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Publications
OF THE
Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
HISTORY,
MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS
OF THE
INDIAN NATIONS.
HISTORY,
MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS
OF
The Indian Nations
WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND
THE NEIGHBOURING STATES.
BY THE
REV. JOHN HECKEWELDER,
OF BETHLEHEM, PA.
New and Revised Edition.
WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY THE
REV. WILLIAM C. REICHEL,
OF BETHLEHEM, PA.
PHILADELPHIA: PUBLICATION FUND OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, No. 820 SPRUCE STREET. 1881.
“The Trustees of the Publication Fund of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania” have published nine volumes, viz.:
- The History of Braddock’s Expedition.
- Contributions to American History.
- Record of Upland, and Denny’s Journal.
- Reissue of Vol. 1 of the Memoirs.
- Minutes of Defence of Philadelphia, 1814-1815.
- Correspondence of Penn and Logan, Vols. 1 and 2.
- History of New Sweden, by Israel Acrelius.
- Heckewelder’s History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations.
The investments held by the trustees of the Fund now amount to twenty-three thousand dollars, the interest only of which is applied to publishing. By the payment of twenty-five dollars, any one may become entitled to receive, during his or her life, all the publications of the Society. Libraries so subscribing are entitled to receive books for the term of twenty years.
The Society desire it to be understood that they are not answerable for any opinions or observations that may appear in their publications: the Editors of the several works being alone responsible for the same.
| John Jordan, Jr., | } |
| Aubrey H. Smith, | }Trustees. |
| Fairman Rogers, | } |
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
PHILADELPHIA.
LIPPINCOTT’S PRESS.
MEMOIRS
OF THE
HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF
PENNSYLVANIA.
VOL. XII.
PHILADELPHIA: PUBLICATION FUND OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA, No. 820 SPRUCE STREET. 1881.
INTRODUCTION.
BY THE EDITOR.
John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, the author of “An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the neighboring States,” was born March 12th, 1743, at Bedford, England. His father, who was a native of Moravia, a few years after his arrival at Herrnhut, Saxony, was summoned to England to assist in the religious movement which his church had inaugurated in that country in 1734. In his eleventh year, the subject of this sketch accompanied his parents to the New World, and became a resident of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Here he was placed at school, and next apprenticed to a cedar-cooper. While thus employed, he was permitted to gratify a desire he had frequently expressed of becoming an evangelist to the Indians, when in the spring of 1762 he was called to accompany the well-known Christian Frederic Post, who had planned a mission among the tribes of the then far west, to the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum. Here Post, in the summer of 1761, had built himself a cabin (it stood near the site of the present town of Bolivar), and here on the 11th day of April, 1762, the intrepid missionary and his youthful assistant began their labors in the Gospel. But the times were unpropitious, and the hostile attitude of the Indians indicating a speedy resumption of hostilities with the whites, the adventurous enterprise was abandoned before the expiration of the year. Young Heckewelder returned to Bethlehem, and the war of Pontiac’s conspiracy opened in the spring of 1763.
In the interval between 1765 and 1771, Mr. Heckewelder was, on several occasions, summoned from his cooper’s shop to do service for the mission. Thus, in the summer of the first mentioned year, he spent several months at Friedenshütten, on the Susquehanna (Wyalusing, Bradford county, Pennsylvania), where the Moravian Indians had been recently settled in a body, after a series of most trying experiences, to which their residence on the frontiers and in the settlements of the Province subjected them, at a time when the inroads of the savages embittered the public mind indiscriminately against the entire race. This post he visited subsequently on several occasions, and also the town of Schechschiquanink (Sheshequin), some thirty miles north of Wyalusing, the seat of a second mission on the Susquehanna.
A new period in the life of Mr. Heckewelder opened with the autumn of 1771, when he entered upon his actual career as an evangelist to the Indians, sharing the various fortunes of the Moravian mission among that people for fifteen years, than which none perhaps in its history were more eventful. The well-known missionary David Zeisberger, having in 1768 established a mission among a clan of Monseys on the Allegheny, within the limits of what is now Venango county, was induced in the spring of 1770 to migrate with his charge to the Big Beaver, and to settle at a point within the jurisdiction of the Delawares of Kaskaskunk. Here he built Friedensstadt, and hither the Moravian Indians of Friedenshütten and Schechschiquanink removed in the summer of 1772. Mr. Heckewelder was appointed Zeisberger’s assistant in the autumn of 1771, and when in the spring of 1773 Friedensstadt was evacuated (it stood on the Beaver, between the Shenango and the Slippery Rock, within the limits of the present Lawrence county), and the seat of the mission was transferred to the valley of the Muskingum, Mr. Heckewelder became a resident of the Ohio country. Here in succession were built Schönbrunn, Gnadenhütten, Lichtenau and Salem, flourishing towns of Moravian Indians, and here our missionary labored with his associates hopefully, and with the promise of a great ingathering, when the rupture between the mother country and her transatlantic colonies, gradually involved them and their cause in the most perplexing complications. On the opening of the western border-war of the Revolution in the spring of 1777, the Moravian missionaries on the Muskingum realized the danger of their position. Strictly neutral as they and their converts were in reference to the great question at issue, their presence on debatable ground rendered them objects of suspicion alternately to each of the contending parties; and when, in 1780, the major part of the Delaware nation declared openly for the British crown, it was evident that the mission could not much longer hold its ground. It was for the British to solve the problem; and at their instigation, in the autumn of 1781, the missionaries and their converts in part were removed to Upper Sandusky, as prisoners of war, under suspicion of favoring the American cause. Thence the former were twice summoned to Detroit, the seat of British dominion in the then Northwest, and arraigned before the commandant of that post. Having established their innocence, and at liberty once more to resume their Christian work, the Moravians resolved upon establishing themselves in the neighborhood of Detroit, with the view of collecting their scattered converts, and gradually resuscitating the mission. The point selected was on the Huron (now the Clinton), forty miles by water northwest of Detroit. Here they built New Gnadenhütten, in 1782. Four years later, New Gnadenhütten was abandoned, and a settlement effected on the Cuyahoga, in the present county of that name in northern Ohio. It was here that Mr. Heckewelder closed his missionary labors, and years memorable in his life, in the course of which he was “in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of his countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the wilderness, in weariness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness,” and yet spared, as to his life, to a good old age, in the quiet days of which, when resting from his labors, he drew up a narrative of this remarkable period in his own experience, and in the history of his church.
On severing his connection with the mission on the Cuyahoga, in the autumn of 1786, Mr. Heckewelder settled with his wife (Sarah m. n. Ohneberg, whom he married in 1780), and two daughters at Bethlehem. This change, however, brought him no rest, as much of his time for the next fifteen years was devoted to the interests of his church’s work among the Indians, in behalf of which he made frequent and trying journeys to the west.
In the summer of 1792, Mr. Heckewelder was associated by Government with General Rufus Putnam (at that gentleman’s request), to treat for peace with the Indians of the Wabash, and journeyed on this mission as far as Post Vincennes, where, on the 27th of September, articles of peace were formally signed by thirty-one chiefs of the Seven Nations represented at the meeting. This was a high testimonial of confidence in his knowledge of Indian life and Indian affairs. In the spring of the following year, he was a second time commissioned to assist at a treaty which the United States purposed to ratify with the Indians of the Miami of the Lake, through its accredited agents, General Benjamin Lincoln, Colonel Timothy Pickering, and Beverly Randolph. On this mission he travelled as far as Detroit. The remuneration Mr. Heckewelder received for these services, was judiciously economized for his old age, his immediate wants being supplied by his handicraft, and the income accruing from a nursery which he planted on his return from the western country. In the interval between 1797 and 1800, the subject of this sketch visited the Ohio country four times, and in 1801 he removed with his family to Gnadenhütten, on the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum. Here he remained nine years, having been intrusted by the Society of the United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen, founded at Bethlehem, in 1788, with the superintendence of a reservation of 12,000 acres of land on the Tuscarawas, granted by Congress to the said Society for the benefit of the Moravian Indians, as a consideration for the losses they incurred in the border-war of the Revolution. During his residence in Ohio, Mr. Heckewelder was also for a time in the civil service, being a postmaster, a justice of the peace, and an associate judge of the Court of Common Pleas.
In 1810 he returned to Bethlehem, built a house of his own, which is still standing, planted the premises with trees and shrubs from their native forest, surrounded himself with birds and wild flowers, and through these beautiful things of nature, sought by association to prolong fellowship with his beloved Indians in their distant woodland homes. He was called in 1815 to mourn the departure of his wife to the eternal world.
At a time when there was a growing spirit of inquiry among men of science in our country in the department of Indian archæology, it need not surprise us that Mr. Heckewelder was sought out in his retirement, and called upon to contribute from the treasure-house of his experience. In this way originated his intimacy with Du Ponceau and Wistar of the American Philosophical Society, and that career of literary labor to which he dedicated the latter years of his life. In addition to occasional essays, which are incorporated in the Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of that society, Mr. Heckewelder, in 1818, published under its auspices, the “Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the neighboring States.” His “Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohican Indians,” appeared in 1820, and in 1822 he prepared his well-known collection of “Names, which the Lenni Lenape, or Delaware Indians, gave to Rivers, Streams, and Localities within the States of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia, with their Significations.” This was his last literary effort; another year of suffering, and on the 31st of January, 1823, the friend of the Delawares having lived to become a hoary old man of seventy-nine winters, passed away.
He left three daughters, Johanna Maria, born April 6, 1781, at Salem, Tuscarawas county, Ohio—the first white female child born within the borders of that State (she died at Bethlehem, September 19, 1868); Anna Salome, born August 13, 1784, at New Gnadenhütten, on the River Huron (Clinton), Michigan; she married Mr. Joseph Rice, of Bethlehem, and died January 15, 1857; and Susanna, born at Bethlehem, December 31, 1786; she married Mr. J. Christian Luckenbach, of Bethlehem, and died February 8, 1867.
Mr. Heckewelder was a fair representative of the Moravian missionaries of the last century, a class of men whose time was necessarily divided between the discharge of spiritual and secular duties; who preached the Gospel and administered the Sacraments in houses built by their own hands; who wielded the axe, as well as the sword of the Spirit, and who by lives of self-denial and patient endurance, sustained a mission among the aborigines of this country in the face of disappointments and obstacles, which would have discouraged any but men of their implicit faith in the Divine power of the Christian religion.
The subject of this notice made no pretensions to scholarship on taking the author’s pen in hand. He was eminently an artless man, and artlessness is his characteristic as a writer. The fascinating volume to which this brief sketch is deemed a sufficient introduction, was received with almost unqualified approbation on its appearance in 1818. It was translated into German by Fr. Hesse, a clergyman of Nienburg, and published at Göttingen in 1821. A French translation by Du Ponceau appeared in Paris in 1822. True, there were those who subsequently took exception to Mr. Heckewelder’s manifest predilection for the Lenape stock of the North American Indians, and others who charged him with credulity, because of the reception of their national traditions and myths upon the pages of his book. Knowing, as we do, that even the most prudent of men are liable to err in their search after truth, it would be presumptuous to claim infallibility for our author. It would, however, be as presumptuous to refuse his statements all claim to respect. Hence it may not be denied that John Heckewelder’s contributions to Indian archæology, touching their traditions, language, manners, customs, life, and character, while supplying a long-felt want, are worthy of the regard which is usually accorded to the literary productions of men whose intelligence, honesty, and acquaintance with their subject have qualified them to be its expounders.
In the preparation of his account, Mr. Heckewelder acknowledges his indebtedness to Moravian authorities, contemporaries, or colleagues of his in the work of missions among the aborigines of this country. He refers frequently to the Rev. J. Christopher Pyrlæus, and introduces extracts from the collection of notes and memoranda made by that clergyman during his sojourn in America. His references to Loskiel, the historian of the Moravian mission among the North American Indians, are more frequent. In fact, it is evident that he availed himself largely of the introductory chapters of that history, the material of which was furnished to Loskiel by the veteran missionary, David Zeisberger. In this way then, Mr. Heckewelder supplemented his personal experience, and the knowledge he had gained by intercourse with the Indians, touching those subjects of which he treats in his charming narrative.
Both the text and the author’s footnotes, as found in the edition of 1818, are faithfully reproduced in the present issue; neither have been tampered with in a single instance. Such a course was deemed the only proper one, although it was conceded that the omission of occasionally recurrent passages, and a reconstruction of portions of the volume might render the matter more perspicuous, and the book more readable, without detracting from its value as a repository of well authenticated facts.[1]
AN ACCOUNT
OF THE
HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS
OF THE
Indian Nations,
WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND
THE NEIGHBOURING STATES.
BY THE REV. JOHN HECKEWELDER, OF BETHLEHEM.
PHILADELPHIA: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY ABRAHAM SMALL, No. 112 Chestnut Street. 1819.
DEDICATION
TO
CASPAR WISTAR, M.D.,
PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, ETC.
Dear Sir.—Having, at your particular request, undertaken the arduous task of giving to the Historical Committee of our Society an Account of those Indian Nations and Tribes which once inhabited Pennsylvania and the adjoining States, including those who are known by the name of the “Six Nations;” I have now, as far as has been in my power, complied with your wishes, or at least I have endeavoured so to do.
Foreseeing the difficulties I should labour under, in writing the history of a people, of whom so many had already written, I could not but consider the undertaking both as unpleasant and hazardous; being aware, that it would be impossible for me in all respects to coincide with those who have written before me; among whom there are not a few, who, although their good intentions cannot be doubted, yet from their too short residence in the country of the Indians, have not had sufficient opportunities to acquire the knowledge which they undertake to communicate. Ignorant of the language, or being but superficially acquainted with it, they have relied on ignorant or careless interpreters, by whom they have been most frequently led astray; in what manner, this little work will abundantly shew.
The sure way to obtain correct ideas, and a true knowledge of the characters, customs, manners, &c., of the Indians, and to learn their history, is to dwell among them for some time, and having acquired their language, the information wished for will be obtained in the common way; that is, by paying attention to their discourses with each other on different subjects, and occasionally asking them questions; always watching for the proper opportunity, when they do not suspect your motives, and are disposed to be free and open with you.
The political state and connexions of the two once great and rival nations, the Mengwe, (or Six Nations) and the Lenape (or Delawares, as we call them), being little, or but imperfectly known to many of us, I have been at some pains in unfolding the origin and true cause of their rivalship; and the means resorted to by the one nation, to bring themselves into consequence with the white people, for the purpose of subduing the other.
How far the Six Nations have succeeded in this, we know; at least, we know so much, that they sold the country of the Lenape, Mohicans, and other tribes connected with them, by piecemeals to the English, so that they were finally obliged to wander to the West, while their enemies, during all this time, remained in full and quiet possession of their country.
If we ought, or wish to know the history of those nations from whom we have obtained the country we now live in, we must also wish to be informed of the means by which that country fell into our hands, and what has become of its original inhabitants. To meet this object, I have given their traditions respecting their first coming into our country, and their own history of the causes of their emigrating from it.
On all the subjects which I have treated respecting the different tribes, I have endeavoured to be impartial. Yet, if I should still be thought to have shewn some partiality for the Delawares and their connexions, with respect to the affairs between them and the Six Nations, I have only to reply, that we have been attentive to all the Six Nations told us of these people, until we got possession of their whole country; and now, having what we wanted, we ought not to turn them off with this story on their backs, but rather, out of gratitude and compassion, give them also a hearing, and acquit them honourably, if we find them deserving of it.
What I have written, concerning their character, their customs, manners, and usages, is from personal knowledge, and from such other information as may be relied on; and in order to be the better understood, I have frequently added anecdotes, remarks, and relations of particular events. In some instances I have had reference to authors, and manuscript notes taken down upwards of seventy years since, by individuals well deserving of credit.
To you, Sir, I need not apologise for my deficiency in point of style and language, which has been known to you long since. I have endeavoured to make amends for this defect, by being the more careful and correct in my narrations, so as at least to make up in matter what in manner may be deficient.
I am, Sir, with great respect, Your obedient humble servant, November, 1817. JOHN HECKEWELDER.
Since the above was written, my excellent friend Dr. Wistar has departed this life, lamented by the whole country, of which he was an ornament. To me he was more than I can express; he directed and encouraged my humble labours, and to his approbation I looked up as my best reward. He is gone, but his name and his virtues will long be held in remembrance. By me, at least, they shall never be forgotten. This Dedication, therefore, will remain, as a testimony of the high respect I bore to this great and good man while living, and as a tribute justly due to his memory.
J. H.
Bethlehem, March, 1818.
CONTENTS
PART I.
PART II.
CORRESPONDENCE RESPECTING THE INDIAN LANGUAGES.
PART III.
| [WORDS, PHRASES, AND SHORT DIALOGUES] | 437 |
