Lecture delivered at the Dietrich Theater, Tunkhannock, PA on October 15, 2023
Thank you for the invitation to speak today at the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock, standing on the traditional lands of the Munsee, Lenapehoking and Susquehannock Indians.
I titled this talk “Places of Peace” and intentionally did not add a question mark. As I will try to show, there were certainly tensions on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, both in the Moravian Indian villages of Friedenshütten and Scheschquehannunk between the Mahican and Delaware (Unami and Munsee) residents, and with their neighbours, both settlers and Native Americans, and also in outward-facing discussions with the Haudenosaunee to the north, specifically the Cayuga nation’s chief and the Colonial Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Colonel William Johnson. But, since the outbreak of the French and Indian war and the subsequent Pontiac’s Rebellion, the villages were places of relative peace in comparison with the violence and bloodshed that was occurring as a result of increasing racial tensions between the white settlers and ANY Native Americans further down the Susquehanna River.
What I would like to discuss today is how this place – from the mouth of the Lackawanna up to what is now the New York/Pennsylvania border – was briefly a place of relative stability and environmental wealth for groups of displaced Moravian Indians, Mohican, Unami and Munsee speaking, who were caught up in both the religious awakening that swept up and down the Susquehanna River in the 1740s and the redefinition and renegotiation of tribal identities in Native communities in the Susquehanna Valley.
To help me in this work, I draw on my own long involvement with the records of the Moravian Church in the North American missions, in particular the deep research for my forthcoming book on the Shamokin mission which predated these North Branch missions by 10-15 years but which contains some of the same actors. Common themes for that research project and this one include the historical work of scholars such as Jane Merritt on the contribution of women missionaries to the intercultural exchanges in Pennsylvania, my own work on trade and missions in early Pennsylvania; the recent revisioning of this time and place by scholars such as Richard Pointer, in his remarkable “biography” of Papunhank, the Munsee religious leader that was published in 2020. Also vital to my work is Amy Schutt’s important essay on tribal identities in Moravian missions on the North Branch; and, as we end today, Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly’s reconstructions of the soundscapes of Moravian mission landscapes. Much of this work is based on the deciphering of the archival records of the Moravian Church, held in Bethlehem PA and also available through Gale Cengage online (if you can read archaic German script).
There are also certain central figures that pervade this work:
- The Moravian missionary, David Zeisberger
- The Munsee “Prophet” (John) Papunhank, baptized into the Moravian Church by Zeisberger
- Job Chillaway and his brother Billy, residents and later title holders to the lands of Wyalsuing
- John Woolman, a leading Quaker whose work with Papunhank was central to his religious vision
- The Moravian missionary couples who worked in Friedenshütten and Scheschquehannunk: Johann and Margeret Jungmann (fluent in Mahican),
- Johann and Johanna Schmick (who was fluent in Mahican and wrote a Mahican dictionary)
- Johannes and Marie Roth (who was learning Munsee dialect of Delaware)
First, who were the Moravians and why were they establishing missions to the Native Americans of the North East in the Colonial period?
Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf was born in Dresden, the capital of Saxony in 1700. Zinzendorf was a descendent of Protestant Austrian nobility and was raised by his grandmother, Henriette Catharine von Gersdorf after his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage. His grandmother, an educated and talented woman, exercised great influence on the politics and pietism of the day. Zinzendorf was educated at Francke’s school in Halle where he first encountered missionaries returning from the Lutheran mission in Tranquebar, India.
During this period in Halle, he most likely heard about emigration to North America, as in 1702 an entrepreneurial German who had lived in Pennsylvania, Daniel Falckner, had met with the leader of the school and discussed subjects as far-ranging as where the other German settlers lived, to what Native Americans ate, how they hunted, how they raised their children and how one might trade and make money. By 1727 over 20,000 Germans had settled in Pennsylvania in search of financial wealth, and religious and political freedom.
Zinzendorf developed a quite unique approach to mission work. For example, Zinzendorf claimed that the refusal of some missionaries from other denominations to mix with the non-Christians, or to live at their level of poverty, was contrary to the spirit of Christ and accordingly, baptisms were to be performed individually and not en masse, that the individual’s path to salvation was charted by means of frequent “speakings” with spiritual Helpers from the same cultural and linguistic background as the candidate, and that each person was a member of a small band of people who came together regularly to discuss their spiritual growth, exchange confidences about their personal problems, encourage and forgive each other, and help each other. Such an individualistic approach toward conversion had both its benefits and drawbacks. The benefits showed themselves in the success of the missions. The drawback was that the number of converted remained small.
In 1742 Zinzendorf travelled to North America and stayed first in Philadelphia and then came up into the Lehigh Valley. From there he made several trips into Indian Country, first to the Mohican village in Shekomeko, Dutchess County NY, then he visited unsuccessfully the Shawnee in the Wyoming Valley, and also he visited Shamokin and met Shikellamy, Madame Montour and Andrew.
The Moravian mission project was just one of many vectors of colonization of Native American religion and lifeways, but arguably, the most well-meaning. Other groups had already proselytized the Native Americans of the North East, such as the Jesuits and the Presbyterians. Some Native Americans (like Madame Montour) were baptized multiple times and some, like the Oneida, Shikellamy had been baptized in his youth but was drawn to the Moraivans, perhaps especially David Zeisberger, and might well have been baptized before his untimely death in December 1748. The Moravian understanding of conversion and baptism required that each individual non-Christian should feel the call to convert within his or her heart because of the model provided by other Moravians (European or Native American) and also the need to repent. This meant that Moravian conversions were small in number, individualized, and yet also more deeply internalized within Native American communities, to the extent that when asked to move within the vicinity of other non-Chrstian Native villages in the aftermath of Pontiac’s War, leaders such as Papunhank refused, citing the difficulty of maintaining their lives of faith when having to live with non-Christians.
The mission at Friedenshütten was the result of years-long negotiation and discussion with both the Colonial authorities and also with Papunhank, the Munsee religious leader who had built up a substantial town at Wyalusing in the 1750s. Born probably in 1705, maybe in upstate New York, Papunhank’s life has been masterfully pieced together by historian Richard Pointer who draws heavily on many different manuscript sources in the Moravian archives. Pointer outlines not only his biography but also the context in which he lived: an incredibly complex world of colonial expansion, Native American negotiation, betrayal, trickery, increasing racial tension, a discovery of faith, renewal, and alliance building. His story is definitely that of the Delaware peoples, as they were displaced and removed, “adopted” and made into rhetorical women and children by the Six Nations. Renouncing alcohol after the death of his father, Papunhank campaigned to ban the trade in rum. He visited the Society of Friends in Philadelphia (especially Anthony Benezet, the abolitionist and author of influential tracts on the shared humanity of both enslaved Africans and colonized Native Americans) and, according to Pointer, possibly met Shikellamy in Shamokin and witnessed how this effective diplomatic and negotiator for the Six Nations managed to effect a delicate balance between his people’s culture and priorities and the rapidly changing landscape of the Colonial period.
Papunhank desired to found his own village, where his rejection of alcohol and his awakened spirituality could determine the rhythm of life. The availability of good hunting and fertile land and access to the waterways that served as the major routes for trade led him in 1752 to settle on land at Wyalusing and build a substantial settlement. But it was not long before the hostilities of the French and Indian War which erupted in 1755 and the Delawares were split in their loyalties between the French and the British.
The fate of the Indian Moravians who had been expelled from New York state in 1744 and had moved to Gnadenhütten on the Mahoning and Nain near Bethlehem has been told many times. The hostilities of Pontiac’s Rebellion and the ensuing attacks on any Native American groups in 1763-4, converted or not, meant that the safest place for them was deemed by the Colonial authorities to be the barracks in Philadelphia. The attacks of the Paxton Boys as they were known on the Conestoga Indians in Lancaster County and then the ensuing march on Philadelphia made it clear that the “Peaceable Kingdom” that William Penn had envisaged was now an impossibility. The perpetrators of the massacre defended their actions in a remonstrance published in 1764, claiming that the violations of the “distressed and bleeding” frontier were an affront to the brethren and relatives of the murdered whites. They also accused the Moravian Indians of Nain of sending messages to the Shawnee living on the Great Island to plot further murders of the white settlers along the Susquehanna River. According to historian Kevin Kenny, the Paxton Boys were not the only ones to suspect that the Moravian Indians of Nain were secretly trading with enemy Indians and supplying them with guns and ammunition. The Assembly’s commissioners also believed that “there is much reason to suspect the said Moravian Indians have also been principally concerned in the late Murders committed near Bethlehem, in the county of Northampton” (Kenny, p. 133) In response to these accusations, in October 1763 restrictions were placed on purchases of gunpowder in Nain, and the commissioners recommended that the Nain Indians be removed to Philadelphia so that their “behavior may be more closely observed.” (ibid.) To this end, on November 8 1763 a party of 127 Indians from the missions of Nain, Wechquetank, Nazareth and Bethlehem set out for Philadelphia.
As I have discussed in another talk, the non-Indian residents of Bethlehem viewed the departure of the Indians, not only from the mission villages but also from within the very choirhouses of Bethlehem with ambivalence. Kate Carté has argued that the removal of the Nain and Wechquetank Indians was something accepted by the Bethlehem non-Indian residents and that they did not fight this decision because they had never seen them as part of their community (Engel, For Religion and Profit, p. 184) And, a few weeks after the Moravian Indians arrived in Philadelphia on November 11, they were greeted by a furious mob ready to murder them. Afraid that the Philadelphia barracks would not protect them from the mob, the Moravian Indians were moved to a former “pestilence house” on Province Island in the Delaware River. And there they stayed for fifteen months. Conditions were terrible in the prison. Disease was rampant. By the end of 1764, 56 of the Indians had died, nearly half of them children.
The fate of the Nain Indians in the Philadelphia barracks was a constant source of concern for the Bethlehem Moravians. Given the political unrest and racial hatred now rampant in the Pennsylvania backcountry, that was spilling into the crowds of the cities of Philadelphia and Lancaster, it was clear that Nain could no longer be the home of Christian Indians. In September of 1764, before even a clear decision had been made as to the fate of the Indians, plans were drawn up to dismantle the buildings. After the leaders of the Indians in the barracks petitioned for their own release, they were permitted to leave the city and arrived on March 22 1765 back in Bethlehem in deep snow. They were allowed to briefly stop for a week at what remained of their old homes. Six of the fourteen houses were sold to individuals in Bethlehem on March 30, (according to Levering, one was the chapel) and then the following day a farewell lovefeast was held and on April 3 the Moravian Indians left Bethlehem for the apparent safety of Papunhank’s village of Wyalusing on the North Branch.
How come these baptized Indians, Delaware and Mohican, were invited to come to the North Branch? According to Pointer, the Muncee prophet’s village was losing its inhabitants in the early 1760s; some no longer wanted to hear his message, some were worried at the violence on the frontier and as close as the Wyoming Valley where Teedyuscung’s village had been attacked. At this point of crisis, the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger turned up in Papunhank’s village and accepted his invitation to preach. This fortuitous appearance in 1763 led to Papunhank inviting the Moravians to send a missionary to the upper North Branch; also Papunhank requested that Zeisberger baptize him into the Moravian Church. Upon baptism, he received the name, Johannes. Now a Moravian and also still the leader of his village he also recognized the threat that his people were under and for this reason joined the Nain Indians in the Philadelphia Barracks. Negotiating with the Six Nations and also the Colonial authorities, Johannes Papunhank should also be credited with arranging the removal of the remainder of the Nain Indians to Wyalusing. According to Pointer, Papunhank assumed the leadership of this new Moravian community in June 1765, preaching in the Muncee dialect of the Lenape language and also, it is thought, able to communicate with the Mohican Moravians due to his time at the Philadelphia Barracks.
The village that became known as Friedenshütten was built in 1766 in a position closer to the river than Papanhunk’s Wyalusing. The mission diary reveals the day-to-day activities that sustained the community both physically and spiritually. From its beginnings in the spring of 1765, when food was scarce, to its dissolution in the summer of 1772, the town supported itself with its gardens of produce, and seasonal hunting and shad fishing. It hosted numerous parties of visiting Indian nations, some very large and very hungry, many coming for political parley, some coming to visit their family members who had converted. Reading the mission diaries that still exist only in manuscript form, a picture emerges of a vibrant community with a multi-lingual school, a Gemeinhaus (church) complete with oil paintings and a bell, log houses with glass windows, bark houses for those who preferred them, fertile kitchen gardens, and canoes tied up along the river bank.
The numbers in this community kept growing. By the end of 1765 the number was 146, by the end of 1766, 172, and by the end of 1767, 185. The population was made up of almost a third of non-baptized Native Americans, Delaware, Mohican, and also visitors from the Nanticoke, Tuscaroras, and the Cayuga, under whose oversight the lands in Wyalusing fell. Disputes did occasionally arise about the language of worship in Friedenshütten, with the Lenape speakers feeling as though they were at a disadvantage with the preponderance of services being held in Mohican.
And perhaps for that reason in 1769 a delegation of Delaware Moravians discussed the transfer of their members to the already existing village of Schih-shi-quan-nink (a Delaware name meaning a rattle made of a tortoise shell) about 13 miles upriver (or 3.5 hours on a good day). As Amy Schutt has discussed in her work on tribal identities on the Upper Susquehanna, the possible separation of the two congregations into their linguistic groupings in fact went against the Moravian mission philosophy of converted Indians seeing themselves as “one people.” However, the separation into two congregations helped relations between the two groups.
Schechschequanunk was a smaller mission village, numbering only 53 individuals, most of whom were not communicant members, and up to half of whom were not baptized. The geographical location of the village, over 20 miles closer to the Munsee settlements on the Chemung River, meant that it attracted frequent visitors from there, many of whom were relatives of those living in the Moravian village. Some visits were also from the extended family of the Montours, especially the granddaughter of Madame Montour, Esther. The picture of “Queen” Esther that emerges from the mission diaries is not of the bloody avenger of the Wyoming Valley but rather of a leader of the Munsee at a time of political turmoil, colonial negotiation and eventually, with the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the prospect of imminent displacement of Native Americans, Christian or not, to lands either under the oversight of the Cayuga (today’s Ithaca, NY) or further west.
Regardless of the threat of imminent removal (surveying of the lands began in June 1769) in both communities, the inhabitants sustained themselves according to the hunting and agricultural traditions of their cultures. There are frequent mentions of the hunting parties coming back with deer, bear and elk meat; but also of the interdiction of hunting on Sundays and the abolition of the celebration of the “bison” or magic hunting medicine ritual in October 1769. The communities are both plagued by wolves who attack livestock repeatedly and thus necessitate the building of a fence around the Friedenshütten village. In March, the inhabitants (women) would leave for the sugar camps where maple sap was tapped and boiled day and night. Corn was planted in late May, when shad were also fished for. Schoolbooks for English spelling were distributed, and the children were reported to be eager learners, and a new schoolhouse was erected to hold the growing population in Freidenshütten. Johannes Roth would bring communicant members of Scheschquinunk down to Friedenshütten for Communion and Easter celebrations.
But in amongst all this activity directed towards building a secure and sustainable settlement, the Moravian Indians were frequently reminded of the insecurity of their right to be on this land. Job Chillaway had filed a legal claim to the lands with the Colonial authorities; Chief Gagohunt of the Cayuga was encouraging the Delaware to move north out of Pennsylvania; David Zeisberger was heeding the invitation of other Delaware chiefs to move west into Ohio country, where the precarity of the property rights in Wyalusing would be unimportant. Johannes Papunhank was however committed to staying put.
Then in September 1771 out of seemingly nowhere, Job Chilloway and others brought accusations of witchcraft against Johannes Panpunhank. This was the final straw in the fight over the land and rights, and although in October chiefs from the Conoy, Nanticoke, Minisink, and Cayuga all refuted the lies told about Papunhank’s sorcery, the distrust stuck. Three weeks later the moving plan to Ohio country was announced which was to be completed by the end of May 1772. Chief Netawatwees of the Delaware council at Gekelemukpechünk had received reports that the way in which the Indians at Wyalusing could live as both Christians and Indians was good and therefore invited them to come west. The message was delivered through Delaware leader Wangomen and then through another leader, Killbuck.
As the 19th-century historian of the Moravian Church William Reichel writes, “The order for the survey at Wyalusing in favour of Job Cilloway is dated the 20th of May, 1772.” The survey was made by John Lukens, Surveyor General. 16th Sept 1773. As we can see from this beautiful digitally restored image of the original survey, completed by Bob Lissa here in Tunkhannock and donated by David Buck, the land covered 623 acres and began on the eastern side of the North Branch at the mouth of the Wyalusing Creek, extended up the side of the creek 139 perches and then over and back to the river. It was part of the Proprietories “Manor of Pomfret” but was called Dundee Manor. The price was 784 pounds.
Why should we be concerned about this history today?
First, this history of complexity and multi-layered identities compounded by place is still with us today; in the place names, the landscapes, the environment that survives from nearly three hundred years ago. As you know, progress towards restoring the environmental health of the river is being made with the help of DCNR and other non-governmental bodies: dams are being removed and fish ladders are being built to allow for the shad to return. New state parks along the river are being created (Vosburg Neck and PA Highlands – last site of Susquehannock village down in York County).
Also scholars are using the internet to open up new public-facing research. Indigenous artists, filmmakers, musicians, are writing this history from their perspective for the audience of today. An example is this powerful retelling of the Conestoga Indian massacre.
Other recent public-facing work that focuses on the links between contemporary Native American populations and this history of peaceful coexistence can be found in the work of Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly (https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/singing-box-331/).
They write of this project: “Reading more deeply in the mission records made clear that these hymns were a significant element of congregational life in Mohican-Moravian communities such as Shekomeko, New York, and Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, in the mid-eighteenth century. They were sung to and by the sick and the dying. They were sung at gravesides. They were sung by men while hunting. They were sung at communal feasts. They were sung for visitors and when traveling to other communities, both Native and European American. They were sung to bring comfort, to call spiritual power, and to create and fortify community.1 And as written documents, the hymnbooks have become important cultural and linguistic records, silently preserving this tradition of Mohican-Moravian hymnody for more than 250 years. As material objects, the hymnbooks in Box 331 are an important, but limited, representation of what was once a living, aural tradition of hymn singing.”
Careful historical research allows us to reconnect and rework the past into the present. Again, Eyerly and Wheeler have worked with the Stockbridge Mohican Munsee population to “resound the compositions of Josua” so we may listen to the past. And in fact today in Nazareth, Dr Eyerly is giving the Zug lecture at the Moravian Historical Society on her book Singing in the Wilderness which includes a collective singing of Moravian hymns in multiple languages. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do that!
Conclusion
I conclude my talk today on places of peace in amongst daily reports of war from Ukraine and most recently from Israel and Palestine. One could say that both of these conflicts have at their core claims to land, whose claims predate whose, and who has a right to live on which lands. As one political scientist has recently said in relation to the issue of economic development in the Global South, without clear title to land, no one will or can invest in building industries and infrastructure. This problem is at the root of economic underdevelopment in countries like Haiti. And indeed one can say the same for the desire for economic development here in Colonial Pennsylvania.
The survey map I show here, also digitally restored thanks to Bob Lissa here in Tunkhannock, is from a collection published by the State of Pennsylvania in 1895 that brought together as many of the land surveys from the Colonial period that had survived a fire in the state printing shop. The volume is entitled Draughts of the Proprietaries Manors. About ten years ago I was handed a copy of this volume with its cover tattered, some pages missing, others covered in river silt from the 1972 flood after Hurricane Agnes inundated the Susquehanna Valley. The donor told me to take it and make good use of it as he knew that I worked on the history of the Susquehanna River. For a long time, the maps lay on the kitchen table of a colleague of mine, waiting for him to help to locate the places on these beautiful drafts on a map of Pennsylvania today. Well, he never quite got around to it. So I showed the volume to another friend, Dave Buck, and, once, thanks to Dave, Bob’s daughter Alianna had done her digital magic, we could work with digitized printouts of the maps. So together we poured over the maps, trying to work out where each Manor might lie. Dave had been trained as a surveyor so he pulled out a pencil and started making calculations about rods, and perches, and chains (which was all quite foreign to me) and turned the maps this way and that to try to make them fit. But they just wouldn’t. So I did some digging around in some databases and found a very helpful article about surveying in early Pennsylvania that confirmed our fears. Some of these terrains were just so hard to traverse, let alone lay down chains to measure, that the surveyor just made it up. Ugh!
The reason I bring this up is that the non-Native or non-indigenous notion of land ownership is predicated on surveys and measurements and limits and boundaries that give us “rights” over that area. But if those boundaries are fictions then what happens? Wyalusing and Friedenshütten were abandoned because the land on which they stood had been “sold” or signed over by multiple agents; the Proprietaries, the Six Nations, the Chilloways and Johann Papunhank. The places of peace that were for a short time here on the North Branch became sites of contention. When the Moravian Indians left Friedenhütten for Ohio country, they tolled the chapel bell as they floated the canoes down the river until they turned the bend in the river below Sugar Run and lost sight of their homes at the Huts of Peace.
Thank you!
Moravian Studies and Digital Thinking and Praxis 