Lenape Among the Quakers by Dawn G. Marsh

Author:Dawn G. Marsh [Dawn G. Marsh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780803248403
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2014-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

4.

Lenapehoking Lost

When Hannah Freeman was a young woman, her father “went to Shamokin and never returned.” As she recounted her life story to Moses Marshall in 1797, she offered little explanation except that he left at a time when “the country becoming more settled the Indians were not allowed to plant corn any longer.”1 In this brief deposition she offers no explanation for what happened to her father, nor his reasons for the journey. It would be easy to dismiss this episode of her life story in light of an absence of details, except that it marked an abrupt change in how Hannah Freeman and her family conducted their lives. It also came at a time when the relationships between Pennsylvania’s provincial government and the Indian peoples living within the colony’s claimed boundaries were disintegrating at an unparalleled rate. The departure of Hannah’s father was an intimate and personal event that she and her family experienced as the loss of a father, a protector, and a provider for their extended family. But that is only part of the story. Her father’s departure to Shamokin connects Hannah and her family to a maelstrom of political goings-on that culminated in an international war that left no one living in the colony untouched. Growth and expansion brought violence and uncertainty into the daily lives of Indian peoples behind the frontier boundaries of the rapidly expanding colony, as was discussed in the previous chapter, and as her father departed for Shamokin, he traveled a well-worn trail that would tie his family to some of the most critical events in the history of colonial North America.

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