USA > Pennsylvania > Pennsylvania, colonial and federal : a history, 1608-1903, Volume One > Part 2
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).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43
We are to remember, when we consider their limited agricul- ture and their habitual residence along the streams, that Pennsyl- vania, from the Delaware to Lake Erie, was then an unbroken forest. Less than one-tenth of its surface, it may be said, was treeless land. To the explorer who passed along its eastern side the trees stood often at the water's edge, and when he landed he found them rising everywhere before him. Then and for a century after, among the whites, to go inland was "going into the woods," and as late as the Revolution an emigrant moving west- ward, if only a hundred miles, was commonly spoken of as "gone to the backwoods."
The Indians had no cutting implements of metal. They were not workers of metal. A few copper articles they seem to have had, but these were mostly ornaments, and the material of which they were wrought may have been "native" or pure copper,. pro- cured from surface deposit or shallow mine, or possibly brought
9
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
from the shores of Lake Superior. To reduce ores, to extract the metal, and work it by fire and hammer, were processes beyond their knowledge.
That the women should be assigned the labors in the field, as well as those within the lodge, was not strange. It was the ordi- nary usage of Indian life, and common indeed among such peoples the world over. The exertions of the men were often far more arduous. For the chase, and still more for the war, they needed not only strength, but agility. Labor which would impair their swiftness of movement would be fatal. The boys were trained from their earliest years to run, to jump, to fish, and to shoot; to endure hardships, to suffer hunger and thirst in silence.
Living thus in closest contact with Nature, and drawing sub- sistence from her. sometimes with greatest ease, sometimes with infinite difficulty, the Indian's faculties of observation were devel- oped to a wonderful keenness. Signs of life and movement in forest or field, which a "civilized" man would not note, appeared to him plain. The habits of all wild creatures, the phenomena of the weather, the birth, growth, and decay of vegetation, the aspects of nature in the atmosphere and the sky, were familiar to him in the minutest detail, and thus for the purposes of the life he led he had a real education. Observing that the seasons recurred regularly, that seed-time and harvest, the budding and the fall of the leaf, came with uniform intervals, he made his own year, and divided it by its thirteen moons. Thus he could count his own age, and assign to events of the past their due order.
But among the Lenape the chronicle of events was practically an engraving on the tablets of the mind, and that only. If we except the "notched sticks" of record, which some of the Algon- kian tribes employed, and which may have been used by the Lenâpé, it may be sweepingly said that they made no records, erected no monuments, carved no stones. The traditions they cherished, the laws they enacted, the usages they set up, all were oral, and were handed down by word of mouth.
IO
The Indians
It has already been said that these Indians had practically no metal implements or arms. Stone was their main material. It provided the axe, the hammer, the pestle-sometimes also the mortar-for pounding their corn into meal ; the knife, the "skin- ner" for stripping off the skins of a slain animal, a hoe and a spade for the field, and a score of other articles in common use. It furnished the pipe in which they smoked their tobacco, quoits for their games, and even ornaments for their persons. For their weapons it supplied arrow-heads and spear-heads, and the "toma- hawk" or battle-axe. It is these stone objects, surviving the tooth of time, which have remained as the most notable evidences of the Indian period in Pennsylvania.
The Lenâpé had, however, some other arts of manufacture. They were skilled in dressing the skins of animals, especially the deer. They made earthenware articles, baking them hard and black. Soapstone they hollowed out for pots and pans, while other household vessels were made of wood. The large wild gourd, the calabash, one of the few contributions to the use of the white people, served them as bucket and dipper. The women wove mats from the soft and tough inner bark of trees, and made ornamental garments from the plumage of birds. Strings of beads, "wampum," which were used to decorate "belts" of cere- mony, and in a limited way served as money, were usually made of bits of shells, from the shore of the sea. For dye-stuffs they had the wild berries, the bark of trees, and plants like the sumac, while colored clays furnished them a coarse but effective paint.
One fact not yet considered influenced the life of the Indians of Pennsylvania to a degree which we can understand only with an effort. They had, with the sole exception of the dog, a half- wild creature, no domestic animal. The horse they had never seen-nor the cow. They had not the llama of South America, the camel, the elephant, or any other of the beasts of burden so useful in the Old World. They had therefore no means of move- ment or transportation but those which their own bodily vigor
II
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
supplied. On land they walked or ran, on the water they paddled their canoes. By their marches on the chase or in war they had worn paths, or "trails," which may yet be traced, here and there, over hill and mountain; but it is most probable that, living near many streams of water, they made large use of these as highways of travel. Their canoes may sometimes have been made of bark, but this seems uncertain ; as a rule, the Lenâpé's canoe must have been a hollow log. By diligent labor with fire and his stone axe he felled a tree, and by the same means cut off a proper length, hol- lowed it out and shaped it. This was the "dug-out," the "pirogue," in which the earliest white explorers of the Delaware found the Indians who lived on its banks coming to meet their ships.
The Lenape were straight, of middle height, their color a reddish brown. Penn speaks of them as "generally tall, straight, well built, and of singular proportion; they tread strong and clever, and mostly walk with a lofty chin." Their complexion he called "black," but said it was artificially produced by the free use of bear-grease, and exposure to sun and weather.1 They married young, the men, he says, usually at seventeen, the women at thirteen or fourteen. But their families were seldom large, and the increase of the tribe must have been slow. Polygamy existed but was not common. Marriage might or might not be a perma- nent relation; it was terminable by the husband at will, and the wife, also, Heckewelder says, might leave the husband. It is probable, however, that such separations were the exception rather than the rule. In one respect marriages were strictly controlled by the tribal law : it was required that a man of one sub-tribe must marry a woman of one of the others. A man of the Turkey sub- tribe, for example, chose a wife from the Turtle or the Wolf. So, too, the descent of sub-tribal membership, of property, and of honors, was through the female line. The child's totem was that
"This is also the statement of Pastorius, the Germantown settler (1685): "The chil- dren were white enough, but their parents
rubbed them with fat, and exposed them to the hot sun, to make them brown." (Pen- nypacker's "Germantown," 235.)
12
The Indians
of its mother. A chief could not be succeeded, therefore, by his son, though he might be by his brother, or by the son of a sister, or son of some other female of his own blood and sub-tribe.
It has been said, earlier in this review, that the Indians had a glimmering perception of religious truth. They believed in the existence of Manitou, a Great Spirit, "the creator and preserver of heaven and earth." They conceived of a future existence.
...
Figures on "Indian God" Rock
There was a general belief in a soul, a spiritual and unmaterial part of man. They did not worship idols, though they gave superstitious reverence to light, especially as manifested in fire and the sun, and to the four winds, as typical of the cardinal points, and as rain-bringers. They conceived that the supreme Manitou had many inferior manitous, to whom he had committed rule and control over special conditions and circumstances, and they therefore desired to conciliate these, by sacrifices, dances, fasts, etc. They did not fear a Devil, Heckewelder says, being confident of safety so long as they believed they had the approval of the Great Spirit, and he declares indeed, as do no other author-
13
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
ities, that the idea of an evil spirit, or devil, was unknown to them until they received it from the whites. Their dances, songs, and sacrifices were significant as prayer, as propitiation, and as thanks- giving. No great undertaking was begun without such cere- mony, and it was equally obligatory if the enterprise had success- fully ended. The song and dance were, in fact, characteristic Indian performances. Nor was the festival less so. "In the fall when the corn cometh in," Penn says, "they begin to feast one another. There have been two great festivals already"-his letter is dated August 16-"to which all come that will."
Of the moral qualities of the Indians it is difficult to form a fair judgment for want of an accepted standard. If we judge them by the highest white ideals of a later day, to which few white men-if any-ever attain, they would be found very deficient. If we compare them to other primitive peoples, in the stage of social development which they had reached, they bear the com- parison well. But the whole question of their morals, and their merits, then and since, has been confused by vehement differences of opinion concerning them. To some they were not merely "savages," but worse-"heathen" and "vermin," whom it was not only no crime but rather a duty to exterminate. In such a view they could not justify their right of existence, and for the white men to end it, by whatever means, was a praiseworthy act. On the other hand, they have had warm defenders and even enthusias- tic eulogists. William Penn saw them with a favorable eye. The pioneer settlers of Pennsylvania, practically without excep- tion, were their friends. The missionaries who labored amongst them, the Moravians especially, became warmly attached to them. So much depends, in fact, upon the point of view concerning the Indians that in a relation of the story of Pennsylvania's life during the colonial period we must be on our guard at every point lest partisanship for or against them influence the account.
Some facts concerning the Lenâpé are not open to dispute. Like Indians generally, they had remarkable self-control and forti-
14
The Indians
tude. They had great endurance; they spared themselves no physical effort when an object important to them was in view. They were not treacherous, in the proper sense of the word; on the contrary they were remarkably loyal in friendships, and faith- ful to their agreements.1 They received the white men in Penn- sylvania kindly and with little appearance of suspicion. In numerous cases they furnished food which saved the settlers from destitution. "In liberality they excel," wrote Penn, and this was a marked characteristic. It was accompanied by and indeed may be said to have partly caused extreme improvidence. Not enough store of food was laid up for winter ; not enough effort was made to provide for to-morrow ; in consequence the Indians were often at starvation's door.
In estimating their moral condition one fact stands out. Though they often ate gluttonously when food was plenty they had no intoxicating drink. It seems plain that they knew not how to make any. No process, not even the simplest, of either fermen- tation or distillation was employed by them. The narcotic to- bacco, which they smoked in pipes of clay, or stone, possibly also of copper, was their nearest approach to stimulant or intoxicant. It was reserved for the white men to bring them the curse of drink. Heckewelder records the Indian tradition of the first appearance of the white men at the mouth of the Hudson, when almost at once they offered the Mohegans drams of rum, and the intoxication that followed gave its enduring name, Manhattan- the island where we all got drunk-to the place. The Dutch, from the first, on both the Delaware and the Hudson, supplied the Indians with drink, and the Swedes and English, who followed,
1Francis Daniel Pastorius, of German- town, already cited (foot-note, ante), says, writing in 1695, of the Indians whom he had seen: "They are entirely candid, keep to their promises, and deceive and mislead nobody." He tells, however, this story: "A very cunning savage came to me one day, and offered to bring me a turkey hen for a certain price. But he brought me
instead an eagle, and insisted upon it that it was a turkey. But I showed him that I knew very well the difference between the two birds. Then hc said to a Swede stand- ing by that he had not supposed that a Ger- man so lately arrived would know these birds apart." (Pennypacker's German- town," p. 238.)
I 5
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
did the same. Kalm, the Swedish writer, said of the Lenape of New Jersey that while the small-pox had destroyed many, "brandy had killed most" of them. Penn, in 1683, described graphically the injury already done. The Indians had become, he says, "great lovers of strong liquors, rum especially," and for it they gave the richest of their skins and furs. "One of the most wretched spectacles in the world" they were when drunk. This remained a sadly familiar description. To the end of their his- tory in Pennsylvania it was the same; the tempting and terrible "fire-water" wrought upon them every misery which humankind can suffer, and stripping them of self-command, vigor, and judg- ment, lost them at last the land they had called their own.
We may now consider that these details have fairly described the Indians of the Delaware region, at the opening of the historic period. It may be at once added that much of the description would apply to other Indians of Pennsylvania. But while our knowledge of the Lenape, at the time the white men came, is limited, and must be pieced out by observations made in later times, as of William Penn seventy-five years after, and of the missionary Heckewelder in the following century, our knowledge of other Indian tribes within the limits of the present State, in the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, is still more meagre. We have little more than a few names, some of them spelled many ways and unpronounceable, a few traditions, and a variety of dis- puted conclusions. We must therefore content ourselves with a brief survey, qualified by many uncertainties.
One general statement may be safely made concerning the Indians of the interior, in the valley of the Susquehanna and its three great branches, from Chesapeake Bay to the river's remotest springs ; it is that none of them was of Algonkian stock, and that all were sometimes at war with, and ultimately were conquered by, the Iroquois of New York. The heads of the Susquehanna river stretch far up into the Iroquois country, and securing firearms promptly from the whites, those fierce and energetic confederates
16
The Indians
descended upon the convenient water ways, and were more than a match for any antagonist they found on the lower reaches of the stream. The whole interior of Pennsylvania, therefore, became by the close of the Seventeenth Century an appanage of the Iroquois.
On the Susquehanna, south of the Juniata and north of the Chesapeake, at the time the white men came, were the tribe called by the English of Virginia and Maryland Susquehannocks, and by the French Andastes. Their palisaded town, often mentioned afterward in colonial history, was apparently within the present limits of Lancaster county. They became familiar to the Swedes and the Dutch as the Minquas, this designation implying not alone bands upon the Susquehanna river itself, but others of the same tribe who occupied streams that flow into that river, and head east- ward toward the Delaware. The Minquas were almost habit- ual enemies of the "river Indians," the Lenape. Their parties coming down the Christiana gave it early the name of Minquas Kill. The Lenâpé dolefully related to the white settlers the mis- eries they had endured at the hands of these "black Indians" of the interior.
Finally, the Susquehannocks, or Andastes, fell as has been intimated before the arms of the fierce confederates of New York, the Iroquois. From about 1650, for some time, the Mohawks were at war with them ; later the Senecas carried on this warfare, and about 1674 finally overcame and scattered them. The Sus- quehannocks from that time disappear, unless, as is probable, the small band of Conestogas, whose dismal fortunes a century later we shall have to relate, were a remnant of this important tribe. Other tribes or bands were identified then and later with the lower Susquehanna ; Captain Smith heard of two, whose names he gives on his map, but which have now no significance for us; and in colonial times there were the Conoys, otherwise Ganawese, who have been identified with the Piscataways of southern Maryland, and apparently were recent immigrants from that region.
I-2
17
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
In western Pennsylvania, the valley of the Ohio was undoubt- edly a favorite Indian land. Abundant evidences of this existed within the historic period. That picturesque region, with its wooded mountains, its swift streams, and narrow but fertile valleys, has, or had, many Indian remains-not only the ordinary stone implements and weapons, and fragments of pottery, but pictured rocks, defensive works, and burial mounds. Who the Indians were that left these behind is wholly unknown. Those tribes whom the whites found in western Pennsylvania, when the settlements were made there, a full century after the white occu- pancy of the Delaware began, were themselves new-comers. frag- ments of tribes driven thither, as the Lenape remnants then had been, from their original homes in regions to the eastward. We shall see, for example, that our earliest precise knowledge of Indian activities on the Allegheny, and at the site of Pittsburg, goes back no further than about 1720-25, leaving more than a century for important changes of habitat after the white men came.
Within the historic period there was a tribe upon the shores of Lake Erie, their habitat extending, it is probable, within the north- western corner of Pennsylvania. These were the people common- ly known as Eries, or Erigas, or as the French called them, the Cat tribe. It is said that they were of the Iroquois family ; it is also said that they were not-that they were Algonkians. It has been suggested that they were identical with the Shawanoes, or Shaw- nees, whose appearance and disappearance in widely-separated places is one of the puzzles in the history of the American Indian. They are described as a large tribe; one authority assigns them twenty-eight villages, with "twelve large towns or forts," and no less than 12,000 members ; but these figures certainly are exagger- ated. They were, French accounts say, fierce warriors, who used poisoned arrows, and were long a terror to the neighboring Iro- quois. The Jesuits, who generally endeavored to convert the tribes on the Lakes, had no mission among them, though they
18
The Indians
appear to have been visited by Etienne Brulé, Champlain's advent- urous interpreter, in the summer of 1615. The Eries also were finally victims of the Iroquois. In the year 1654, earlier than the subjugation of the Susquehannocks, the Iroquois attacked them furiously, and defeated and scattered them, and the historic account concerning them thus ends.
One enduring impress left upon Pennsylvania by the Indians and perhaps the most conspicuous one, is the names of places, and especially of flowing waters. Very generally the names which were given and which remain upon the rivers and creeks are Indian. The Delaware and Schuylkill are conspicuous exceptions, but the Lehigh, the Susquehanna, the Juniata, the Ohio, the Alle- gheny, the Monongahela, the Youghiogheny, the Kiskeminetas, the Conemaugh, are examples sufficient to prove the rule. Through- out the State scores and probably hundreds of the streams have Indian names, some of them strikingly beautiful, some by corrup- tion of the original changed to forms less pleasing and hardly to be identified as Indian.
Though we shall be anticipating somewhat the course of our narrative, and taking up events out of their order, it seems most convenient to consider here the relation borne for a time, after the white men came, by the Iroquois Indians of New York to the Lenâpé Indians on the Delaware. It is unquestionable that dur- ing a period more or less extended the former claimed, and the latter, or some of them, conceded, a certain supremacy of the Iroquois. But the exact nature of this supremacy, the time when it began, the manner in which it was established, and the extent of its exercise, have all been matters of dispute.
We shall be able to relieve the subject of part of its liability to confusion by considering first some facts which are not dis- puted. In the first place, there is no evidence that the purchases of the land on the Delaware made by the Dutch, or the Swedes, or by William Penn, had any reference to the Iroquois tribes of New York. These dealings were with local Indian chiefs, and with
19
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
them only. The deeds make no allusion to any overlordship. From the Capes northward nearly to the Lehigh river, on the
x
Indian Rock Pictures, Millsboro
Reproduced especially for this work from United States government reports
west side, and upward into New York on the east side, the lands were sold by the Lenâpé as an independent and sovereign people.
In the valley of the Susquehanna, as we have seen, the Lenape held no land. It was held by their enemies, the Susquehannocks on the lower reaches of the river, and the Iroquois on the upper,
20
The Indians
until the latter, by conquest, acquired entire control. The Lenape had possession, it would appear, of lands on the western affluents of the Schuylkill, but they had no hold upon the region beyond the watershed where they rise.
By eliminating thus a large part of the Delaware valley and the whole of the Susquehanna valley from consideration, we have narrowed the field in which the Iroquois could have exercised a supremacy of any great importance over the Lenape. We have left simply the mountain country of the Minsi, from the Lehigh river northward, on the west side of the Delaware. It may be said in a word that the Minsi, while they remained in this region, were probably subject, for some fifty years or more, to the Iro- quois.
So early as 1609, when Champlain, in July of that year, made his famous attack upon them, on the site of Ticonderoga, the Mohawks of New York learned the deadly effectiveness of fire- arms. His match-locks with triggers-the "arquebuses" of the French armorers of that time-spread death and dismay in the ranks of the Indians. It was a lesson to them, terrible and effect- ive, and needing no repetition. From that day they endeavored to procure for themselves the weapons whose destructive power they had witnessed, and in the Dutch records there is abundant evidence that the demand thus created was soon supplied.
The encounter at Ticonderoga coincided almost precisely with Hudson's discovery of the great river that bears his name. The two events were but a month apart. Trade on the Hudson river began quickly, and filled with desire for Indian furs, the Dutch traders lost no time in supplying the guns and powder which would secure them. By 1630, when traffic on the Delaware was hardly yet begun, there was centered at Albany, extending into the country of the Iroquois, a barter of furs and firearms, whose profits brought joy to the white trader, and which equipped the red man for a more effective warfare than he ever yet had waged. In November, 1643, the Dutch settlers at Manhattan, in their
21
Pennsylvania Colonial and Federal
pitiful appeal for aid to the authorities in Holland, said the Indians were "well provided with guns, powder, and lead, which they purchased for beaver from the private traders who have had for a long time free range here." The "Brief Description of New Netherland," written 1641-1646, for use in Holland, says the settlers of Rensselaerwyck (on the Hudson below Albany), at an early time, "perceiving that the Mohawks were craving for guns, which some of them had already received from the English," made large profits by selling more of them, and also that the gain of the trade being noised about, traders coming over from Hol- land "brought over great quantities," and the Mohawks, "in a short time," were seen well provided "with firelocks, powder and lead."
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.