Source:Fleming-iroquois/content
THE subject of Indian names and Indian translated names in our geographical and street designations is a wide one. It is apparent that it should be further pursued.
Some remarks on nomenclature and then the historical phase of some well known one, and a short sketch of one or two noted Indian characters who colored the history of our region, will form the story today.
The Indian was the child of the forest, a child of nature. He never coined a name that did not have a sensible and fitting meaning. He did not apply names of animals singly in his geographical designations, or his tribal name, or the names of his chiefs. The white did that. They took away the name Onandaga [sic] from the seat of the great council house of the Six Nations, most worthy of preservation from its historic associations, and applied it to the lake and New York county that we know and dubbed the town that now sits on the ancient site of the council Syracuse, the name of a Greek colony in Roman Sicily, a name that means nothing to America. So, too, Rome and Utica in New York.
The Indian would never designate a a [sic] town Buffalo, Red Oak, Paw Paw, Seneca or Kilbuck, neither would he give us Aliquippa's Cross Roads, or Cornplanter's Corners. He had no opolises, burgs or villes. He knew no language but his own or an allied one, with the exception of some little French and English words—and these mostly vile ones.
When he gave a place a name it was always significant and often entrancing in euphony. It was deserving also.
We have had handed down to us nevertheless many geographical names purely Indian. In this region mainly from the Delaware tongue. some Iroquoian on account of the preponderance of the Senecas hereabouts. We have become so accustomed to some names that we never consider their origin.
Erie is one of our best known Indian commemoratives. Few think of its origin. Fewer know its history.
An Ancient Tribe.
The lake and city of that name are neighboring and always familiar, and we have also Erie street on the North Side.
The Eries passed away more than two centuries ago. Most antiquarians think they were akin to the Iroquois. They were properly of the Wyandot or Huron–Iroquois family.
These with the Andastes, although of like blood, were nevertheless exterminated by the Iroquois proper or the Five Nations, subsequently the Six Nations, or to give their own title of their confederacy, the Hodenosaunee, signifying, "they form a cabin," fancifully "The Long House;" in truth the people of the long house—one family.
We find the name Wyandot spelled also Wyandott and Wyandotte, the former the accepted spelling, but spelled Wyandotte in our street name. The Hurons and Wyandots are the same tribe.
It was in 1649 that the Iroquois subdued and dispersed them in the Huron country. However, they rallied again and were never positively conquered.
It is claimed for this tribe that down to the end of the eighteenth century they exercised sovereignity [sic] over the Ohio country.
Contra distinguished [sic] from the Iroquoian tribes is the great Algonquin family comprising 21 tribes that figure in the colonial history of America, including the Indians of New England and of those that ranged about Fort Pitt and gathered there at times, the Mohicans, Delawares or Lenape, Shawanese, Miamis or Twightnees, Kickapoos, Pottawatonues and Ottawas, and Chippewas.
Southern Families.
The Munsies, frequently mentioned, were Delawares. We have this name now in Pennsylvania geography Muncy.
Of the Southern Indian families, the Cherokees, who inhabited the mountainous regions of Tennessee, Georgia, North and South Carolina, most frequently got as far North as the Ohio. These and the Catawbas were usually at war with the more Northern tribes.
The tribes east of the Mississippi only have been spoken of. Those of the great plains were a distinctive family. Chief among them the Dakotas or Sioux with whom our history has nothing to do.
The Indian of the plains was as distinct from the Indian of the woods as the free negro of the North was from the slave of the cotton fields.
Erie is perhaps the best known and most commom [sic] of our geographical names. The tribe that bore this name ranged along the southern border of that lake, their habitat extending into Northern Pennsylvania. They were also known as Erigas, and the French called them the cat tribe.
Old French maps, notably De l'Lisle's [sic] map of Louisana [sic], 1718; Van Keulen's map of New France, 1720, and Bellin's may [sic] of Louisana [sic], 1744, mark the region of the Eries, as above noted, the earlier maps referring to them as the "Nation du Chat," and all three as "Detruite," or destroyed, the two latter adding "by the Iroquois." This on the face of the map in French.
French Visitors.
We have some French accounts of the Eries. As early as 1615 they were visited by Etienne Brule, Champlain's interpreter; at least the claim is made for him in French histories. The Jesuits, who generally worked among all the lake tribes, had no mission among the Eries.
Their history is of a shadowy nature and authorities differ, some claiming the Eries were of Algonquian birth, others suggesting they were identical with the Shawanese, whose appearances and disappearances is the one great puzzle in the history of the North American Indians.
Descriptions agree that the Eries were a large tribe. Some assign them 28 villages with 12 large towns or forts and not less in number than 12,000. The French accounts say they were fierce warriors who used poisoned arrows and were long a terror to the neighboring Iroquois.
The nearest approach to the date of their utter defeat by the Iroquois is 1654, and their history, brief as it is, ends then, except for the very brief notes on the French maps.
Of a truth the Eries vanished. Charles McKnight, in his lifetime a well known Pittsburgh historian and newspaper publisher, in his book, "Our Western Border," has a fanciful account of the wiping out of this tribe, but he is cautious about ascribinig [sic] the sources of his information.
Drake's Account.
Samuel G. Drake, one of the best historians of the Indians, had but brief mention of the Eries. He says:
Among the many tribes or nations wholly or partly destroyed were the Eries, a powerful tribe on the southern shore of the great lake, whose name they bore. In 1653 they were entirely extirpated and no remnant of them has since been heard of in existence.
He refers to Charlevoix, the great historian of "New France," in corroboration.
Parkman, in the opening chapter of "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," gives much of tribal history. He states that the remnant of the Eries were incorporated with the conquerors or with other tribes. Also that the Iroquois traditions obtained by him from a Caypga [sic] chief do not agree with the Jesuit narratives.
Parkman is not satisfied that the Eries were of the Iroquois family, and thinks it possible they were identical with the Shawanese. He, too, refers to Charlevoix.
The Andastes' ruin came next in order, but these brave people fought their inexorable foemen for upwards of twenty years. Their end came in 1672, and their history is as little known as the Eries.
The Iroquois as scions of a warlike stock were of singular vitality and forceful in the extreme. Few tribes matched them in prowess, constancy, moral energy or intellectual vigor.
Nevertheless the Hurons were the best soldiers. They alone of all the tribes held it disgraceful to flee from the face of an enemy when the fortunes of fight were adverse.
Noting that their habitat lay about Detroit and along the south shores of Lake Erie, Theodore Roosevelt states (Winning of the West, Vol. I.)
They were close kin to the Iroquois though bitter enemies to them, and they showed the desperate valor of their hostile kinsmen, holding themselves above the surrounding Algonquins, with whom nevertheless they lived in peace and friendship.
Dangerous In Battle.
Mr. Roosevelt also makes prominent the fact that it was a point of honor among the Wyandottes not to yield, of all the tribes the most dangerous in pitched battle.
We have other admiration for the Iroquois. Their confederacy was the purest democracy the world ever saw. When we commemorate anything pertaining to these people we honor manhood, we honor conquerors, we honor deservedly—in most cases.
For the sake of variety in our story let us dip briefly into biography and take one chief whose name is familiar, Shingiss, found spelled Shingass also.
This chief was a brother of the Beaver, the great war chief of the Delawares, and they are frequently referred to in history as King Beaver and King Shingiss. Heckewelder calls the latter Shingask and when Heckewelder, who was a missionary among the Delawares, first knew him Shingiss had a fairly good character for an indian [sic].
He lived at thee [sic] forks of the Ohio and it [sic] can truthfully be said to have been an early resident here. In time Shingiss became the deepest dyed villain that ever steeped his gory tomahawk in innocent blood.
Shingiss knew Washington. In his journal of his trip to the French forts in Northwestern Pennsylvania in 1753, Washington records:
About two miles from this (the Forks of the Ohio) on the southeast side of the river, lives Shingiss, King of the Delawares, at the place where the Ohio Company intend to build a fort. We called upon him to invite him to a council at Logstown.
Shingiss in Council.
Shingiss attended us to the Logstown where we arrived between sunsetting and dark the 25th day after I left Williamsburg.
This was November 24, 1753. The place of Shingiss' residence at the time was McKees Rocks. He also lived awhile at Kittanning. Shingiss would not accompany Washington and his party to Venango. Washington records:
They (Taunacharison and Monacatoocha) informed me that Shingiss could not get in his men, and was prevented from coming himself by his wife's sickness; (I believed by fear of the French), but that the wampum of that nation (the Delawares) was lodged with one of their chiefs at Venango.
Christian Frederick Post met Shingiss on both of his journeys to Logstown, and has much to say of the chief in the journals he kept. Shingiss was then in bad repute.
In his entry for August 28, 1758, Post records:
We set out from Sawkunk in company with 20 for Kuskushkee; on the road Shingiss addressed himself to me and asked if I did not think that, If he came to the English, they would hang him as they had offered a great reward for his head. He spoke in a very soft and easy manner. I told him that was a great while ago; it was all forgotten and wiped clean away; that the English would receive him very kindly.
Then Shamokin Daniel, a treacherous Indian guide, who accompanied Post, broke in with cursing and reviling, calling Post a liar and a fool, but Shingiss rebuked him and said for him to keep quiet for he did not know what he said.
Sawkunk was the Indian town at the mouth of the Beaver River and Kush-Kushkee, also spelled, and so by Post later, Kushkushking, a town on the Mahoning, at the site of New Castle.
Reason for Rewards.
The massacres Drake tells us after Braddock's defeat were horrible beyond description. Shingiss and Capt. Jacobs were believed to be the principal instigators of them, and $700 was offered for their heads. No wonder Shingiss was timid.
Jacobs was killed in the battle at Kittanning, when Col. John Armstrong destroyed that town September 7, 1756.
Post was successful in his missions and withheld the Indians from their alliance with the French, but he had a stormy time and came very near being killed. Shingiss was certainly good to him then. Post's mission was of incalculable value to Forbes, then on his way here.
On the day after the conversation quoted above Post dined with Shingiss, who told Post that:
Though the English had set a great price on his head, he had never thought to revenge himself but was ever kind to any prisoners that were brought in and that he assured the Governor he would do all in his power to bring about an established peace and wished he could be certain of the English being in earnest.
Shingiss was good this time and he and his brother, The Beaver, saved a prisoner, one Sergt. Osten, who had been captured near Fort Duquesne and who was to have been burned at the stake by the Shawanese.
The story of Post's missions is one of thrill from start to finish and Shingiss shines through it all.
But he was not always good. We have interesting testimony of his baseness.
Of this man Hackewelder said later:
Were his war exploits all on record, they would form an interesting account, though a shocking one! Conachocheague, Big Cove, Sherman's Valley, and other settlements along the frontier felt his strong arm sufficiently, that he was a bloody warrior,—cruel his treatment, relentless his fury.
His person was small but in point of courage and nativity, savage prowess, he was said never to be exceeded by anyone.
We do not know when the renowned Shingiss became a good Indian in fact, by passing from this life. We do know we have a street named in his honor and that he was both a cheerful companion and a bloodthirsty wretch, as he may have had the inclination.
After all, he had nothing on Pontiac or Osceola. Don't their names live?
Street Not Prominent.
To be sure, Shingiss street is not much of a street and now has houses only on the east side, and only 14 in all, the yards of the Panhandle Railroad having taken those on the west, and all of that delectable locality once known as "Hardscrabble."
Shingiss is actually becoming a business street, however, having a print shop and a store among the few remaining houses.
Once decent enough, with hard working, respectable citizens dwelling there, Shingiss street became a sure enough police item furnisher and served to wear out the tires on the old-style wagon. And it is believed by some that Yellow Row, on Second avenue, not far away, at one time had cause to fear for her police laurels. Of late years Shingiss street has been as quiet as a cow pasture.
Occasional mention has been made of the titles, king, half-king, queen, captain, etc., among the tribes. It is evident these are English terms. Sachem, chief, medicine man and warrior are Indian terms, with spheres of activity and control widely apart.
The sachem was the presiding officer in the councils, the chief led on the warpath. King Beaver, Queen Aliquippa, The Half-King, Taunacharison are interesting characters mentioned in our stories, each with nominal power. The Iroquois overlord dominated even these.
The story of Aliquippa is also a most interesting one. We have her name in our street list, and the new manufacturing town down the Ohio has placed it on the map of Pennsylvania for good.
So also Capt. Kilbuck—his name in Ohio, too; but these stories will have to go over.
