Source:Fleming-indian-names
George T. Fleming. "Indian names of Pittsburgh streets: Tribes and individuals so honored recall thrilling historical passages: Ohio valley tales." Pittsburgh Gazette Times, Apr. 4, 1915, sec. 6, [p. 5]. Newspapers.com 85419817.
THE vast history of the region about the forks of the Ohio as evolved from the consideration of commemorating names in Pittsburgh streets has been but lightly touched on. So far it has been wholly from the standpoint of the white race.
There is another point of view—that of the Red Man.
Incidentally, tribes and chiefs have been mentioned. Today's story is a strange story of a race long passed from this region.
Their names have survived; their deeds have made pages of history. Once we shrank in horror from the recital of their shocking deeds. Now they are too remote.
Not only have the names of white men prominent in our early history been bestowed upon our streets, but the "noble red man," once so-called, has not been forgotten.
In the same manner as in the bestowal of white race commemoration, that of Indian nomenclature as applied to our streets has been haphazard, regardless alike of continuity or logical connection, and in some instances the commemoration has been unwise, in that it has made to endure the base and the detestable. Names that once caused terror have been perpetuated in our city.
Notable instances are Shingiss, Pontiac and Osceola, the latter without local significance and wholly from the standpoint of euphony. The name charms from its richness of vowel sounds.
Pontiac and Shingiss made bloody history here. The admiration that attaches to these names simply as names is not an admiration to be commended.
We have in local Indian names those of our rivers that are sweet sounding—to define the word euphonious, and changing from the Greek to the Latin adjective designation we may say mellifluous; sweetly flowing—that is to say, smooth.
We have our best instance of this in the word Ohio. Alliquippa is equally as smooth, and the Iroquois tribal names Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga and Tuscarora appeal. They are all smooth and resonant.
Contrary instances are Kittanning, Shawanese, contracted to Shawnee, and Shingiss, and they are not so bad as some recent creations.
Names for White Men.
Some Indian names that have come down are those given individuals by white men, notably Kill-buck, which bears its own interpretation; White Eyes, Captain Pipe and the White Mingo. Of these we have Kilbuck prominent in a street and a township in Allegheny county. White Eyes deserve commemoration.
It may be set down as a fact that Indian names are always full of expression and replete with common-sense interpretations. Thus Ohio is the beautiful river; La Belle Riviere, the French translated and designed it; Monongahela, the river with the falling in banks; Connoquenessing, a long, straight course; Youghiogheny, a stream running a contrary or crooked course; all these meanings we know are characteristic and descriptive.
The well-known Indian town Saukunk, described the town "at the mouth," because its location was at the mouth of the Big Beaver, which the French translated Grand Castor.
Most of our Indian names in Pennsylvania are of Iroquois origin. We have them in our Pittsburgh streets, Susquehanna, Tioga, etc. We have Delaware and Shawanese names in Kittanning and Sewickley, meaning "at the main mountain stream," and the "place of sweet water trees" respectively.
Spellings of Indian names vary greatly. It is seldom that two authors spell alike. For instance, Parkman always calls them the Shawanoes, Charles A. Hanna gives 21 names for this tribe, mainly variations. The French called them the Chaouanons. Our common form is Shawnee.
So, too, the Delawares, which suggests itself as a distinctive English term taken from the river on which they once dwelt, that name coming from Lord De La War, as we are taught. This tribe was the Lenape. In history the English designation has obtained preference and we seldom read of the tribe otherwise designated. We have both Shawnee and Delaware as street designations.
Running over the voluminous list of Pittsburgh street names the impress of the Indian on our history is apparent.
The Indian could not spell. He had no written language unless we except sign words exemplified in the rude speeches on the rocks that have been found, the best known now those in the Ohio river near Smith's Ferry visible at low water.
The early writers hence attempted to spell Indian names phonetically and made queer jumbles. The French were notonous [sic] distorters of these names and with the Swedish, Dutch and English forms, there is little wonder antiquarians are puzzled, and there has been built up many an argument upon similarity of Indian words in the various tongues and dialects.
The renowned Heckewelder, a Delaware one may say, at least, by adoption, is the most ingenious of this class of writers.
Many Indian Names.
At any rate we have many undoubted Indian names in our geography, general, state and local. We have them in our street nomenclature and destined to remain. A hasty run over the extensive list of Pittsburgh streets reveals the following names:
Allequippa, Shingiss, Kilbuck, Pontiac, Delaware, Tuscarora, Seneca, Oneida, Tioga, Susquehanna, Pawnee, Osceola, Sandusky, Mingo, Mohawk, Modoc, Ottawa, Wyandot, Shawnee, Miami and Tecumseh.
We have Cubba-you-quit also, but that is another story.
The first traders, a sorry lot, found the savages along the Ohio living in the shadow of a tyranical [sic] confederacy. History has since designated this the "Six Nations"—previous to 1712, the "Five Nations"—called the Iroquois by the French.
With the passing of the Indian races or their adaptation of civilized life, the story of their savage state and its place in history becomes more and more interesting. We can pass by the horrors recorded and derive other facts that are distinctively notable. We cannot go into tribal histories nor individual biographies, or even to touch upon the several great Indian families. That history has been ably written so that one must refer to Parkman, Schoolcraft, Drake, O'Callaghan and other writers for details. We shall consider the Indian from the standing ground of our local phases of history.
We can begin by quoting Parkman as of general truth.
The Indian is (was?) a true child of the forest and the desert. The wastes and the solitudes of nature are his congenial home. His haughty mind is imbued with the spirit of the wilderness and the light of civilization falls on him with a blighting power.
Pride a Characteristic.
His unruly pride and utnamed [sic] freedom are in harmony with the lonely mountains, cataracts and rivers among which he dwells, and primitive America, with her savage scenery and savage men, opens to the imagination a boundless world, unmatched in wild sublimity.
The Iroquois in their wonderful career of conquest left their footprints on the banks of the Ohio and the Mississippi; their war cries rang from Canada to the Carolinas. They drove into the region of our homes, the deluded Delawares and the submissive Shawanese, both savages of another stock, Algonquins, a blood different from that of the imperial Iroquois coursed through the veins of these nations and we speak of tribes as nations. Parkman tells us:
Foremost in war, foremost in eloquence, foremost in the savage arts of policy, stood the fierce people called by themselves the Hodenosaunee, and with all the wrongs, cruelty, duplicity and horrors with which they may be charged, they stood a brazen wall between the French in Canada and the infant colony of New York, and their resistance to the French domination of the Ohio in great measure preserved that region to the English.
Coming of Whites.
And hence to us. This is the truth of history.
With the coming of the white man events developed with startling abruptness and left a memory of inexpressible horror. The history of Pittsburgh is the history of Western Pennsylvania and the opening of the West.
Thus we have so many names handed down—some of singular sweetness, and forceful in expression, and it must be admitted, wise or unwise in commemoration, greatly preferable to many meaningless and nonsensical modern names.
Undoubtedly the Iroquois were a primitive race, as Tacitus has said of the Germans, indigenous. We opine from this that they sprang from their own soil. The same is true of the Lenape children of the forest.
We can readily see how the region about the beautiful Ohio appealed to the red men. Here he found a land to suit every desire.
Let us hasten to say, however, that the coming of the Delawares and the Shawanese to our region was not voluntary. They were driven here.
If the Iroquois deserved the title of Romans—and no one disputes it—the Shawanese as justly could have been called Bedouins.
"Bold, roving, adventurous spirits," says Parkman, "their eccentric wanderings, their sudden appearances and disappearances perplex the antiquary and defy research."
Always at War.
Early at war with the Iroquois, they fled to the South to avoid utter destruction. Some went to the East and settled among the Lenape at the headwaters of the Delaware.
Wherever the Shawanese went they became embroiled in war with their neighbors, and, driven from place to place, with the coming of the white man into Pennsylvania, they were found in the Ohio valley hereabouts, and, associated with the Lenape, both tribes subject to the power and authority of the Iroquois, both, in common language, mere tenants at will.
The Shawanese, in spite of this noted subserviency, have given to history the name Tecumseh and all for which that name stands, and we commemorate him in a street in our city.
From the days of Penn and Shackamaxon, and its treaty tree, the trail of the Delawares lay to the West. Their traditions say they came from the West. This is well set forth in a recent work, "Pennsylvania, Colonial and Federal," reproduced, of course, from Heckewelder.
The land-hungry Penns, no less so than others of the times, induced the first step in the various migrations of the Delawares, and in this initial step they took with them their English designation henceforth to be their historical name.
History Is Pathetic.
Their condition was pathetic. Parkman tells it well:
When William Penn came to them in the placidity of his sect, he extended a hand of brotherhood to a people unwarlike as his own pacific followers. This state could not be ascribed to any inborn love of peace. The Lenape were then in a state of degrading vassalage to the Five Nations, who, that they might drain to the dregs the cup of humiliation, had forced them to assume the name women, and forego the use of arms.
One cannot follow here the various wanderings of the Delawares.
Their masters, the Iroquois, soon found that land had a money value and that the white man wanted it. Like true politicians, they said henceforth the Penns must deal with them. The Shawanese and Delawares were nobodies, women without power to alienate lands, without power to do anything but what they were told. They were vassals who ought daily to thank the Great Spirit that their imperious and imperial masters had not utterly destroyed them as they had the Eries, the Andastes, and other tribes, leaving scarcely a memory.
So the Iroquois sent their vice-gerents to dwell among these vassals. Some of these overlords have left their impress on Pennsylvania history, notably Shikellimy the Oneida at old Shamokin, now Sunbury and Scarroady and Oneida also, at Logstown on the Ohio. These vice-gerents ruled with all the regal hauteur of a born king.
When the Delawares sun had set in the affairs of the province of Pennsylvania the power of the six nations began to increase.
Tribes Move West.
The Delawares and Shawanese were alienated not alone from their lands, but in another sense from their former friends, the English.
These tribes came over the Endless Mountains (as they called the Alleghenies) from the Susquehanna during the years 1727–1732. Conrad Weiser, Christopher Gist and Christian Frederick Post found them at Logstown. Celeron followed also and attempted French domination. It came later in another way—mutual alliance against the English.
With the retreating Lenape and their allies, the Shawanese, there came also to this region the Senecas, the most westward dwellers of the Iroquois in New York, and with the easiest route to the Ohio country, down the upper branches of that river by canoes.
Hence the predominance of the Senecas here and the breaking away of part of the tribe from the New York portion and settling upon the Ohio River and driven further West, becoming as bitter foes to the English as the Ottawas, Wyandots, Miamis or any of the Western tribes. The Senecas on the Ohio figure in our history as Mingoes.
Weiser, treating in 1743 with the deputies of all the "nations of Indians settled on the waters of the Ohio," desired them to give him a list of their fighting men.
This they did, computing them by little sticks tied up in bundles.
Weiser counted these and found the Senecas, Shawanese and Delawares about tied in force with 163, 162 and 165, respectively. The Owendats, as he calls the Wyandots, numbered 100, the Mohawks 74, the Onondagas 35, the Cayagas [sic] 20, the Oneidas 15, the Molicans 15 and the Eisagechroan (Mississagas) 40.
Here were represented 10 tribes, the six nations numbering 307, the other tribes 482, in all 789. Indeed so many Indians collected in the town that provisions ran short and many had to leave.
With the preponderance of numbers why did not the other tribes throw off the Iroquois yoke? In time they did, but the dread of Iroquois vengeance was then supreme.
With their removal to the Ohio, the Lenape, once first in importance among the widely distributed Algonquins, the parent stem in fact, lost their ancestral claim, and in the councils, their benign title grandfathers, gave way to the collateral one, nephews, more frequently cousins.
No longer could the Lenape call the other Algonquins grandchildren, nephews or younger brothers. The Lenape were women. The Iroquois yoke was on them, and these were now the "uncles" of the Lenape. Even the Wyandots, also subservient to the Iroquois, were quick to lord over the degraded Lenape.
The subjugation of this people has been given prominence by all historians of our region, and Neville B. Craig, born in the Bouquet block house, living in the embryo city of Pittsburgh before the last of these tribes departed, well acquainted with the Seneca, Guyasuta, has thought it proper history to tell of the relations of the Six Nations and Delawares and Shawanese. And Hanna has followed much in detail.
Craig's Indian Tale.
Let us read Craig on this subject, onfirmed [sic] by Parkman, whose "Conspiracy of Pontiac" was contemporaneous with Craig's History of Pittsburgh, 1851. Craig may be in error as to the date of subjugation, but it was evidently previous to Penn's landing.
Craig says:
The Delawares, another nation occupying this region, were once the formidable enemies of the Iroquois, but about 200 years ago their condition was greatly altered. The mediators among the Indians are the women. It is deemed disgraceful for a warrior to speak of peace while war exists.
About 1617 the Iroquois had by their own account conquered the Delawares and forced them to put on petticoats and assume the character of women. The Delawares admit the fact of the assumption of this new character, but say the Iroquois accomplished their purpose by artifice, by persuading them that it would be magnanimous for a great and heroic nation like the Delawares to assume the character of a mediator.
The ceremony of the metamorphosis was celebrated with great pomp at Albany in the presence of the Dutch, whom the Delawares accused of conspiring with their enemies, the Mengwe, to degrade them.
Mengwe was the Dutch name for the Six Nations.
The cause of the Delawares and their explanation of this strange occurrence is zealously advocated by Heckewelder, but that view of the matter seems far from satisfactory. The Iroquois on several subsequent occasions assumed that dictatorial or authoritative tone toward the Delawares which might be expected from a conqueror and not from a treacherous subjection.
Walking Purchase of Land.
The submissiveness of the Delawares under such treatment seems rather to resemble the timidity of the conquered than the firce resentment of a deceived people.
Craig proceeds to tell of the dispute arising out of what is called the walking purchase of the lands in the forks of the Delaware.
When in 1742 a new treaty was to be made between the Indians and Gov. Thomas at Philadelphia he solicited the influence of the six nations, who sent down 230 warriors. Cannassatego, chief speaker of the Iroquois at this council, made short work of Delaware pretension. He told Gov. Thomas that:
They saw the Delawares had been an unruly people and were altogether in the wrong; that they had concluded to remove them, and oblige them to go over the River Delaware and quit all claims to any lands on this side for the future, since they had received pay for them—and they had eaten it up. Only the chief used a very vulgar simile).
He said further that:
The Delawares deserved to be taken by the hair of the head and shaken severely until they recover their senses.
In fiery eloquence he proceeded:
We conquered you and made women of you, and you know you can sell no more lands than women. For all these reasons we charge you to remove instantly. We don't give you liberty to think about it. You are women. Don't deliberate, but remove away.
Delawares Chased Away.
The cowed Delawares obeyed. They left immediately. Some went to Shamokin and Wyoming, the places assigned them by Cannassatego, and some to the Ohio and here they made history for us.
Charles A. Hanna thinks the date of the submission of the Delawares was about March 13, 1677, so that Craig's date may be a typographical error or one in transcribing.
Cannassatego further said:
We assign you to two places either to Wyoming or Shamokin. You may go to either of these places and then we shall have you more under our eye and see how you behave.
In old-time printing these last words would be put in italics to emphasize them.
Hanna Craig and Parkman have each found the speech in the minutes of the Indian council of 1742. A pamphlet was published in London in 1759 by Charles Thompson entitled "Causes of the Alienation of the Delawares and Shawanese Indians From the British Interests," detailing much as above.
Can we imagine anything more supremely arrogant, more despotic, than the behavior of Cannassatego on this occasion? We can see the lordly Onondaga, towering in his vigorous manhood, strong in the pride of his venerated ancestry, boastful of the triumphs of his confederacy, with raised hand and menacing finger, cry out in all the power of the Iroquoian master tone:
Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once. We do not give you liberty to think about it.
Vengeance of Delawares.
The cringing Delawares went and enough came to the Ohio country to color all its future history.
Here about our homes they threw off the garments of women and wended the trail back over the Alleghenies, back to their old homes, even to the banks of the Delaware, and when they returned the trail was red with the blood of the innocent, for they spared nothing white. Their vengeance was fully glutted.
Driven from their first assignments of their masters they spread their towns over Western Pennsylvania. With Logstown arose Saucunk (Beaver, Kushkusking (New Castle), Kittanning, Venango and some smaller towns.
Not all were Delaware towns, however, for the Shawanese came too. The wandering traders, steeped in vice, whose one great commodity was rum, followed in the footsteps of the retreating tribesmen. Rum and land had been the primal causes of the emigration of these tribes. Rum and land continued causes, but the contest for the land lay between nations and white races.
The French traders came, too, and then in the debatable land about the Ohio the great struggle commenced between the Anglo-Saxon—the Teuton, one may say, and the Celt. In the eighteenth century the beautiful river and its glorious country was the prize.
The Anglo-Saxon won, else we may not have been here.
