“I desire all that I have said . . . may be taken down aright”: Revisiting

Notes and Documents

“I desire all that I have said . . . may be taken down aright”:

Revisiting Teedyuscung’s 1756Treaty Council Speeches

James H. Merrell

ON November 13 , 1756 , a Delaware Indian leader namedTeedyuscung stood up to speak at a treaty council with Englishcolonists in Easton, Pennsylvania, a frontier town some fifty

miles up the Delaware River from Philadelphia. He was there to continuepeace talks that he and his colonial counterparts had begun the previoussummer. Vital to ending the terrible border war then raging was theCondolence Ceremony, a Native American ritual designed to heal heartsaching from sorrow and anger. Beginning that rite, the Delaware said:

Brother, The Times are not now as they were in the Days of ourGrandfathers; then it was Peace, but now War and Distress; Iam sorry for what has happened, and I now take and wipe theTears from your Eyes, as there is great Reason for Mourning . . .—I take away the Blood from your Bodies, with which they aresprinkled: I clear the Ground, and the Leaves, that you may sitdown with Quietness: I clear your Eyes, that when you see theDay-light you may enjoy it.

James H. Merrell teaches history at Vassar College. For advice and encourage-ment, he thanks seminar participants at the University of Minnesota, the Universityof Pennsylvania, and Yale University, along with Marshall Becker, Charles Cohen,Robert DeMaria Jr., Clyde Griffen, John Howe, Jane Merritt, Philip Morgan, JeanO’Brien, Daniel Richter, Karim Tiro, and readers for the William and MaryQuarterly: John T. Juricek, David Silverman, and one who preferred to remainanonymous.

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXIII, Number 4, October 2006

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778 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

On the other hand, perhaps Teedyuscung put it like this:You are not ye same as your Grand fathers

Bror I also now take & wipe ye tears from your Eyes as there is agreat reason of mourning . . . he takes & wipes all ye Bloodfrom your Body & clears ye place yt you may sit down takes yeBlood from ye Leaves yt you may sit down wth quietness yt wnyou see ye Day light you may enjoy it[.]1

Or maybe his words were these:

Brother I also now takes & wipes the Tears from Your Eyes asthere is Great Reason for it . . . that their places may be Clear &that they may Sit Down in peace & wipe off the blood which isSprinkled on You which was not the Case with Your fathers[.]

Three days later, urging Pennsylvanians to carry on the work ofpeace by uncovering and redressing the grievances (termed “Uneasiness”)that had caused Indians to go to war, Teedyuscung spoke as follows:

God, that is above, hath furnished us both with Powers andAbilities.—As for my own Part, I must confess, to my Shame, Ihave not made such Improvements of the Power given me as Iought; but as I look on you to be more highly favoured fromabove than I am, I would desire you, that we would join ourEndeavours to promote the good Work; and that the Cause ofour Uneasiness, begun in the Times of our Forefathers, may beremoved; and if you look into your Hearts, and act according tothe Abilities given you, you will know the Grounds of ourUneasiness in some Measure from what I said before.

It could be that the Delaware headman phrased it this way:

Therefore look into your heart you will find ye truth not onlywe but many different nations therefore as to this present busi-

1 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 2 (superscript text denotes revisions byeither the original scribe or a contemporary editor). These transcriptions, with con-text as well as sources and editorial methods, appear on the William and MaryQuarterly Web site: http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/wmq/supplement.htm. Abbreviationsused to identify sources in the Easton Treaty Texts (and noted here) include: APS(American Philosophical Society), BF (Benjamin Franklin), FAH (FriendlyAssociation, Haverford College), HSPRM (Historical Society of Pennsylvania,“Rough Minutes”), JH (John Hughes Account Book), MA (Moravian Archives), RPC(Records of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania). Please refer online to EastonTreaty Texts, Sources, for more information about the texts and repositories.

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ness, you are wise men & if you look into your as you arefavourd from above wth greater abilities yn us if you act agre-able to them you shall certainly know ye Questions wherein ouruneasiness lies & in measure according to what I have answeredbut not fully.

Or perhaps he simply said:

As we now esteem you much, that you are able, you can easilyjudge what was the Grounds of our Uneasiness.2

These versions of Teedyuscung’s words are among several that dif-ferent colonists wrote down that autumn. The first and longest excerptin each set is also the most famous and the most often consulted andquoted: Benjamin Franklin, who was at the council (but apparently didnot take notes as Teedyuscung spoke), edited and published the minutesof the congress some months later. Reading Franklin’s rendition along-side the others raises questions about just what the Delaware leader said.Did he apologize or not? Did he say that he was ashamed of himself ornot? Did he indeed pronounce the colonists God’s chosen people whowere “more highly favoured from above” than the Indians?

Such questions, in turn, beg a larger question: when Teedyuscung atan Easton council the previous July said “I desire all that I have said . . .may be taken down aright,” did he get his wish?3 More generally, andmore importantly, the scattered, scrawled remains of this Delawarediplomat’s words at Easton—published and unpublished, in fragmentsand in full, as raw rough drafts and polished fair copies—shed new lighton Native American oratory, a topic of fascination from Franklin’s dayforward. That light has the curious, paradoxical effect of shaking faithin this genre and restoring that faith. Sifting, sorting, and studying vari-ous accounts has the added effect of beckoning scholars toward a largelyuncharted realm, a strange place where one Indian seems to be sayingseveral different things at the same time.

Ever since European colonists first wrote down an Indian treaty speechin 1642, there has been an eager audience for these orations, both in per-son and in print (Figure I). Crowds of colonists flocked to gatheringslike the ones at Easton, and those too far away or too busy to attendcould satisfy their curiosity with any of the fifty books of treaty proceed-ings published before 1776. (Franklin alone brought out thirteen

TEEDYUSCUNG’S TREATY COUNCIL SPEECHES

2 Ibid., Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 2.3 Ibid., July 30, 1756, pt. 2, BF.

as I esteem you & preferable to me

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FIGURE I

The Indians giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet . . . in Octr. 1764, engraving froma sketch by Benjamin West, from [William Smith], An Historical Account ofthe Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the year MDCCLXIV under theCommand of Henry Bouquet, Esq. (Philadelphia, 1766), plate 14. Though thistreaty council took place eight years later and several hundred miles fartherwest, the depiction captures some of the elements found at Easton in 1756,including the wampum belt, the scribe, and the native orator’s dramatic pose.Courtesy, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia.

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different councils from 1736 to 1762, shipping copies to London forsale.) People on both sides of the Atlantic were impressed by what theyheard or read. At a time when the English-speaking world was enjoying “arhetorical revival,” Indian speakers drew rave reviews. The Six NationsIroquois possessed “a bright and noble Genius” comparable to “the great-est Roman Hero’s,” exclaimed New York colonist Cadwallader Colden;nowhere was this talent more evident than “in their Publick Treaties,”where one could see “the Indian Genius in the Arts of negotiating.” ThatIroquois ambassador “would have made a good figure in the forum of oldRome,” remarked a Pennsylvania official after one treaty, while aMarylander at the same congress “declared, ‘that he had never seen so justan action in any of the most celebrated orators he had heard speak.’”4

During the twentieth century, scholars began adding their voices tothis chorus of praise, calling Indian council speeches “after two hundredyears the most original and engaging documents of their century inAmerica.” Particularly in the past generation, historians, anthropolo-gists, linguists, and others have brought unprecedented energy andimagination to bear on decoding the “hundreds, probably thousands, ofIndian speeches” scratched across “thousands of manuscript pages.” In1979 the first volume of Early American Indian Documents, a projectdevoted to collecting and publishing those pages, captured the generalenthusiasm when it pronounced treaties “among the most crucialsources for understanding early American history in general and the eth-nohistory of Indian-European contact in particular.”5

4 Francis Jennings, ed., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: AnInterdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League (Syracuse, N.Y.,1985), xiv. On proceedings published before 1776, see William N. Fenton, The GreatLaw and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman, Okla.,1998), 434. For Benjamin Franklin’s production of council minutes, see Julian P. Boyd,ed., Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762 (Philadelphia, 1938). Onoratory, see David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in NorthAmerican Indian Texts (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), chap. 3; Jay Fliegelman, DeclaringIndependence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford,Calif., 1993); Matthew Lauzon, “Savage Eloquence in America and the LinguisticConstruction of a British Identity in the 18th Century,” Historiographia Linguistica 23,nos. 1–2 (1996): 123–58; Edward G. Gray, “The Making of Logan, the Mingo Orator,” inThe Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800, ed. Gray and Norman Fiering (NewYork, 2000), 258–59; Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performancein Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 113–22 (“rhetorical revival,” 117); JohnHowe, Language and Political Meaning in Revolutionary America (Amherst, Mass., 2004).Colden’s views are in Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian NationsDepending on the Province of New-York in America (1727; repr., Ithaca, N.Y., 1964), vi, x,135. For the remarks by a Pennsylvanian and a Marylander, see “Witham Marshe’sJournal of the Treaty Held with the Six Nations by the Commissioners of Maryland,and Some other Provinces, at Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, June, 1744,” Collections of theMassachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser., 7 (1800): 200.

5 Carl Van Doren, introduction to Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by BenjaminFranklin, viii (“engaging documents”). See also Lawrence C. Wroth, “The Indian


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Amid the encomiums are quieter but nagging doubts about just howclosely these documents come to capturing what Native Americans said.Some scholars do maintain that these are “the actual words they[Indians] spoke,” that “treaty journals allow readers to listen over theshoulders of . . . chiefs almost as the members of their bands and villagesmight have.” Yet others point out that the words on a page have been“put through the wringer” or have “run a gauntlet” of formidable obsta-cles. Since Indian ambassadors insisted on using their native tongue, alanguage barrier stood squarely between them and their colonial audi-tors. How good were the translators in charge of crossing that barrier?How fluent, how honest, how sober, how awake? Much as he admiredIroquois genius, determined as he was to convey some sense of that geniusto his readers, Colden had to admit “that I suspect our Interpreters maynot have done Justice to the Indian Eloquence.” Colden could even recallcouncils when, “after the [Indian] Speaker had employ’d a considerabletime in Haranguing with much Elocution, the Interpreter oftenexplained the whole by one single Sentence.”6

Treaty as Literature,” Yale Review 17, no. 4 (July 1928): 749; A. M. Drummond andRichard Moody, “Indian Treaties: The First American Dramas,” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 39, no. 1 (February 1953): 15–24. Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness:Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (Oxford, Eng., 2004),9 (“speeches”). Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native Historyof Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 110, 133 (“manuscript pages”). Alden T.Vaughan, ed., Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789, vol. 1,Pennsylvania and Delaware Treaties, 1629–1737 (Washington, D.C., 1979), xiii (“cru-cial sources”). See also Robert A. Williams Jr., Linking Arms Together: AmericanIndian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600–1800 (New York, 1997), 11. Those study-ing the Six Nations concur that “the most valuable clues to Iroquois perspectivescome from the speeches native leaders made during diplomatic encounters withEuro-Americans,” that these orations “resonate Iroquoian words and worlds, some-times quite explicitly,” and that the treaty “text remains decidedly Iroquois in for-mat and allusion” (Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of theIroquois League in the Era of European Colonization [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992], 5;Michael M. Pomedli, “Eighteenth-Century Treaties: Amended Iroquois CondolenceRituals,” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 3 [Summer 1995]: 319; Thomas Hallock,From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of aNational Pastoral, 1749–1826 [Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003], 92).

6 Van Doren, introduction to Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by BenjaminFranklin, xviii (“actual words”); Benjamin Ramirez-Shkwegnaabi, “The Dynamics ofAmerican Indian Diplomacy in the Great Lakes Region,” American Indian Cultureand Research Journal 27, no. 4 (2003): 55 (“over the shoulders”). See also Wroth, YaleReview 17: 766; Drummond and Moody, Quarterly Journal of Speech 39: 16–17;Raymond J. DeMallie, “Touching the Pen: Plains Indian Treaty Councils inEthnohistorical Perspective,” in Ethnicity on the Great Plains, ed. Frederick C.Luebke (Lincoln, Neb., 1980), 38, 40. On doubts, see “Robert Livingston(1654–1728), Secretary for Indian Affairs, and His Papers,” in Lawrence H. Leder,ed., The Livingston Indian Records, 1666–1723 (Gettysburg, Pa., 1956), 10 (“wringer”);Shoemaker, Strange Likeness, 9 (“gauntlet”); Colden, History of the Five Indian

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So it was on the Pennsylvania frontier in Teedyuscung’s day. During a1757 treaty, one disgusted observer reported “that after ye Indians hadexpressed ymselves wth. great freedom & openness in long Speeches, TheInterpreter . . . in a low untelligable manner mutter’d a small part of it.”Of course the pages bearing “several Parts of ” what Teedyuscung said at adifferent council “appear dark and confused,” grumbled anotherPennsylvanian; the Delaware leader had “been . . . kept almost continuallydrunk,” and “more especially . . . the Interpreter, at the Time the Speechwas delivered, was dozed with Liquor and Want of Sleep.”7

If a treaty talk managed to make it across the treacherous linguisticfrontier more or less intact, it still faced the perils of transcription. Adishonest scribe omitted and altered Indian speeches in pursuit of colo-nial aims that ran counter to (or ran over) native interests. A cautiousscribe “softened” and “Glossed over” orators’ “forcible expressions” thatconveyed their “extravagant notions of Freedom, property, and indepen-dence.” A bored scribe daydreamed while a Delaware or Iroquois deliv-ered what colonists considered interminable “Harrangues.” ThePennsylvania borderlands certainly had slipshod penmen aplenty. Onenoted only that an Iroquois “made a long and tedious Relation using allthe Indian Ceremonies and Phrases.” Another “took some short Notes ytconvey no determinate meaning”—“Right to Land,” “Complaint”—then later went back to “these sleight Memorandums” to “fill up theDefects of Verbs and connecting Particles so as to make what he pleasesout of them.” Some writers “miserably curtail’d & mangled” the min-utes, while others simply put down their pens to “Evade minuteing” thisor “Omit minuting” that. No wonder colonists who heard Teedyuscungat Easton in 1756 and then read the official account thought that his“Warmth and Earnestness” regarding “the Wrongs that had been donethem” was, on the page, “much too faintly expressed.”8


Nations, xi (quotations). See also Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 133;Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 6; Michael K. Foster, “Recovery and Translation ofNative Speeches Accompanying Ancient Iroquois-White Treaties,” Canadian StudiesReport, no. 5e (August 1978): 2–3; Foster, “On Who Spoke First at Iroquois-WhiteCouncils: An Exercise in the Method of Upstreaming,” in Extending the Rafters:Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies, ed. Foster, Jack Campisi, andMarianne Mithun (Albany, N.Y., 1984), 203 n. 5. My own doubts are noted in JamesH. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (NewYork, 1999), 210–15, 254, 412–13 nn. 6–8.

7 Israel Pemberton to John Fothergill, 2 8 mo. [Aug.] 1757, in PembertonPapers, box 2, file 26, Frank M. Etting Collection, no. 29, Historical Society ofPennsylvania, Philadelphia; [Charles Thomson], An Enquiry into the Causes of theAlienation of the Delaware and Shawanese Indians from the British Interest, And intothe Measures taken for recovering their Friendship . . . (London, 1759), 114.

8 For dishonesty, see David L. Ghere, “Mistranslations and Misinformation:Diplomacy on the Maine Frontier, 1725–1755,” American Indian Culture and Research

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Yet even the most conscientious secretary, even someone whobelieved that when it came to treaty “Minutes . . . we cannot be tooexact,” still struggled with the mundane mechanics of writing, the chaosof councils, and the tricks memory plays. Quill pens had to be sharp-ened or replaced, ink and paper replenished; fingers tired; patience worethin; speakers or interpreters talked too fast; background noise had to betuned out. What an amanuensis left a session with then had to be“reduce[d] into Form” and tidied up. “I settled ye Minutes & wrotethem fair,” noted the Anglican clergyman and provincial councilorRichard Peters, the Penn family’s man in the province and usually theofficial scribe at treaties, after a day’s talks (Figure II). Once the congressbroke up and he returned to Philadelphia, the settling continued asPeters “corrected Minutes” one day and spent parts of several others fur-ther “revising Minutes” before taking them to the printer. Exactly whatsettling, revising, and correcting involved, he did not say.9

Knowing the vagaries of translation and transcription has dampenedsome of the enthusiasm for treaty texts. Their “perverse incompleteness”and “pervasive bias,” one student of these documents concedes, renderthem “at best . . . only partial fragments” of the Indian way of thinking.Nevertheless—and nevertheless often enters at this point—most scholars

Journal 8, no. 4 (1984): 3–26. E. B. O’Callaghan, The Documentary History of theState of New-York; Arranged under Direction of the Hon. Christopher Morgan, Secretaryof State (Albany, N.Y., 1849), 2: 946 (“softened”); Colden, History of the Five IndianNations, x (“Harrangues”); Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, Fromthe Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government (Harrisburg, Pa.,1851), 7: 53 (“tedious Relation”); Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, Feb. 18, 1756, inPenn Manuscripts, Official Correspondence, 8: 41 (14 of document), HistoricalSociety of Pennsylvania (“short Notes”); Israel Pemberton to John Fothergill, 2 8mo. [Aug.] 1757, in Pemberton Papers, box 2, file 26, Etting Collection, no. 29(“curtail’d”); “Journal of James Pemberton at the Lancaster Treaty, 1762,” in Boyd,Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 321 (“Evade”); John Pemberton toRachel Pemberton, 27 8 mo. [Aug.] 1762, in Pemberton Papers, 16: 33, HistoricalSociety of Pennsylvania (“Omit”); Pennsylvania Archives, 8th ser., 6 (1935): 4502(“faintly”). For pathbreaking work on these matters in Pennsylvania, see FrancisJennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War inAmerica (New York, 1988), 267, 272 n. 56, 396 n. 74.

9 Richard Peters to Conrad Weiser, Apr. 25, 1756, in Richard Peters Papers, 4:52, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (“exact”). Peters was not always a scrupulousscribe, however. See 798–812. For Peters reworking notes, see Peters to [ThomasPenn], June 14, 1756, in Penn Manuscripts, Official Correspondence, 8: 113(“reduce[d]”); Peters, Diary, No[.] 15, 26 7ber 1758—7th Nov. 1758, Oct. 8 (“set-tled”), 31 (“corrected”), Nov. 2 (“revising”), in Peters Papers (see also Oct. 11, 14, 16,Nov. 1, 3–4, 6). Peters did not use shorthand, nor did Charles Thomson, anotherscribe at Easton in 1756. For Thomson, see Boyd Stanley Schlenther, CharlesThomson: A Patriot’s Pursuit (Newark, Del., 1990), 32, 213 n. 38. For the technology ofwriting in this time, see Michael Finlay, Western Writing Implements in the Age of theQuill Pen (Wetheral, Eng., 1990). Thanks to Robert DeMaria Jr. for this reference.


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FIGURE II

Attributed to John Wollaston, Richard Peters, circa 1758, oil on canvas, 301⁄16 x251⁄16 inches. Courtesy, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, gift ofMrs. Maria L. M. Peters.

785TEEDYUSCUNG’S TREATY COUNCIL SPEECHES

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(myself included) find these sources too rich, too abundant, too avail-able, and altogether too tempting to linger long on their faults or avoidthem completely. “It is amazing, nevertheless, how good the colonialrecords are,” concluded Iroquoianist William N. Fenton after decadesspent studying past and present Iroquois oratory. “The amazing thing,”he wrote elsewhere, “is the degree to which the Indian flavor comesthrough the faulty chain of communication.” “Nevertheless,” concurshistorian Daniel K. Richter, “in no other source did ethnocentric Euro-Americans preserve with less distortion a memoir of Indian thoughts,concerns, and interpretations of events.” It seems likely, Richter argues,“that much of what the Indian speakers intended found its way topaper.”10

Believing that they did better than merely convey intent, Pennsylvaniascribes during Teedyuscung’s era said they tried by various means totransfer the spoken word intact onto the page. Having the orator andinterpreter go slowly helped, as did reading back what was said,“Sentence by Sentence, to the Indians,” whether during the sessionitself, at the end of a day’s proceedings, or the next morning. Secretariessometimes compared notes; interpreters might “be askd if this be not anexact Account of what passed” or, at treaty’s end, be invited to sign astatement that “I have carefully perused the foregoing minutes, & dofind them to give a true Account of what Passed between the Governor& Indians in my Presence at Easton.” All these methods were calculatedto reduce spillage, slippage, and breakage of a council speech as it madeits way across the cultural divide.11

10 Williams, Linking Arms Together, 12 (“fragments”), 37–39. For other doubts,see Mary A. Druke, “Iroquois Treaties: Common Forms, Varying Interpretations,”in Jennings, History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, 86–88; Harry Robie, “RedJacket’s Reply: Problems in the Verification of a Native American Speech Text,” NewYork Folklore 12, nos. 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1986): 100. More positive assessmentsinclude Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, 8 (“how good”); William N. Fenton,“Structure, Continuity, and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,” inJennings, History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, 26 (“flavor”); Daniel K. Richter,“Rediscovered Links in the Covenant Chain: Previously Unpublished Transcripts ofNew York Indian Treaty Minutes, 1677–1691 ,” Proceedings of the AmericanAntiquarian Society 92, pt. 1 (April 1982): 47–48 (“less distortion”); Richter, Ordeal ofthe Longhouse, 6 (“intended”). See also Nancy Shoemaker, who writes: “If skepticsimmersed themselves in the documentary record of eighteenth-century councils, theywould soon detect telltale signs of authenticity” (Shoemaker, Strange Likeness, 9).

11 Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 220 (“perused”), 654, 648–49, 8: 32 (“bySentence”; see also Peters, Diary, no. 15, Oct. 12, 1758, in Peters Papers); Minutes ofEaston Conference, Aug. 7, 1757, in Executive Correspondence, Records of theProvincial Council, 1682–1776, in the Pennsylvania State Archives (from record group21 in the Division of Archives and Manuscripts), ed. George Dailey and George R.Beyer (Harrisburg, Pa., 1966), reel B8, card no. 1612 (“askd”). For comparing notes,see James Sullivan et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany, N.Y., 1921),

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Yet Peters and other scribes claiming that the minutes were “just &true” never silenced critics who insisted that the notes rarely were readback to the Indians for their assent, that texts were concocted “in pri-vate,” that settling, revising, and correcting transcripts long after thecouncil amounted to a license to shape and shade them. Some notetakersat Easton in 1756 complained that “the hasty & inconsiderate Method inwhich the Indians Answers were received [by Peters and other provincialofficials] rendered it impracticable to be so Exact [in recording the min-utes], as the Importance of the Occasion and Subject required.” Amongthe critics was Teedyuscung himself: back at Easton the following sum-mer, he announced that he wanted his own clerk to sit beside the officialscribe in order “to take Minutes of all that pass’d & that before theBreaking up of every Meeting the Minutes should be read & he shouldbe satisfy’d that they were truly taken.” The idea came to him, heexplained, “after the last Treaty held by him at this place” the previousNovember.12 A closer look at the various accounts of the Delawareleader’s 1756 Easton speeches suggests the source of his skepticism.

The Easton councils of July and November 1756 do not necessarily standout from the crowded field of treaties that Indians held with colonists.True, during a season of war they brought a glimmer of peace, the firstfaint light Pennsylvanians had seen since darkness descended in the fallof 1755. And these conclaves certainly had their share of drama: Indianraids nearby distracted the ambassadors and almost derailed the

3: 766; “Marshe’s Journal,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1st ser.,7 (1800): 200; Hubertis Cummings, Richard Peters: Provincial Secretary and Cleric,1704–1776, Pennsylvania Lives (Philadelphia, 1944), 98; “The Following Accot. isgiven by some of the Trustees, who attended the late Treaty with the Indians atEaston,” in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records, ca. 1745–1983,Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by PacificMeasures, Quaker Collection, Haverford College Library, Haverford, Pennsylvania,5: AA5, 157; Peters, Diary, no. 15, Oct. 12, 1758, in Peters Papers.

12 Minutes of Easton Conference, Aug. 7, 1757, in Executive Correspondence,Records of the Provincial Council, 1682–1776, reel B8, card no. 1612 (“just & true”);Israel Pemberton to John Fothergill, 2 8 mo. [Aug.] 1757, in Pemberton Papers, box2, file 26, Etting Collection, no. 29 (“private”); Friendly Association for Regainingand Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures, Minutes, 1755–1757, Am.525, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 13v (“hasty & inconsiderate”; a variant of thistext, which has “inconsiderate” as “inconsistent,” is in Vaughan, Early AmericanIndian Documents, vol. 3, Pennsylvania Treaties, 1756–1775, 123); Israel Pemberton toMary Pemberton, 21 7 mo. [July] 1757, in Pemberton Papers, 12: 46 (“truly taken”);Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 657 (“last Treaty”). Another Delaware claimedthat even before the war began he had suggested that Teedyuscung get his own clerk.See “Moses Tetamy’s Accot. of Indian Complaints &ca.,” n.d., in Philadelphia YearlyMeeting Indian Committee Records, 1: AA1, 65.


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negotiations as ominous rumors—Teedyuscung plans to carry on the warunder the cloak of peace! Colonists are plotting to slaughter the Delawaredelegation!—swirled around the council fire that summer and fall.Moreover the charges of land fraud that Teedyuscung leveled against thePenns in November would rock the provincial and imperial world for sev-eral years, as they have engaged the scholarly world since. But these Eastonconversations were only the first tentative steps on the road to peace, merepreliminaries to the gathering in that town two years later of the great con-gress that convened west of Philadelphia at Lancaster in 1762. The 1756delegations were minuscule—two or three dozen Indians came withTeedyuscung in July, forty-odd that fall—when set beside the hundredsgathered at Easton in 1758 and Lancaster in 1762, not to mention thethrongs that descended on Albany in 1754 and Fort Stanwix in 1768.13

Nor does Teedyuscung’s eloquence distinguish him from the ranksof gifted native speakers. One who heard him claimed that the Delawarecompared with renowned British orator William Pitt, and todayTeedyuscung sometimes joins Pontiac, Tecumseh, Chief Seattle, andChief Joseph in anthologies devoted to Indian oratory.14 But his manydetractors, then and since, disagree. A Delaware king? A spellbindingspeaker? Hardly. This Teedyuscung “is in fact a poor Jersey stragglingIndian” who grew up among colonists, scoffed Richard Peters; leader of“all the Rifraff from all Parts [that] are collected” now along one stretchof the Susquehanna River, the fellow “knows nothing of [treaty]Business” or of “the Indian forms,” which at Easton that July “he neitherunderstood nor observed.” Even colonists who praised the Delawareemissary—Conrad Weiser, the colony’s Indian agent, said “he is a man

13 The standard accounts of the Pennsylvania frontier in this era are Julian P.Boyd, “Indian Affairs in Pennsylvania, 1736–1762,” in Boyd, Indian Treaties Printedby Benjamin Franklin, xix–lxxxviii; Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760:Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia, 1945), 395–506; Anthony F. C.Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (1949; repr., Salem, N.H.,1984); Vaughan, Early American Indian Documents, 3: 1–191; Jennings, Empire ofFortune ; Stephen F. Auth, The Ten Years ’ War: Indian-White Relations inPennsylvania, 1755–1765, Outstanding Studies in Early American History (New York,1989); Merrell, Into the American Woods, chaps. 6–7; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War:The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766(New York, 2000). For the size of delegations, see Minutes of the Provincial Council,7: 220, 224, 313; Wallace, King of the Delawares, 130; Peters to Penn, Nov. 22, 1756,in Penn Manuscripts, Official Correspondence, 8: 201 (2 of document).

14 Wallace, King of the Delawares, 206. For anthologies, see W. C. Vanderwerth,ed., Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains, Civilization of theAmerican Indian Series (Norman, Okla., 1971), 14–22; Annette Rosenstiel, Red andWhite: Indian Views of the White Man, 1492–1982 (New York, 1983), 88–89; VirginiaIrving Armstrong, comp., I Have Spoken: American History through the Voices of theIndians (Athens, Ohio, 1984), 19.

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that can think well, and I believe him to be sincere”—in the samebreath admitted that “he is a Drunkard and a very Irregular man.”15

Most telling of all, perhaps, some of his own people thoughtTeedyuscung a braggart who drank more than he should, claimed morepower than he had, and sometimes tripped over his own tongue. Afterthe November council, two of his Delaware advisers admitted privatelyto Weiser “that their King Deedjoskon had every Thing in his Heartwhat to say before he came to Easton [words lodged there by the townsand tribes that sent him], and there his Memory was refreshed; butbeing too often overcome with strong Liquor, he spoke confused, tho’nothing that was wrong or false in itself, only not in such Order as heought to have done; and one Passage he never mentioned at all . . . .”16

Teedyuscung was no Tecumseh, then, and Easton in 1756 was noAlbany of 1754. Yet that ragged town deserves a visit and that befuddledand occasionally besotted spokesman a listen because a combination offorces filled the council site with men who had a pen or pencil in hand.For obvious reasons colonial officials preferred to have only one

15 Peters to Penn, Aug. 4, 1756, in Penn Manuscripts, Official Correspondence,8: 135 ([5–5v of document], “knows nothing,” “neither understood,” “the Indianforms”); Peters to Penn, Nov. 22, 1756, ibid., 8: 201 ([2–3 of document], “Rifraff”);Peters to the Proprietor, Feb. 14, 1757, in Peters, Letters to the Proprietaries,1755–1757, 140 (“straggling”), Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania;Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 3: 68 (“Irregular”). Peters’s criticism that August mustbe balanced with a remark he made after the November treaty: “Teedyuscungbehaved exceedingly well” (Peters to Penn, Nov. 22, 1756, in Penn Manuscripts,Official Correspondence, 8: 201 [2 of document]). For varying scholarly assessmentsof Teedyuscung, see Wallace, King of the Delawares; Jennings, Empire of Fortune,chaps. 12, 15, 17, 19; Auth, Ten Years’ War, chap. 4; Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads:Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003),chaps. 6–7; Mathew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War inVirginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2003), chaps. 5–7.

16 Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 431. (That delivering a speech “in order”was important to Indians is clear from ibid., 7: 137.) Besides going over speecheswhile still in Indian country and refreshing his memory between council sessions, anative orator also rehearsed the main points of a speech in preliminary conversationsand informal talks before the official sessions got underway. Even messagesTeedyuscung sent to Philadelphia more than a month before the first Easton treatycontain elements, including topics and phrases, that prefigured what he would say informal council. Compare, for example, ibid., 7: 139–41, with the speeches in lateJuly. This description of speech preparation resembles earlier English forms. Leah S.Marcus has found that Queen Elizabeth I usually spoke “‘extempore’ . . . Ratherthan writing her speeches out verbatim beforehand, she appears, in keeping withtechniques taught by the standard sixteenth-century manuals on memory, to haveorganized what she planned to say in her own mind as a series of rhetorical loci orplaces that could be amplified and otherwise adjusted during her delivery” (Marcus,“From Oral Delivery to Print in the Speeches of Elizabeth I,” in Print, Manuscript,and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed.Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol [Columbus, Ohio, 2000], 37).


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secretary—theirs—to control the flow of information coming out of atreaty. During the summer of 1756 , however, Quaker leaders inPhiladelphia had other ideas. The coming of war the previous year hadopened a new theater in the ongoing political contest between theSociety of Friends (working through the elected provincial assembly)and Pennsylvania’s proprietors (operating by means of the governor andcouncil they appointed). Each group blamed the other for the outbreakof hostilities: proprietary men accused Quaker pacifists of leavingPennsylvania defenseless by refusing to buy muskets and pay militias;Friends retorted that William Penn’s heirs Thomas, John, and Richardwere responsible for the bloodshed because they had stolen Indian landsand now would not contribute a shilling of their own vast wealth to pro-tect the province from war parties bent on revenge.17

Whoever was at fault—scholars still debate the issue, but it seems fairto say that there was plenty of blame to go around—the happy result formodern readers is that in July 1756 some forty Quakers, unwilling to trustGovernor Robert Hunter Morris, Peters, and other proprietary men tohandle peace negotiations, descended on Easton. Back again they came forthe second round of talks in November. Bearing gifts and greetings to theIndians, the Quakers, “by attending at the time and place [of a treaty ses-sion] & crowding our Selves in,” one Friend wrote, “obtained Admissionand kept Minutes of what was said by and to” the natives.18

On finding a seat and picking up a pen, Quakers taking notes wouldhave seen German colonists doing the same. The men were Moravians,members of a pietist sect that had founded nearby Bethlehem fifteenyears earlier. Not only did these people happen to live in the neighbor-hood, they were even more deeply involved in Indian affairs thanFriends or their proprietary foes. For more than a decade, Moravians hadbeen dispatching missionaries to Indian country, inviting natives toBethlehem for talks, and setting up villages for converts. Teedyuscunghimself had been baptized in 1750, acquired the name Gideon, and livedwith his family in the mission town of Gnadenhütten some twenty-fivemiles northwest of Bethlehem before moving to the Susquehanna Valleyin 1754. Many of the Delaware with him at the 1756 Easton councilswould also have been old acquaintances of the Bethlehem men.19

17 After the 1756 Easton meetings, officials tried to explicitly forbid people fromtaking notes. See Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 654; Sullivan et al., Papers ofSir William Johnson, 9: 743–44. For the political battles, see Jennings, Empire ofFortune, chaps. 12, 15; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 225–31; Ward, Breaking theBackcountry, 125–32.

18 Minutes of the Friendly Association, 1755–1757, 13v.19 Merritt, At the Crossroads. See also Wallace, King of the Delawares, chaps. 3–5.

The Moravian most likely to have been at the treaties was David Zeisberger; the

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All this furious scratching and scribbling generated an unusual (butby no means unique) array of texts recording the same Indian’s speechesacross seven different days, making it possible to move past monaural orstereo consideration of treaty talk into the quadraphonic realm and atsome moments even beyond. To constructively complicate matters fur-ther, the official notes penned or edited by Peters sometimes survive indrafts, revealing the course this particular channel of transmission fol-lowed from the illegible, incoherent jottings made on the spot through arefining process that ended with Benjamin Franklin’s volume.20

Whatever his talent (or lack thereof ) as an orator, Teedyuscung him-self is another reason to eavesdrop at Easton simply because he knewEnglish. Whether it was “broken English” or “plain English” is lessimportant than that the Delaware knew enough to judge how accuratelythe interpreter was translating his speeches.21 This ability fixes one key

November treaty minutes in the Moravian Church Archives might be in his hand.See Earl P. Olmstead, David Zeisberger: A Life among the Indians (Kent, Ohio, 1997),96–97; Edmund De Schweinitz, The Life and Times of David Zeisberger: The WesternPioneer and Apostle of the Indians (1870; repr., New York, 1971), 245; Jennings,Empire of Fortune, 278. Quakers at Easton noted that unnamed Moravians weremuch among the Indians in July (Minutes of the Friendly Association, 1755–1757,12v). Certainly Moravians had been deeply involved in the preliminaries to peacefrom April through mid-July, providing food, shelter, and advice to emissaries whowent to and from Teedyuscung, then on the Susquehanna River. Before 1756Moravians kept minutes of their own councils with native leaders (Moravian ChurchArchives: Records of the Moravian Mission among the Indians of North America from theArchives of the Moravian Church, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania [Woodbridge, Conn.,1970], reel 34, box 315, folders 1–2, reel 35, box 323, folder 1, items 1–3).

20 For why governors’ speeches are not included, see Easton Treaty Texts,Introduction. For studies of other native talks and treaties, see Raymond J.DeMallie, ed., The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G.Neihardt (Lincoln, Neb., 1984); Rudolf Kaiser, “Chief Seattle’s Speech(es): AmericanOrigins and European Reception,” in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native AmericanLiterature, ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 497–536;Don F. McKenzie, “The Sociology of a Text: Oral Culture, Literacy and Print inEarly New Zealand,” in The Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and RoyPorter, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture (Cambridge, 1987), 161–97(I thank Robert DeMaria Jr. for this reference); Denise Low, “ContemporaryReinvention of Chief Seattle: Variant Texts of Chief Seattle’s 1854 Speech,”American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 407–21; Albert Furtwangler,Answering Chief Seattle (Seattle, Wash., 1997) ; Jane T. Merritt, “Metaphor,Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the PennsylvaniaFrontier,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to theMississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill,N.C., 1998), 60–87.

21 Account of the Easton Treaty with Indians, June 1762 , in FriendlyAssociation for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by PacificMeasures, Manuscripts, 1762, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College,Swarthmore, Pa. (“broken English”); Depositions of John Neal, John Biddle Jr., andSamuel Dupui, June 1762, in Board of Trade Papers, Proprieties, 1697–1776, vol. 21,


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variable in the calculus of councils: the uncharted chasm, glimpsed byCadwallader Colden and many others, lying between what an Indianspeaker said in his native tongue and how a translator rendered thosewords in English. At Easton in 1756, what the colonial audience heardTeedyuscung say in English probably was acceptable to the man whoactually said it in Delaware.

The translator, John Pumpshire (Cawkeeponen), is still anotherattraction of these particular treaty minutes because he earned the trustof colonists and Indians alike. Pumpshire, concluded Peters shortly afterJuly’s proceedings, is “a sensible good man and an excellent Interpreterfor the Delaware Language.” Teedyuscung, too, pronounced himself “inFavour of the Interpreter . . . and . . . pleased with his Conduct.” LikeTeedyuscung, Pumpshire was a Delaware from New Jersey; l ikeTeedyuscung, he spoke “tolerable good English.”22

A letter Pumpshire penned that summer gives some idea of how “tol-erable good.” On July 1 the Delaware interpreter and an Iroquois envoynamed Newcastle (Kos Showweyha) were in Indian country to invitenative leaders to a treaty when the Delaware wrote “To the Captn of theFort Allen [a frontier post] Also to Bethlehem.” Crossing paths withsome Indians, “Captn Newcastle directed them to come to the BrethrenEnglish,” Pumpshire began, “and this is to desire the Captn at Fort Allen& other Officers to Shew Kindness.” Moreover a Shawnee “will requireto come again to fetch his Father down soon as possible.” AfterNewcastle marked and Pumpshire signed the dispatch, the Delawareadded, “Little farther more I desire Mr. Spangenberg [a Moravian leader]to shew Kindness to those Men” so that “when those men comes backagain” to their village they can attest to colonial friendship.23

pt. 1, 1761–1762, 267, 271v, 275v, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (“plainEnglish”). See also Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 3: 107, 263, 275. Because he couldreview Pumpshire’s interpretation, I use “Teedyuscung said” throughout, ratherthan “Pumpshire said,” though the latter is technically the more accurate phrase.

22 Peters to Penn, Aug. 4, 1756, in Penn Manuscripts, Official Correspondence,8: 135 (5v of letter) (“excellent Interpreter”); Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 16, 1756, pt.7, BF (“in Favour”); Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 3: 275 (“tolerable good”). ForPumpshire’s Delaware name, see “Names of Indians at Easton,” July 27, 1756, filelabeled “Indians—Treaty at Easton July, 1756,” in box labeled “Indians (transferredfrom Society Collections),” Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At times in the earlysessions, the record lists multiple interpreters—Pumpshire, Ben, and Joseph Peepy—but Pumpshire seems to have been the principal translator and intermediarythroughout. An additional reason to revisit these particular negotiations is thatPumpshire certified one transcript of the November proceedings as accurate. See813–15.

23 “To the Captn of the Fort Allen Also to Bethlehem [copy],” July 1, 1756, inTimothy Horsfield Papers, 1: 155, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.Original not found. Variant versions are in Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 189;

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Some three weeks later, Pumpshire and Newcastle, with Teedyuscungand his band in tow, had made it to Easton. Soon Governor Morris andhis entourage, along with a passel of Quakers and a crowd of curiousonlookers, joined the Indians, ready to talk peace. The scriveners, penspoised, were ready, too.

A first look at the collection of documents compiled by that flock ofpenmen might cause readers unpleasant symptoms, among them bewil-derment and boredom, that could bring on a bad case of what ConradWeiser came down with a few months before Easton: an “aversion toIndian Minutes.”24 If it is any consolation, the originals of these minutesare often more confounding still because they vary spectacularly in char-acter and completeness. A scrap of paper beginning “Tatteweskund said”has one paragraph of the Delaware’s July 29 speech. Five sheets labeled“RoughMinutes of Treaty at Easton 28. to 31. 7 mo. 1756” bear that para-graph, along with several from the previous day, written down by at leasttwo people. A small leather notebook belonging to Quaker assemblymanand treaty commissioner John Hughes, originally used for keepingaccounts a generation earlier, was put to a different purpose in 1756.That the notebook can be held in the palm of one’s hand and that itspages bear speeches hastily scrawled (sometimes in pencil) suggest thatHughes was sitting in the crowd, taking notes surreptitiously.

Nor do deciphering texts and preparing transcripts cure all the ele-ments that gave Weiser his aversion. Matters are further complicatedbecause not all documents were independently produced, so each entrydoes not represent a separate line of transcription. Some scribes copiedfrom others or polished rough notes; hence, a resemblance may not bebecause different penmen jotted down precisely the same words during acouncil session but because one either embellished his own notes orshared his manuscript with somebody else.

The very first part of the opening day’s speeches on July 28 gives asense of the pitfalls awaiting those brave or foolish enough to head downthe tangled trail of transcripts. One source drew from a second beforeRichard Peters revised that second version. Another text—call it thefourth, since Peters’s revision of the second makes three so far—appearsto be a fair copy of the “RoughMinutes of Treaty at Easton,” whichwould be text five. Curiously, Benjamin Franklin’s folio (number it six)

Vaughan, Early American Indian Documents, 3: 85–86. That Pumpshire wrote it him-self is clear from Horsfield to William Parsons, July 7, 1756, in Horsfield Papers, 1:177; Peters to Weiser, July 11, 1756, in Peters Papers, 4: 66.

24 The collection of documents is posted on the William and Mary Quarterly’sWeb site, http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/wmq/supplement.htm. Peters to Weiser, Apr.25, 1756, in Peters Papers, 4: 52.


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shares a first paragraph with four and five, then departs from those twoaccounts to follow one through three, which omit the opening para-graph that four and five contain. Meanwhile the Hughes notebook goesits own way, as does the record kept by a Moravian. (Indeed theMoravian version is so idiosyncratic that it is possible this scribe knewDelaware and, ignoring John Pumpshire, rendered his own translation ofTeedyuscung’s words.) To say the least, the relationship among the treatyminutes is badly snarled and maddeningly hard to follow.

But engaging this “bewildering multiplicity” is as revealing as it isfrustrating.25 Readers can form their own judgments by visiting theWilliam and Mary Quarterly’s Web site and venturing into this wilder-ness themselves. The aim here is to begin a conversation aboutTeedyuscung’s Easton oratory—and, implicitly, Native American councilspeeches in general—by offering some tentative interpretations derivedfrom time spent thrashing about in the textual thicket. It turns out thatconsidering a range of records rather than a single seemingly authorita-tive and readily available text (in this case, Franklin’s) provides new waysof considering both the council ground and the transmission of Indianwords across the centuries.

Among the insights are those gleaned from stray remarks in onedocument that enrich and enliven the overall picture of council culture.For example, Teedyuscung’s dexterity with the wampum belts thatIndians considered vital to negotiations comes across more powerfullywhen one scribe happened to mention the moment in a speech on July28 (and another writer on November 9) that the Delaware lifted a belt ofbeads at precisely the right time needed to emphasize a particular point.Other asides in this or that transcript further attest to Teedyuscung’sflair for the dramatic, as on July 30 when, while saying that he wouldbring home the good word about peace, one text noted that the oratoropened “his hand wide” to indicate how, having carried it safely intoIndian country, he would broadcast the news. On November 13 anothersecretary caught the Delaware speaker’s equally theatrical way withwords, jotting down that Teedyuscung, accusing the Penn family offraud, went beyond saying that the proprietors “take Lands from theIndians which they never sold” (as other versions had it) to add “takelands from ye Indians, wch They never sold, & Say Pugh; we boughtthem.” That one word “Pugh,” which meant “an ejaculation expressingimpatience, or contemptuous disdain or disregard for anything,” givesthe proprietors a more hostile, dismissive tone. Three days later thatsame scribe recognized how frayed colonial nerves were when he wrotethat Teedyuscung not only promised to return in the spring “with as great

25 Marcus, “From Oral Delivery to Print,” 46.

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a force of Indians as I can get” but also “(Being asked what he meant byforce, he reply’d, As many as he Could bring in a friendly manner).”26

Perhaps the most startling of these occasional remarks came duringan after-dinner chat on July 29. Once Teedyuscung and his son finishedeating with Governor Robert Hunter Morris, other natives joined theparty and heard Morris tell the assembly, doubtless with some trepida-tion, the “very bad News” that provincial troops nearby had killed anIndian they suspected of being an enemy warrior. If the victim turnedout to be a friend of Teedyuscung’s, peace was imperiled. Not to worry,several accounts of the conversation have the Delaware reply; friend orfoe, the intruder’s death will not derail negotiations. Was that the end ofthe exchange? Not according to another scribe, who went on to writethat, “in Confirmation of his friendship and Integrety,” Teedyuscung“Gave the Governor a String [of wampum] & the Governor Returned yeString with a Declaration of the Same Sentiments & then Kisd. 2 of theLadies.” The unusual if not unique image of a provincial official bussingIndian women makes one wonder how often scribes, out of deference ordelicacy, omitted this dimension of frontier diplomacy.27

Useful as such asides can be, careful comparison of various minutesis still more revealing and at first more unsettling for those accustomedto quoting what Teedyuscung or some other Indian orator said. Ofcourse not every difference between transcripts is necessarily laden withprofound significance. Does it matter whether Teedyuscung told theaudience that he received word of peace “with gladness” (as one accounthad it) or with “joy” (as others wrote)? Whether he said “the mainThing” or “the Cheef matter”? Whether he asked that the governor“reward” Pumpshire for services rendered, make sure “that he has a littlemoney in his pocket,” or “put a few pennies in his pocket”? Whether heinvoked “ye Good Spirit” or “ye Great God Above,” the “Great Creator”or “Great Being”?28 It is telling that secretaries took matters into theirown hands and pens at once, turning main thing into chief matter (or

26 Easton Treaty Texts, July 28, 1756, pt. 4, MA, Nov. 9, 1756, pt. 2, FAH, APS,July 30, 1756, pt. 1, RPC-1, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 11, BF, FAH, APS [emphasis added],Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 6, APS n. 117, FAH n. 119 [emphasis added]. Oxford EnglishDictionary online (http://www.oed.com), s.v. “pooh.”

27 Easton Treaty Texts, July 29, 1756, pt. 3, JH [emphasis added]; Boyd, IndianTreaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 145 (“News”). It might or might not be relevantin considering this incident that Morris “never married, but he did father four childrenout of wedlock.” See John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American NationalBiography (New York, 1999), 15: 914. Thanks to Wayne Bodle for this reference.

28 Easton Treaty Texts, July 28, 1756, pt. 1, HSPRM (“gladness”), FAH (“joy”;also BF, APS, RPC), Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 4, BF (“main Thing”; also APS, FAH, RPC,JH), MA (“Cheef matter”), Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 7, APS, FAH, BF (“reward”), MA (“alittle money”), JH (“a few pennies”), Nov. 8, 1756, pt. 3, FAH, APS (“ye Good


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vice versa) and gladness into joy (or vice versa). But to go beyond that isto venture into a semantic realm that few might care or dare to enter.

Other variations, however, cross the line between semantics andsomething more. The choice of a phrase, even of a single word, can con-vey a very different impression of Teedyuscung. The Delaware who saysto colonists “I desire you would” do something sounds unlike the onewho demands “I require you would do it,” just as the fellow who callshimself “a simple Man” is no kin to the one saying he is “a Simpleton.”So, too, a native referring to “the late troubles” is more diplomatic thanif he bluntly speaks of “how I came to strike you.” As with words, sowith gestures: an Indian punctuating his speech by “laying his Hand tohis Heart” adopts a different pose than one described as “clapg his handon his breast.”29

Various accounts of the same oration can also render Teedyuscungmore or less eloquent and more or less adept at the diplomatic niceties.Some scribes mentioned that on November 13 the Delaware forgot partof his speech and had to retrieve the wampum string he had laid on atable to mark the conclusion of that portion of his talk in order to con-tinue; others let the clumsy moment go unremarked. That forgottenpassage, in which Teedyuscung promised to get word to Pennsylvania ifhe learned of an impending attack on the province, is itself testimony toa pen’s power to raise or lower an orator’s prowess. One writer had himsay that Indian messengers will come “even at mid=night, we Can go byye light of this Council fire, which is now kindled”; another (fromwhich the official version derives) bled most of the life out of it by writ-ing simply “if it be in mid night.” The rhetorical range had been evenwider a few minutes earlier when Teedyuscung, relating how he had feltabout accusations that he had started the war, might have said anythingfrom “I was in fear on this charge” to “I was under a Good Deal ofConcern that this Charge was made against me.”30

Spirit”), JH (“ye Great God Above”), Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 3, BF, RPC-2 (“GreatCreator”), RPC-1 (“Great Being” crossed out, “Creator” substituted).

29 Ibid., Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 5, MA, APS (“desire” [emphasis added]), RPC-1, JH,BF (“require” [emphasis added]). FAH had it “require,” then struck that out andwrote in “desire” above the line. Ibid., Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 7, BF, FAH, APS (“simpleMan”), JH (“Simpleton”). See also Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 7, RPC-1, “lookd upon sim-ple.” It is unclear whether this talk of being “simple” was Pumpshire referring tohimself or Pumpshire rendering Teedyuscung’s reference to himself. Ibid., Nov. 13,1756, pt. 5, MA (“late troubles”), BF (“strike you”), July 28, 1756, pt. 6, BF, RPC(“laying”), HSPRM, FAH (“clapg”).

30 For his forgetting a passage, ibid., Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 8, RPC-1. Ibid., Nov. 13,1756, pt. 8, APS (“mid=night,” see also JH), RPC-1 (“mid night”), Nov. 13, 1756, pt.5, RPC-1 (“fear”), RPC-2 (“Concern”).

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Setting side by side the two best-known published accounts of the1756 Easton councils—Franklin’s, the only version to appear in colonialtimes, and the Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, pro-duced a century later from a different transcript—further uncovers theshades of meaning buried in seemingly innocuous differences.31 On theprinted page, Franklin’s Teedyuscung is a more eloquent, more elegantIndian than his nineteenth-century counterpart. He mentions “what Ihave heard,” not “what I have heared,” talks of “though for such Trifles,”not “tho’ for such Triffles,” and intones the solemn “there is greatReason for Mourning” rather than the inane “there is great reason forMorning.” In just one paragraph, Franklin has the Delaware swear “if itcosts me my Life,” saving him from “if it cost me my Life,” then doeshim the same favor with “I have already proceeded a great Way” insteadof “I have already proceed a great way” and with “use your Ability,which is much greater,” not the later “use your Ability, which are muchgreater.” Even in a single sentence, Franklin rescued Teedyuscung fromembarrassment by putting on the page

Some bad Reports have lately been spread, which deserve to beno more minded than the Whistling of Birds

instead of the crude

Some bad reports have lately been spread which deserves to beno more minded than the wistling of Burds.32

The general impression Franklin conveyed is what David Murraycalls Indian diplomats’ “unruffled formality and aristocratic dignity,”comparable in many ways to “classical oratory.”33 The folio’s elegantlines raise the Delaware speaker rhetorically by tidying up colloquialismsand correcting spelling. Considering this famous account of the wordsTeedyuscung spoke and Pumpshire translated in the light cast by otherversions as well as by the letter the translator wrote earlier in the

31 Franklin’s publication came out shortly before Mar. 10, 1757 (Leonard W.Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin [New Haven, Conn., 1963], 7:112). Though Peters apparently signed off on the version of the treaty minutesFranklin printed, the secretary was not happy with that publication because itincluded an assembly report that challenged the accuracy of the official minutes(Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 166). Peters to Weiser, Mar. 19,1757, in Conrad Weiser Papers, 2: 45, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

32 Compare Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 151, 152, 155,157, 163, with Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 315, 317, 321, 324, 334. ForFranklin’s handling of an earlier treaty, see Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 119–21.

33 Murray, Forked Tongues, 39–40 (quotations, 40).


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summer of 1756 helps chart how much their English improved as itmade its way from Easton council ground to Philadelphia printing press.

It is easier to measure the distance between treatments of the same ora-tion than it is to account for that distance. No texts explain what if anydesign underlies them. Are differences the product of a concerted effortto slant one’s notes a certain way? Or do they merely reflect a wearywriter’s desperate groping for words to get down on the page as JohnPumpshire plowed ahead with his rendition of Teedyuscung’s speech? Itis usually hard to say. But the work of Richard Peters—the man at thecenter of the storm of ink and paper, the man who oversaw productionof the official minutes, which in turn found their way to Franklin’sshop—affords a glimpse of how a lead actor on the scribal stage soughtto write the script of the proceedings. Because some of this secretary’sdrafts survive, as do some of his revisions of others’ efforts, it is possibleto track him through the textual terrain to learn a little about his set-tling and correcting of treaty minutes.

Some refinements Reverend Peters made involved the polishing thatthe Franklin folio bears witness to (Figures III–IV). An Oxford-educatedtheologian said to be fond of the Greek and Roman classics, a man deeplyinvolved in the new Philadelphia Academy, an old acquaintance ofanother academy founder (Benjamin Franklin), the Anglican clergymanknew well the literary potential of the raw material Teedyuscung andPumpshire supplied. Besides fixing an occasional run-on sentence in aclerk’s copy, he sometimes sought to make the Delaware leader more elo-quent and perhaps more pleasing to an audience eager for specimens ofNative American rhetoric. At one point during the Condolence Ceremonyon November 13, he inserted in the margin a long metaphorical flourish.At another the secretary’s raw notes had Teedyuscung say that

I am glad you have askd me & given me ye Liberty to relate mymind in this manner[,]

which in the next draft became

I am pleased You Gave me the Liberty of Speaking my Mindfreely as to any Uneasiness I was Under

before being buffed to a high gloss as

asked me this Question & thereby have given me an Oppy

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FIGURE III

Minutes of Easton Conference , November 16 , 1756, in Execut iveCorrespondence, Records of the Provincial Council, 1682–1776, in thePennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. These rough min-utes are in Richard Peters’s hand. Courtesy, Pennsylvania State Archives.

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FIGURE IV

Minutes of Conferences, Held with the Indians, at Easton, In the Months ofJuly and November, 1756 . . . (Philadelphia, 1757), 28. Courtesy, LibraryCompany of Philadelphia.

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801

I am pleased you asked me this Question, having hereby givenme an Opportunity of Speaking my Mind freely as to anyUneasiness I was under.34

Moreover when a clerk, probably adopting the same pronounPumpshire used, wrote “he wishes” or “his Power,” Peters changed it tothe first person for dramatic effect. “I have it in my hand” just soundsbetter—more immediate, more direct—than the original “he has it inhis hand.” Going over his fellow provincial councilor Benjamin Chew’snotes on one Teedyuscung speech—

Desires all that he says & what is said to him may be takendown right—

Peters made it

That he desires all that he says and what is said to him may betaken down aright.

With an eye toward publication, at the start of the November talks theproprietary agent even offered something like stage directions, scrib-bling atop the first page: “The Govrs arrival . . . ^

here put Teedyuscungsvisit & . . . The mode of Marching to be entered first mentiond by wayof Introduction.”35

34 Cummings, Richard Peters. Franklin and Peters had known one another sincethe late 1730s. They joined forces to start the academy, traveled together to the 1754Albany Congress, and had common interests in finding a Northwest Passage. By1756, however, they were becoming political enemies as Franklin stepped up a cam-paign against the Penn family, Peters’s patrons. For a run-on sentence, see EastonTreaty Texts, Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 3, RPC-3. For Peters inserting a metaphorical para-graph, see “Conferences held with the Indians, at Easton, In the Months of July andNovember 1756, with Two previous Messages sent by the Government to theIndians residing on Sasquehannah; and their Answers thereto” (Library of theMuseum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, Huntington Free Library andReading Room, Bronx, N.Y.), 34. I have consulted the copy in Francis Jennings etal., eds., Iroquois Indians: A Documentary History of the Diplomacy of the Six Nationsand Their League (Woodbridge, Conn., 1984), reel 19, July and November 1756, 34(the addition is Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 3, BF). For variations on“asked me this question,” ibid., Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 10, RPC-1, RPC-2; Conferences atEaston, July and November 1756, Library Museum of the American Indian/HeyeFoundation, 38.

35 Easton Treaty Texts, July 29, 1756, pt. 1, RPC-1, esp. n. 24 (“hand,” “hewishes,” “Power”), RPC-2 (“I wish”), July 30, 1756, pt. 2, RPC-1 (“desires”), RPC-2(“I des i re”) ; Minutes of Easton Conference , Nov. 8 , 1756 , in Execut iveCorrespondence, Records of the Provincial Council, 1682–1776, reel B7, card no. 1340(“here put”).


Brother I . . . I have said and you have said to one another

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Such attention to detail suggests a man in full command of theunfolding drama, at work in the quiet of his Easton room or later hisPhiladelphia study to, as one scholar put it, shepherd “life . . . almostunaided into literature.” The truth is messier. At one delicate momentin the negotiations, Peters so lost control that he abruptly announced hewould write no more. On November 12 Governor William Denny—anovice at Indian affairs who had recently replaced Robert HunterMorris—asked Teedyuscung, despite strenuous objections from Peters,what had set the Delaware people on the warpath. The Indian’s reply,that proprietary land abuses helped cause the conflict, ignited afirestorm of charge and countercharge that would burn for years. Withhis patrons under attack, some observers claimed, Peters tried everythingto put a stop to the proceedings. “Being or pretending to be in theUtmost Confusion, so that he could not take the Minutes,” he “threwdown his Pen” as the Delaware spoke and declared that it was time tobreak for dinner. Undeterred, Denny turned to Charles Thomson, mas-ter of the Friends’ Latin School in Philadelphia, who had come toEaston with the Quakers and was busy taking down the speeches.Noticing that Thomson was “steadily attending to his Business, the gov-ernor desired him to proceed therein and Signifyed that he should con-sider his Notes as the most Perfect.” The surviving minutes forNovember 13 hint that if Peters really “was so confused he did not knowwhat he was doing” and dropped his quill, he reached for it again with-out delay once his ploy failed. But on that day and others, the barelylegible pages in his hand, full of deletions and insertions as well as falsestarts and sudden stops, confirm that, s itt ing at the table withTeedyuscung and Pumpshire standing before him, Peters was indeedoften confused.36

36 Van Doren, introduction to Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by BenjaminFranklin, xviii (“unaided”). For the confusion in November, see James[?] Pembertonto Dr. Fothergill, 30 5 mo. [May] 1757, in Pemberton Papers, box 2, file 23, EttingCollection, no. 29 (“Utmost Confusion”); Thomson, Enquiry into the Causes, 112(“threw”); Vaughan, Early American Indian Documents, 3: 176 (“most Perfect”);Account of the Trustees, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records,5: AA5, 155–57 (“so confused,” 157 [original crossed out]). According to Quakers, onNov. 8 Peters “desir’d Cha Tompson to assist in taking Minutes” (ibid., 150).Thomson’s role in these proceedings and in Indian affairs generally is chronicled bySchlenther, Charles Thomson, chap. 2. Weiser’s very different view of these events is inConrad Weiser, “Observations, made on the Pamphlet, intituled, an Inquiry into theCauses of the Alienation of the Delaware and Shawano Indians from the BritishIntrest. by Conrad Weiser. Chiefly on Land Affairs,” in Moravian Church Archives, reel30, box 225, folder 6, item 6 (repr. in Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760, 461–62). Forexamples of confusion in Peter’s notes, see Easton Treaty Texts, July 30, 1756, pt. 1,Nov. 9, 1756, pts. 1–2, Nov. 13, 1756, pts. 10–11, Nov. 16, 1756, pts. 1–3, RPC.

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Whether he did not know what he was doing is another matter. Somepassages do suggest that Peters was having trouble getting the storystraight. Though he occasionally went out of his way to improveTeedyuscung’s oratory, at other times he omitted metaphorical languagethat testified to the Delaware speaker’s grasp of diplomatic culture. A clerkput down “Council Fire”; Peters, reviewing the draft, picked up his quill tomake it “Council”; where some transcripts have Teedyuscung say “Councilfire,” Peters put “Conferences” or “Meeting.” When on November 8Teedyuscung assured Pennsylvanians that, as promised, he had spreadamong the Indians the news about peace, one scribe had him say:

I have with all faithfulness held up to the Indian Nations, theBelt I recieved from this Govermt: the Mohawks & Delawarespresent Can Wittness this, & they have believed and taken holdof it, & are ready to Joyn to promote ye Good work that isbegun.

Peters, ignoring all that figurative talk of wampum belts held up andgrasped, rewrote it as a European enterprise of closing a deal:

In confirmation that I have faithfully publishd what was com-mitted to my care several Indians of different Places as well Sixnation Indians as Delaware are come along with me & beingnow present will put their hands and Seals to the Truth of whatI say, they have acted upon what I deliverd in the behalfe of thisGovernment and their minds are intent on the good Work thatis going on.37

Comparison of the transcripts reveals that the official secretarybecame similarly entangled trying to convey Teedyuscung’s demeanortoward colonists. For example he saw to it that an editorial asidedepicted the Delaware as temperamentally ill-suited to diplomacy.When Teedyuscung happened on a private conference one day whereGovernor Morris, Peters, Conrad Weiser, and Newcastle were plottingstrategy, he was alarmed by what he considered secret schemes hatched“in ye Dark.” “Desires all that he says & what is said to him may betaken down right,” scribbled Peters’s colleague Benjamin Chew. The

37 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 1, RPC-2 (“Council Fire”), Nov. 8,1756, pt. 1, RPC (“Conferences”), APS, FAH (“Council fire”), July 28, 1756, pt. 1,RPC (“Meeting”), HSPRM, FAH (“council fire”). Sometimes Peters did write or letstand “council fire.” Ibid., July 28, 1756, pt. 1, 5, Nov. 9, 1756, pt. 2, Nov. 13, 1756,pt. 7, RPC. For the change from grasping belts to signing, ibid., Nov. 8, 1756, pt. 2,APS, FAH, RPC.


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next draft, however, included an introductory sentence asserting that“The King who was very irregular in his Visits, as well as in hisDiscourses, bolted all of a Sudden into the Room, and with a high Toneof Voice spoke as follows.” What did follow in Peters’s revision subtlyreinforced the belligerence: the Chew version requesting an accuraterecord of “all that he says & what is said to him” in the public councilsessions became the more intrusive “all that I have said and you have saidto one another” in those secret conclaves. At least here Peters keptTeedyuscung expressing only a desire; elsewhere, when scribes had theDelaware saying “I desire,” Peters rendered it “I require,” again posinghim in an aggressive stance.38

At other times, however, perhaps to shield himself and his superiorsfrom criticism of their policies, Peters dulled the sharp edge of that tone.His rough notes for November 13 had Teedyuscung tell Pennsylvaniaofficials that the Delaware people went to war only because “one of yourmen Broadhead came” and threatened the Indians; the next draftchanged this charge to the less accusatory “a man . . . Called CharlesBroadhead an Inhabitant of this Province.” Another transcript hadTeedyuscung blunt ly b laming colonis t s for the war, te l l ingPennsylvanians that “You have Given the cause” and later announcingthat “the Times are Difficulties & . . . these Difficulties are from Yourse lves .” Peters would have none of that . Though he scr ibbledTeedyuscung’s direct charge “you are too blame,” in going over the min-utes he elided such talk, leaving only an invitation to colonists to “lookinto your hearts & to know . . . wch has given ye great cause.”39

Overall the Teedyuscung in Peters’s pages tends to come across asmore abject and apologetic than other scribes made him out to be. Did

38 For the private conference, ibid., July 30, 1756, pt. 2, RPC-1, RPC-2 [empha-sis added]. The editorial addition is not in Peters’s hand but apparently was doneunder his supervision; he made other changes on the page. For “desire” and“require,” ibid., Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 5. Another so-called irregular visit by theDelaware speaker occurred three days before the July 30 encounter (PennsylvaniaArchives, 1st ser., 2: 727). Curiously, at other points Peters omitted passages thatwould have reinforced the picture of Teedyuscung as impulsive and maladroit. Atthe opening of the July 28 proceedings, one version had Teedyuscung stray from thescript at once: “Agreeable to what passed between the Govr. and Teedyuskung in theMorning it was expected that he would have given Answers to the Messages byNewcastle [sent from Philadelphia that spring], but instead of doing this he spoke asfollows” (see Easton Treaty Texts, editorial introduction to July 28, 1756). It is notclear why Peters failed to retain this diplomatic gaffe.

39 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 5, RPC-1, RPC-2 (“Broadhead”[emphasis added]), Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 6, RPC-1 (“ye great cause”), JH (“Given thecause”), Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 3, JH (“Times are Difficulties”), RPC-1 (“too blame”).For Broadhead, see Wallace, King of the Delawares, 75–80; Vaughan, Early AmericanIndian Documents, 3: 188 n. 78.

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he regret the raids on the province? A clerk had Teedyuscung mentionno regrets; going over the minutes, Peters inserted “I am sorry for whathas happened.” A few strokes of the quill could make Indians soundever-so-s l ight ly more subserv ient , a s when two accounts hadTeedyuscung announce that “we are here now to hear what You have toSay,” whereas Peters rendered it “now here at your pleasure, & ready tohear what you have to say.”40

Using his pen to defuse Teedyuscung’s anger and put him in a sub-missive pose, Peters also arranged for the orator to flatter colonists andadmire the supposed gap between savage and civilized. Near the close ofthe November council, the Delaware asked Governor Denny for a copyof the treaty “to prevent Misunderstandings.” Most transcripts have himgo on to explain that, though “I am not able to read, yet others may,”and future generations, too, will be able to learn “what has passedbetween this Government and me.” No other texts had anything moreby way of explanation for this request. Yet the official minutes Petersoversaw added a ringing Indian endorsement of writing. The praise iscurious, since by 1756 most natives had come to mistrust colonists’ “Penand Ink work,” correctly considering it a weapon that was robbing themof their homelands through fake deeds and fraudulent treaties. NotPeters’s Teedyuscung. “What is committed to Writing,” the Delawarespeaker supposedly went on to proclaim, “will not easily be lost, andwill be of great Use to all, and better regarded” than native ways of reck-oning and remembering promises or agreements. Peters could not havesaid it better himself.41

By turns belligerent and obsequious, eloquent and inept: it is hardto tell if Peters’s pages accurately reflect Teedyuscung’s so-called irregular

40 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 2, RPC-2 (“sorry”), Nov. 9, 1756, pt.1, JH (“here now,” see also FAH, APS), RPC-1 (“at your pleasure” [emphasisadded]). Peters did the same with a speech by Governor Morris that summarizedwhat Teedyuscung had said. Where the clerk put down “at the same time letting us[colonists] know, you was in Distress,” Peters added after “know”: “yt you was sorryfor what had passed” (Minutes of Easton Conference, July 25–31, 1756, in ExecutiveCorrespondence, Records of the Provincial Council, 1682–1776, reel B7, card no. 1271[16 of document]). For the Franklin version of this passage, which includes “sorry,”see Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 143.

41 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 7, BF. Peters’s own draft had only thecryptic phrase “yt ye be regarded” (Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 7, RPC-1). Teedyuscungreceived that copy at Easton on July 22, 1757 (Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7:653–55). For native views of writing, see Merrell, Into the American Woods, 193–97,215–21; Merritt, At the Crossroads, chap. 6; Shoemaker, Strange Likeness, chap. 4;Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 133–34. “Pen and Ink work” was the phrase ofIroquois orator Canasatego at a Lancaster council in 1744, which he mentioned“particularly” while lamenting that Indians were “lyable to many . . . Inconveniencessince the English came among Us” (Minutes of the Provincial Council, 4: 708).


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ways and confused speeches, the colonist’s own perplexity during thesessions and his mixed feelings about the man, or the limited time hehad to revise the minutes (on November 22 Peters mentioned that “myClerks have wrote, night and day, to get the Treaty copied” so that itcould go on a ship leaving for England three days later).42 Perhaps allthese factors had a role. Nonetheless, despite confusion and contradic-tion, in some respects it seems that Peters did know what he was doing,that the proprietors’ man tended to craft the transcript in ways thatdiminished the Delaware in general and Teedyuscung in particular.

Undermining Pennsylvania’s Delaware neighbors was by 1756 some-thing of a habit. For more than a decade Peters—working with otherprovincial officials, William Penn’s sons, the colony’s IroquoianistWeiser, and Six Nations sachems—had been striving to relieve theDelaware of their lands and their sovereignty, rendering them unfit tospeak in public councils because they supposedly were ruled by theIroquois. In the fall of 1755 , Delaware war parties, rememberingPennsylvania’s mistreatment and encouraged by the French, began tear-ing through Penn’s Woods, leaving mangled corpses and smoking ruinsin their wake. With summer came Teedyuscung, a Jersey Delaware ofuncertain standing in Indian country: the previous winter he had ledraids on the province; in June he had visited a French fort and received acoat there that he boldly wore at Easton in July; now he was claimingthe role of peacemaker for who knew how many native peoples. It com-plicated matters considerably. To simplify things it appears that Peterssettled the council minutes to denigrate Teedyuscung and the people herepresented.43

One way to accomplish that was to rewrite history. For more than ageneration, a core component of Delaware claims to prominence and pow-erful leverage in their dealings with colonists had been their special rela-tionship with William Penn, the sainted Founder, during Pennsylvania’s

42 For varying views on Teedyuscung, see footnote 15. Peters to Penn, Nov. 22,1756, in Penn Manuscripts, Official Correspondence, 8: 201–3 (4–5 of document)(“Clerks”; see also Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 3: 107).

43 Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant ChainConfederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to theLancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, 1984), pt. 3; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, chaps.2–5, 7–8, 11–12, 15, 17–18. Jennings found that the habit of changing treaty speechesto undermine the Delaware people went back even further. At a 1712 treaty withPennsylvania, a Delaware leader en route to Iroquois country told provincial offi-cials “that his tribesmen were ‘friends of the 5 Nations’ bearing ‘presents’—whichwould have meant the sort of things exchanged between parties of equal status attreaty conferences.” James Logan, Peters’s predecessor as Penn family agent heavilyinvolved in Indian relations, “later altered the language to make” it “appear to havebeen that the Delawares were ‘friends and Subjects of the 5 Nations’ who were bear-ing ‘tribute’” (Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 263).

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infancy. It was a link Delaware diplomats emphasized in treaties over theyears, and Teedyuscung was no exception. On November 9 he hauledold Penn out once more, saying, according to one account,

I also Remember the Conversation past between our old people& Governor pin[,]

which another scribe took down as

I remember well ye Conferences that have been held by ourancient people especially with Wm Penn, they are Still fresh inour Memory[.]

Peters apparently strove to distort that memory and shut down thattwo-way conversation:

I remember the Conversation wch passed among our [illegibleword] old antient People especially between with Govr Penn &them about Govr Penn. What he said to the Indians is fresh inour mind & memory[.]

Dressed up in Franklin’s folio, Teedyuscung now proclaimed:

I remember what has passed in Discourse and Conversationamong our old antient People, especially about Governor Penn;what he sa id to the Indians i s f resh in our Minds andMemory[.]

Transforming talks between Penn and them or with Penn into talksamong Indians about Penn, Peters revised his own notes to erase conver-sations with the Founder, leaving Penn speaking to a passive, silentnative audience.44

While altering the Delaware place in Pennsylvania’s past, Petersmight also have picked up his quill to write them out of the colony’sfuture. When Teedyuscung in July sketched his vision of what he hoped

44 For the Delaware people recalling Penn, see Merrell, Into the AmericanWoods, 122–25, 275; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 38–39, 268–69; Merritt, “Metaphor,Meaning, and Misunderstanding,” 84–85. The accounts of Teedyuscung’s words arein Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 9, 1756, pt. 3. The shift here appears to be deliberate.Elsewhere, however, the official minutes had the governor mention, more generi-cally, “the antient Friendship that subsisted between William Penn and the Indians”and talk of “your old Friend William Penn” (Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed byBenjamin Franklin, 144–45).

what has passed in discourse &

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peace talks would yield, many scribes had him look forward as well asbackward and beyond peace to the restoration of a closer, richer, moreenduring relationship between peoples. One transcript had him wish for

peace unity & good will to last forever,

in another he spoke of how

peace Love & Unity shd be throughly Settled,

while a third made him declare that

as our Ancestors had peace we may Settle peace Unity & goodwill to last forever.

And Peters? His Teedyuscung merely mentioned hopes that

we may settle Peace as heretofore,

a markedly less-effusive statement that said little about the past andnothing about the future. This account found its way into the officialtext published by Franklin. Yet with three other versions pushingbeyond peace into the realms of love, unity, and goodwill, beyondheretofore and into forever, it seems reasonable to ask whether the stan-dard account is the correct one and whether the proprietary secretarywas subtly continuing the campaign of Delaware removal.45

Peters performed the same scriptural legerdemain on Teedyuscung as

45 Easton Treaty Texts, July 28, 1756, pt. 3. Here, too, Peters was not alwaysconsistent, and establishing whether he systematically skewed the minutes requiresfurther study. On the one hand, at times the official version is indeed cooler than itscounterparts when describing the relationship between Indians and Pennsylvanians,with governors giving gifts “in Testimony of the Satisfaction you have given all ourPeople” rather than, as another account has it, “as a Token of our love,” or talkingof colonists’ “Regard and Affection” rather than their “kind Love” (Boyd, IndianTreaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 144, 161; Easton Treaty Minutes, July 29,1756, Moravian Church Archives, reel 35, box 323, folder 3, item 1, n.p.; ibid., “IIISession” [Nov. 15, 1756], reel 35, box 323, folder 4, item 2, page 5). On the otherhand, the official version of the governor’s speeches sometimes looked to the future,and it occasionally mentioned more than peace, though it tended, following officialpolicy, to avoid naming the Delaware people to focus on the Iroquois as principalactor on this stage. On July 29, when Governor Morris praised Pennsylvanians’“known and Constant Friendship to the Six Nations, and all the Indians in Alliancewith them,” Peters changed “known” to “Love” (Minutes of Easton Council, July25–31, 1756, in Executive Correspondence, Records of the Provincial Council,1682–1776, reel B7, card no. 1271 [15 of document]; see Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed

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he did on the Delaware. Paradoxically, he pulled off this sleight of penin part by wildly inflating the Indian’s claims to authority to brand hima fraud and a fool. Many colonists noticed that Teedyuscung—aspokesman selected by the Delaware and a few neighboring groups onthe Susquehanna, not a hereditary leader but nonetheless a choiceapparently approved by the Iroquois—was prone to overstate his power.“Haughty, and very desireous of Respect,” reported an Easton inhabitantwho kept a close eye on the supposed monarch in the days before theJuly proceedings began, “the King was full of himself.” In preliminarytalks with Governor Morris, the would-be peacemaker allegedly pro-nounced himself “a great Man” who “was made King by Ten Nations.”Peters shrewdly picked up on the braggadocio and pushed it still furtherin an attempt to discredit the man by making him sound like a bombas-tic blowhard; this paper promotion had the added benefit of creatingfr ic t ion between Teedyuscung and the Six Nat ions Iroquois ,Pennsylvania’s close allies and the Delaware people’s putative rulers.Thus when the official clerk had Teedyuscung say

I have the appointment of ten Nations, among which are myUncles the Six Nations, authorizing me to transact Business formy own Nation,

a fairly modest (and fairly accurate) claim, Peters changed this to the fictive

authorizing me to transact Business for my own Nation treat withyou.

Later in the same speech, when the man taking notes under Peters’swatchful eye and pen had Teedyuscung again carefully limit his author-ity to the Delaware alone—I am “authorized by the Six Nations to act inall State Affairs for my People the Delawares”—Peters courted incoher-ence by changing it to “authorized by the Six Nations to act in all State

by Benjamin Franklin, 143; Easton Treaty Minutes, July 29, 1756, Moravian ChurchArchives, reel 35, box 323, folder 3, item 1, n.p. [“peace and friendship”]). InNovember Governor William Denny, too, spoke of a “lasting and durable Peace” or“eternal Peace,” and Peters added to a draft (about wounds being healed) the hopethat they would “never break out again, whilst the Rivers run, or the Sun and Moongive Light to the Earth” (Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 154, 159[emphasis added]; Minutes of Easton Conference, Nov. 15, 1756, in ExecutiveCorrespondence, Records of the Provincial Council, 1682–1776, reel B7, card no. 1366[Peters’s notes, which concluded that part of the speech with “may never break outagain”]; Minutes of Easton Conference, Nov. 15, 1756, ibid., card no. 1365 [Petersadded to clerk’s draft: “whilst the Rivers run or the Sun & Moon give Light to theEarth”]).


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Affairs for my People the Delawares.” Realizing his predicament the sec-retary gave up, drew a line through the entire paragraph, and inserted“You know you have invited me here I cam therefor[.] My Uncles ye SixNations will confirm what I say.”46

Clever as he was at putting words into (or taking them out of )Teedyuscung’s mouth, Reverend Peters did not always have the lastword. On the morning of November 15, a single term, “greedy,” lodgedin minutes taken two days earlier, drove the cleric to distraction anddrove him, too, scurrying “half dress’d” about the streets of Easton “in aconfused manner.” Accosting one Quaker he demanded to see the man’snotes on the November 13 speeches, insisting that those penned byPeters’s replacement that day, Thomson, were “taken down wrong”because the schoolmaster was doing the bidding of the Penns’ foes.Thomson, Peters fumed, had the Delaware leader saying “that the

46 For his claims to power, see Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 2: 724–25 (quota-tions). Stephen Auth gives a good assessment of Teedyuscung’s authority (Auth, TenYears’ War, 93–96, 99–100). William A. Hunter helps explain Teedyuscung’s claims:“king denotes one concerned with intertribal relations.” In colonial times “‘king’meant, pretty specifically, ‘designated spokesman.’ Only in this sense—and eventhen only by stretching the facts—could Teedyuscung have claimed, in 1756–57, tobe the ‘King of Ten Nations’” (Hunter, “Documented Subdivisions of the DelawareIndians,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey 35 [1978]: 21). See alsoWallace, King of the Delawares, 143; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 219–20, 224–25;Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 326. For the handling of “authorized,” see EastonTreaty Texts, July 28, 1756, pts. 2, 4, RPC [emphasis added]. Francis Jennings wasthe first to notice Peters’s handiwork (Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 274–75 n. 58).This effort to inflate Teedyuscung’s claims to power might also explain why Petersstruck out a mention of Iroquois coaching and control of the Delaware orator fromthe beginning of the Nov. 8 minutes: “Teedyuscung agreable to what had been men-tiond in a private Council betwn the Six nation Indians & Coll Weiser opened theopened the Conference with the following Speech.” A slip of the pen resulted in aneven more egregious exaggeration of Teedyuscung’s status, one that Peters appar-ently never planned. On Nov. 8, listing the dramatis personae, he wrote down:

Teedyuscung the Delaware King, with Speaker

of the Six NationsDelaware Indians & of the Six Nations Shawenese.

The secretary probably intended to leave blank spaces for the number of nativesfrom each group, as in the final version (“Four of the Six Nations, Sixteen DelawareIndians, Two Shawonese”). Franklin, however, got hold of a copy lacking that headcount, so he rendered it: “Teedyuscung, the Delaware King, Speaker of the SixNat ions” (Minutes of Easton Conference , Nov. 8 , 1756 , in Execut iveCorrespondence, Records of the Provincial Council, 1682–1776, reel B7, card no. 1340;Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 150; Minutes of the ProvincialCouncil, 7: 313).

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Proprietaries were greedy of purchasing Lands,” but that was not true,“nor had Teedyuscung said any such thing.” A little later several Friendswere in their lodgings when (one of them wrote afterward) the secretary“flies upstairs bolts into a Chamber . . . & bawls out ‘I find you arepractising upon the Indians & putting words in their mouths & tellingthem what to say,’” then stormed “off in a great Passion.” Quakers wereastonished that Peters was “now denying that [the word greedy] was eversaid which more than twenty Persons can readily prove they heardSpoken by the Interpreter.”47

Friends would have been even more astonished had they known thatback in Peters’s room sat a piece of paper bearing notes, in his hand, onthe November 13 proceedings (apparently he had recovered his wits andhis pen soon enough), including “The Proprs yt purchased Lands werevery greedy at purchasing lands.” What was a man eager to please hispatrons—a man who only days later would have to write a full report onthe treaty to those very patrons—to do about this unfortunate word?48

Peters tried to rework Thomson’s draft, to which, since on November 13Governor Denny made it part of the official record, he had access.Where that sheet bore

And the Proprietor Greedy to purchase Lands,

Peters changed it to

And the Proprietor Greedy to purchase Lands,

adroitly deflecting Teedyuscung’s charge from Penns in particular tocolonists in general. But then he changed his mind. Had the scene hemade on November 15 come back to haunt him? Certainly after thatescapade, everyone would be on the lookout for this telltale passage.Whatever his reasons Peters crossed out his own revision and wrote,

47 Several Quaker accounts reconstruct this scene: Vaughan, Early AmericanIndian Documents, 3: 176–77; Minutes of the Friendly Association, 1755–1757, 21–22;Account of the Trustees, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records,5: AA5, 157 [portions crossed out]; Samuel Parrish, Some Chapters in the History of theFriendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by PacificMeasures (Philadelphia, 1877), 35–37.

48 One cannot say definitively that Peters had written this page prior to themorning of Nov. 15. Atop that sheet is the heading “Explanation of Fraud,” and itwas unusual for him to employ such a heading in his draft notes. The page, how-ever, lies in order amid sheets containing Peters’s rough transcript of Teedyuscung’sNov. 13 speech. His report to his patrons is Peters to Penn, Nov. 22, 1756, in PennManuscripts, Official Correspondence, 8: 201–5.


as there are many among you

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after the next line, “and the Proprietors greedy to purchase Lands.” Thelabel “greedy” stuck.49

Peters might have lost this battle, but it can be argued that he wonthe war. The Teedyuscung known to history is as much the creation ofPeters’s quill as anyone’s. And the Penn family, greedy or not, was nevercalled to account for taking Delaware lands.50 Consciously or uncon-sciously, the provincial secretary, custodian of the official record, waspursuing his patrons’ policies and defending their interests even as hewas, perforce, writing down accusations against those patrons, policies,and interests.

Surveying the cluttered textual landscape and uncovering some of whatcorrecting minutes entailed can make it seem that, like talks elsewherebetween colonizer and colonized, these records were “born . . . maimedand deformed,” so crippled as to leave the Delaware leader speechless.Such a reading of Easton would support those who ask whether nativeorations are more scribe than speaker, more Cicero or Demosthenesthan Iroquois or Delaware, and wonder “how much they were influ-enced by White expectations and motives, including literary fashions ofthe times.” Some students of the American encounter go beyond doubtto argue that such texts reveal l itt le if anything about Indians.Translation itself, “no matter how decorous,” argues one, “is an act ofviolence,” and still more damage is done when an oral performance getschopped into paragraphs and pinned to a page. Another warns againstreading colonial sources that discuss native peoples “as if the mediationof European representations were an incidental consideration, easily cor-rected for . . . We can be certain only that European representations ofthe New World tell us something about the European practice of repre-sentation.” Indeed “the natives themselves often seem most silent atthose rare moments in which they are made to speak.”51

49 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pts. 11–12, RPC-1, RPC-2, Nov. 13, 1756,pt. 11, APS, FAH (FAH has it “The Proprietor and others greedy to purchaseLands”).

50 Wallace, King of the Delawares; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, chaps. 12, 15, 19.51 For doubts, see McKenzie, “Sociology of a Text,” 189 (“deformed”), referring

to versions of New Zealand’s 1840 Treaty of Waitangi; Michael K. Foster, “AnotherLook at the Function of Wampum in Iroquois-White Councils,” in Jennings,History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, 100 (“literary fashions”); Eric Cheyfitz,The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan(New York, 1991), 37 (“decorous”; I was led to this useful discussion in Cheyfitz byHallock, From the Fallen Tree, 91). For paragraphs, see Arnold Krupat, Red Matters:Native American Studies, Rethinking the Americas (Philadelphia, 2002), 41. StephenGreenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), 7(“European representations”), 146 (“most silent”). Peters was not only a clergymanbut also a classicist, and in 1744 Franklin printed the first American translation of

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Given all the static in the transmission lines coming out of Easton,what one scholar terms the “fine-grained details” of an Indian orationand another calls “the turn of a phrase, the choice of a word, a particularmetaphor” must, without closer scrutiny, be considered suspect, evenspurious. Nor is it possible to learn what the Delaware leader actuallysaid on that council ground; no urtext can be cobbled together out ofthe paper trail from those days. Though Governor William Dennypromised on November 13 to consider Charles Thomson’s notes themost perfect, though a modern expert on the minutes has pronouncedBenjamin Franklin’s version “generally more satisfactory” than the onein the Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, no one can con-f ident ly c la im that Frankl in or Richard Peters came c loser toTeedyuscung’s original than this Moravian or that Quaker.52

Even the strongest candidate for the most reliable account, consid-ered more carefully, cannot silence skeptics. It is a tantalizing prospect:sometime between the council’s close on November 17 and his owndeparture from Easton late the following day, none other than JohnPumpshire signed a statement that “the foregoing Minutes of the[November negotiations] . . . having been read to me deliberately byCharles Thomson the Clerk who wrote the same down as they weredelivered and each paragraph being duly considered and attended to, Ido hereby Certify that they contain just and true Minutes of the saidConferences.”53 But closer study can turn what looks like an oasis of cer-tainty in a desert of doubt into a mirage.

For one thing Teedyuscung was not in the room and, though he andPumpshire had worked together since July, they were not longtime com-patriots who always agreed on Delaware foreign policy. The two hadbeen on different paths for a generation. Around 1730 Teedyuscung and

Cicero at the very time he was typesetting an Indian treaty (Van Doren, introduc-tion to Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, vii; Labaree, Papers ofFranklin, 7: 403–5, 412 nn. 6–7, 416; Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 271–78).According to one scholar, Franklin’s New York counterpart Cadwallader Colden,writing his History of the Five Indian Nations, “modeled his prose style uponThucydides and Clarendon, and like them he seems to have followed the classicaltradition of making up suitably dramatic speeches to insert at appropriate places inhis history” (Robie, New York Folklore 12: 100). My reading on this topic includesKrupat, Red Matters, chap. 2 ; Anthony Mattina, “North American IndianMythography: Editing Texts for the Printed Page,” in Swann and Krupat, Recoveringthe Word, 129–48; Brian Swann, ed., Voices from Four Directions: ContemporaryTranslations of the Native Literatures of North America (Lincoln, Neb., 2004),xiii–xxii.

52 Foster, “Another Look at Wampum,” 100 (“details”); Shoemaker, StrangeLikeness, 9 (“phrase”); Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, 434 n. 1 (“satisfactory”).

53 Easton Minutes, Nov. 1756 , in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting IndianCommittee Records, 5: AA5, 185 (21 of document).

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his kin moved from New Jersey to the Pennsylvania frontier, where hewould embrace the Moravians and ultimately settle in the SusquehannaVal ley. Pumpshire remained in New Jersey, forging t ies with aPresbyterian mission. When war began in the fall of 1755, the two foundthemselves on opposing sides: Teedyuscung raided Pennsylvania;“Liuetenant Pumshard” apparently stayed home if he did not actuallyjoin the colonial militia. Then in June 1756, while Teedyuscung was try-ing on that coat French officers gave him, Pumpshire—recruited byGovernor Robert Hunter Morris and the provincial council—crossed theDelaware River to help Newcastle carry Pennsylvania’s message toTeedyuscung and other enemy Indians on the Susquehanna.54

Once the two men finally teamed up at Easton, they still were notexactly in step. When colonial officials started having Pumpshire inter-pret at the first informal meeting, Teedyuscung announced that hewanted to use “a young Indian called Benjamin” instead. Colonistsbalked because they considered the man “an impudent, forward youth,who had enlisted in the Jersey [militia] Companies, and afterwardsdeserted and went over to the Enemy Indians.” For his part Pumpshire“said he would not be concerned in interpreting if Benjamin wasallowed to speak.” This impasse resolved itself, yet in the ensuing nego-tiations Teedyuscung and Pumpshire often went their own ways. Theinterpreter tended to stick close to Conrad Weiser and others in the pro-prietary faction that had hired him; Teedyuscung drifted into theQuakers’ orbit. It is also telling that, after the November council closed,the Delaware leader and the rest headed back to Indian country, whereasPumpshire went home, but not before offering Weiser a critique ofTeedyuscung’s per formance and a v i s ion for the future of theDelaware.55 Given their differences, in background and temperament aswell as in peace and war, it is hard to be sure that minutes the Delawareinterpreter declared accurate would have satisfied the Delaware speaker.

54 Wallace, King of the Delawares, 82–84. Capt. George Reynolds to WilliamEdwards or Mr. Spangenberg, July 14, 1756, in Horsfield Papers, 1: 221 (“LiuetenantPumshard”). For his recruitment by Pennsylvania, see Directions to William Loganfrom the Governor, n.d. [June 1756], in James Logan Papers, box 11, file 64,Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Logan was instructed to find “three or four ofthe most sensible and considerate Delaware Indians living among the English,” men“such as are of good dispositions & known to be well attached to the English andacquainted with the manner in which they have been treated since the commence-ment of Hostilities” (see also Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 145).

55 Minutes of the Provincial Council, 7: 205 (quotations). Pumpshire went on tosoften his stance on Benjamin: “but he would attend to what should be said by theKing; and in case of Forgetfulness or Misapprehension in Benjamin, he would endeav-our to set him right; and as Benjamin understood English, he might be allowed”(ibid.). Pumpshire’s work with Peters and Weiser can be found in ibid., 7: 200, 206,296, 307, 309, 431–33; Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 2: 728, 3: 66, 86–87, 107, 263–65,275–76.

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But that is not the only objection to raise about the text Pumpshirecertified: trying to imagine what went on between the covering of thecouncil fire and the interpreter’s departure the next day yields all sorts ofpossible ways the transcript could be corrupted. Consider that for somereason the Delaware did not peruse the minutes himself; he listened asThomson read them, thereby enabling the colonist to omit or condenseas he saw fit and leaving open the question of how closely whatPumpshire heard resembled what he endorsed. Moreover it is impossibleto know whether the few corrections made on the speeches—the stern “Irequire” to the softer “I desire,” one passage so strenuously crossed outthat the original is unreadable—were done at Pumpshire’s behest or afterhe left town. Certainly it is improbable that the most significant revi-sions, marginalia blasting the proprietary faction for “shamefullyneglecting” Indians, were read aloud and more unlikely still that hewould have approved them if they had been. The governor and provin-cial council had not just hired Pumpshire in the first place but were thatvery fall putting “a little money in his pocket,” and he was also keen tokeep a horse they had lent him.56

Nor would the power dynamics of the reading that day necessarilyhave left the interpreter feeling free to object to this word or thatphrase, for though Pumpshire was among Friends, he might not havefelt that he was among friends. He and the Quakers’ scribe Thomson(with a colonial witness) apparently convened in the room of Quakerleader Israel Pemberton, a man Pumpshire so disliked that a few daysearlier he had exclaimed to Weiser: “Israel is Wicked.” Whether theDelaware thought he could speak his mind, it is also possible that hisgrasp of the text’s finer points was less than sure. Some fifteen monthslater, Pumpshire and four other Jersey Delaware would send a letter ask-ing for colonial help with land affairs, “as we find we are Not able toTrans act in Deep things[,] we are at lost what to do.” Sitting by himselfthat day without any Indian companions to consult, eager to headhome, fretting about his pay and that horse, probably exhausted, possi-bly ill, perhaps hung over, how well did Pumpshire fathom the council’sdeep things? How badly was he lost?57

56 Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 11, FAH n. 91 (“neglecting”), Nov. 16,1756, pt. 7, MA (“money”). For the horse, see Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 3:86–87, 206.

57 Weiser, “Observations,” Moravian Church Archives, reel 30, box 225, folder 6,item 6 (“Wicked”). I speculate that they were in Pemberton’s lodgings because thelast page of the document Pumpshire signed bears the cryptic “Isr: Pemberton’s”(Easton Minutes, Nov. 1756, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian CommitteeRecords, 5: AA5, 186 [22 of document]). Pumpshire’s relations with Friends werecomplicated. Whereas Quakers occasionally rewarded Delaware Moses Tatamy “as atoken of our regard for him” and for “services at the late treaty,” I have found no


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When a transcript certified by the Delaware interpreter himself canbe interrogated in these ways, it seems clear that a definitive account ofwhat passed at Easton is a will-o’-the-wisp. So, too, anyone intent onretrieving “an authentic, indigenous voice” from treaty documents ischasing a chimera. That Pumpshire was literate and that Teedyuscungknew enough about paper and ink to request copies of the minutes andto demand a clerk of his own the following summer is testimony enoughto the distance they had traveled from some imagined aboriginal way ofthinking and speaking. Indeed when reading the transcripts it is some-times impossible to say for certain what was Indian and what colonial.Even if this passage or that cadence could be traced to the Bible, forexample, it still might have come from the Delaware side of the councilfire because Teedyuscung and Pumpshire were conversant with biblicalterms and phrases from their long acquaintance with missionaries. Atthe same time, many of the colonists at Easton had been hearing andreading Indian speeches for years. Thus when a Quaker at the Novembercouncil wrote his wife back in Philadelphia that “we hope the Eyes ofmany others will be gradually turn’d to see” the good things happeninghere and that “some hopes appear’d of the Clouds dispersing,” was heechoing Teedyuscung and Pumpshire—“in all ten Nations, are nowturning their Eyes this way,” the two Delaware proclaimed in July, so letus “dispel” or “scatter the Clouds”—or were they echoing him?58

evidence of similar payments to Pumpshire beyond one coat he requested in October1756 and a later reference to tailoring work for Tatamy and him (Parrish, History ofthe Friendly Association, 48 [quotations], 97–98, 109; Pumpshire to Pemberton, Oct.23, 1756, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records, 1: AA1, 199;Accounts, n.d., ibid., 2: 410). For “Deep things,” see John Pumpshire et al. to IsraelPemberton, Mar. 8, 1758, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee Records,1: AA1, 427. I raise the possibility of a hangover from mention of his being intoxi-cated at a 1757 treaty (Thomson, Enquiry into the Causes, 114) and an allusion thatsame year to Pumpshire’s having been drunk at a council sometime in the past(Charles Read to Pemberton, May 17, 1757, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting IndianCommittee Records, 1: AA1, 339). Shortly before the Nov. 1756 treaty, Pumpshirementioned a lingering illness that he had had for some months (Pumpshire toPemberton, Oct. 23, 1756, ibid., 1: AA1, 199). For Pumpshire’s Easton departure, seeEaston Minutes, Nov. 1756, in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian CommitteeRecords, 5: AA5, 185 (21 of document); William C. Reichel, ed., Memorials of theMoravian Church (Philadelphia, 1870), 1: 274–75; Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 3:66–68, 86–87, 206, 8th ser., 6: 5058, 5061.

58 Thomas Hallock, questioning the search for “an authentic, indigenousvoice,” terms these documents “genuine products of the encounter” that “show hownatives forged identities in a colonialist setting” (Hallock, From the Fallen Tree, 90).See also Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and NativeCommunity in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2000), 3, 9–10; Maureen Konkle,Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography,1827–1863 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 232. For “Eyes” and “Clouds,” see Israel

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Perhaps, then, the naysayers are right about treaty minutes. Maybetotaling the variations among Teedyuscung’s Easton speeches in 1756compels the conclusion that this encounter was another of thosemoments when a native seemed to be speaking but in fact silencereigned. If so, an important resource for rescuing the native perspectivefrom oblivion must be played down rather than played up. For almost acentury, council orations have been vital to the enterprise of addingIndian voices to the American conversation. The Franklin accounts ofPennsylvania’s proceedings in particular have been something of amother lode, heavily mined, since they are “among the most richlydescribed in the colonial records.”59 Does recovering miscellaneoustexts, then assaying them, yield only fool’s gold?

Before consigning remnants of Indian utterances to some evidentialslag heap (or handing them over to intellectual historians and literarycritics), it is worth wondering whether scholars are asking too much ofthese documents. Is a textual Holy Grail, an accurate, unadulteratedrecord of authentic native speech centuries ago, not only elusive but alsoillusory? Those embarking on this quest may have been led astray by afaith in the written record inherited from men such as Peters, men whosecareers and very lives were fashioned out of paper—deeds and contracts,laws and sermons, official reports and, yes, treaty minutes—and whowere not shy about sharing their views. “Writing is more certain thanyour Memory,” colonists told Indians at another Pennsylvania council adozen years before Easton. “That is the way the white people have of pre-serving Transactions of every kind, and transmitting them down to theirChildrens’ Children for ever; and all Disputes among them are settled bythis faithfull kind of Evidence, and must be the Rule between the GreatKing and you.” In January 1758 the provincial council committee thatGovernor Denny had appointed to investigate Teedyuscung’s claimsabout land fraud prefaced its report by noting that “the Indians beingutterly unacquainted with reading and Writing, keep no Records of theirSales of Land, or other Transactions; and . . . therefore, their Knowledgeof what their Ancestors did, being only traditional, is imperfect, andoften very erroneous.” Denny, reading the report, would have foundnothing to quarrel with: at Easton he had told Teedyuscung bluntly that“you do not understand Writings and Records.”60

Pemberton to Mary Pemberton, 10 and 13 11 mo. [Nov.] 1756, in Pemberton Papers,11: 137, 140; Easton Treaty Texts, July 28, 1756, pts. 1, 3.

59 Foster, “On Who Spoke First,” 204 n. 7 (see also 186).60 Minutes of the Provincial Council, 4: 718 (“more certain”), 8: 248 (“unac-

quainted”); Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 160 (“do not under-stand”). See also Merritt, At the Crossroads, 210–18; Shoemaker, Strange Likeness,chap. 3.


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The boasts about documents and the aspersions cast on nativeways of recording and recalling agreements hid the fact that theEnglish themselves were incapable during this era of producing averbatim account of their own orations. Royal addresses survive instrikingly different forms, and parliamentary debates, even thosetitled the True Relation, were as much fiction as fact. The rage forrhetoric did not bring with it a devotion to accuracy. Two decadesafter Easton, a member of Parliament, reading a published accountof a speech he made on the floor of the Commons, remarked: “Why,to be sure, there are in that report a few things which I did say, butmany things which I am glad I did not say, and some things which Iwish I could have said.” Another parliamentary orator drylyobserved, “I have sometimes borrowed a [news]paper to hear what Isaid myself ” and was “sometimes very much surprised at it.”61

Given the difficulty anyone in those days had capturing speechwith fidelity up to modern standards, it is clear that pursuit of theperfect record should be abandoned; it is less clear that the recordsthemselves should be. Indeed if one lesson to take away from theEaston transcripts is that it is a mistake to make too much ofthem—to quote too uncritically, to parse too closely—another isthat it is also a mistake to make too little. Any treaty document is byits nature a hybrid. Like the councils it chronicles, it is too much the

61 Peter D. G. Thomas, “The Beginning of Parliamentary Reporting inNewspapers, 1768–1774,” English Historical Review 74, no. 293 (October 1959):623–36 (quotations, 634). See Wallace Notestein and Frances Helen Relf, eds.,Commons Debates for 1629: Critically Edited: And an Introduction Dealing withParliamentary Sources for the Early Stuarts, Studies in the Social Sciences(Minneapolis, Minn., 1921) ; Benjamin Beard Hoover, Samuel Johnson’sParliamentary Reporting: Debates in the Senate of Lilliput (Berkeley, Calif., 1953);A. Aspinall, “The Reporting and Publishing of the House of Commons’Debates, 1771–1834,” in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, ed. Richard Paresand A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1956), 227–57; Robert DeMaria Jr., The Life ofSamuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford, Eng., 1993), 52–66; Marcus,“From Oral Delivery to Print,” 33–48. For the complex relationships amongoral, manuscript, and print cultures in early modern England, see KeithThomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,” in The WrittenWord: Literacy in Transition: Wolfson College Lectures 1985, ed. Gerd Baumann(Oxford, Eng., 1986), 97–131; D. F. McKenzie, “Speech-Manuscript-Print,” inNew Directions in Textual Studies, ed. Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford(Austin, Tex., 1990), 86–109. Accurate transcripts of parliamentary speecheswould not appear until the next century. In American history perhaps the mostfamous collection of documents (imperfectly) recording speeches occurred whiledrawing up the Constitution in Philadelphia, where numerous scribes tooknotes. See Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (NewHaven, Conn., 1911), 1: xi–xxv.

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product of the “middle ground” between native and newcomer to belongto one side or the other; hence, the search for an unfiltered aboriginalvoice ought to be abandoned.62

But all is not lost. Studying the multiple transcripts bequeathed bycouncils actually lends credibility to the treaty minutes as genuineechoes of a long-forgotten native voice and a native sensibility. Untilnow whatever confidence scholars have invested in these texts has beengrounded more in a hope and a hunch than in systematic analysis orcareful comparison. Considered together, different iterations of a singleevent that show from one line of sight an alarming range of vagary andvariation look from another angle like close kindred, close enough tosuggest that these pages approach “the Indian way of speaking.”63

Even as he joined the ranks of the skeptics by questioning the Eastonminutes, Weiser, who knew more about Indian ways of speaking than anyPennsylvanian of his day, indirectly affirmed their validity. Perusing atranscript of the November 13 proceedings, the German colonist, adoptedMohawk, and proprietary man echoed Peters by insisting that his patrons’Quaker enemies must have talked Teedyuscung into accusing the Penns ofland fraud. “The rest of that paragraph is no Indian phrase,” Weiserscoffed. Several years later he was still fuming that “Many ExpressionsTeedjouskon made use of ” at Easton “were no Indian Phrases”; connivingFriends, Weiser concluded, must have put words in the Delaware’s mouthto open a new front in their war against the proprietors.64

But if the rest of that paragraph and many expressions did not qual-ify, to Weiser’s ear, as Indian phrases, by implication many other para-graphs and many other expressions certainly did. Here is where havingseveral versions of a speech can help make something of treaty talk’s tan-gled skein: at those points where they resemble one another, duringthose moments when two or three penmen were jotting down the samemetaphors, the same phrases, a passage must come close to the verywords Teedyuscung uttered and Pumpshire translated. Finding suchconcordance is only a matter of listening for the harmonies in thiscacophony instead of the discord.


62 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in theGreat Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991). For treaties as hybrids, seeShoemaker, Strange Likeness, 70; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 133–37;Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 121.

63 Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 2: 746. See also Minutes of the ProvincialCouncil, 7: 187.

64 Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser . , 3: 39 (“no Indian phrase”); Weiser,“Observations,” Moravian Church Archives, reel 30, box 225, folder 6, item 6 (“noIndian Phrases”). During the Easton councils, Weiser, though he did not knowDelaware, was sometimes called on to clear up confusion in translation (Easton TreatyTexts, July 28, 1756, pt. 6, RPC, APS, BF; Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 2, APS, FAH n. 108).

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The opening of this piece, where Teedyuscung began the CondolenceCeremony on November 13, supplies an example. In one transcript afteranother, not just this passage but those preceding and following it bear afamily resemblance. It is impossible to tell which of them is in fact whatPumpshire actually had Teedyuscung say, but it can be concluded thatthe Delaware orator metaphorically wiped tears from Pennsylvanians’eyes and blood from their bodies and from the ground, that he cleanedand dressed wounds, that as a brother he rejoiced at colonists’ recovery,and that he then proceeded to talk about the origins of the war.

Comparing different transcripts of a speech Teedyuscung made theprevious summer reveals similar convergence:

he wishes the Same good Spirit that possess’d the good old ManW. Penn who was a Frd to the Indians may inspire the People ofthis Province at this Time.

I desire and wish that the Spirit of old Willm. Penn may reviveagain in Pensylvania & Peace may Prevail and continue in thisLand.

And he Desires that the peacable Disposition of old Wm penwho was Always a frd to the Indians may now Govern all Andbring About a Last ing peace to which he Shd Do hisEndeavour[.]

Further I wish, that the spirit of William Penn may rise again inPensylvania, & the old frindship & Peace might be perform’d.65

Did Pumpshire say peaceable disposition, just spirit, or good spirit? DidTeedyuscung hope that remembering Penn would inspire onlyPennsylvanians, or govern all, or simply prevail and continue in thisland? No one will ever know. But there can be no doubt that theDelaware leader was summoning William Penn to his side once more.

Such tolerance of different words, rather than insistence on beingexact (as Peters put it) right down to the last syllable, was in keepingwith Indian ways. The native world from which Teedyuscung came towriting and to Easton had different views on accuracy. In that worldprecise wording and verbatim transcripts were neither expected nordesired. Heirs to a long and powerful oral tradition, Indian peoples wereaccustomed to variations on a theme in different recollections or render-ings of a speech. “Except in recent times when the program of the

65 Ibid., July 29, 1756, pt. 1.

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Condolence Council has become fixed and there is fanatical insistenceon adhering to its forms,” wrote William Fenton, “the evidence from the[colonial-era] treaty documents demonstrates how facile the Iroquois werein accommodating its forms to the particular circumstances.” Fenton’s fel-low Iroquoianist Mary Druke adds that in oral cultures “the exactitudewith which details [of a speech or ceremony] are transmitted in manycases is not as important . . . as the structure of the narration.” Thus, sheargues, “Iroquois oral traditions of treaties are not exact verbatim accountsof council proceedings, but convey an accepted interpretation of relation-ships based on agreements made in council negotiations.”66

Studying Iroquois oratory in contemporary times by tape recordingone person giving the same speech on different occasions as well as dif-ferent speakers delivering the same ceremonial address, Michael K.Foster confirms the enduring power of native assumptions aboutspeeches’ structure and significance. He observes:

Rituals are not memorized for verbatim recitation, but are com-posed—literally built anew—each time the speaker rises tospeak. What speakers share, and what gives continuity to the tra-dition . . . is a set of composition rules for each ritual type . . .and a common repertoire of conventionalized formulas . . .There is a widespread impression that different versions of a rit-ual are in some sense equivalent. If the hierarchic structure ispreserved and the familiar phrases drawn upon, the ritual countsas a certain type, even though there may be a considerable rangein length and specific details on different occasions.67

Read in this light, differences in wording and phrasing that mightseem as troubling to scholars today as they were to Peters and his con-temporaries probably were less important to the Delaware, Iroquois, and

66 Fenton, “Structure, Continuity, and Change,” 28; Druke, “IroquoisTreaties,” 90–91.

67 Michael K. Foster, From the Earth to Beyond the Sky: An EthnographicApproach to Four Longhouse Iroquois Speech Events, Canadian Ethnology Service(Ottawa, Ontario, 1974), vi–viii. Comparing a Delaware oration in 1756 withIroquois speeches tape-recorded two centuries later is less far-fetched than it mightseem. For one thing the Delaware Teedyuscung was relying heavily on Iroquoisforms and rituals, as Foster himself observes when including the November 1756Easton treaty among the four “Iroquois-White Councils” he chooses to study (seealso Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, 189, 400). For another I am engaged herein “upstreaming” from the recent to the remote past in the fashion that Foster—and, before him, William Fenton, who developed the term and method—suggests:employing “modern ethnographic sources . . . to afford a perspective for evaluatingearlier written sources” (Foster, “On Who Spoke First,” 183–207 [quotation, 197]).

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other Indians listening at Easton. Moreover Foster’s work in developing“a native theory of speech acts” uncovers striking parallels with elementsin Teedyuscung’s orations taken down by harried penmen who knew lit-tle about natives and less about native oratorical culture. Examinedthrough the lens Foster has fashioned from modern materials furnishedby his Iroquois informants, phrases and sentences jotted down more thantwo centuries ago reveal that, far from ignorant or inept, Teedyuscung(coached by Delaware and Iroquois advisers) was well-versed in diplo-matic culture and that together the texts unwittingly conform to the cus-toms of Indian country.68

Among what Foster calls “the ingredients of the speaker’s situation”is repetition. Common in oral societies everywhere—and a source ofirritation to literate men listening to natives traverse the same rhetoricalspace time and again—repetition was a crucial means of emphasizing apoint and lodging it firmly in mind and memory. Easton penmen mightnot have liked the reiteration, and they might well have omitted muchof it to save ink and spare weary fingers, but they nonetheless capturedthis ingredient in Teedyuscung’s recipe, conveying at least some of itonto the page. Many times, on many different November days, and inmany different texts, the Delaware speaker assured his listeners thatsince the treaty last July he had fulfilled his promise to spread through-out Indian country the good news of a possible peace. Similarly,embarking on an explanation of the war’s causes, he went over the sameground, saying “I will now [?] tell you the truth why I have struck you,”and “In answer to yr Question I will tell you ye truth,” and “Accordingto yr desire I will now wth an honest heart answer to tell you ye truth,”and “Now Br I have told you ye truth that you desird me.”69

Other phrases heard again and again at Easton capture the centralityof additional items Foster found in a contemporary orator’s tool kit. OnIroquois reservations today “the speaker must be appointed,” whichhelps explain why, in the early sessions that July, Teedyuscung soundedalmost obsessive about establishing his authority: “Tho’ you may think Iam alone here, yet it will not be long before you will be convinced that Iam here by the Appointment of ten Nations, among which are myUncles the Six Nations, authorizing me to treat with you, and what I do

68 Michael K. Foster, “When Words Become Deeds: An Analysis of ThreeIroquois Longhouse Speech Events,” in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking,ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1989), 362 (quotation).

69 Foster, From Earth to Beyond the Sky, 171–72. See also Merrell, Into theAmerican Woods, 212–13. On Teedyuscung’s keeping his promise, see Easton TreatyTexts, Nov. 8, 1756, pts. 1–2, Nov. 9, 1756, pts. 1–2, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 7, Nov. 13,1756, pt. 6, RPC-1. On telling the truth, see Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 6, RPC-1 (and July28, 1756, pt. 3, Nov. 9, 1756, pt. 3, Nov. 13, 1756, pts. 1, 5–6, Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 3).

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they will all confirm”; “there are only two Kings appointed to transactpublick Business, of which I am one”; “I am but a Messenger from theUnited Nations, though I act as a Chief Man for the Delawares.”70

Repeatedly assuring the audience that he was duly entitled to speak,Teedyuscung followed other rhetorical pathways still visible. That “thespeaker should be sincere,” as Foster learned from the Iroquois, mightaccount for Peters’s editorial changes on July 28. When the clerk had theDelaware spokesman say simply “Tho’ you may think I am alone here,” his superior, Peters, added

Tho’ you may think I am alone here.

So, too, when modern orators ask the audience “for your patience in the mat-ter of this speech,” they echo scribes who had Teedyuscung say “I . . . hopeyou will have Patience to hear me,” or “he begs the Governor will hear himpatiently,” or “I desire You Would hear me a few Words with patience.”71

Even the Delaware leader’s expressions of abasement and apologymight have more to do with rules about a speaker’s proper pose thanwith any genuine sense of inferiority. Among Iroquois in the late twenti-eth century, “strong norms of modesty” required that a speaker mention“his inadequacy for the task” and offer “the proper ritual apology” forany mistakes or omissions. Perhaps it was the same impulse that lacedEaston speeches with phrases such as “I represent myself only to be aBoy; I am really no more,” and “according to my foolish notion ofIndian affairs,” and “according To my weakness, & Indian manner ofExpression,” and “according to my mean Capacity and Abilities.”Besides linking his performance with an ongoing oral tradition, thisframe of reference offers an alternative interpretation of the man him-self. Maybe he was not, after all, “mercilessly ridden by the specter of hisown inferiority”; it could be that what looked like a “dependent, almostchildlike relation to the whites” was really his mouthing of the standardapologia expected of a council speaker.72


70 Foster, “When Words Become Deeds,” 364 (“appointed”); Easton TreatyTexts, July 28, 1756, pts. 1–5, July 29, 1756, pt. 1, BF.

71 Foster, “When Words Become Deeds,” 365 (“sincere,” “patience”); EastonTreaty Texts, July 28, 1756, pt. 2, RPC. Here, too, the line between Indian and colo-nial is hard to draw, since sincerity was also a crucial rhetorical element in Englishand colonial culture (Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, xxi, 226, 231). For patience, seeEaston Treaty Texts, Nov. 13, 1756, pt. 1, BF, JH, Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 1, RPC-3.

72 Foster, “When Words Become Deeds,” 364–65 (“modesty”). For apologies,see Easton Treaty Texts, Nov. 9, 1756, pt. 3, BF, Nov. 16, 1756, pt. 7, RPC-1, APS,FAH, BF. For Teedyuscung’s expressions of inferiority, see Wallace, King of theDelawares, 17 (“childlike”), 265 (“specter”). It is possible that this stance was anexample of borrowing from colonial as well as Indian rhetorical tools, since it was

I solemnly & wth the utmost Sincerity declare that

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On these terms, native terms, the multivalent transcripts retrievedfrom Easton bear up rather well under scrutiny. Even cursory compari-son of them reveals considerable overlap in topics covered, metaphorswielded, and arguments developed. The handiwork of Peters, Franklin,Quakers, and Moravians did not make Teedyuscung mute. Remainingon these pages are the grievances and aspirations, the strategies andstruggles of the man and his people not only for peace but also for ahomeland that would be Delaware forever. That campaign would takeTeedyuscung from Easton in 1756 through many more towns and manymore treaties. It ended with his murder in the spring of 1763 whenConnecticut colonists bearing a fraudulent grant to the Susquehannacountry burned his house and village to the ground (with the Delawareleader asleep in his bed), then moved in and renamed the spot Wilkes-Barre.73

The June before his death, Teedyuscung visited Easton for whatwould turn out to be his last treaty council there. Having had six moreyears’ experience with clerks and copies, with translators and transcripts,he blamed the conflicts between natives and newcomers on scribes.“Somebody must have wrote wrong,” he said, “and that makes the Landall bloody.”74 When he finally got his own copy of the 1756 Easton min-utes, would he also have said someone wrote wrong and his words werenot taken down aright?

conventional in petitions and letters for colonists to offer apologies and deference byway of prologue. I thank Jean O’Brien and Charles Cohen for this suggestion.

73 Even casual comparison of Teedyuscung’s speeches at other councils also bol-sters confidence in the 1756 Easton transcripts. He (or his interpreter) did offer somemetaphors not recorded at Easton in 1756. Performing the Condolence Ceremony,for example, he at other times spoke of using a wing, a feather, or a cloth to wipeclean the space. Or he might borrow the Iroquois metaphor of a Covenant Chainbinding colonists and Indians that had grown rusty or refer to his alliance withcolonists as a “Union of Hands.” Overall, however, the resemblance in themes andmetaphors is pronounced. The cadence of condolence, the talk of peace as being“this good Work,” the placement of the Delaware people in the middle betweenIroquois and Pennsylvania, the requests that colonists examine their hearts, the useof tobacco and pipe, the talk of colonists being wiser or stronger than the Delawarenation—these and other modes of expression heard at Easton in 1756 find echoesthroughout the corpus of Teedyuscung’s treaty talks. See Minutes of the ProvincialCouncil, 6: 360–63, 7: 649–52, 668–70, 675–77, 689–91, 699–700, 703–7, 709–10,712–13, 770–71, 8: 9–11 (quotations, 10), 32–35, 47–51, 84–85, 87–91, 96, 133–34, 175,180, 200–203, 211–12, 344–46, 403–4, 415–18, 421, 464–67, 469, 497–99, 594–95,635–36, 651, 654–55, 668, 707–8, 9: 6–9; Sullivan et al., Papers of Sir WilliamJohnson, 3: 762–63, 765–68, 770–71, 777–81, 785–86. For Teedyuscung’s career after1756, see Wallace, King of the Delawares, chaps. 12–19; Auth, Ten Years’ War, chap. 7;Merritt, At the Crossroads, pts. 3–4.

74 Sullivan et al., Papers of Sir William Johnson, 3: 767.

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If that question is hard to answer, nonetheless it is clear from this ini-tial foray into the documents produced during the summer and fall of1756 that they bear a profoundly ambiguous legacy, one that can sup-port either side in the ongoing debate over Indian oratory. On the onehand, collecting and then placing the minutes side by side is in someways profoundly unsettling; it can erode confidence that any Indian atany treaty can be heard across the imposing boundary between a nativespeaking at some colonial-era council and the written word sitting onthe page or screen today. On the other hand, approached from a differ-ent angle and guided by a different set of values, it can be argued thatthe multiple manuscripts have the opposite effect of shoring up theintegrity of the countless Indian speeches that litter the American his-torical landscape. Considered in the light cast by work on native ora-tory and approached with an ear attuned to consonance, those textssuggest that Teedyuscung’s speeches were no figment of the colonialimagination.

The documents Richard Peters and his scribal colleagues createdhave the added salutary effect of undermining colonial claims about thepower of pen and paper: writing is more certain than your memory?This faithful kind of evidence? Oral tradition is imperfect, and oftenvery erroneous? A closer look at what the men who delivered such ser-mons actually penned makes such arrogant assertions about the superi-ority of white ways ring false. Only those with the mind-set of colonistssuch as Reverend Peters—who made paper and ink the emperors of thetreaty ground, who insisted there is only one truth and that it is theirtruth, inscribed and enshrined on the page—only they will be disap-pointed and downcast, rather than encouraged and intrigued, by apolyphonic Teedyuscung.

Far from ending the discussion of these speeches as irredeemablycontaminated by too many hands and too many agendas, eavesdrop-ping on Teedyuscung and his fellow Indian orators opens up for explo-ration a vast, nearly untouched textual domain. All sorts of possibilitiesawait the intrepid adventurer into that forbidding land. What might ascholar coming to the Easton transcriptions from the Old Testament,the classical world, or contemporary English literature—not to men-tion someone fluent in Delaware—make of them? Or think of thequestions awaiting an answer just about this one Indian speaker. DidTeedyuscung sound the same across the years and the councils? Did adifferent interpreter change his voice? A different scribe? How does thatvoice compare with the voices of others (Delaware, Iroquois, Shawnee)who were operating in the colonial theater at the same time? It has been

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250 years since Teedyuscung stood before the penmen at Easton, yet wehave barely begun to listen to him.

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