White eyes

White Eyes (* 1730 , † 1778 ) was a chief of the Munsee - Indians , a tribe of the Lenni Lenape , and a member of the Turtle- clans (Turtle Clan), who at the time of the American Revolution lived (1775-1783) in the Ohio Country . His Indian name was Koquethagechton , but because of his light skin and eye color, he was generally known as White Eyes by the settlers and border fighters (English: Frontiersmen). He was a tireless mediator between the conflicting parties and negotiated the first treaties with the young United States . His most important but unachieved goal was the formation of a secure territory , an Indian state, for the indigenous people living there. The circumstances of his possibly violent death have never been clarified.

Early years

Nothing is known about White Eyes' youth, which he presumably spent in what is now Pennsylvania . He was first mentioned in history as a messenger of embassies during contract negotiations at the end of the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Around 1766 he was apparently working as a trader and innkeeper in a Lenape village on the Beaver River, a tributary of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania. This fact suggests that he had good relations with the English traders, although he could not read or write and probably could hardly speak English.

After the French and Indian War, the settlements of the white colonists grew around Fort Pitt near the Lenape villages in western Pennsylvania , so that the Lenape were displaced to the Muskingum River in eastern Ohio. The same fate met the inhabitants of the Christian Lenape villages, who had been converted to Christianity by the Moravian missionaries . Although he was not a Christian himself, White Eyes insisted that the Lenape converts still remained members of the Lenape nation. White Eyes established his own domicile, White Eyes Town, near the Lenape capital Coshocton . In 1774, White Eyes was elected Chief of Lenni Lenape by the Grand Council.

Lord Dunmore's war

At the beginning of the 1770s, acts of violence increased on the settlement border and open war threatened to break out. Despite the peace efforts of White Eyes, the Lord Dunmores War (1773–1774) broke out between the Shawnee and Mingo on the one hand and the colony of Virginia on the other. To protect the settlers, Lord Dunmore , Governor of Virginia, moved to the Upper Ohio Valley with 2,500 colonial militia in May 1774. The Lenape and the tribes on the Great Lakes remained neutral, so Cornstalk , warchief of the Shawnee, only had to oppose Dunmore's force at Point Pleasant, the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers, on October 10, 1774 with his Shawnee and Mingo warriors. There were great losses on both sides and eventually the Indians lost and fled north. Cornstalk had to sign a peace treaty that allowed white settlement south of the Ohio. White Eyes did a great job as a peace broker between the two warring parties in this conflict and was instrumental in the peace treaty that ended the war.

American War of Independence

General Lachlan McIntosh

Soon after the end of Lord Dunmore's War, the next conflict broke out, the American War of Independence. In the midst of the contract negotiations with Lord Dunmore about a secure residential area for the Lenape in Ohio, Dunmore was forced by American revolutionaries to leave Virginia, so that White Eyes had to negotiate again with the Americans. In 1776 the Lenape sent White Eyes to represent them in the Continental Congress , which officially thanked him for his efforts to bring peace between Indians and white settlers. He also received three hundred dollars and two horses with saddles and bridles. White Eyes promised Congress that in the event of a war against the British, the Lenape would side with the Americans. He promised his people that Congress would guarantee the Lenape the formation of a fourteenth state in a future independent America.

In 1778, Congress named White Eyes lieutenant colonel in the American Continental Army . General Lachlan McIntosh, the current commanding officer of Fort Pitt, was planning an attack on Detroit . White Eyes refused to attack the Lenape who lived there. But to show his goodwill, he accompanied General McIntosh to the new Fort Laurens on the west bank of the Tuscarawas River.

Mysterious death

During this campaign, in which he served as a scout and negotiator, White Eyes met a mysterious death in November 1778. Some historians believe that he was killed by an unknown enemy. Other scientists believe in an accident in which he was killed by his own people. Shortly after his death, the American military spread that White Eyes had smallpox and had died during the campaign. When the news of White Eyes' death reached the Lenape in Coshocton, it came as a shock and ultimately led to the break of the alliance with the Americans.

Years later, George Morgan, a congressional agent and confidante of White Eye, revealed in a letter to Congress that White Eyes' death was actually an insidious murder by American militias. The act was only hushed up to prevent the Lenape from breaking off their alliance with the Americans. No details of White Eyes 'death were disclosed, but many historians accepted Morgan's version of White Eyes' death, although the reasons for it are unknown. White Eyes had been passionate about ending the bloodshed in Lord Dunmore's War, and a similar attempt in the American Revolutionary War may have cost him his life.

As is well known, White Eyes' vision of founding an Indian state in the Ohio area has not come true. On the contrary, the descendants of his people, the Lenni Lenape, now live widely spread across North America, from Ontario in the north to Oklahoma in the south and from Colorado in the west to New Jersey in the east.

White Eyes' wife reportedly died in 1788 at the hand of a white murderer. His son George Morgan White Eyes (1770–1798) attended college in New Jersey (later Princeton University ) at the expense of the American government.

literature

• Russell A. Booth: The Tuscarawas Valley in Indian Days: 1750-1797 . Cambridge, Ohio, 1994.
• Colin G. Calloway: White Eyes. In: American National Biography . Oxford University Press, 1999.
• The American Revolution in Indian Country . Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Gregory Evans Dowd: A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 . Johns Hopkins, Baltimore 1992.
• CA Weslager: The Delaware Indians . New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1972.
• Richard White: The Middle Ground. Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 . New York, 1991.

Web links

• Text of the 1778 treaty
• The 1778 treaty
• White eyes

annotation

1. ↑ Except for a few additions, this article is a translation of the article from the English Wikipedia: White Eyes