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In the early 1740s, a Pennsylvania fur trader named Thomas Kinton observed a curious ritual during a visit to a Delaware Indian village near the intersection of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. Kinton watched in amazement as the village’s inhabitants gathered around a rat that they had discovered lurking in their village. After some time, the Indians killed the unwelcome intruder. While the extermination of the rodent seemed commonplace enough to Kinton,the reaction of the Delawares to the rat’s presence in their village struck the trader as extraordinary. Many of the Indians “seemed concerned”over the appearance of the rat and its potential significance . These “antiants,” as the trader called them, approached Kinton and sternly informed him that “the French or English should not get that land [the Allegheny River basin] from them, the same prediction being made by their grandfathers on finding a rat on [the] Delaware [River] before the white people came there.” Kinton was confused as to why a rat should cause such alarm, but for the Delawares the presence of rats and bees, or “English flies,” as many eastern woodlands Indians referred to them, was a telling portent of impending troubles, as they were well-known products of the ecological changes wrought on the environment by the advancing tide of Euro-American settlement.It was a warning that trouble might be coming ,and for these Delawares,many of whom were refugees from the eastern part of Pennsylvania, that was very unwelcome news.1 The Delawares had good reason to be concerned. In the decade preceding the start of the Seven Years’War, often referred to as the French and Indian War in Pennsylvania, the hills and valleys of the western Pennsylvania frontier drew the interest of individuals,trading firms,colonies,and even empires.· 13 · One Provinces Will Be Jealous of One Another 14 a colony sprung from hell The focal point of this attention,the forks of the Ohio River,seemed destined to become a place of importance. At that point the south-flowing Allegheny River intersected with the Monongahela,gently moving in from the south,to form the westward rushing Ohio, gateway to the interior of midland North America. For centuries it had been a nexus of trade along a far-reaching network of native commerce,before being mostly abandoned at some point during the seventeenth century. But by the 1740s the forks of the Ohio and the Allegheny River watershed once more had become home to a multitude of Indian peoples.Many Delawares,Shawnees,and Mingos,a group of Iroquois peoples who were probably Senecas, moved west and south during the first half of the eighteenth century and settled alongside the numerous rivers and streams of the Allegheny–upper Ohio watershed. Most—and the Delawares in particular—were refugees from the mounting pressures for Indian land in the eastern portions of the American colonies and sought to assert their independence from the political and economic controls imposed on them by European empires or the Iroquois Confederacy, which claimed political dominion over the Indian peoples of the upper Ohio.2 These Indian migrants soon discovered,however,that they had not completely escaped the reach of Euro-Americans. French traders had been active in the Ohio Country since at least 1680, following Robert Chevelier de La Salle’s voyage of discovery down the Ohio River, and they had moved as far east as the Ohio forks in their pursuit of furs. Similarly, traders from the British colonies of New York and Pennsylvania followed migrating Indian peoples over the Appalachian Mountains and established lucrative trading posts along the western Pennsylvania frontier, before making substantial headway into the broader Ohio Country to the west. Indeed, the British traders soon outnumbered their French rivals, who lamented in 1730 that “the English are found scattered as far as the sea.”The role played by these peddlers, trappers, hunters, and adventurers, often lumped together under the generic name “Indian trader” transcends the economic boundaries of trade. They were the advance agents of westward Euro-American expansion . Through economic interaction with Indian peoples, traders made inroads into the trans-Appalachian west that led to diplomatic and political alliances while simultaneously heightening the awareness of their eastern colonial brethren to the latent possibilities of the region.3 By the 1740s, traders from Pennsylvania dominated much of the commercial exchange in the region. Replicating patterns of trade first established along the Susquehanna River in the early decades of the eighteenth century...

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