of some goods, and of Penn's former ex- penses in making the purchase, deeded to Penn and his heirs and assigns the Susquehanna River and its islands and land on both sides of the river formerly the right of the nation called the Susquehannagh Indians, or by what name they were known, and confirmed the bargain and sale made to Dongan. In July, 1721, Civility, "a descendant of the ancient Susquehannah Indians, the old settlers of these parts, but now reputed as of an Iroquois descent," said that he had been informed by their old men that they were troubled when they heard that their lands had been given up to a place so far distant as New York, and that they were overjoyed when they understood William Penn had bought them back again, and that they had confirmed all their right to him.
James II having avowed his sovereignty over the Five Nations, and undertaken to protect them, and they having supported the English in the war carried on by William III, recognition of those tribes as English
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subjects was made by the French King in the following sentence in the treaty of Ryswick :
Les habitans de Canada & autres, Sujets de la France, ne molesteront point à l'avenir les cinq Nations ou Cantons des Indiens soûmis a la Grande Bretagne ni les autres Nations de l'Amerique, amies de cette Cou- ronne. (Du Mont's Corps Diplomatique.)
This gave the English the foundation of a claim that the French had yielded, or recognized as belonging to England, all the territory of the Five Nations and of the tribes subject to them, such as the Delawares, Sus- quehannocks, Ganawese, Pennsylvania Shawnees, and the natives around Lake Erie. France, on the contrary, about the time at which this history closes, insisted that there was only a stipulation for the safety of per- sons, and that the territory in question followed a clause in the treaty surrendering to the parties what each had before the war, and that France had then owned, by right of discovery, all the land drained by the Ohio and the Great Lakes.
Besides the Delawares, Susquehannocks, and Five Nations, certain remnants or detachments of tribes, nearly all of them Algonquian, were to be found within Penn's boundaries before his death. The reader is referred to Charles A. Hanna's compendious work, The Wilderness Trail, for many items in the history of all the Indians with whom our frontiersmen came in contact, also for a presentation of evidence of much that is here written, and for narratives of the adven- tures of individuals, which, as mere local history, are not mentioned here.
Hanna has said very little about the Pascatoways, mentioned on a preceding page, as to whom some facts must now be given. They are usually called in the Pennsylvania records, Ganevi, Ganawese, or Conoys, from the name by which they were known to the Five Nations. The tribe is classed as Algonquian. Brinton
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would explain the derivation from the verb "pashk," meaning in one Algonquian language "to divide," from the old seat being on the Pascatoway, or Piscataway, Creek, where an estuary of the Potomac may be said to divide into that creek and Timber Creek. In the rapid fluctuations of power among savages, these, whatever their kinship, their locations, or their name, seem once to have been a great nation. The Maryland Archives furnish us with the statement of the Pascatoway speaker in 1660 that the fourteenth or earlier King, or Tayac, before the one then reigning, had come from the Eastern Shore, and commanded all the Maryland Indians and also the Patowmacks and Susquehannocks. A Virginia record, telling of an expedition in the latter part of 1623 against the Pascoticans and their associ- ates, recognizes them as "the greatest people in these parts." The expedition revenged a murder by the Anacostans. The first settlers of Maryland found apparently in control of the Patowmacks, and very much what the leader of the Massowomekes of Smith's time might have been, an Emperor, or Tayac, of Pascat- oway, who could summon 500 men with bows, and whose successor had a dominion of one hundred and thirty miles, with inferior chieftains under him. This people, Lord Baltimore took under his suzer- ainty, confirming the succession of subsequent Tay- acs. He made peace between the Pascatoways and the Susquehannocks. Between 1660 and 1667, the former seem to have included the Anacostanck, Doags, Mikelwoman, Manasquasend, Mattawoman, Chingawa- waterck, Nangemaick or Hangemaick, Portoback, Se- cayo, Panyayo, and Choptico Indians. The Pascato- ways, although reduced in number, and the Matta- women turned to Maryland in her struggle with the Susquehannocks in 1675 or 1676, and, after suffering at the hands of the latter and the Senecas, the Pasca-
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toways were embraced in the peace made by Maryland with the Five Nations in 1682.
Apparently the Pascatoways immediately thereafter united themselves as a tributary nation to the great northern confederacy. When the English Revolution took place, the Protestants in Maryland became suspi- cious of the Indians, who had been friendly with the Lords Baltimore. Various circumstances alarmed this tribe, and caused the seeking of refuge. In 1697, the Emperor and his followers were found between the two mountain ranges of Virginia beyond the head of the Occaquan River. Although the Maryland government tried to induce them to return to that province, they, after coming back to the Potomac River, went far enough north to feel themselves within the boundaries of the Quaker jurisdiction, and preferred to trust them- selves as guests or tributaries of their old enemies, the Seneca-Susquehannocks. Old Sack, chief of Conoy Town, is reported to have said in 1743 that his fore- fathers came from Piscatua to an island in Potowmack, and from there down to Philadelphia in William Penn's time, and that, after their return from visiting Penn at Philadelphia, they brought all their brothers from Potomac to Conejoholo,-the land on both sides of the Susquehanna for a number of miles was so called,-and built a town on the eastern side, and afterwards moved higher up to Conoy Town, the Six Nations-evidently the Senecas of the Conestoga region-saying that there was land enough, and giving permission to settle any- where about the Susquehanna.
It is possible that the variations or derivatives of the Algonquian word for south or southern appearing quite early as the name of a tribe, like Chawons on Capt. John Smith's map, and Chowanoke in his Description of Virginia, may not designate the same nation which after 1688 was always meant by such attempts to represent the sound as Savino, Sabber-
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nowle, Shevinor, Shawan, Shawanees, and finally Shawnees in English, and as Chuans and Chauonons in French. In Visscher's Dutch map before 1660, we find Sauwanoos on both sides of the Delaware at some indefinite distance above the Falls, agreeing with the tradition of the Shawnees coming to Pennsylvania before the time of this history, and of their occupying Shackamaxon, as mentioned in Rev. John Hecke- welder's Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States. The Shawnees who entered Pennsylvania in the period of these Chronicles came from the south or southwest, the tradition being that the nation was a branch of the Lenni Lenape which had very early split off, and gone thither. About 1688, there were Shawnee villiages on the Ohio and in Caro- lina and one near La Salle's Fort St. Louis, as well as probably some still on the Cumberland River, called by the French geographer in 1718 "Riviére des anciens Chaouanons," while he called the Savannah "Riviére des Chaouanons ou d'Edisto." The proximity to the French of the old homes of the Shawnees and the alli- ance of various bodies of them with the French made all members of the tribe within the English possessions objects of suspicion.
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