Unsettling the West by Rob Harper

Author:Rob Harper [Harper, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018
Goodreads: 35926692
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

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chapter 5

pennsylvanian commissions to longtime pennsylvania opponents, he and his

government gained a semblance of legitimacy.31

meanwhile, the United states’ few remaining indian allies made new

homes around pittsburgh, hoping for security and fearing further violence.

nonhelema, one of the only shawnee leaders to have supported the ameri-

cans throughout the war, lived with her daughter in a house in the Fort pitt

orchard, making and selling moccasins and other “beautiful articles.” Betsey,

a delaware woman, lived in the fort itself with her children and husband,

John gibson. meanwhile, gelelemend and perhaps a few dozen delaware

men, women, and children huddled through the winter on smoky island, a

twenty- acre woodland a few hundred yards downstream. even more than

their famished counterparts at sandusky, they now depended whol y on

their military allies for food, supplies, and physical protection. The fort’s

commanders supported them, but nearby colonists and soldiers grew in-

creasingly hostile. in January, two corporals from the garrison allegedly tried

to murder moses, a former moravian convert who had joined gelelemend’s

band. irvine sharply censured the men, but a court- martial found insuffi-

cient evidence to convict them. like Brodhead and gibson before him, ir-

vine stationed regular soldiers to guard the delawares’ camp. Then he left

Fort pitt to visit his family and to lobby for a more welcome assignment. in

his absence, gibson barely kept his poorly clothed and seldom paid men

from mutiny.32

Thanks to a mild winter, Wyandot and delaware warriors attacked upper

Ohio colonists early in 1782. in mid- February, robert Wal ace returned to his

raccoon creek homestead to find “his wife and children gone, his house

broke up, the furniture destroyed, and his cattle shot and laying dead about

the yard.” he raised a party of his neighbors to pursue the attackers, but a

heavy snowfall that night, and the dozens of warrior footprints nearby, de-

terred them. The captors soon killed Jane Wal ace and her smallest child,

probably because they could not keep up, but her husband did not learn of

their deaths, or of the survival of his remaining son among the Wyandots, for

nearly three years. elsewhere, six warriors captured John carpenter and his

two horses on the road from Buffalo creek to pittsburgh. The cruelest of his

captors, carpenter later reported, “called themselves moravians” and spoke

german. after swimming the frigid Ohio, captors and captive found refuge

at the muskingum mission towns, where both carpenter and the warriors

reportedly warned the corn- gathering moravians “to be off,” as “the whites . . .

would follow up the warriors, and fall upon them.” They then headed on

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