So successful was the Indian policy in general, however, that on the outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 between England and France, the Iroquois were cajoled into granting the English practically all the Ohio valley and sealing the bargain with an alliance to help protect the property against the French who were already there. In fact, commissioners from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, meeting with an Iroquois delegation around the council fire at Lancaster, obtained “a Deed recognizing the King’s right to all the Lands that are, or shall be, by his Majesty’s appointment, in the Colony of Virginia.”
As far as the Virginians were concerned those lands by ancient charter stretched all the way to the South Sea, wherever that was, although they were willing to settle for the Ohio valley for the time being. Nor did the Quaker colony seriously dispute Virginia’s claim at the time, even though nearly all of the fur traders beyond the mountains, who were now aggressively competing with the French, were Pennsylvanians.
Chief among these was George Croghan. He had not arrived in Pennsylvania from Dublin until 1741, but he was established in trade on the Ohio River well before King George’s War. By 1746 he had a number of storehouses on Lake Erie itself. From the bustling base of his operations in the 1740’s near Harris Ferry (Harrisburg) on the Susquehanna, and later from Aughwick farther west, he and his various partners directed effective attacks on French trade in the Ohio valley.
Together with his brother-in-law William Trent, and Andrew Montour, Barney Curran and John Fraser, Croghan controlled fort-like storehouses about the forks of the Ohio, up the Allegheny and the Youghiogheny, on the south shore of Lake Erie, at the forks of the Muskingum, and even on the Scioto and Miami Rivers. From these trading posts, all of which developed into rude settlements of sorts, the Pennsylvanians distributed rum, gunpowder, lead and flints, as well as calicoes, ribbons, colored stockings, kettles, axes, bells, whistles and looking-glasses. In return, they collected a fine variety of pelts and skins—beaver, raccoon, otter, muskrat, mink, fisher, fox, deer, elk, and bear.
Croghan’s pack traders, at times possibly numbering twenty-five men and driving a hundred or more mules altogether, followed the Ohio down to the falls and worked the streams that fed it. They were trading and fighting in what is now West Virginia and eastern Kentucky almost a quarter of a century before Daniel Boone. They bartered under the very guns of French forts, engaging in bloody skirmishes with the French and Indians and on occasion being taken as captives to Montreal and even to France.
Croghan had his English competitors too. There were, for instance, the five Lowrey brothers, as aggressive and as rugged a lot of rivals as might have been found on any fur frontier. But all the Pennsylvanians were as one in their persistent encroachment on the French. Backed by factors in Philadelphia and Lancaster, including Shippen and Lawrence and the firm of Levy, Franks and Simon, both of which specialized in the Indian trade and in turn received credit from wealthy merchants of London and Bristol, these intrepid frontiersmen stubbornly picked away at the French trade.
In one respect the Englishmen were fortunate. During King George’s War the French had trouble getting sufficient trade goods, and many Indians with whom they had been trading became contemptuous of them. It is said that, on one occasion, when a Frenchman only offered a single charge of powder for a beaver skin, the Indian with whom he was bartering “took up his Hatchet, and knock’d him on the head, and killed him upon the Spot.” Croghan and his Pennsylvanians took full advantage of the temporary French embarrassment, building up their annual business in pelts to a value of some 40,000 pounds sterling.
It was the prospect of a share in this lucrative trade that motivated some wealthy Virginians, among them Thomas Lee and the Washingtons, who conceived the Ohio Company after the Treaty of Lancaster. While acting as a vehicle to establish England’s claim west of the mountains, the company as it was finally organized promised future dividends from land development in those parts. But there was the immediate prospect of rich gains from the fur trade, and little time was lost in lining up experienced Indian traders for the project.
Thomas Cresap, a clever Yorkshireman, who operated a trading post in the mountains near the junction of the North and South Branches of the Potomac River, became an organizing member of the Ohio Company. So lavishly hospitable was Cresap to the Indians and others with whom he did business that he was known to them as “Big Spoon,” but to his Pennsylvania trading competitors he was an undercutting Marylander not above committing murder for a beaver skin. Certain it is that he had once been carted off in irons, after some “rascality” on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, to spend a year in prison at Philadelphia.
In any case the aristocratic tidewater Virginians counted “Colonel Cressup” a key member of their Ohio Company. The Marylander’s trading paths already led to the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. So, the fort-like establishment he maintained on Virginia’s northwestern frontier served as a convenient base from which the company commenced its well-financed operations in the Ohio valley.