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CHAPTER III.

The Indians in the Conestoga Valley.

HE valley of the Conestoga was the favored home of the Indian when the Welshmen

came there, and they continued to share it with him for many years. The new settlers retained the name the Indians had given to the stream-Conestoga, "Crooked Creek." The tribe that had its villages in the valley was known far and wide under the name of the "Conestoga Indians." They were a sub-tribe of the Delawares, and acknowledged allegiance to the Six Nations, with whom they were constantly in communication and accord.

The ploughs of the Welshmen continued for many years to turn up in the valley stone arrowheads, axes, and other Indian implements which bore witness to the presence of the Indians there in their stone age. Their villages consisted of cabins built closely together along narrow streets. Here they planted their corn in the fertile soil of the valley, and crushed it into meal with their primitive pestle and mortar of stone. Here also they grew the tobacco which they smoked in their pipes of soapstone and reed. The white man was no stranger to them, though he had not settled

in this remote valley before the Welshmen came. More than half a century earlier the ancestors of these Indians had carried their beaver-skins down to the Dutch and Swedish trading-posts at the mouth of the Schuylkill, where they were known as Minquas; and a Swedish missionary, the Rev. Jonas Aurén, had labored among them in the earliest years of the eighteenth century. It was not the fault of the Indian if he had not always lived on terms of friendly intercourse with the whites. He welcomed them when they came, dealt fairly with them, and sold them his lands for a few trinkets. He was more sinned against than sinning. A Dutch preacher on the Delaware expressed his sense of the injustice that had been done by the whites to the Indian, by saying that he dreaded to meet him face to face in Heaven.

As yet they were the same magnificent creatures of the forest that roamed these wilds before the Dutch and the Swedes came, on whom these Welshmen must have looked with unfeigned admiration -straight, alert, graceful, fleet of foot, and of inexhaustible endurance. Their blood was still enriched by the game which nature had provided for them with lavish hand. Governor Oglethorpe, who knew them in their prime, declared that the North American Indians were the finest specimens, intellectually, physically, and morally, of any people the world had ever seen, and that they lacked only Christianity to make them perfect.

But their decline had already begun when they

exchanged their romantic bow and arrow for the rifle; when they decorated themselves with the aid of the looking-glasses they got from the Dutch, instead of looking over the banks into their limpid pools of water; when they substituted the sluggishness of the hook and line for the alertness and skill with which they speared their fishes; when they exchanged their fur and feather mantles for the gay duffels made in Holland; when they learned that the wild excitements of their active life could be simulated, after a fashion, by the "fire-water" which the Dutch and Swedes gave them. A drunken Indian did not make a picturesque ruin.

After Penn had made his treaty with the Indians, the Province provided a reservation for the Conestogas, of about five hundred acres, near where the creek flows into the Susquehanna River. Here the Province substituted its paternal care for the bounty of nature, and with the change the Indian lost much of the splendor that was his when he was the ward of the wilderness. In recent years the fatigues of the hunt had been endured not only for sport or for the necessaries of life, but in order that they might have the peltries to exchange with the white trader for the articles of civilization that he had to offer them.

They lived a simple and romantic life on this reservation for sixty years, measuring the flight of time by the recurrence of the seasons, the new moon, and the rising and setting of the sun, hunt

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ing in the Welsh Mountain, the Blue Ridge, and the distant Alleghanies, selling their furs and their deer and beaver skins to the Indian trader, and eating their game in peace and contentment. They referred to Penn's treaty with their ancestors as a chain which was still preserved, strong and bright," and hoped that it might always be so "while the Great Spirit rules in heaven and earth, and while the water flows, and the sun shines in the heavens." Voltaire truly spoke of this treaty as the only compact that had never been sworn to and never broken. When their allies, the Six Nations, swept the valley of the Susquehanna with their cruel massacres during the Seven Years' War, these Conestoga Indians remained peaceably upon their reservation, and so this little valley escaped the atrocities of that war. It stands to their credit as an enduring monument of their honor and fidelity.

More than that, these Conestoga Indians were often a peaceful element in a very disturbing condition of affairs. Always peaceable themselves, they exercised a restraining and conservative influence upon restless, aggressive, and less friendly tribes. Their reservation furnished a neutral place where the chiefs of other tribes, who would not go to Philadelphia, were willing to assemble and hold their conferences with the leaders of the whites. They occupied a middle position between the Southern Indians and the Six Nations to the north. Many council-fires were lighted

upon this reservation, around which were assembled from time to time the great chiefs of the Six Nations and other leading tribes of the continent, as well as the governors and councillors of the Province. At these councils important differences with and between the Indians were adjusted. Many treaties were made there and belts of wampum exchanged with all the dignity and formal ceremonies of these romantic and imaginative people. The rivalry and aggressions of the Southern Indians occasionally led their young men into war with them, and sometimes they were reluctantly drawn into the wars between the more distant tribes, but generally their pursuits were peaceful.

Their numbers were gradually diminished by these wars. When their old queen died and the old warriors were succeeded by a new generation, a number of their young men, who fretted under the monotony of the reservation, moved off into wilder regions upon which the white settlements had not as yet relentlessly encroached. As time went on, still others were crowded out by the increasing population of the Conestoga Valley. Finally, when the killing of deer was prohibited, the more active were obliged to seek new huntinggrounds where they might follow without restraint their wild pursuits. So the once powerful and influential tribe of the Conestogas gradually became a memory of the past.

At the time of the French and Indian War (1754)