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The 1744 Treaty of Lancaster had given backcountry farmers more secure title to their lands, and it provided for the more peaceful transit of northern warriors through the backcountry. It did not, however, bring peace to the backcountry. On the contrary, the treaty created new problems and glossed over others, allowing them to fester beneath the surface. It left many Shawnees and Delawares embittered and angry with the Iroquois and the English. It failed to quench the thirst of land speculators and farmers for Indian territory,and it opened up a new intercolonial boundary dispute, this time between Pennsylvania and Virginia. The treaty’s provisions also included a nasty little time bomb that, in retrospect, could not have been better calculated to set off a major war against the French and their Indian allies. Though many backcountry residents suffered when the Seven Years War and Pontiac’s War spilled over from the nearby Ohio Valley in the 1750s and early 1760s, others profited greatly. The Seven Years War drew backcountry residents much more fully into a far-flung market economy, so much so that they collectively reconfigured both the backcountry and fall-line landscapes to reflect this commercial orientation: numerous towns emerged in the interior, while on the inner coastal plain Alexandria and Georgetown burgeoned into the eighteenthcentury equivalents of the large Algonquian villages of the early seventeenth century . In short, the war permanently altered the farmers’ economy and their relationship to the land, created distinctive new settlement patterns at the fall line and in the interior, and set into motion processes of environmental degradation that shape life there to this day. c h a p t e r ฀ t h i r t e e n “The Finest Country I Ever Was In” ., 228 Nature and History in the Potomac Country On the Frontiers of Empire As the Treaty of Lancaster was being negotiated in the summer of 1744, Governor George Thomas of Pennsylvania noted with some concern that only one representative of the Ohio Valley Shawnees was in attendance. He immediately “set afoot an enquiry into the reason of it,”from which he learned“that the Six Nations and the Shawonese are far from being on good terms, and that the latter have been endeavoring to draw the Delawares from Shamokin [on the Susquehanna] to Ohio.” The Shawnees and Delawares, he was warned, would oppose the English in the Anglo-French war that began just before the Lancaster gathering.1 Although the rumors of Shawnee and Delaware hostility were true, the anticipated attacks on the backcountry settlements did not materialize during the Anglo-French war of 1744–48. French authorities did try to encourage their Indian allies to attack the English, but the war coincided with a series of French economy measures that sharply reduced subsidies for gifts to Native allies. Since exchange and diplomacy were so closely linked,this failure to provide trade goods and presents opened the door to the competition. The governments of Pennsylvania ,Virginia, and New York took advantage of the moment, adopting a conciliatory approach to the Susquehanna and Ohio Valley nations. British diplomacy was also made easier because there was (thanks to the war) little pressure from farmers to move in on Indian lands.2 The Ohio nations set about establishing a thriving trade and diplomacy with Pennsylvania during the war. By 1747 the Ohio Shawnees and Delawares, together with Iroquois migrants from the northeast (“Mingos”),had established“a loosely confederated network” of towns with a council fire at Logstown, a Shawnee village on the Monongahela River. A year later nearly twenty Pennsylvania traders were doing business at Logstown, while others had penetrated to Pickawillany, a Miami River town in today’s western Ohio, and to Cuyahoga, a Mingo town on the site of modern-day Cleveland. By 1748 furs and skins accounted for over a third of Pennsylvania’s exports. With this trade came closer diplomatic relations between Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley Shawnees, Delawares, Iroquois, Wendats , and Miamis.3 The Pennsylvania traders’ success attracted a host of competitors for control of the Ohio Valley. There were French and British imperial officials, for example, as well as optimists within the Six Nations who still aspired to speak for the Shawnees and Delawares. The most immediate and direct European competition for control of the Ohio Valley came from Virginia, which attempted to use a clause that its representative had buried in the Treaty of Lancaster: in it, the Iroquois [3.17.150...

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