With George Washington into the wilderness

by Edwin L. Sabin

It had been raining with a cold spring rain for two days, and the vast forest here in southern Pennsylvania of 1748 was dripping and soggy. The Indians did not mind; they were well greased with bear’s grease and well painted, and their skin scarcely felt the wet. Besides, they were in a hurry.

Robert, whose Seneca name was the Hunter, did not mind it either. He also was Indian. To be sure, his mother was called the White Woman. But she had been captured forty years ago, when a little girl, by the Mohawks of the French from the north, and had been traded south, and had become the wife to Chief Feather Eagle of the Delawares in the Ohio Country.

So Robert had been brought up as an Indian boy. When his father had died the great Tan-a-char-i-son, head chief of all the Mingo Iroquois and known as Half-King, passing by White Woman’s Creek on return home from a visit to the Shawnees in the west, had taken him to train him as a warrior.

To a warrior there is no weather. Heat and cold, dry and wet, they are the same to a warrior, especially a Mingo warrior of the Six Nations who have council-seats in the Long House of the proud Iroquois.

Less than a moon ago, at Logstown which was the principal village of the Mingos, upon the Ohio River, Half-King had said to Robert the Hunter:

“Listen: Tomorrow White Thunder bears a speech belt to our brothers the Delawares near the Susquehanna and I wish you to go with him. You will learn much; and if you are to be a warrior it is well that you should know your way through the woods and across the mountains.”

From that Logstown upon the north bank of the upper Ohio—the Ohion-hiio or Beautiful River—seventeen or eighteen miles down from where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now stands, Robert had set out with White Thunder the Keeper of the Mingo wampum belts, and with Aroas or Silver Heels the warrior, to travel afoot eastward through the forests and mountains for the Delawares of central Pennsylvania.

The Mingos were those Oneidas, Senecas and others of the Iroquois Six Nations who had moved from New York into Western Pennsylvania which the Iroquois claimed to have conquered. They thought little of the Delawares. The Iroquois had claimed to have conquered the Delawares also, and called them “women.” But all the Indian peoples—Iroquois, Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, Miamis—had been invited to meet the English in council at Albany, the capital of New York, this coming June, to talk peace again. Therefore Half-King Tanacharison wisely wished to learn what the Delawares to the east of him were going to do.

Now this was no small journey, although, of course, it was nothing to an Indian. Nobody except Indians and birds and beasts lived in that country, and the only white persons to cross it were the traders. But the game such as bear, deer and turkeys was plentiful, and the three travellers from Logstown had meat at every camp.