CHAPTER III.

In the Days of the Iroquois.

When the first white men crossed the Allegheny mountains and came to the Western Country, they found it "occupied by the Indians," some historians assert; others say "inhabited by the Indians." Both are in a measure wrong in their statements. "Possessed" is altogether a better word, and more truthfully expresses the fact. The first history of the region arises from this possession; its origin and nature passes rapidly to English claims and English-Indian alliances, disclosing a rivalry ages old and leading to extended warfare. Most histories of Pennsylvania begin with accounts of the Indians that William Penn found dwelling on the Delaware in 1682, and with whom he made his famous treaty. Some histories go back to Columbus.

Neville B. Craig begins his "History of Pittsburgh" with some account of the earliest known occupants of the region; Howard N. Jenkins' first chapter in that elaborate work, "Pennsylvania, Colonial and Federal," is headed, "The Indians of Pennsylvania." Judge James Veech, in his "Monongahela of Old," first tells of the Mound Builders, passes to the story of the Indian occupants, thence follows the line of events. So, too, others—and the same is true of most histories of the United States. The Aborigines cannot be passed over, and their history must be told, regionally at least, in any history of any part of the country. It is more than regional history when Pittsburgh is the subject, for hereabouts mighty events, following trivial ones, took place, which brought on the long war between France and Great Britain, called by the English colonists the French and Indian War, which in the end decided the fate of the North American continent, when the issue was whether Celtic Gaul or the Anglo-Saxon should rule this continent, and, incidentally, whether the region treated of in this history as "Pittsburgh and Its Environs," in fact the Western Country, should be part of New France in America or be brought under the Royal Banner of St. George.

With that decision the history of the region changed, but the phases given it by the Indians still continued. In the sense of color, it was red; perhaps not so sanguine in hue as when the French allied tribes ravaged the length and breadth of Pennsylvania and left a shocking record. Not until Anthony Wayne punished the Western tribes on the Maumee in August, 1794, did the menace of the red warrior depart from Western Pennsylvania. From the time when Governor Dinwiddie sent the youthful George Washington as ambassador to the French commander in Northwestern Pennsylvania in 1753, until twenty years after

British sovereignty had ceased in the Thirteen Colonies, the bane of the savage was ever at hand in the Western Country, and armed forces and block houses were constantly required to protect the settlers in even a slight degree, not only in the trans-Allegheny region, but also the older settlements along and east of the Susquehanna. True, there were lulls in the warfare-intervals of peace-but the menace remained, and the peaceful periods were short and fleeting.

It will therefore be proper to tell of the tribes that occupied the Western Country, their mode of life, and how governed; their activities in war; their racial and political enmities; their espousal of the cause of "Onontio"-the governor-general of French Canada, or of "Onas" -William Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, each claiming jurisdiction of the region about the Forks of the Ohio, and thereby running counter to the claims of the government of the colony of Virginia.

Before coming to these claims of the English colonial governors, and antecedent even to the claims of France to the region, the story of the Pennsylvania Algonquins and their subserviency to other tribes, or their enmity, must be written, and a strange story it is. Then, too, how came these tribes to the region, neither indigenous nor long seated here? Herein first looms up the power of the most wonderful confederacy of savage nations, the purest democracy since the early days. of Athens, rivaling that, in fact-the League of the Iroquois, "The Romans of America," in the language of De Witt Clinton. In the story of the Indians of Western Pennsylvania the Iroquois are the landlords; the other tribes were tenants at will-especially the Delawares and Shawanese-for both these tribes had fixed habitations assigned them in the region of the Upper Ohio, and with them most of the Indian history of Pittsburgh has to do.

The Ottawas, Wyandots, Miamis, Cherokees, Mohicans, and even more remote tribes, have also place in our local Indian history, but in the main, the Delawares and Shawanese are the chief sources of it. The Mingoes, oftmentioned, were Iroquois; emigrants, we may term them, from the most western of the Western Iroquois in New York, or those who dwelt on the shores of Lake Erie and at the headwaters of the Allegheny, thence following an easy waterway to the Ohio, which river they regarded as the main stream, only a continuation of the Allegheny. Delaware and Seneca names therefore are most common commemorations in our regional geographical nomenclature, and will receive more extended notice farther on, as they most frequently occur in this history and should have mention.

The region beyond the Alleghenies, to be more explicit, that extending westward from the northern Susquehanna at its forks was Iroquoian hunting grounds. In this vast timbered area, abounding in mountain and stream, the Indian found his ideal country. The Iroquois, while

savage in nature and indulging to excess all their savage propensities and barbaric rites, were nevertheless semi-civilized. They had their dwelling houses of bark, their farms and gardens well tilled by their women, and above all their Long House, or seat of assembly. They were warriors-a race of warriors, whose origin was lost in myths, weird, shudder-causing, wonderful. But they loved the chase also, for they required the peltries of the fur-bearing animals for clothing and home comfort. So when the conquest was over for a season, their hunters sought the woodland wilderness, trapped the bear, the otter and the beaver, and killed the buffalo and deer for meat and skins, and in this pursuit roamed over wide stretches, for the warrior-hunter was at home anywhere. He was never lost or dismayed. In the inimitable language of Parkman we are awakened to this truth. He tells us that "The Indian is the true child of the forest and the desert. The wastes and solitudes of nature are his congenial home. His haughty mind is imbued with the spirit of the wilderness, and the light of civilization falls on him with a blighting power. His unruly pride and untamed freedom are in harmony with the lonely mountains, cataracts and rivers, among which he dwells; and primitive America, with her savage scenery and savage men, opens to the imagination a boundless. world, unmatched in wild sublimity."1

In the wilderness of Western Pennsylvania, in its vast forests of pine and hemlock and in the deciduous woods along its quickly flowing streams and on its clear lakes, the Iroquois hunters reveled in the chase, and that, conquerors as they were for centuries, they should share this hunting ground with the conquered, awakens surprise and evokes inquiry. The tribes of the Algonquian stock were here by their permission-the Delawares and the Shawanese driven here at the behest of Onas, and in all it is a strange story, curious in inception, dramatic in its forceful telling, and tragic in its ultimate results. The name Delawares, it will be noted, is of English derivation; rightly these were the Lenape-in Indian orthography, the Len-ni-Len-a-pe, a tribe of the great Algonquian family whose history is more inextricably interwoven with Pennsylvania history than that of any other, not even excepting the Iroquois and the Delaware congeners variously called Shawanese, Shawanoes and Shawnees.

The Iroquois therefore call for special and specific mention, for they were the masters. Again recourse to Parkman. He tells us in this regard:

Foremost in war, foremost in eloquence, foremost in the savage arts of policy, stood the first people called by themselves the Hodenosaunee, and by the French the Iroquois, which has since been applied to the entire family of which they formed the dominant number. They extended their conquests and their depredations from Quebec to the Carolinas, and from the western prairies to the forests of Maine. On the south

1"Conspiracy of Pontiac," Francis Parkman, Vol. I, Chap. 1; also quotations post.