Full download ebook at ebookmass.

com

Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey

and the Fight for Civil Rights Samuel G. Freedman

For dowload this book click link below

https://ebookmass.com/product/into-the-bright-
sunshine-young-hubert-humphrey-and-the-fight-for-
civil-rights-samuel-g-freedman/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Download more ebook from https://ebookmass.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the

Fight for Civil Rights Samuel G. Freedman

https://ebookmass.com/product/into-the-bright-sunshine-young-
hubert-humphrey-and-the-fight-for-civil-rights-samuel-g-
freedman-2/

The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil

Rights 1st Edition Thomas C. Holt

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-movement-the-african-american-
struggle-for-civil-rights-1st-edition-thomas-c-holt/

Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the

Civil Rights Movement 1st Edition Erin R. Pineda

https://ebookmass.com/product/seeing-like-an-activist-civil-
disobedience-and-the-civil-rights-movement-1st-edition-erin-r-
pineda/

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights

Zachary Kramer

https://ebookmass.com/product/outsiders-why-difference-is-the-
future-of-civil-rights-zachary-kramer/
The Civil Rights Movement: A Very Short Introduction
Thomas C. Holt

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-civil-rights-movement-a-very-
short-introduction-thomas-c-holt/

The civil rights movement: a documentary reader First

Published Edition Kirk

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-civil-rights-movement-a-
documentary-reader-first-published-edition-kirk/

Bretons and Britons: The Fight for Identity Barry

Cunliffe

https://ebookmass.com/product/bretons-and-britons-the-fight-for-
identity-barry-cunliffe/

Ukraine And The Art Of Strategy Lawrence Freedman

https://ebookmass.com/product/ukraine-and-the-art-of-strategy-
lawrence-freedman/

Basic Civil and Mechanical Engineering 1st Edition G.

Shanmugam

https://ebookmass.com/product/basic-civil-and-mechanical-
engineering-1st-edition-g-shanmugam/
INTO THE BRIGHT SUNSHINE
 ALSO BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Small Victories
The Real World, of a Teacher, Her Students, and Their High School

Upon This Rock

The Miracles of a Black Church

The Inheritance
How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond

Jew vs. Jew

The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry

Who She Was

My Search for My Mother’s Life

Letters to a Young Journalist

Breaking the Line

The Season in Black College That Transformed the Game and
Changed the Course of Civil Rights

⋆⋆⋆

Dying Words
The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How It Transformed The New York Times
(Companion book to the public radio documentary produced by Kerry Donahue)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

The Journey from Stage to Screen
(Companion book to the Netflix film directed by George C. Wolfe)
 INTO THE BRIGHT SUNSHINE
YOUNG HUBERT HUMPHREY AND THE FIGHT FOR
CIVIL RIGHTS
SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Samuel G. Freedman 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2023934131
ISBN 978–0–19–753519–6
eISBN 978–0–19–753520–2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197535196.001.0001
 To you, again, my bashert,
Christia Chana Blomquist Freedman
This book began with your question
*
And in memory of two mentors whom I lost along the way
Alice Mayhew, 1932–2020
Jim Podgers, 1950–2018
True freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free!
—Stanzas of Freedom, James Russell Lowell
 CONTENTS

Prologue: “30 Years Ago—Here”

1 Beyond the Meridian

2 “Horse-High, Hog-Tight, Bull-Strong”
3 A Path Out of the Dust
4 The Silken Curtain and the Silver Shirt
5 The Jim Crow Car
6 Vessel and Voice
7 “We Must Set the Example”
8 “We Are Looking in the Mirror”
9 The Coming Confrontation
10 Inside Agitator

Epilogue: “The Unfinished Task”

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
 PROLOGUE
“30 Years Ago—Here”

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
May 22, 1977
Hubert Humphrey, a fallen hero and a dying man, rose on rickety
legs to approach the podium of the Philadelphia Convention Hall, his
pulpit for the commencement address at the University of
Pennsylvania. He clutched a sheaf of paper with his speech for the
occasion, typed and double-spaced by an assistant from his
extemporaneous dictation, and then marked up in pencil by
Humphrey himself. A note on the first page, circled to draw
particular attention, read simply, “30 years ago—Here.” In this place,
at that time, twenty-nine years earlier to be precise, he had made
history.
From the dais now, Humphrey beheld five thousand impending
graduates, an ebony sea of gowns and mortarboards, broken by one
iconoclast in a homemade crown, two in ribboned bonnets, and
another whose headgear bore the masking-tape message “HI MA
PA.” In the horseshoe curve of the arena’s double balcony loomed
eight thousand parents and siblings, children, and friends. Wearing
shirtsleeves and cotton shifts amid the stale heat, they looked like
pale confetti from where Humphrey stood, and their flash cameras
flickered away, a constellation of pinpricks.
The tableau stirred Humphrey’s memories of the Democratic
National Convention on July 14, 1948: the same sweltering air inside
the vast hall, the same packed seats and bustling lobby, the same
hum of expectancy at the words he was about to utter. All these
years later, Humphrey was standing in very nearly the identical spot.
 Since that afternoon in 1948 had placed him on the national
stage, Humphrey had assembled credentials more than
commensurate with this day’s hortatory role: twenty-three years in
the U.S. Senate, four as vice president to Lyndon Johnson, three
times a candidate for his party’s nomination for president, and one
very narrow loss as its candidate. In Humphrey’s years as arguably
the nation’s preeminent liberal politician, he had pressed for the
United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate disarmament amid
the nuclear standoff of the Cold War, introduced the legislation that
created and indeed named the Peace Corps, and helped to floor-
manage the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Relentlessly
energetic, effusive to a fault, he practiced what he called “the
politics of joy.”1
Even so, five days shy of his sixty-sixth birthday, Humphrey was a
dynamo diminished. Two cancers were ravaging him, one blighting
his body and the other his legacy. As if entwined, each affliction had
been inexorably growing over the preceding decade. Nineteen sixty-
seven was the year when the escalating war in Vietnam, which
Humphrey dutifully supported, deployed nearly half a million
American soldiers and took more than ten thousand American lives.
It was the year of the “Long Hot Summer,” when Black Americans in
more than 150 cities erupted with uprisings against the police
violence and economic inequality that persisted regardless of civil
rights laws. And it was the year when Hubert Humphrey first noticed
that his urine was stained with blood.
Of the team of doctors who examined Humphrey, only one
warned of incipient cancer, and he was overruled.2 The decision
suited Humphrey’s congenital optimism and his yearning for the
presidency, and he went through the 1968 campaign assuming good
health. The next year, a biopsy confirmed evidence of bladder
cancer, and after four more years without Humphrey having either
symptoms or treatment, doctors discovered a spot of malignant
tissue termed “microinvasive.” The word meant that the rogue cells
could sink roots and spread, like the plagues of thistle that overran
the wheat fields of Humphrey’s prairie childhood. Subsequent rounds
of radiation and chemotherapy, a regimen that Humphrey described
as “the worst experience of my life,” bought him three years of
remission, and with it the false hope of full recovery.
For in the fall of 1976, Humphrey again spied blood in his urine,
and a biopsy confirmed that the bladder cancer, far from defeated,
was expanding. Humphrey submitted to the harsh and logical option
of having his bladder removed and chemotherapy resumed. For
public consumption, wearing a mask of willed buoyancy, Humphrey
declared himself fully cured. Newspaper accounts of his stay at
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center told of him “prodding
patients out of their wheelchairs, shaking hands with everyone in
sight and generally infusing gaiety and hope into a normally somber
ward.”3
In fact, the disease had already invaded Humphrey’s lymph
nodes, the staging areas for it to advance with one nearly certain
result. On the days when Humphrey received chemotherapy, he was
so weak, and perhaps so humiliated, that a young aide had to roll
him up into a blanket and carry him between the senator’s car and
the Bethesda naval hospital.4 Humphrey was both impotent and
incontinent now and reduced to relieving himself through a port in
his abdomen into a collection bag. In one of the rare moments when
private truth slipped out, he described his cancer as “a thief in the
night that can stab you in the back.”5
The decline of Humphrey’s health coincided with the degradation
of his public image. Barely had Humphrey joined Johnson’s White
House than the musical satirist Tom Lehrer titled one song on his
Top 20 1965 album That Was the Year That Was, “Whatever Became
of Hubert?” “Once a fiery liberal spirit,” Lehrer sang in answer to his
own question, “Ah, but now when he speaks, he must clear it.” The
clearance, Lehrer’s sophisticated listeners understood, had to come
from Lyndon Johnson, and its price was Humphrey’s cheerleading for
the Vietnam War.
Humphrey received the presidential nomination in 1968 less by
competing for it rather than by having it delivered to him by tragic
circumstance and machine manipulation: Johnson’s decision in
March 1968 not to run for re-election; the assassination in June of
the next front runner, Robert F. Kennedy; and a coronation by the
centrist party establishment at a Chicago convention sullied by a
police rampage against antiwar protestors. Humphrey campaigned
under the twin burdens of an increasingly unpopular war and the
televised beating of young activists. At a more personal level, his
erstwhile protégé Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator who was
revered on the left for his antiwar insurgency against Johnson in the
early primaries, withheld his vital endorsement of Humphrey until it
was too late to matter.
In defeat, Humphrey returned to the University of Minnesota, his
alma mater, where the political science faculty rejected his
appointment, ostensibly because he had never finished his doctoral
degree. Even after the university managed to place Humphrey in a
category of non-traditional faculty, the professors there banned him
from their social club, the Thirty-Niners.6
When voters returned Humphrey to the U.S. Senate in 1971, it
was as a freshman, starting over at the bottom of the seniority
totem pole. And when he vied again for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1972, he lost to another protégé, George McGovern,
the senator from South Dakota whose opposition to the Vietnam
War made him an idealistic idol to his youthful legions. Even more
humiliating, Humphrey’s trademark ebullience now looked frenetic
and desperate. One bard of the counterculture, Hunter S. Thompson
of Rolling Stone, laid into Humphrey with particular rhetorical relish.
To Thompson’s unsparing eye, Humphrey was “a treacherous,
gutless old ward-heeler,” “a hack and a fool,” who “talks like an
eighty-year-old woman who just discovered speed.” And in this insult
that beyond all others clung in the popular memory, he “campaigned
like a rat in heat.”7
The calumnies were hardly the exclusive property of Woodstock
Nation. Stewart Alsop, a grandee among Washington columnists,
reiterated some of Thompson’s barbs in Newsweek. Theodore H.
White, American journalism’s authoritative chronicler of presidential
campaigns, pronounced that Humphrey “had been part of the
scenery too long, as long as Richard Nixon, and had become to the
young and the press a political cartoon.”8
By the time the 1976 presidential campaign began, Humphrey
was sick enough, dispirited enough, or both to stay out of it. His
home city of Minneapolis, which he had made a national model of
liberalism as mayor, was about to re-elect a law-and-order ex-cop
named Charles Stenvig for his third term as mayor in yet one more
example of white backlash against racial progress. Another of
Humphrey’s protégés, Senator Walter Mondale, vaulted past him into
the national spotlight as the incoming vice president for Jimmy
Carter. During the week of their inauguration, Humphrey was
vomiting from the effects of chemotherapy.9
When Congress convened in January 1977, Humphrey tried one
last race—running to be Senate Majority Leader. Even his longtime
allies in the AFL-CIO let their opposition privately be known because
he was “starting to slip fast.”10 Facing certain defeat, Humphrey
withdrew. And the cruelest part of the outcome was assenting to the
senator who captured the prize by acclamation. Robert Byrd of West
Virginia was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, a filibustering foe
of civil rights legislation, and the very embodiment of the Jim Crow
system that Humphrey had devoted his adult life to dismantling.
All of these blows, and the prospect of his own demise, put
Humphrey in an uncharacteristically pensive mood—more than just
ruminative, closer to depressed. After nearly thirty years in national
politics, he found himself wondering what it had all been for.
“I always try to be a man of the present and hopefully of the
future,” he wrote in early 1976 to Eugenie Anderson, a career
diplomat and longtime friend. “I am, of course, strengthened and
inspired by some of the achievements of the yesterdays; but also a
person is sobered and tempered by some of the other experiences
that didn’t produce such favorable results. I hope the experience
that I have had has given me some sense of judgment and a bit of
wisdom.”11
By January 23, 1977, when Humphrey wrote to Anderson again in
the wake of cancer surgery and the failed bid to become majority
leader, his tone was even more despairing: “I’m no child and I surely
am not naive, but I do feel that some of those I helped so much
might have been a little more loyal. But I suppose it’s part of human
weakness so why worry about it. That’s all for now.”12
In the present moment, standing before the imminent Penn
graduates and their doting families, Humphrey looked visibly
weathered, even from a distance. His gown dangled from sloping,
bony shoulders as if off a coat hanger. His skin had a grayish hue,
the same color as the wispy hair and eyebrows just starting to grow
back with the cessation of chemotherapy. His cheeks, the tireless
bellows for so many speeches, were shrunken back into the bone.
His chin jutted, a promontory.
Even for this celebratory occasion, even on the day he would
receive an honorary doctorate, Humphrey was revisiting a place not
only of triumph but rebuke. He had been picketed and heckled by
antiwar protestors in this very hall in 1965, with one placard asking,
“How Much Did You Sell Your Soul for Hubert?” During a presidential
campaign rally in Philadelphia in 1968, the signs called him
“murderer” and “killer.” And after a speech on the Penn campus
during the 1972 primary race against McGovern was disrupted by
everything from paper airplanes to chants of “Dump the Hump,”
Humphrey lamented, “I’ve been to 192 campuses, but I’ve never
had anything like this.”13
So as he edged into his commencement address, Humphrey held
off from the prepared text, with its survey of international affairs and
its appeal for youthful idealism. He led instead with jokes that,
depending how one chose to hear them, sounded either self-effacing
or self-lacerating. They had the aspect of a perpetual victim mocking
himself before any bully could, as if controlling the blow might limit
the pain. “I’ve given more speeches than any man ought to be
permitted to,” Humphrey said. “I have bored more people over a
longer period of time than any man ought to be permitted to.” Then
he recalled his own graduation from the University of Minnesota in
1939 and said, “For the life of me, I can’t remember what the
commencement speaker said, and I’ll bet you that when you leave
here, at least a year from now, you’re gonna say, ‘Who was that
fellow? What did he say?’ ”14
Humphrey had the crowd laughing now, not in ridicule, but a kind
of affable affinity. Maybe because the Vietnam War was over at last.
Maybe because the political villain of the age was Nixon. Maybe
because people felt pity for Humphrey’s illness or some pang of
conscience about the scorn he had endured. Whatever the reason,
Humphrey seized the interval of good will and pivoted into a matter
of substance and memory.
“I’ve been reminded . . . of the day I was here in July nineteen
hundred and forty-eight,” he said, his voice reedy and unforced.
“Boy, it was hot, in more ways than one. I was the young mayor of
the city of Minneapolis . . . but in my heart, I had something that I
wanted to tell my fellow partisans, and I did.”
What Humphrey said on that day preceded the Supreme Court’s
decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus
boycott led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the two events
commonly and incorrectly understood as the beginnings of the civil
rights movement. What he said on that day anticipated the wave of
civil rights legislation that Lyndon Johnson would push through
Congress in the 1960s, addressing the unfinished business of
emancipation. What he said on that day set into motion the partisan
realignment that defines American politics right up through the
present.
What he said on that day—with Black marchers outside the
Convention Hall threatening mass draft resistance against the
segregated armed forces, with Southern delegates inside the
building vowing mutiny against such equal rights, with the
incumbent president and impending nominee, Harry Truman,
seething about this upstart mayor’s temerity—followed on two
sentences.
“Because of my profound belief that we have a challenging task
to do here,” Humphrey had declared from the convention podium,
“because good conscience, decent morality demands it, I feel I must
rise at this time to support a report, a minority report, a report that
spells out our democracy.
“It is a report,” he continued, “on the greatest issue of civil
rights.”15
 CHAPTER 1
BEYOND THE MERIDIAN

Doland, South Dakota

1922–1931
Fifteen years after the Civil War ended in Confederate surrender and
the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the federal census
recorded the residents of John T. Cotton’s home in the rolling
pastureland of central Kentucky. Among them was a farm laborer
named Clay Shipman, twenty-six years old, and his wife Ellen, a cook
who was four years his junior. The enumerator categorized the
Shipmans as “mulatto,” a designation of inferior racial caste and the
evidence, too, of the slave master atrocities that had been inflicted
upon their forebears.
Even with the war’s resolution, when Black citizenship should
have been a settled matter, Kentucky resisted granting both equal
rights and equal protection across the color line. Though it had been
a slave state, Kentucky never seceded from the Union, and so
federal troops were not deployed there as elsewhere in the South to
enforce Reconstruction. The state’s General Assembly rejected the
Thirteenth Amendment altogether. Ku Klux Klan vigilantes attacked
Black churches and freedmen’s schools, assaulted Black veterans of
the Union Army, and, in one instance, besieged a large iron foundry
to force the expulsion of its Black workers. No sooner had freed
Blacks helped to elect narrowly a Republican government in Boyle
County, where the Shipmans lived, than a series of lynchings
erupted and the surrounding region went on to lead the state in that
grim statistic.1 A federal official trying to resettle liberated Blacks in
the county faced such hostility that he declared, “Satan is loose in
Ky.”2
By the middle of the 1880s, Clay and Ellen Shipman had four
children, ranging from toddler to nearly teenager, and not a single
material object worth taxation. They continued to subsist on Clay’s
take from farm work, part of it in the form of provisions rather than
cash wages, and what Ellen could make hiring herself out to white
peoples’ kitchens. John Cotton, for his part, descended from a
slaveholding family that still owned hundreds of acres of land for
grain, horses, and cattle.
In all likelihood, the Shipmans were hearing of those several
thousand Black people from Kentucky and Tennessee, among other
Southern states, who had headed to the western plains a few years
prior, calling themselves Exodusters. The Shipmans decided to join
them, taking aim at a section of northeastern Nebraska, Madison
County to be precise, that had just been connected in 1880 to the
transcontinental railroad. There was land there waiting to be
homesteaded, land from which the American army had driven the
Pawnees.
It is possible that the Shipmans traveled by horse-drawn wagon.
It is possible they traveled on foot. It is possible, though improbable,
they somehow gathered the necessary money to travel on the Union
Pacific. Sometime and somewhere in that journey, Ellen evidently
died, because all mentions of her in the public record cease. By the
decade’s end, Clay and his children had settled on a farm several
miles outside the small town of Battle Creek, Nebraska. Thus
established, Clay married for a second time in 1889, wedding a
German immigrant nearly a dozen years his junior who would bear
five children, all of them capable of passing as white.
Besides running his own farm, Clay ultimately managed to buy
and sell 120 acres of land, and also to take regular side work on
road-building teams.3 Of the children from his first marriage, his
Black children, it was the youngest one, a son named Otis, who
picked up the trade. The 1910 census found Otis in Laramie,
Wyoming, twenty-six years old and working as a teamster. A decade
later, he and his wife Mollie and their two daughters were living in
Omaha, which then had the largest Black community of any Western
city except Los Angeles. Along with his unmarried older brother
Leslie, Otis formed a company that graded land for the roads and
rails spreading veinlike across the plains. Leslie mostly oversaw the
office, and Otis led the crews—one year over in Yorktown, Iowa, the
next in Elm Creek, Nebraska, and, in the summer of 1922, on a
rutted, sun-cracked dirt track just outside Doland, South Dakota, a
village of six hundred marooned in the state’s eastern grasslands.
There, on an August afternoon, the son of a Black man once
enslaved met the white son of Doland’s resident idealist.
The boy, Hubert Humphrey, was a few months past his eleventh
birthday, freckled and fair-skinned and a little bit feeble by the
standards of the frontier. He had barely survived the influenza
pandemic of 1918 and in chillier weather wore a fleece tunic to
protect his weakened lungs. The folks in Doland all knew him as
“Pink” or “Pinky,” a nickname that referred to the way his mother
had dressed him as a toddler. And he was so awkward on his gangly
legs that people joked about how often he stumbled.4
In a community that venerated the farmer and hunter, men who
contended with nature, Hubert was more of an indoor creature, the
prodigy in his grade school class and the adoring son of a bookish
father who ran the local drugstore. One of Hubert’s jobs there was
to peddle all the newspapers, some shipped from the distant East
and others printed close to home. So it probably had not escaped his
inquiring eye when Doland’s weekly paper, the Times-Record,
recently published this item:

The highway construction crew is at work three miles west of town and are
making good time. Those who have driven over the road say the work is
about the best they ever saw in the state. The contractor is a negro [sic] and
is doing the work exactly as called for in the specifications.5

Purely as a feat of engineering, the construction of U.S. Highway

212 captivated Doland. South Dakota barely had gravel roads
outside its few small cities as of 1920,6 and without them any
motorist who dared the dirt routes after snow or rain risked having
his automobile sink into muck down to the axles and then waiting
hours to be tugged free by some farmer’s team of horses. People
and commodities moved almost entirely by railroad, which for
Doland meant the Chicago & North Western, one train a day
eastbound and one headed west. That monopoly gave the rail
barons control over shipping prices for grain and livestock, much to
the farmers’ infuriation. This newly improved road being built with
federal money by Otis Shipman’s crew (among other contractors)
would open an alternative path to the mills of Minneapolis and the
slaughterhouses of St. Paul. To the west, the highway would run
twenty miles to the Spink County seat of Redfield and then,
incredibly, nearly seven hundred more through the Black Hills to the
national park in Yellowstone, relieving the suffocating isolation in
every far-flung settlement like Doland along the way.
To the thrill of such progress was added, especially for Hubert
Humphrey, the specific prospect of meeting a Black person for the
first time in his life. From the perspective of Doland, with its
preponderance of Protestants rooted in Germany and Scandinavia,
difference was defined by the so-called “Rooshins”7 of the Hutterite
religious colonies south of town and the French Canadian Catholics
clustered in the hamlet of Turton eleven miles to the north. The
Native peoples had long since been pushed onto reservations
halfway across the state. The small Black community composed of
railroad maintenance workers in Huron, replete with its own African
Methodist Episcopal church, lay forty miles of often impassable dirt
road away. It might as well have been in another hemisphere.
When Hubert sought out the road crew that August afternoon,
Otis Shipman must have looked as grand and strange as a Roman
charioteer. He had coiled hair and tawny skin, and the relentless sun
of a blistering August had darkened him even more. Beneath a
broad-brimmed hat, strapping in his lace-up boots and suspenders,
he directed the progress of a machine called an elevating grader as
it was pulled by a team of sixteen mules. A couple of hundred feet a
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Advice and Assistance, as the People of Pennsylvania & the
Delawares were like one Family.
The same Day the rest of the Goods arriv’d the Men said they had
nine Days’ Rain & the Creeks arose, & that they had been oblig’d to
send a sick Man back from Franks Town to the Inhabitants with
another to attend him.
The neighboring Indians being sent for again, the Council was
appointed to meet to-morrow. It rain’d again.
17th. It rained very hard, but in the Afternoon it held up for about
3 hours; the Deputies of the several Nations met in Council & I
delivered them what I had to say from the President & Council of
Pennsylvania by Andrew Montour.
“Brethren, you that live on Ohio: I am sent to You by the President
& Council of Pennsylvania, & I am now going to Speak to You on
their behalf I desire You will take Notice & hear what I shall say.”—
Gave a String of Wampum.
“Brethren: Some of You have been in Philadelphia last Fall &
acquainted us that You had taken up the English Hatchet, and that
You had already made use of it against the French, & that the
French had very hard heads, & your Country afforded nothing but
Sticks & Hickerys which was not sufficient to break them. You desir’d
your Brethren wou’d assist You with some Weapons sufficient to do
it. Your Brethren the Presidᵗ. & Council promis’d you then to send
something to You next Spring by Tharachiawagon,[38] but as some
other Affairs prevented his Journey to Ohio, you receiv’d a Supply by
George Croghan sent you by your said Brethren; but before George
Croghan came back from Ohio News came from over the Great Lake
that the King of Great Britain & the French King had agreed upon a
Cessation of Arms for Six Months & that a Peace was very likely to
follow. Your Brethren, the President & Council, were then in a
manner at a loss what to do. It did not become them to act contrary
to the command of the King, and it was out of their Power to
encourage you in the War against the French; but as your Brethren
never miss’d fulfilling their Promises, they have upon second
Consideration thought proper to turn the intended Supply into a Civil
& Brotherly Present, and have accordingly sent me with it, and here
are the Goods before your Eyes, which I have, by your Brethren’s
Order, divided into 5 Shares & layd in 5 different heaps, one heap
whereof your Brother Assaraquoa sent to You to remember his
Friendship and Unity with You; & as you are all of the same Nations
with whom we the English have been in League of Friendship,
nothing need be said more than this, that the President & Council &
Assaraquoa[39] have sent You this Present to serve to strengthen the
Chain of Friendship between us the English & the several Nations of
Indians to which You belong. A French Peace is a very uncertain
One, they keep it no longer than their Interest permits, then they
break it without provocation given them. The French King’s People
have been almost starv’d in old France for want of Provision, which
made them wish & seek for Peace; but our wise People are of
opinion that after their Bellies are full they will quarrel again & raise
a War. All nations in Europe know that their Friendship is mix’d with
Poison, & many that trusted too much on their Friendship have been
ruin’d.
“I now conclude & say, that we the English are your true Brethren
at all Events, In token whereof receive this Present.” The Goods
being then uncover’d I proceeded. “Brethren: You have of late
settled the River of Ohio for the sake of Hunting, & our Traders
followed you for the sake of Hunting also. You have invited them
yourselves. Your Brethren, the President & Council, desire You will
look upon them as your Brethren & see that they have justice done.
Some of your Young Men have robbed our Traders, but you will be
so honest as to compel them to make Satisfaction. You are now
become a People of Note, & are grown very numerous of late Years,
& there is no doubt some wise Men among you, it therefore
becomes you to Act the part of wise men, & for the future be more
regular than You have been for some Years past, when only a few
Young Hunters lived here.”—Gave a Belt.
 “Brethren: You have of late made frequent Complaints against the
Traders bringing so much Rum to your Towns, & desir’d it might be
stop’t; & your Brethren the President & Council made an Act
accordingly & put a stop to it, & no Trader was to bring any Rum or
strong Liquor to your Towns. I have the Act here with me & shall
explain it to You before I leave you;[40] But it seems it is out of your
Brethren’s Power to stop it entirely. You send down your own Skins
by the Traders to buy Rum for you. You go yourselves & fetch Horse
loads of strong Liquor. But the other Day an Indian came to this
Town out of Maryland with 3 Horse loads of Liquor, so that it appears
you love it so well that you cannot be without it. You know very well
that the Country near the endless Mountain affords strong Liquor, &
the moment the Traders buy it they are gone out of the Inhabitants
& are travelling to this Place without being discover’d; besides this,
you never agree about it—one will have it, the other won’t (tho’ very
few), a third says we will have it cheaper; this last we believe is
spoken from your Hearts (here they Laughed). Your Brethren,
therefore, have order’d that every cask of Whiskey shall be sold to
You for 5 Bucks in your Town, & if a Trader offers to sell Whiskey to
You and will not let you have it at that Price, you may take it from
him & drink it for nothing.”—Gave a Belt.
“Brethren: Here is one of the Traders who you know to be a very
sober & honest Man; he has been robbed of the value of 300 Bucks,
& you all know by whom; let, therefore, Satisfaction be made to the
Trader.”—Gave a String of Wampum.
“Brethren, I have no more to say.”
I delivered the Goods to them, having first divided them into 5
Shares—a Share to the Senekas, another to the Cajukas, Oneidos,
the Onontagers, & Mohawks, another to the Delawares, another to
the Owendaets, Tisagechroanu, & Mohickons, and the other to the
Shawonese.
The Indians signified great Satisfaction & were well pleased with
the Cessation of Arms. The Rainy Wheather hasted them away with
the Goods into the Houses.
 18th. The Speech was delivered to the Delawares in their own
Language, & also to the Shawonese in their’s, by Andrew Montour, in
the presence of the Gentlemen that accompanied me.[41] I
acquainted the Indians I was determined to leave them to-morrow &
return homewards.
19th. Scaiohady, Tannghrishon, Oniadagarehra, with a few more,
came to my lodging & spoke as follows:
“Brother Onas, We desire you will hear what we are going to say
to You in behalf of all the Indians on Ohio; their Deputies have sent
us to You. We have heard what you have said to us, & we return you
many thanks for your kindness in informing us of what pass’d
between the King of Great Britain & the French King, and in
particular we return you many thanks for the large Presents; the
same we do to our Brother Assaraquoa, who joined our Brother
Onas in making us a Present. Our Brethren have indeed tied our
Hearts to their’s. We at present can but return thanks with an empty
hand till another opportunity serves to do it sufficiently. We must call
a great Council & do every thing regular; in the mean time look upon
us as your true Brothers.
“Brother: You said the other Day in Council if any thing befell us
from the French we must let you know of it. We will let you know if
we hear any thing from the French, be it against us or yourself. You
will have Peace, but it’s most certain that the Six Nations & their
Allies are upon the point of declaring War against the French. Let us
keep up true Corrispondence & always hear of one another.”—They
gave a Belt.
Scaiohady & the half King, with two others, had inform’d me that
they often must send Messengers to Indian Towns & Nations, & had
nothing in their Council Bag, as they were new beginners, either to
recompense a Messenger or to get Wampum to do the business, &
begged I wou’d assist them with something. I had saved a Piece of
Strowd, an half Barrell of Pow[d]er, 100 pounds of Lead, 10 Shirts, 6
Knives, & 1 Pound of Vermillion, & gave it to them for the aforesaid
use; they return’d many thanks and were mightily pleased.[42]
The same Day I set out for Pennsylvania in Rainy Weather, and
arrived at George Croghan’s on the 28th Instant.[43]
Conrad Weiser.
Pennsbury, Sepᵗ. 29th, 1748.
 FOOTNOTES
[1] Pennsylvania Colonial Records (Harrisburg, 1851), iv, p. 88.
[2] Ibid., pp. 660-669, for journal of this tour.
[3] Pennsylvania Colonial Records, v, p. 72.
[4] Ibid., pp. 121, 140, 145-152, 189, 190, 257.
[5] Ibid., pp. 286-290, 307-319.
[6] Ibid., pp. 290-293, 304.
[7] There appear to have been two copies of this journal
prepared, one as the official report to the president and council of
Pennsylvania, which was published in the Pennsylvania Colonial
Records, v, pp. 348-358. A reprint from the same manuscript
appeared in Early History of Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburg and
Harrisburg, 1846), appendix, pp. 13-23. The other copy seems to
have been preserved among the family papers; and was edited
and published by a descendant of Weiser—Heister M.
Muhlenberg, M.D., of Reading, Pennsylvania—in Pennsylvania
Historical Society Collections (Philadelphia, 1851), i, pp. 23-33.
We have followed the official copy, indicating by footnotes
variations in the other account.—Ed.
[8] Weiser’s house was about one mile east of Womelsdorf,
now in Berks County, Pennsylvania. James Galbreath was a
prominent Indian trader, one of those licensed by the government
of Pennsylvania.—Ed.
[9] Croghan lived at this time just west of Harrisburg in
Pennsboro Township, Cumberland County.—Ed.
[10] There were three great Indian paths from east to west
through Western Pennsylvania. The southern led from Fort
Cumberland on the Potomac, westward through the valleys of
Youghiogheny and Monongahela, to the Forks of the Ohio, and
was the route taken by Washington in 1753, later by Braddock’s
expedition, and was substantially the line of the great
Cumberland National Road of the early nineteenth century.
The central trail, passing through Carlisle, Shippensburg, and
Bedford, over Laurel Mountain, through Fort Ligonier, over
Chestnut Ridge, to Shannopin’s Town at the Forks of the Ohio,
was the most direct, and became the basis of General Forbes’s
road, and later of the Pennsylvania wagon road to the Ohio. Gist
took this trail in 1750.—See Hulbert, Old Glade Road (Cleveland,
1903).
The northern, or Kittanning trail, was the oldest, and that most
used by Indian traders. It is this route that Weiser followed. From
Croghan’s, he passed over into the valley of Sherman’s Creek (in
Perry County), crossed the Tuscarora Mountains at what was later
known as Sterritt’s Gap, and reached the Black Log sleeping place
near Shade Valley in the southeastern part of Huntingdon County.
This was a digression to the south, for in an extract from his
journal in Pennsylvania Archives, ii, p. 13, Weiser says: “The Black
Log is 8 or 10 miles South East of the Three Springs and Frank’s
Town lies to yᵉ North, so that there must be a deduction of at
least twenty miles.” From here, following the valley of Aughwick
Creek, he crossed the Juniata River, and approached the
“Standing Stone.” This was a prominent landmark of the region,
and stood on the right bank of a creek of the same name, near
the present town of Huntingdon. It was about 14 feet high, and
six inches square, and served as a kind of Indian guidepost for
that region. From this point, the trail followed the Juniata Valley,
coinciding for a short distance with the line of the Pennsylvania
Central Railway, but turning off on the Frankstown branch of the
Juniata at the present town of Petersburg.
There was also a fourth trail, still farther north, by way of
Sunbury and the west branch of the Susquehanna to Venango.
This was Post’s route in 1758.—Ed.
[11] Frankstown was an important Indian village in the county
of Blair, near Hollidaysburg. The present town of this name lies on
the north side of the river, whereas the Indian town appears to
have been on the south bank. Remains of the native village were
in existence in the early part of the nineteenth century. The
Indian name was “Assunepachla,” the title “Frankstown” being
given in honor of Stephen Franks, a German trader who lived at
this place.—See Jones, History of Juniata Valley (Harrisburg,
1889, 2nd ed.), pp. 298-303. The cause of its desertion when
Weiser passed, is not known. The other edition of the journal
says, “Here we overtook one half the goods,” which seems more
correct in view of the succeeding account.—Ed.
[12] Of the place where the Kittanning trail crosses the
Allegheny Range, Jones writes (op. cit.), that the path is still
visible, although filled with weeds in the summer. “In some places
where the ground was marshy, close to the run, the path is at
least twelve inches deep, and the very stones along the road bear
the marks of the iron-shod horses of the Indian traders. Two
years ago we picked up, at the edge of the run, a mile up the
gorge, two gun-flints,—now rated as relics of a past age.” Clear
fields was at the head waters of Clearfield Creek, a branch of the
Susquehanna River, in Clearfield Township, Cambria County. This
is not to be confused with Clearfield (Chinklacamoos), an
important Indian town farther north. See Post’s Journal, post.—
Ed.
[13] The Shawnees (Fr., Chaouanons), when first known,
appear to have been living in Western Kentucky; they were
greatly harassed by the Iroquois, and made frequent migrations
which are difficult to trace. In 1692, they made peace with the
Iroquois and the English, and portions of the tribe settled in the
Ohio country and Western Pennsylvania. Intriguing with both
English and French, they were treacherous toward both nations.
The location of the cabins mentioned here by Weiser is not
positively known—it was in the northern part of Indiana County;
somewhere on the Kittanning trail.—Ed.
[14] Weiser turned aside from the regular trail that ended at
the Delaware Indians’ town of Kittanning, and followed a branch
of the path that turned southwest; crossed the Kiskiminitas Creek
at the ford where the town of Saltzburg, Indiana County, now
stands; and reached the Allegheny River (then called the Ohio) at
Chartier’s Old Town, now Chartier’s Station, Westmoreland
County. It was at this point that in 1749, the French explorer,
Céloron de Blainville, met six traders with fifty horses laden with
peltries, by these sending his famous message to the governor of
Pennsylvania to keep his traders from that country, which was
owned by the French. Weiser calculated the distance of his
journey by land as one hundred and seventy miles, and by
deducting twenty miles for the detour at Black Log, made the
distance from the settlements one hundred and fifty miles.—Ed.
[15] This was the Delaware village known as Shannopin’s
Town, from a chief of that name, who died in 1749. It was
situated on the Allegheny River in the present city of Pittsburg,
and contained about twenty wigwams, and fifty or sixty natives.
See Darlington, Gist’s Journals (Pittsburg, 1893), pp. 92, 93.—Ed.
 [16] The reference is to Queen Aliquippa, whose town, directly
at the Forks of the Ohio, was called by Céloron “the written rock
village.” The writings proved on examination to be but names of
English traders scrawled in charcoal on the rocks. See Father
Bonnécamps’s Relation, Jesuit Relations (Thwaites’s ed.,
Cleveland, 1896-1902), lxix, p. 175. Céloron says of the Seneca
queen: “She regards herself as a sovereign, and is entirely
devoted to the English.” Upon the advent of the French, she
removed her village to the forks of the Monongahela and
Youghiogheny, where she told Gist in 1753 she would never go
back to the Allegheny to live, unless the English built a fort.
Céloron says of the site of her first village: “This place is one of
the most beautiful I have seen on the Beautiful River [la Belle
Rivière, the French name for the Ohio].”—Ed.
[17] Logstown (French, Chinnigné, Shenango) was the most
important Indian trading village in that part of the country. It was
a mixed village composed of Indians of several tribes—chiefly
Iroquois, Mohican, and Shawnee. When Céloron visited it a year
after Weiser’s sojourn, he spoke of it as “a very bad village,
seduced by the desire for the cheap goods of the English.” He
was near being attacked here, being saved by discovering the
plot, and displaying the strength of his forces. Like Weiser, he was
received with a salute of guns, but feared it was more a sign of
enmity than amity. Later, the Indians of this village returned to
the French alliance, and after the founding of Fort Duquesne,
houses were built by the French for its inhabitants. With the
restoration of English interest, the importance of the place
diminished, and by 1784 it is spoken of as a “former settlement.”
The site of Logstown is about eighteen miles down the river from
Pittsburg, just below the present town of Economy, Pennsylvania.
It was on a high bluff on the north shore. For the history of this
place, see Darlington’s Gist, pp. 95-100.—Ed.
[18] There were two Indian towns called by this name—one at
the mouth of Chartier’s Creek, Allegheny County, three miles
below Pittsburg; the other opposite the mouth of Chartier’s Run,
which falls into the Allegheny in Westmoreland County. Weiser
refers to the latter of these. Chartier was a French-Shawnee half-
breed that had much influence with his tribe. In 1745, he induced
most of them to remove to the neighborhood of Detroit, on the
orders of the governor of New France. See Croghan’s Journals,
post.—Ed.
 [19] The other edition of the journal adds, that the horses were
“all scalled on their backs.”
The importance of “wampum” in all Indian transactions cannot
be overestimated. It was used for money, as a much-prized
ornament, to enforce a request (as at this time), to accredit a
messenger, to ransom a prisoner, to atone for a crime. No council
could be held, no treaty drawn up, without a liberal use of
wampum. It was used also to record treaties, as the one
described by Weiser between the Wyandots, Iroquois, and
governor of New York. Hale—“Indian Wampum Records,” Popular
Science Monthly, February, 1897—thinks that it was a
comparatively late invention in Indian development, and took its
rise among the Iroquois. Weiser’s list of the wampum used and
received in this journey is to be found in Pennsylvania Archives, ii,
p. 17.—Ed.
[20] The French had retained the Iroquois deputies in order to
secure from them the French prisoners in their hands. La
Galissonière, the governor wrote to his home government in
1748, that he should persist in retaining their (the Iroquois)
people, until he recovered the French. The governor of New York
demanded the Mohawks, on the ground of their being British
subjects, a claim the French refused to admit. The matter was
finally adjusted without an Indian war, although it caused much
irritation. See O’Callaghan (ed.), New York Colonial Documents
(Albany, 1858), x, p. 185.—Ed.
[21] Kuskuskis was an important centre for the Delaware
Indians, on the Mahoning Branch of Beaver Creek, in Lawrence
County, Pennsylvania. It consisted of separate villages scattered
along the creek, one of which, called “Old Kuskuskis,” was at the
forks, where New Castle now stands. See Post’s Journal, post.—
Ed.
[22] The Indian town at the mouth of Beaver Creek, where the
town of Beaver now stands, was known indifferently as King
Beaver’s, or Shingas’s Old Town (from two noted Delaware
chiefs), or Sohkon (signifying “at the mouth of a stream”). This
was a noted fur-trading station, and after the building of Fort
Duquesne, the French erected houses here, for the Indians. It
was the starting place for many a border raid, that made
Shingas’s name “a terror to the frontier settlements of
Pennsylvania.” See Post’s experiences at this place in 1758, post.
—Ed.
 [23] Andrew Montour was the son of a noted French half-
breed, Madame Montour, who being captured by the Iroquois in
her youth married an Oneida chief and was a firm adherent of the
English. Montour’s services for the English were considerable. He
was an expert interpreter, speaking the languages of the various
Ohio Indians, as well as Iroquois. First mentioned by Weiser in
1744, when he interpreted Delaware for his Iroquois, he assisted
in nearly all the important Indian negotiations from that time until
the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, being employed in turn by the
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York governments, and the Ohio
Company. In 1754, he was with Washington at the surrender of
Fort Necessity. Several times he warned the settlements of
impending raids, among other services bringing word of Pontiac’s
outbreak. He accompanied Major Rogers as captain of the Indian
forces, when the latter went to take possession of Detroit; and in
1764 commanded a party against the recalcitrant Delawares. He
received for his services several grants of land in Western
Pennsylvania, as well as money. For a detailed biography see
Darlington’s Gist, pp. 159-175.—Ed.
[24] Twigtwees was the English name for the Miamis, a large
nation of Algonquian Indians, that were first met by the
seventeenth century explorers in Northern Illinois. But later, they
moved eastward into the present state of Indiana, and settled on
the Maumee and Wabash rivers, also on St. Josephs River in
Michigan. The French had had posts among them for two
generations, but from 1723 the English traders had been seeking
a foothold in their midst. Their adherence to the English in 1748
was a blow to the French trade.—Ed.
[25] Scarroyahy was an Oneida chief of great influence with the
Ohio Indians, especially at Logstown. He remained firm in the
English interest, and in 1754 moved to Aughwick Creek, to get
away from the French influence, and to protect the settlements.
His death the same year, was imputed by his friends to French
witchcraft.—Ed.
[26] The Wyandots, or Tobacco Hurons, or Petuns, were of
Iroquois stock, but nearly destroyed by that nation in the
seventeenth century. Fleeing westward, they placed themselves
under French protection, and, after its founding in 1701, were
settled chiefly about Detroit. In the early eighteenth century they
straggled eastward along the south shore of Lake Erie, and began
to open communication with their ancient enemies, the Iroquois.
In 1747, occurred the rebellion of their chief Nicholas, who built a
fort in the marshes of the Sandusky, and defied the French
soldiers. The chiefs whom Weiser met, were deputies from this
party of rebels.
The other edition of Weiser’s journal does not mention the
“Wondats” until September 7; and has the following entry for
September 6: “One canoe with goods arrived, the rest did not
come to the river. The Indians that brought the goods found our
casks of whiskey hid by some of the traders; they had drunk two
and brought two to the town. The Indians all got drunk to-night,
and some of the traders along with them. The weather cleared
up.”—Ed.
[27] The Tisagechroanu were “a numerous Nation to the North
of Lake Frontenac; they don’t come by Niagara in their way to
Oswego, but right across the Lake.”—Pennsylvania Colonial
Records, v, p. 85. Probably they were a party of the Neutral
Hurons.
The other edition adds after the Mohawks, “among whom there
were 27 French Mohawks.” The Mohicans were a wandering tribe,
whose original home was on the banks of the Hudson, and in the
Connecticut Valley. Charlevoix found them in the far West in
1721. These on the Ohio were called “Loups” by the French.—Ed.
[28] Stroud was a kind of coarse, warm cloth made for the use
of the Indian trade. A match-coat was a large loose coat worn by
the Indians, originally made of skins, later of match-cloth.—Ed.
[29] The other edition adds, “coming down the river.”—Ed.
[30] His name is given in the other edition as Robert Callender.
He accompanied Croghan and Gist on their journey to the Ohio in
1750-51.—Ed.
[31] “Onas” was the Indian term for the governor of
Pennsylvania—first used for Penn in his treaty with the
Delawares, in 1682.—Ed.
[32] Apparently this was a lad named William Brown, whom
Croghan sent to the settlements, October 20, 1748.—
Pennsylvania Archives, ii, p. 17.—Ed.
[33] The Catawbas were a powerful Indian tribe of South
Carolina, thought by Powell—“Indian Linguistic Families of North
America,” in U. S. Bureau of Ethnology Report, 1885-86—to be of
Siouan stock. They inhabited the western portion of the Carolinas,
and were traditional enemies of the Iroquois. The Cherokees were
a settled tribe in North Carolina and Tennessee, and at this time
in the English interest.—Ed.
[34] “Jonontady Hagas” was the Iroquois phrase for the
Wyandot or Huron Indians.—Ed.
[35] “Onontio” was the Indian term for the governor of
Canada.—Ed.
[36] Olumpias was principal chief of the Delawares. He had
formerly lived in the Schuylkill Valley, and signed the treaty of
purchase by which the Germans came into possession of their
lands in that region (1732). He died in the autumn of 1747, the
president and council of Pennsylvania being asked to name his
successor. The Delawares considered themselves the aborigines
of Pennsylvania, and spoke of the Shawnees, whom they had
permitted to come among them, as “grandchildren.”—Ed.
[37] These names are given in the other edition as
“Shawanapon and Achamantama.”—Ed.
[38] This was Weiser’s Indian name.—Ed.
[39] The Virginians were called by the Indians “Long Knives,” or
more literally “Big Knives.” Ash-a-le-co-a is the Indian form of this
word, which Weiser spells phonetically. He means that the
present was sent by both Pennsylvania and Virginia.—Ed.
[40] For this proclamation against the sale of liquor to Indians,
see Pennsylvania Colonial Records, v, pp. 194-196.—Ed.
[41] One of those who accompanied Weiser was William, son of
Benjamin Franklin, who later became governor of New Jersey.
See Pennsylvania Archives, ii, p. 15.—Ed.
[42] Here occurs the following, in the other edition: “The old
Sinicker Queen from above, already mentioned, came to inform
me some time ago that she had sent a string of wampum of three
fathoms to Philadelphia by James Dunnings, to desire her
brethren would send her up a cask of powder and some small
shot to enable her to send out the Indian boys to kill turkeys and
other fowls for her, whilst the men are gone to war against the
French, that they may not be starved. I told her I had heard
nothing of her message, but if she had told me of it before I had
parted with all the powder and lead, I could have let her have
some, and promised I would make inquiry; perhaps her
messenger had lost it on the way to Philadelphia. I gave her a
shirt, a Dutch wooden pipe and some tobacco. She seemed to
have taken a little affront because I took not sufficient notice of
her in coming down. I told her she acted very imprudently not to
let me know by some of her friends who she was, as she knew
very well I could not know by myself. She was satisfied, and went
away with a deal of kind expressions. The same day I gave a
stroud, a shirt, and a pair of stockings to the young Shawano,
King Capechque, and a pipe and some tobacco.”—Ed.
[43] The following description of the homeward journey is
contained in the other edition:
“The 20th, left a horse behind that we could not find. Came to
the river; had a great rain; the river not rideable [fordable].
“The 21st, sent for a canoe about 6 miles up the river to a
Delaware town. An Indian brought one, we paid him a blanket,
got over the river about 12 o’clock. Crossed Kiskaminity creek,
and came that night to the round hole, about twelve miles from
the river.
“The 22d, the weather cleared up; we travelled this day about
35 miles, came by the place where we had buried the body of
John Quen, but found the bears had pulled him out and left
nothing of him but a few naked bones and some old rags.
“The 23rd, crossed the head of the West Branch of the
Susquehanna; about noon came to the Cheasts [Chest creek,
Cambria County]. This night we had a great frost, our kettle
standing about four or five feet from the fire, was frozen over
with ice thicker than a brass penny.
“The 24th, got over Allegheny hill, otherwise called mountains,
to Frankstown, about 20 miles.
“The 25th, came to the Standing Stone; slept three miles at
this side; about 31 miles.
“The 26th, to the forks of the wood about 30 miles; left my
man’s horse behind as he was tired.
“The 27th, it rained very fast; travelled in the rain all day; came
about 25 miles.
“The 28th, rain continued; came to a place where white people
now begin to settle, and arrived at George Croghan’s in
Pennsbury, about an hour after dark; came about 35 miles that
day, but we left our baggage behind.
 “The 29th and 30th, I rested myself at George Croghan’s, in the
mean time our baggage was sent for, which arrived.
“The 1st of October reached the heads of the Tulpenhocken.
“The 2nd I arrived safe at my house.”—Ed.
 II
A Selection of George Croghan’s Letters and
Journals Relating to Tours into the Western
Country—November 16, 1750-November, 1765.

Sources: Pennsylvania Colonial Records, v, pp. 496-498, 530-536,

539, 540, 731-735; vi, pp. 642, 643, 781, 782; vii, pp. 267-271.
Massachusetts Historical Collections, 4 series, ix, pp. 362-379.
Butler’s History of Kentucky (Cincinnati and Louisville, 1836),
appendix, with variations from other sources. New York Colonial
Documents, vii, pp. 781-788.
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Next to Sir William Johnson, George Croghan was the most
prominent figure among British Indian agents during the period of
the later French wars, and the conspiracy of Pontiac. A history of his
life is therefore an epitome of Indian relations with the whites,
especially on the borders of Virginia and Pennsylvania and in the
Ohio Valley. A pioneer trader and traveller, and a government agent,
no other man of his time better knew the West and the counter
currents that went to make up its history. Not even the indefatigable
Gist, or the self-sacrificing Post, travelled over so large a portion of
the Western country, knew better the different routes, or was more
welcome in the Indian villages. Among his own class he was the
“mere idol of the Irish traders.” Sir William Johnson appreciated his
services, made him his deputy for the Ohio Indians, and entrusted
him with the most delicate and difficult negotiations, such as those
at Fort Pitt and Detroit in 1758-61; and those in the Illinois (1765)
by which Pontiac was brought to terms.
Born in Ireland and educated at Dublin, Croghan emigrated to
Pennsylvania at an early age and settled just west of Harris’s Ferry in
the township of Pennsboro, then on the border of Western
settlement. The opportunities of the Indian trade appealed to his
fondness for journeying and sense of adventure. His daring soon
carried him beyond the bounds of the province, and among the “far
Indians” of Sandusky and the Lake Erie region, where he won
adherents for the English among the wavering allies of the French.
His abilities and his influence over the Indians soon attracted the
attention of the hard-headed German, Conrad Weiser, who in 1747
recommended him to the Council of Pennsylvania. In this manner he
entered the public service, and continued therein throughout the
active years of his life.
Croghan was first employed by the province in assisting Weiser to
convey a present to the Ohio, whither he preceded him in the spring
of 1748.[1] The following year he was sent out to report on the
French expedition whose passage down the Ohio had alarmed the
Allegheny Indians, and arrived at Logstown just after Céloron had
passed, thus neutralizing the latter’s influence in that region.[2]
The jealousy of the Indians over the encroachments of the settlers
upon their lands west of the mountains on the Juniata, and in the
central valleys of Pennsylvania, determined the government to expel
the settlers rather than risk a breach with the Indians. In this task,
which must have been uncongenial to him, Croghan, as justice of
the peace for Cumberland County, was employed during the spring
of 1750.[3] The autumn of the same year, found him beginning one
of his most extensive journeys throughout the Ohio Valley, as far as
the Miamis and Pickawillany, where he made an advantageous treaty
with new envoys of the Western tribes who sought his alliance. To
Croghan’s annoyance, the Pennsylvania government in an access of
caution repudiated this treaty as having been unauthorized.
In 1751 Croghan was again upon the Allegheny, encouraging the
Indians in their English alliance, and defeating Joncaire, the
shrewdest of the French agents in this region, by means of his own
tactics. The next year, he was pursuing his traffic in furs among the
Shawnees, but without forgetting the public interest;[4] and the
following year finds him assisting the governor and Council at the
important negotiations at Carlisle.[5] This same year (1753) Croghan
removed his home some distance west, and settled on Aughwick
Creek upon land granted him by the Province. His public services
were continued early in the next year by a journey with the official
present to the Ohio, where he arrived soon after Washington had
passed upon the return from the famous embassy to the French
officers at Fort Le Bœuf.
The outbreak of the French and Indian War ruined Croghan’s
prosperous trading business, and brought him to the verge of
bankruptcy. While at the same time a large number of Indian
refugees, desiring to remain under British protection, sought his
home at Aughwick, where he felt obliged to provision them, with but
meagre assistance from the Province. To add to his troubles, the
Irish traders, because of their Romanist proclivities, fell under
suspicion of acting as French spies, and Croghan was unjustly eyed
askance by many in authority.[6] Although he was granted a
captain’s commission to command the Indian contingent during
Braddock’s campaign, he resigned this office early in 1756, and
retired from the Pennsylvania service.
About this time he paid a visit to New York, where his distant
relative, Sir William Johnson, appreciating his abilities, chose him
deputy Indian agent, and appointed him to manage the
Susquehanna and Allegheny tribes.[7] From this time forward he was
engaged in important dealings with the natives, swaying them to the
British interest, making possible the success of Forbes (1758), and
the victory of Prideaux and Johnson (1759). After the capitulation of
Montreal, he accompanied Major Rogers to Detroit. All of 1761 and
1762 were occupied with Indian conferences and negotiations, in the
course of which he again visited Detroit, meeting Sir William
Johnson en route.[8]
Late in 1763, Croghan went to England on private business, and
was shipwrecked upon the coast of France;[9] but finally reached
London, where he presented to the lords of trade an important
memorial on Indian affairs.[10]
Upon his return to America (1765), he was at once dispatched to
the Illinois. Proceeding by the Ohio River, he was made prisoner near
the mouth of the Wabash, and carried to the Indian towns upon that
river, where he not only secured his own release, but conducted
negotiations which put an end to Pontiac’s War, and opened the
Illinois to the British.
A second journey to the Illinois, in the following year, resulted in
his reaching Fort Chartres, and proceeding thence to New Orleans.
No journal of this voyage has to our knowledge been preserved.
 Croghan’s part in the treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) was rewarded
by a grant of land in Cherry Valley, New York. Previous to this he had
purchased a tract on the Allegheny about four miles above Pittsburg,
where in 1770 he entertained Washington. At the beginning of the
Revolution he appears to have embarked in the patriot cause,[11]
but later was an object of suspicion; and in 1778 was proclaimed by
Pennsylvania as a public enemy, his place as Indian agent being
conferred upon Colonel George Morgan. He continued, however, to
reside in Pennsylvania, and died at Passyunk in 1782.[12]
In our selection of material from the large amount of Croghan’s
published work, we have chosen that which exemplifies Western
conditions under three aspects: First, the period of English
ascendency on the Ohio, which is illustrated by three documents of
1750 and 1751. Secondly, the period of French ascendency, hostility
toward the English, and war on the frontiers; for this epoch we
publish four documents, ranging from 1754 to 1757. The third
period, after the downfall of Canada, is concerned with the
surrender of the French posts, and the renewed hostility of the
Indians; the two journals we publish for this period present
interesting material for the study of Western history. Each deals with
a pioneer voyage, for Rogers and Croghan were the first Englishmen
(except wandering traders or prisoners) to penetrate the Lake Erie
region and reach Detroit. The voyage down the Ohio (1765), with its
circumstantial account of the appearance of the country, and its
description of Indian conditions and relations, is noteworthy.
Croghan was a voluminous writer. In addition to the official reports
of his journeys, he evidently had the habit of noting down the
events of the day in a simple, straightforward manner, so that many
manuscripts of his were long extant, presenting often different
versions of the same journey. The earlier antiquaries published these
as chance brought them to their notice.[13] The official reports
themselves were preserved in the colonial archives, and are
published in the Pennsylvania and New York collections. It is
believed that this is the first attempt to bring together a selection of
Croghan material that in any adequate manner outlines his
interesting career. The chronological extent of these journals (from
1750-1765) makes those which follow—Post’s of 1758; and Morris’s
of 1764—interludes in the events which Croghan describes, thus
throwing additional light upon the same period and the same range
of territory.
R. G. T.
 A SELECTION OF GEORGE CROGHAN’S
LETTERS AND JOURNALS RELATING TO TOURS
INTO THE WESTERN COUNTRY—NOVEMBER
16, 1750-NOVEMBER, 1765

Croghan to the Governor of Pennsylvania[14]

Logstown on Ohio, December [November] the 16th, 1750.[15]

Sir: Yesterday Mr. Montour and I got to this Town, where we
found thirty Warriors of the Six Nations going to War against the
Catawba Indians; they told us that they saw John Coeur about one
hundred and fifty miles up this River at an Indian Town, where he
intends to build a Fort if he can get Liberty from the Ohio Indians;
he has five canoes loaded with Goods, and is very generous in
making Presents to all the Chiefs of the Indians that he meets with;
he has sent two Messages to this Town desiring the Indians here to
go and meet him and clear the Road for him to come down the
River, but they have had so little Regard to his Message that they
have not thought it worth while to send him an answer as yet.[16]
We have seen but very few of the Chiefs of the Indians they being
all out a hunting, but those we have seen are of opinion that their
Brothers the English ought to have a Fort on this River to secure the
Trade, for they think it will be dangerous for the Traders to travel the
Roads for fear of being surprised by some of the French and French
Indians, as they expect nothing else but a War with the French next
Spring. At a Town about three hundred miles down this River, where
the Chief of the Shawonese live,[17] a Party of French and French
Indians surprised some of the Shawonese and killed a man and took
a woman and two children Prisoners; the Shawonese pursued them
and took five French Men and some Indians Prisoners; the
Twightwees likewise have sent word to the French that if they can
find any of their People, either French or French Indians, on their
hunting Ground, that they will make them Prisoners, so I expect
nothing else but a War this Spring; the Twightwees want to settle
themselves some where up this River in order to be nearer their
Brothers the English, for they are determined never to hold a Treaty
of Peace with the French. Mr. Montour and I intend as soon as we
can get the Chiefs of the Six Nations that are Settled here together,
to sollicit them to appoint a Piece of Ground up this River to seat the
Twightwees on and kindle a Fire for them, and if possible to remove
the Shawonese up the River, which we think will be securing those
Nations more steady to the English Interest. I hope the Present of
Goods that is preparing for those Indians will be at this Town some
time in March next, for the Indians, as they are now acquainted that
there is a Present coming, will be impatient to receive it, as they
intend to meet the French next Spring between this and Fort De
Troit, for they are certain the French intend an Expedition against
them next Spring from Fort De Troit.[18] I hear the Owendaets
[Wyandots] are as steady and well attached to the English Interest
as ever they were, so that I believe the French will make but a poor
hand of those Indians. Mr. Montour takes a great deal of Pains to
promote the English Interest amongst those Indians, and has a
great sway amongst all those Nations; if your Honour has any
Instructions to send to Mr. Montour, Mr. Trent will forward it to me.
[19] I will see it delivered to the Indians in the best manner, that
your Honour’s Commands may have their full Force with the Indians.
I am, with due respects,
Your Honour’s most humble Servant,
Geo. Croghan.
The Honoble. James Hamilton,[20] Esq.

Proceedings of George Croghan, Esquire, and Mr. Andrew Montour

at Ohio, in the Execution of the Governor’s Instructions to Deliver
the Provincial Present to the several Tribes of Indians settled

there:
[21]
 May the 18th, 1751.—I arrived at the Log’s Town on Ohio with the
Provincial Present from the Province of Pennsylvania, where I was
received by a great number of the Six Nations, Delawares, and
Shawonese, in a very complaisant manner in their way, by firing
Guns and Hoisting the English Colours. As soon as I came to the
shore their Chiefs met me and took me by the Hand bidding me
welcome to their Country.
May the 19th.—One of the Six Nation Kings from the Head of Ohio
came to the Logstown to the Council, he immediately came to visit
me, and told me he was glad to see a Messenger from his Brother
Onas on the waters of the Ohio.
May the 20th.—Forty Warriors of the Six Nations came to Town
from the Heads of Ohio, with Mr. Ioncoeur and one Frenchman more
in company.
May the 21st, 1751.—Mr. Ioncoeur, the French Interpreter, called a
council with all the Indians then present in the Town, and made the
following Speech:
“Children: I desire you may now give me an answer from your
hearts to the Speech Monsieur Celeron (the Commander of the Party
of Two Hundred Frenchmen that went down the River two Years
ago) made to you.[22] His Speech was, That their Father the
Governor of Canada desired his Children on Ohio to turn away the
English Traders from amongst them, and discharge them from ever
coming to trade there again, or on any of the Branches, on Pain of
incurring his Displeasure, and to enforce that Speech he gave them
a very large Belt of Wampum. Immediately one of the Chiefs of the
Six Nations get up and made the following answer:
“Fathers: I mean you that call yourselves our Fathers, hear what I
am going to say to you. You desire we may turn our Brothers the
English away, and not suffer them to come and trade with us again;
I now tell you from our Hearts we will not, for we ourselves brought
them here to trade with us, and they shall live amongst us as long
as there is one of us alive. You are always threatning our Brothers
what you will do to them, and in particular to that man (pointing to
me); now if you have anything to say to our Brothers tell it to him if
you be a man, as you Frenchmen always say you are, and the Head
of all Nations. Our Brothers are the People we will trade with, and
not you. Go and tell your Governor to ask the Onondago Council If I
don’t speak the minds of all the Six Nations;”[23] and then [he]
returned the Belt.
I paid Cochawitchake the old Shawonese King a visit, as he was
rendered incapable of attending the Council by his great age, and let
him know that his Brother the Governor of Pennsylvania was glad to
hear that he was still alive and retained his senses, and had ordered
me to cloathe him and to acquaint him that he had not forgot his
strict Attachment to the English Interest. I gave him a Strowd Shirt,
Match Coat, and a pair of Stockings, for which he gave the Governor
a great many thanks.
May the 22d.—A number of about forty of the Six Nations came up
the River Ohio to Logstown to wait on the Council; as soon as they
came to Town they came to my House, and after shaking Hands
they told me they were glad to see me safe arrived in their Country
after my long Journey.
May the 23d.—Conajarca, one of the Chiefs of the Six Nations, and
a Party with him from the Cuscuskie, came to Town to wait on the
Council, and congratulated me upon my safe arrival in their Country.
May the 24th.—Some Warriors of the Delawares came to Town
from the Lower Shawonese Town, and brought a Scalp with them;
they brought an Account that the Southward Indians had come to
the Lower Towns to War, and had killed some of the Shawonese,
Delawares, and the Six Nations, so that we might not expect any
People from there to the Council.
May the 25th.—I had a conference with Monsieur Ioncoeur; he
desired I would excuse him and not think hard of him for the Speech
he made to the Indians requesting them to turn the English Traders
away and not suffer them to trade, for it was the Governor of
Canada’s Orders[24] to him, and he was obliged to obey them altho’
he was very sensible which way the Indians would receive them, for
he was sure the French could not accomplish their designs with the
Six Nations without it could be done by Force, which he said he
believed they would find to be as difficult as the method they had
just tryed, and would meet with the like success.
May the 26th.—A Dunkar from the Colony of Virginia came to the
Log’s Town and requested Liberty of the Six Nation Chiefs to make
[a settlement] on the River Yogh-yo-gaine a branch of Ohio, to
which the Indians made answer that it was not in their Power to
dispose of Lands; that he must apply to the Council at Onondago,
and further told him that he did not take a right method, for he
should be first recommended by their Brother the Governor of
Pennsylvania, with whom all Publick Business of that sort must be
transacted before he need expect to succeed.[25]
May the 27th.—Mr Montour and I had a Conference with the
Chiefs of the Six Nations, when it was agreed upon that the
following Speeches should be made to the Delawares, Shawonese,
Owendatts and Twightwees, when the Provincial Present should be
delivered them in the Name of the Honourable James Hamilton,
Esquire, Lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the
Province of Pennsylvania, and Counties of New Castle, Kent, and
Sussex, on Delaware, in Conjunction with the Chiefs of the Six
United Nations On Ohio:
A Treaty with the Indians of the Six Nations, Delawares, Shawonese,
Owendatts and Twightwees.

In the Log’s Town on Ohio,

Thursday the 28th May, 1751.
Present:
Thomas Kinton, Samuel Cuzzens, Jacob Pyatt, John Owens,
Thomas Ward, Joseph Nelson, James Brown, Dennis Sullavan, Paul
Pearce, Caleb Lamb, Indian Traders.
 The Deputies of the Six Nations, Delawares, Shawonese,
Owendatts, and Twightwees; Mr. Andrew Montour, Interpreter for
the Province of Pennsylvania; Toanshiscoe, Interpreter for the Six
Nations.
George Croghan made the following Speech to the several
Nations, when they were met in Council, in the Name of the
Honourable James Hamilton, Esquire, Governor of the Province of
Pennsylvania:
“Friends and Brethren:—I am sent here by your Brother the
Governor of Pennsylvania with this Present of Goods to renew the
Friendship so long subsisting between Us, and I present you these
four strings of Wampum to clear your Minds and open your Eyes and
Ears that you may see the Sun clear, and hear what your Brother is
going to say to you.”—Gave 4 Strings of Wampum.
A Speech delivered the Delawares—in answer to the Speech they
sent by Mr. Weiser three Years ago to his Honour the Governor to
acquaint him of the Death of their Chief, King Oulamopess[26]—by
George Croghan:
“Brethren the Delawares:—Three years ago some of the Chiefs of
your Nation sent me a Message by Mr. Weiser to acquaint me of the
Death of your King, a man well beloved by his Brethren the English.
You told Mr. Weiser that you intended to visit me in order to consult
about a new Chief, but you never did it. I have ever since condoled
with you for the Loss of so good a Man, and considering the
lamentable Condition you were in for want of a Chief I present You
this Belt of Wampum and this Present to wipe away your Tears, and
I desire you may choose amongst Yourselves one of your wisest
Counsellors and present to your Brethren the Six Nations and me for
a Chief, and he so chosen by you shall be looked upon by us as your
King, with whom Publick Business shall be transacted. Brethren, to
enforce this on your Minds I present you this Belt of Wampum.”—
Gave a Belt of Wampum, which was received with the Yohah.[27]
 A Speech delivered the Shawonese from the Honourable James
Hamilton, Governor of Pennsylvania, by George Croghan:
“Brethren the Shawonese:—Three years ago when some of your
Chiefs and some Chiefs of the Six Nations came down to Lancaster
with our Brethren the Twightwees, they informed me that your
People that went away with Peter Chartier was coming back, and
since that I hear that Part of them are returned. I am glad to hear
that they are coming home to you again that you may become once
more a People, and not as you were dispersed thro’ the World. I do
not blame you for what happened, for the wisest of People
sometimes make mistakes; it was the French that the Indians call
their Fathers that deceived You and scattered you about the Woods
that they might have it in their Power to keep you poor. Brethren, I
assure you by this Present that I am fully reconcil’d and have forgot
any thing that you have done, and I hope for the future there will be
a more free and open Correspondence between us; and now your
Brethren the Six Nations join with me to remove any
misunderstanding that should have happened between us, that we
may henceforth spend the remainder of our days together in
Brotherly Love and Friendship. Now, that this Speech which your
Brothers the Six Nations joyn with me in may have its full Force on
your minds, I present you this Belt of Wampum.”—Gave a Belt of
Wampum, which was received with the Yo-hah.
A Speech delivered the Owendatts, from the Honourable James
Hamilton, Governor of Pennsylvania, by George Croghan:
“Brethren the Owendatts:—I receiv’d a Message by the Six Nations
and another by Mr. Montour from you, by both which I understand
the French, whom the Indians call their Father, wont let you rest in
your Towns in Peace, but constantly threaten to cut you off. How
comes this? Are you not a free and independent People, and have
you not a Right to live where you please on your own Land and
trade with whom you please? Your Brethren, the English, always
considered you as a free Nation, and I think the French who attempt
to infringe on your Liberties should be opposed by one and all the
Indians or any other Nations that should undertake such unjust
proceedings.
“Brethren: I am sorry to hear of your Troubles, and I hope you
and your Brethren the Six Nations will let the French know that you
are a free People and will not be imposed on by them. To assure you
that I have your Troubles much at heart I present you this Belt and
this Present of Goods to cloathe your Families.”—Gave a Belt of
Wampum, which was received with the Yo-hah.
A Speech delivered the Twightwees from the Honourable James
Hamilton, Esquire, Governor Pennsylvania, by George Croghan:
“Brethren the Twightwees:—As you are an antient and renowned
Nation I was well pleased when you sent your Deputies now three
years ago to sollicit our Alliance; nor did we hesitate to grant you
your Request, as it came so warmly recommended to us by our
Brethren the Six Nations, Delawares, and Shawonese. At your
further Request we ordered our Traders to go amongst you and
supply you with Goods at as reasonable rates as they could afford.
We understand that in obedience to our Commands our Traders
have given you full Satisfaction to your Requests. In one your Towns
about three Months ago Mr. George Croghan likewise informs us that
some more of your Tribes earnestly requested to become our Allies.
He and Mr. Montour did receive a writing from you Certifying such
your Request, and containing your Promises of Fidelity and
Friendship, which we have seen and approve of. Brethren: we have
recommended it to our Brethren the Six Nations to give you their
advice how you should behave in your new Alliance with us, and we
expect that you will follow it, that the Friendship now subsisting
between Us, the Six Nations, Delawares, Shawonese, Owendatts,
and you, may become as Strong as a great Mountain which the
Winds constantly blow against but never overset. Brethren, to assure
you of our hearty Inclinations towards you I make you this Present
of Goods; and that this Speech which I make you now in
Conjunction with the Six Nations may have its full Force on your
minds, I present you this Belt of Wampum.”—Gave a Belt, which was
received with the Yo-hah.
A Speech made to the Six United Nations by George Croghan in
behalf of the Honourable James Hamilton, Esquire, Governor of the
Province of Pennsylvania:
“Brethren the Six Nations: Hear what I am going to say to you.
Brethren: it is a great while since we, your Brothers the English, first
came over the great Water (meaning the Sea); as soon as our ship
struck the Land you the Six Nations took hold of her and tyed her to
the Bushes, and for fear the Bushes would not be strong enough to
hold her you removed the Rope and tyed it about a great Tree; then
fearing the winds would blow the Tree down, you removed the Rope
and tyed it about a great Mountain in the Country (meaning the
Onondago Country), and since that time we have lived in true
Brotherly Love and Friendship together. Now, Brethren, since that
there are several Nations joined in Friendship with you and Us, and
of late our Brethren the Twightwees: Now, Brethren, as you are the
Head of all the Nations of Indians, I warmly recommend it to you to
give our Brethren the Twightwees your best advice that they may
know how to behave in their New Alliance, and likewise I give our
Brethren the Owendatts in charge to you, that you may Strengthen
them to withstand their Enemies the French, who I understand treat
them more like Enemies than Children tho’ they call themselves their
Father.
“Brethren: I hope we, your Brothers the English, and you the Six
Nations, Delawares, Shawonese, Owendatts, and Twightwees, will
continue in such Brotherly Love and Friendship that it will be as
strong as that Mountain to which you tyed our Ship. Now, Brethren,
I am informed by George Croghan that the French obstruct my
Traders and carry away their Persons and Goods, and are guilty of
many outrageous Practices, Whereby the Roads are rendered unsafe
to travel in, nor can we ask our Traders to go amongst you whilst
their Lives and Effects are in such great Danger. How comes this to
pass? Don’t this proceed from the Pride of Onontio, whom the