among the Conestogas. Chartiers was an Indian trader at Pequea, whose wife was a Shawanese squaw. Chartiers, whose name appears in the Maryland Archives as "Martin Shortive," and often found spelled without the final "s," was the father of Peter Chartiers, the perfidious halfbreed trader once located on the Allegheny and Ohio, whose name has been commemorated in Chartiers creek and Chartiers townships in Allegheny and Washington counties, and in a Pittsburgh street. Martin Chartiers was one of the deserters from La Salle in August, 1680. He seems to have roamed over the whole region from Quebec and Mackinaw, through the Illinois country to the far south, before he came to Pennsylvania with the Shawanese. These Indians were surely driven here, and it was some time prior to 1700. Additional mention of Peter Chartiers will come in the chapter on the traders (Chapter IX). The attempts of the French in their efforts to dissuade the Delawares and Shawanese on the Allegheny, which began as early as 1728, were continuous and persistent for more than a decade, and these also must be narrated in a subsequent chapter.

Bancroft notes the arrival and settlement of the few score families of Shawanese in 1698 who planted themselves on the Susquehanna with the consent of the governor of Pennsylvania at Conestoga. Sad were the fruits of the hospitality of the Pennsylvania authorities. The remainder of the nation followed, so that in 1732, of 700 Indian warriors in the province, one-half were Shawanese emigrants. Some Delawares had come to the Ohio about 1724 for better hunting than the Susquehanna region afforded, and beginning in 1728 the Shawanese gradually followed. Here about the headwaters of the Ohio the Canadian traders found them, led by Joncaire, the sly, crafty half-breed, "an adopted citizen" of the Seneca Nation, and in commemoration M. Joncaire has had his name perpetuated in a Pittsburgh thoroughfare. Proud is authority for the statement that the Indians on the Ohio in those years consisted chiefly of the hunters of the several nations under the "protection or subjection of the Six Nations." However, with their continuous emigration, the Delaware and Shawanese villages arose, and some became noted in Pennsylvania history. Several Delaware villages lay within the territory of municipal Pittsburgh.18 In the "Critical Notes" communicated to the "Register of Pennsylvania" (Vol. V. page 113) this paragraph occurs:

1755-The date of the settlements of the Shawanese does not correspond with their accounts given by their agents as in the public records at Harrisburg, for the Shawanese came to Pennsylvania previously to the landing of William Penn, for their chiefs held a conference with him under the great tree at Lackawaxen, to which they repeatedly refer in their different talks. They did not remove to Ohio in the year 1728 or 1729, but many reinained at their wigwam on the Beaver Pond near the present location of Carlisle. (See Notes of Assembly, Vol. IV, p. 528.)

18"History of United States," George Bancroft; Vol. III, pp. 240, 297, 314.

Pitts.-9

The presence of any Shawanese at Shackamaxon is not substantiated. It is apparently mere claim, for the Indians became proud of any participation in historic events. They were on the Conodoguinet, about the site of Carlisle.

C. C. Royce, in the "Magazine of Western History" for May, 1885, has an interesting article regarding this nation, entitled "An Enquiry into the Identity and History of the Shawnee Indians," to which he appended a footnote stating the paper was offered with the understanding that it purported to be nothing but a brief outline of some unfinished investigations. He begins this article thus:

The Shawanees were the Bedouins, and I may almost say the Ishmaelites of the North American tribes. As wanderers they were without rivals among their race, and as fomenters of discord and war between themselves and their neighbors their genius was marked. Their original home is not with any great measure of certainty known. Many theories on the subject have been already advanced, each with a greater or less degree of plausibility. More, doubtless, will from time to time be offered, but after all, the general public will be restricted to a choice of probabilities, and each must accept for himself that which to his mind shall seem the most satisfactory and convincing.

Royce uses the term "Chaouanous," which is sometimes found, and the "u" in the last syllable arouses suspicion that the French term "Chaouanons" may have been distorted, or vice versa, though the terminal "ons" is clear enough in most histories.

Craig has something to say of the Shawanoes or Shawanese and other tribes and things about Pittsburgh:

The Shawanese are described as a restless people who constantly engaged in war with some of their neighbors. They were originally from the South; the French say from the Cumberland river.

Mr. Heckewelder was told by other Indians that they were from Florida and Mr. Johnson,19 United States agent at Piqua, Ohio, states that they came from the Suwanee river, Florida, and that it derived its name from them. He also states, that they, only, of all the Indian tribes, have a tradition that their ancestors crossed the sea. Also that they kept a yearly sacrifice for their safe arrival.

About 1698 they first appeared in Pennsylvania, as Mr. Heckewelder states, at Montour's Island (now Neville Island, six miles below Pittsburgh). Some of them went to Conestoga and others settled at the headwaters of the Susquehanna and Delaware.

In 1728 they were again in motion to the West, and located near the Allegheny and Ohio. In 1732 of 700 warriors in the State, 350 were Shawanese.

They had several villages within the limits of the present counties of Allegheny and Beaver. Post passed through three Shawanese villages between Fort Duquesne and Saucunk, which, we believe, was near the mouth of the Beaver river about where the town of Beaver now stands. Their principal residence was afterwards on the Scioto.

Of the Six Nations the Senecas were the most western. Their homes extended from the headwaters of the Allegheny river some distance down the Ohio, and to this nation belonged Tanacharison, also Guyasutha and Cornplanter.

These various nations strangely mixed together and yet preserving their distinc

19 Col. John Johnston, see "Historical Collections of Ohio," Henry Howe, pp. 363365; Schoolcraft “Indian Nations," Vol. I, p. 19; "The Wilderness Trail,” Hanna, Vol. II, p. 128.

tive and separate organizations were dwelling here in peace when the white man appeared among them. The Englishman claiming title under a charter from a distant king, strengthened by a treaty with the Iroquois. The Frenchman resting upon the first discovery. (That of LaSalle.)

It is useless now to inquire which had the better or worse title. Certainly it was easy enough for either claimant to find sufficient flaws in his adversary's title to excuse his resistance to it; especially in a case where only a plausible pretext was needed.

France then held extensive possessions in North America, Canada and Louisiana, belonging to her, and she was anxious to strengthen herself and circumscribe her adversary, by establishing a line of posts from her northern to her southern colony. The point at the junction of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, at once became a commanding position in this great scheme.20

In 1749 Captain Celoron came, deposited his leaden plates, only not claiming the country, but taking renewed possession of the River Ohio, "and of all those which fall into it and of all the territories on both sides as far as the source of said rivers as the preceding kings of France have possessed or should possess them." The story could not be better told. From this act of Celoron's began the stirring history of all the region about the Forks of the Ohio, and to quote a writer of our own times, the Rev. Dr. George P. Donehoo of Coudersport, now secretary of the Historical Commission of Pennsylvania:

Historic development works out along strange lines. Had there been no migration of the Delawares and Shawanese to the Ohio, there would have been no rivalry between the French and the English traders-no French and Indian war. Had there been no French and Indian war, there would have been no tax on tea. Had there been no tax on tea there would have been no American revolution and no United States.

Consequently, when the first hardy pioneers commenced to build their cabins on the banks of the Conodoguinet Creek (at Carlisle) they were commencing the erection of the greatest empire the world has yet known.

There are no trivial events in history. The migration of a red, feather-crested warrior with his squaw and pappoose from the waters of the Susquehanna was a trivial event in itself. But it meant the closing of one period of human history, and the dawning of a new era for a great continent.

It meant the final destruction of the forest and the wild, free life of the mountains and valleys, and the beginning of the Empire of Cities, threaded by its network of steel highways.

The long silence of centuries which had brooded over the sweeping forest was to be broken by the sound of the woodsman's ax, as he cut down the trees to build his home, and later on the Indian trail was to become a trail of steel over which a nation would send its wealth to the uttermost parts of the earth.

The rhetoric here is both beautiful and appealing. We admit its truth.

This brings us to the consideration of other phases of the subject. History is not built up on hypotheses. The red feathered-crested warriors did come, and prone as we are to speculate, history must in its very definition—a record of past events-human events-pass by the fanciful and the might have been. Too often has the fate of nations hung upon a thread and oftentimes the thread has broken.

20"History of Pittsburgh," Neville B. Craig; new edition with an Introduction and Notes by George T. Fleming; 1917; pp. 3-6.

CHAPTER VII.

Indians in Petticoats.

"Disgraced Indians," our chapter head could have read. It will already have beeen noted how much the word petticoat has been used in Pennsylvania Indian history as a term of disgrace and as an emblem of subserviency. Whenever the Iroquois spoke of the Delawares they mentioned the bondage of that nation and invariably the taunt, "we conquered you," followed. The metamorphosis story is altogether a Delaware myth. While the petticoat as apparel was not actually worn-it might as well have been. The term is used only figuratively, but frequently. Hanna heads one chapter in his voluminous work, "The Petticoat Indians of Petticoat Land." Alliterative and fanciful, this does very well to call attention to the vassalage of the Pennsylvania Indians which province we may take as the Petticoat Land. The fact that the ascendancy of the Iroquois was acknowledged by the Pennsylvania authorities can be found in the early archives of the province. Thus that veteran soldier and octogenarian, Governor Patrick Gordon, in his instructions to Henry Smith and John Petty, September 1, 1728,.wrote:

Tell Shakallamy particularly he is set over the Shawannah Indians. I hope he can give a good account of them. They came to us only as strangers about thirty years ago, they desired leave of this government to settle amongst us as strangers, and the Conestoga Indians became security for their good behaviour. They are also under the protection of the Five Nations, who have set Shakallamy over them. He is a good man and I hope will give a good account of them.1

Shikellimy was a white man, born of French parents in Montreal, but having been captured by the Iroquois in early childhood, was adopted by the Oneidas and grew up and could not be told from an Indian. He was a man of fine abilities and justly celebrated in the Indian history of Pennsylvania. There is evidence that Shikellimy was set over the Delawares also as vice-regent, overlord or deputy of the Six Nations. On this sachem's monument at Sunbury, Pennsylvania, his name is carved "Shikellamy." He was the father of Logan, of speech fame.

The story of the Lenape having been conquered by strategem rather than arms, as told by the Lenape themselves, finds a ready belief in Heckewelder and is accepted in good faith by Bishop Loskiel, also a Moravian historian. But these men were missionaries among the Delawares, and Heckewelder, for many years among them, as already remarked, looks at everything through Delaware eyes. Parkman ("Conspiracy of Pontiac," Chap. I) dismisses the story as absurd, that "a people so acute and suspicious, could be the dupes of so palpable a

1"Penna. Archives;" First Series, Vol. I, p. 228, quoted by Chas. A. Hanna. “Wilderness Trail," Vol. I, p. 149

trick, and it is equally incredible that a high-spirited tribe could be induced by the most persuasive rhetoric to assume the name of women, which in Indian eyes is the last confession of abject abasement."

Truly so for the woman was the Indian worker, never a warrior, though oft a mediator. In the words of Schoolcraft:

There was a reserved power in the Iroquois councils which deserves to be mentioned. I allude to the power of the matrons. This was an acknowledged power of a conservative character which might at all times be brought into requisition, whenever policy required it, and it exists today (1846), as incontestibly as it did centuries ago. They were entrusted with the power to propose a cessation of arms. They were literally peacemakers. A proposition from the matrons to drop the war-club could be made without compromising the character of the tribe for bravery, and accordingly, we find in the ancient organization there was a male functionary, an acknowledged speaker, who was called the representative, or messenger, of the matrons. These matrons sat in council, but it must needs have been seldom that a female possessed the kind of eloquence suited to public assemblies, and beyond this there was a sentiment of respect due the female class which led the tribes, at their general elections, to create this office.2

The Delaware's version is best presented, with comments by Zeisberger's biographer, Bishop De Schweinitz, who says:

After the Dutch had settled New York and the French Canada, the Iroquois became the friends of the former and the enemies of the latter. Against these they often warred. The Iroquois finding the contest with the Lenape too great for them because they had to cope on the one hand with European arms and on the other with native prowess, excogitated a master stroke of intrigue. They sent an embassy to the Lenape with a message in substance as follows: That it is not well for the Indians to be fighting among themselves at a time when the whites in ever larger numbers were pressing into their country, that the original possessors of the soil must be preserved from total extirpation; that the only way to effect this was a voluntary assuming on the part of some magnanimous nation the position of "women" or umpire; that a weak people in such a position would have no influence, but a powerful one like the Lenape, celebrated for its bravery, and above all suspicion of pusillanimity, might properly take the step; that, therefore, the Iroquois (Aquanoschioni) besought them to lay aside their arms, devote themselves to pacific employments and act as mediators among the tribes, thus putting a stop forever to the fratricidal wars of the Indians. To this proposition the Lenape cheerfully and trustfully assented, for they believed it to be dictated by exalted patriotism and to constitute the language of genuine sincerity. They were, moreover, themselves very anxious to preserve the Indian race. At a great feast prepared for the representatives of the two nations, and amid many ceremonies, they were accordingly made women and a broad belt of peace was entrusted to their keeping.

The Dutch, the tradition continues, were present and had instigated the plot. That it was a plot to break the strength of the Delawares soon became evident. They woke up from their magnanimous dream to find themselves in the power of the Iroquois. From that time they were "cousins" of the Iroquois and these their "uncles." It was

This tradition is as ingenious and unique as it is fabulous and absurd. devised by the Delawares to conceal the fact that they had been conquered, and yet history recognizes and will ever know them as the vassals of the Iroquois, who exercised authority over them, stationed an agent in their country and would not permit their lands to be alienated without the consent of the Confederate Council. The story of the Delawares contradicts itself. Suspicious as Indians are to this day, this nation could not have been so completely duped; and brave as it was, it would never have submitted to such a degradation. The whole character of the Aborigines renders the

2Louis H. Morgan (Skenandoah) can be quoted to the same effect. See "Notes on the Iroquois;" H. R. Schoolcraft, p. 84.