Daily stories of Pennsylvania

by Frederic Antes Godcharles

This treaty was supposed to have settled all difficulties between the two courts, but the French were determined to occupy the whole territory drained by the Mississippi, which they claimed by priority of discovery by La Salle. The British complained to the French Government about encroachments being made by the French upon English soil in America.

The French deemed it necessary, in order to establish legal claim to the country which they believed to be theirs, to take formal possession of it. Accordingly, the Marquis de la Galissoniere, who was at that time Governor General of Canada, dispatched Captain Bienville de Celeron with a party of two hundred and fifteen French and fifty-five Indians to publicly proclaim possession and bury at prominent points plates of lead, bearing inscriptions declaring occupation in the name of the French King.

Celeron started on June 15, 1749, following the southern shore of Lakes Ontario and Erie, until he reached a point opposite Lake Chautauqua, when the boats were drawn up and carried over the dividing ridge, a distance of ten miles. They followed down the lake and the Conewago Creek, where they arrived at what is now Warren, near the confluence of the creek with the Allegheny River. Here the first plate was buried.

These plates were eleven inches long, seven and a half wide, and one-eighth of an inch thick. The inscription was in French, and in the following terms, as fairly translated into English:

“In the year, 1749, of the reign of Louis[Louis] XIV, King of France, We Celeron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissoniere, Governor General of New France, to re-establish tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried this plate of lead at the confluence of the Ohio with the Chautauqua this 29th day of July, near the River Ohio, otherwise Belle Riviere, as a monument of the renewal of the possession we have taken of the said River Ohio, and of all those which empty into it, and of all the lands on both sides as far as the sources of the said river, as enjoyed or ought to have been enjoyed by the King of France preceding, and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and by treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix-la-Chapelle.”

The burying of this plate was attended with much form and ceremony. All the men were drawn up in battle array, when the commander, Celeron, proclaimed in a loud voice, “Vive le Roi!” and declared that possession of the country was now taken in the name of the King. A plate on which was inscribed the arms of France was affixed to the nearest tree.

The same formality was observed in planting each of the other plates, the second at the rock known as “Indian God,” on which are ancient inscriptions, a few miles below the present Franklin; a third, at the mouth of the Wheeling Creek; a fourth at the mouth of the Muskingum; the fifth and sixth, at the mouths of the Great Kanawha and the Great Miami.

At the last point, the party burned their canoes, and obtained ponies for the return trip to the portage, when they returned to Fort Frontenac, arriving on November 6.

The Indians through whose territory this expedition passed viewed this planting with great suspicion. By some means they got possession of one of the plates, generally supposed to have been planted at the very commencement of their journey near the mouth of the Chautauqua Creek. An account of this stolen plate, taken from the original manuscript journal of Celeron and the diary of Father Bonnecamps in Paris secured by Mr. O. H. Marshall, is interesting:

“The first of the leaden plates was brought to the attention of the public by Governor George Clinton to the Lords of Trade in London dated New York, December 19, 1750, in which he states that he would send to their Lordships in two or three weeks a plate of lead full of writing, which some of the upper nations of Indians stole from Jean Coeur, the French interpreter at Niagara, on his way to the Ohio River, which river, and all the lands thereabouts, the French claim, as will appear by said writing. He further states that the lead plates gave the Indians so much uneasiness that they immediately dispatched some of the Cayuga chiefs to him with it, saying that their only reliance was on him, and earnestly begged he would communicate the contents to them, which he had done, much to their satisfaction and the interests of the English. The Governor concludes by saying that ‘the contents of the plate may be of great importance in clearing up the encroachment which the French have made on the British Empire in America.’ The plate was delivered to Colonel, afterwards Sir William Johnson, on December 4, 1750, at his residence on the Mohawk, by a Cayuga sachem who accompanied it by the following speech: