For anyone who has spent even a small amount of time absorbing the sound, fragrance, and feathery feel of the Eastern White Pine, you have experienced what the Iroquois called the “will of the Master of Life.” It is a fitting expression for a tree whose needles were once used to make teas that we know today contain nearly 500% more Vitamin C than lemons of equal weight; whose cambial layers (soft inner bark) were once harvested as a flour substitute; whose roots were once turned into a pine tar for adhesive and medicinal purposes; and whose resin was once used not only as a waterproofing agent, but as a base compound used in healing salves. Yet for the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples who made up the Six Nations of the Iroquois (after 1722), the Eastern White Pine also came to symbolically represent peace and unity.
Legend holds that the “Great White Roots of Peace” spread in all four central compass directions—north, east, south, and west—and that anyone who sought peace merely had to follow the roots back to the base of the tree. Once there, peace could be experienced by burying one’s hatchet, whether quite literally by digging a hole amongst the roots and placing one’s weapons in the hole or more figuratively by simply letting go of any harbored animosities or ill thoughts, intentions, or omens. It is said that the six ethnically different—and often vying—nations that came to form the Iroquois Confederacy did so because of the tree of peace. As a result, they were able to solidify and expand their territorial claims—claims that stretched from areas around Lakes Erie and Ontario, down both windward and leeward sides of the Appalachian Mountains to Kentucky and Virginia, and into the Ohio Valley (the Seneca having given name to the latter for its principle river, Ohi: yo’ meaning “Good River”). Given the expanse and location of their claimed region (they were geographically located between the British along the eastern coast of North America and the French to the north in Canada and to the west throughout the interior), it is little wonder that the Iroquois came into contact and conflict with both the French and British whose soldiers and settlers sought access and ownership of their rich lands, resources, and game.
Beginning in the early 1600s and their first contact with Europeans along their eastern borders, the Iroquois sought to embrace the newcomers to the continent, whether British, Dutch, or French. Iroquois foreign policy was bent toward creating allies out of the Europeans while concomitantly acquiring the powerful technology the Europeans wielded, especially axes and muskets. Once the Iroquois successfully traded for the new technologies, they used those weapons to expand their borders by conquering weaker tribes in an effort to extend the root system of their “Tree of Peace.” (Akin to advanced peoples, Ancient or Modern, Iroquois foreign policy utilized war, whether the threat of it or direct, total application of it, as an instrument of peace). Iroquois leaders also keenly recognized the fierce competition between Europeans, especially the British and French. As a result, they designed a policy, however cunning or duplicitous depending on one’s view, which strategically played one side against the other while never fully committing themselves to either side.
By the summer of 1744, the drums of war between England and France had been beating for nearly four years in Europe when they reached the shores of America (known as “King George’s War” in America or the “War of Austrian Succession” in Europe). In June, 1744, British representatives from the colonies of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were eager to address ongoing land disputes, the ever-increasing hostilities caused by British settlers pushing west, and the desire to mitigate any possible Iroquoian alliance with the French. As a result, they met with deputies of the Six Nations in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, some three score miles west of Philadelphia city and near the western edge of what was then British settlement.
On June 25, British colonial leaders, well known for their haughty disposition, opened the meeting with the equally self-assured members of the Iroquois delegation who long referred to themselves as the Ongwehoenwe, or “Men Surpassing all others.” Fortunately for both headstrong parties, the council was moderated by Conrad Weiser, a 48 year old German-born pioneer and English-Iroquois interpreter well known and esteemed throughout the Six Nations and British frontier alike. So well received was Weiser by the Iroquois, they referred to him as Tarachiawagon or “Holder of the Heavens.”
Over the course of the ten-day council (June 25 to July 04), Weiser helped both parties, each largely unfamiliar with the cultures and customs of the other, find the common ground necessary to affect a peaceful agreement. Led by Canassatego, the Iroquois generally controlled the proceedings. Just how much Weiser had schooled the British commissioners in dealing with the Iroquois is subject to speculation since the historical record is generally silent. It is likely, however, that Weiser made clear that Iroquois (and most native peoples) had to be cajoled, bribed, and made to feel they were in control. Negotiations to the contrary would be a mere exercise in futility. Therefore, whether the British simply allowed the Iroquois to take the lead or Iroquois persona actually did win command and direction of the council, the British commissioners found themselves surprised and impressed by the oratorical eloquence of the Iroquois, especially Canassatego. Reverend Richard Peters, Anglican minister and official scribe at the council (his notes of the council’s proceedings would later be published by an enterprising young printer from Philadelphia by the name of Benjamin Franklin), himself noted, “[t]he Indians really appear superior to the [British] Commissioners in point of sense and argument.” This council thus perhaps helped to shatter the Indian stereotype of “savages,” at least for most members of the British commission.
On July 04, the council fires were extinguished and a treaty was reached. The Iroquois agreed to cede land claims to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in return for three hundred pounds in gold, eight hundred pounds in Pennsylvania currency, the right to move through the lands ceded in Virginia in order to be able to attack Catawabas and Cherokees to their south, and British acknowledgment of Iroquois dominion over several tribes in the South. As Canassatego led the Iroquois away from Lancaster, generally following the Susquehanna River whose waters cut their way through the rugged, game-filled Iroquois-claimed hunting lands of central Pennsylvania, he must have been imbued with a sense of strength in keeping with the Iroquois belief in themselves as Ongewhoenwe. After all and by all objective accounts, it did appear that the Iroquois gained much from the British in the final treaty.
Yet as is the case in many agreements, the devil is often in the details. Whether Conrad Weiser had adequately explained the wording and meaning of the land claims embedded in the treaty from the British perspective or conveniently failed to articulate them fully remains the subject of ongoing historical discussion. The British commissioners had paid a total of 1100 pounds for “all the land within the said Colony [of Virginia] as it is now or hereafter may be peopled and bounded by his said Majesty”—wording accepted by the Iroquois thus giving Cassanatego the impression that British land claims ended at the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet because the original royal charter for Virginia (1609) claimed lands “from sea to sea, west and northwest” (language the Iroquois didn’t know about or the British failed to fully disclose), the Iroquois unknowingly signed away not only British rights to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, but nearly all of their own lands, to include those in the “Ohio Country.” The British had acquired access to thousands of acres from the Iroquois for a nominal fee payable in currency and gold. Therefore, the British, too, must have left Lancaster quite confident that they had legally secured the right to continue westward expansion, especially beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
While the old saw “white man speak with forked tongue” may come to mind here, it is worth noting that the Iroquois could hardly claim any high moral ground as it related to agreements or treaties. Not only had they sold over a half million acres of Delaware (Leni Lenape) land to the Penn family (eastern Pennsylvania) some years before, the Iroquois also sold lands in the Shenandoah Valley to the British at the Lancaster council to which they held no more than a fictive claim. Put simply, the Iroquois proved to be adept at selling lands that belonged to other tribes.
In the ensuing months of the Treaty of Lancaster, the strength of the Iroquois Tree of Peace would be tested. As the Six Nations began to better understand the British interpretation of the treaty—the belief that Cassanatego and other Iroquois delegates had sold most of their lands—a call to arms was made for the Six Nations to resist British claims thus forcing each nation to decide their course of action. The Mohawk nation, the eastern-most and most Anglophile of the Six Nations, openly broke with the other five when they sided with New York (the British) during King George’s War (1744 – 1748). Beyond the fact that any western Iroquoian lands lost to the British would have been outside the Mohawk nation's lands (generally located in much of today’s eastern New York), the Mohawk were also motivated by a desire to maintain the lasting trade relations with the British. Thus the roots of trade with the British proved to run far deeper for the Mohawk than those of the Tree of Peace with their Iroquoian neighbors. It would prove to be a fateful decision for the Mohawk as a people and the confederacy of the Six Nations more generally as both would suffer because of the fracture. In the end, it can be said with some certainty that the Treaty of Lancaster helped uproot the Iroquois Tree of Peace.
Did you know:
Born in 1696, Conrad Weiser emigrated with his family from the war-ravaged Palatine region of Germany (the Middle Rhine region of the Holy Roman Empire) to England in 1709. Outside of London, he and several thousand German refugees were placed in camps as the British Parliament debated what to do with them. Fearful they would not assimilate into British society, Weiser and his family joined some 3,000 others who were shipped to the colony of New York. Once in New York, the refugees worked in British indentured camps until their labor hours offset the cost of the government transport to the New World. In 1712, Weiser’s father (Johann Conrad Weiser, Sr.) worked off the family debt and moved the family to what is today Schoharie County, New York (Schoharie derived from the Mohawk word “driftwood” in the region). Once there, Johann Weiser arranged for Conrad, then 16 years old, to live with the Mohawks in the Schoharie Valley to learn their language and customs. Thus began the transformation of Conrad Weiser, the refugee turned frontier interpreter, diplomat, and beloved son of the Iroquois and British colonial governors alike.
Select considerations for further reading:
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 – 1766. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2001.
Merrell, James H. Into the Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Weidensaul, Scott. The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012.
