Race and Community on the Pennsylvania Frontier

Abstract

In October of 1736, Seneca chief Kanickhungo met with Pennsylvania Proprietor Thomas Penn. Reminding Penn of his father William's treatment of the colony's Native American neighbors, Kanickhungo reported that the elder Penn opened and cleared the Road between this Place and our Nations, which was very much to our good Liking ... We now desire that this Road ... may be kept clear and open, free from all Stops or Incumbrances (p. 1). This meeting, with which Jane Merritt opens her book, At the Crossroads: and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763, also provides the concept that guides much of the narrative that follows. At the Crossroads investigates the multitude of relationships developed between native and white communities (and individuals) in western Pennsylvania during the first half of the eighteenth century up until the end of the French and Indian War. Rejecting the accommodation or resistance paradigm of many earlier histories, Merritt emphasizes instead the diversity of options available to both native peoples and European settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier. Indian experience of a colonial New World, Merritt argues, begins to look more like a crossroads, a place where many paths converged, providing divers possibilities and directions to those who passed (p. 2). In the early years of interaction in this region, Indians in the mid-Atlantic region negotiated a common space with European settlers along the shifting frontier where roads both literally and figuratively passed through and between communities, connecting their lives and histories (p. 3). The thesis of the book, however, deals with the ultimate breakdown of interracial cooperation during and after the French and Indian War. By the 1760s, Merritt argues, differences between natives and Europeans increasingly came to be characterized by race. [T]he hybrid nature of frontier life, and competition for resources, and the tension of an imperial war had