So here we are, at the part of the story where Native tribes in and around the Upper Ohio River Valley recognize that the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) gave away their lands at Stanwix 1768 and decide to move west. Not exactly. One, while it may have appeared to colonial leaders that the Haudenosaunee had sold their land away, but from their point of view, it wasn’t so clear cut, and two, the Shawnee, Lenape, and others actually living there did not recognize the Haudenosaunee’s right to sell what they viewed it as their homeland.

Or maybe this is the part where the tribes unite to drive out the wave of incoming settlers through coordinated war. Not quite. History is never a straight line. That would require everyone to agree, and there are always multiple perspectives, conflicting goals, and layered motivations. 

Surface Peace, Submerged Tensions

“We alone cannot make a Peace, it would be of no signification; for as all the Indians to the Sun Rise to Sun Set are united in one body, ’tis necessary that the whole should join in the Peace or it can be no Peace.”  Keekyuscung to Frederick Christian Post [1]

The fact was Native Americans, despite popular belief, did not all fall in line under a Chief appointed over them. Tribal leadership in the Upper Ohio River Valley was rooted in consensus, not command. Even leaders recognized by their people could be challenged, questioned, or overridden. And sometimes, a treaty was signed, but not truly accepted. Grief, rage, or loss would compel individuals, often young men, to take vengeance, regardless of formal diplomacy. In the stories we are told, one side is often cast as noble victims and the other as relentless aggressors. But the truth is far more uncomfortable: both sides committed acts that, today, would be described as war crimes. Scalpings, massacres, revenge killings, burned villages, tortured prisoners, and children caught in the middle. 

And once you peel back the layers, the pattern becomes clear: violence was not the monopoly of one side. It was not a war of heroes against villains but a cycle of retribution that drew in settlers and Native peoples alike. Grief, anger, and survival drove choices that spilled into atrocity, and the scars of those choices carried forward. To understand what followed in the Ohio Valley—massacres, councils, betrayals, wars—we have to begin here, in that cycle of pain and reprisal.

Where do you even begin?

Where do you begin the story of violence between Natives and Europeans? You could trace it back to Metacom and King Philip’s War in New England, or even earlier, to the first fragile alliances along the Atlantic coast. The point is simple: conflict ran almost as deep as contact itself. By the eighteenth century, the pattern was well set. Violence in the Ohio Valley did not erupt out of nowhere in 1774; it was the continuation of a long cycle.

For more than a century, war between Native peoples and Anglo-European colonists followed a brutal symmetry: scalp for scalp, raid for raid, child for child. Native war parties torched cabins with families inside. Settler militias massacred peaceful villages and mutilated the dead. Both sides struck at women, elders, and infants as well as warriors. No one held a monopoly on cruelty, and no one walked away untouched.

What the Period Newspapers Said

“No accounts have been received of what tribe or nations the Indians were; but it is thought the relations of those Cherokees who were killed last year in Virginia, will, according to their inhuman custom, take every opportunity for revenge, at least till they have killed as many were lost.” — The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1766 [2], on the killing of a father and son in the North Carolina backcountry.

This passage offers a glimpse into how frontier violence and Native mourning practices surfaced in colonial newspapers. The writer acknowledged a retaliatory motive—what Native nations understood as mourning raids, acts rooted in grief and balance—but cast it as barbaric “custom.” To the Native raiders, the violence was not senseless; it was a way of reckoning with loss.

Yet the Gazette’s tone reveals how little sympathy or understanding colonists extended to that grief. It reads more like a detached anthropological note than recognition of human pain. Stripped of context, it became another report of “Indian violence,” feeding settler fears. It is human to seek revenge, but by framing vengeance as a Native custom, colonial writers flattened a complex system of grief into the stereotype of the “savage.”

Put plainly: an Indigenous family lost members to Anglo-American violence, and others from their community struck back against settlers who had nothing to do with the original attack. Word spread of a brutal “Indian” raid, and frontier communities braced for yet another cycle of blood. In the meantime, those same settlers plotted ways to eliminate the threat of Native retribution once and for all. On the borderlands, vengeance was predictable—but justice, as settlers defined it, was impossible. What remained was reprisal, repeated endlessly on both sides.

“Some People may tell your Lordship that the white People (as they are called here) are the Aggressors; that some of them make Retaliation I make no Doubt of. And is it to be wondered at? Is it to be thought that Britons, who have boldly and honestly settled themselves in this back Country, who have got their Estates surveyed, and paid the proper Fees of Office; who have brought with them their little All, what they earned with great Toil at home, got with a fair Character, and intended to appropriate for the Use of a darling Family—if they should be plundered of not only what their honest Endeavours brought them, but, shame be it said, had their Humanity so far abused… Tell me, my Lord, when this Country will be settled, if the Adventurers are to meet with a Succession of Encouragement like this? Is this a suitable Recompence to a brave Adventurer, after leaving his Country and his Friends to settle in a Wilderness? Is it to be thought, my Lord, but that Britons will revenge such Injuries? If the Laws of your Lordship will not protect them, they will assuredly protect themselves.” — The Public Advertiser (London), July 21, 1770 [3].

“They Will Never Find a Man Guilty”: The Frontier’s Open Secret

As a historian we center on a thesis or a narrative to write to, but what happens when you can’t make sense of the past? I can’t make it all make sense. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the frontier wasn’t a stage for heroes and villains, just a place where pain outpaced justice, and memory got weaponized. I have a couple examples I’d like to mention to close out this post:

“All the People of the Frontiers, from Pennsylvania to Virginia inclusive, openly avow, that they will never find a Man guilty of Murder, for killing an Indian.” [4] — General Thomas Gage, Letter to Lord Dartmouth, 1772

Notes and Citations

[1] Post, Christian Frederick, 1710-1785, and Reuben Gold Thwaites. Two Journals of Western Tours. [Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904] Image. https://www.loc.gov/item/04017883/. 199.

[2] “Oct 08, 1766, Page 2 – the Pennsylvania Gazette at Newspapers.Com.” https://www.newspapers.com/image/39393760/?match=1&clipping_id=new.

[3] The Public Advertiser (London), July 21, 1770, 2. Accessed via Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/image/34411340/

[4] Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, 1772, quoted in Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25.

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