Bunch of naked drunken women pursue Moravian monk in New York wilderness

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Warriors, Wampum, and Wolves, the eighth of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
In April 1753, frontier missionary David Zeisberger prepared for a month-long voyage up the Susquehanna River’s North Branch by walking along the river bank at present-day Sunbury and selecting a suitable tree to fashion into a dugout canoe.

Zeisberger and another missionary felled the tree, then spent two days hollowing its trunk into the shape of a canoe, before setting sail. A month later they came upon a fleet of 25 canoes carrying Nanticoke Indians upriver. “As far as the eye could reach, you could see one canoe behind the other along the Susquehanna,” the missionaries wrote.

Zeisberger is one of many real characters who people the pages of this non-fiction book about the Pennsylvania frontier. Others include Shikellamy, the Iroquois half-king at Shamokin; Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvania colony’s Indian agent; Teedyuscung, king of the Delawares; Benjamin Franklin, builder of frontier forts; and a Delaware war chief known as Shingas the Terrible.

Author John L. Moore used journals, letters, official reports and other first-person accounts to portray the frontiersmen and the events and conflicts in which they were involved.

The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.

What Others Say:
“Moore brings us an engaging treatment of Gen. Edward Braddock’s ill-fated campaign in 1755 to oust the French from the Ohio Valley. His account gives us a fresh perspective of something often lost in the histories of this march through the wilderness – the troubles the British army experienced with logistics and their erstwhile Native American allies.

“Moore includes a later description by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder of how horses’ hooves made ‘dismal music’ as they walked over the unburied bones of Braddock’s soldiers. But Moore’s book is overall about a lost world of encounters in the forest between the colonial Americans and the Iroquois and Delaware – the tree paintings along trails and the travails of a Seneca given the English name of Captain Newcastle. It’s a world worth visiting.” ~ Robert B. Swift, author of “The Mid-Appalachian Frontier: A Guide to Historic Sites of the French and Indian War.”

“One can’t go wrong with this work. It’s the kind of tale one might read aloud to one’s children out in the woods at evenings while huddled around a campfire.” ~ Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas, bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer

“As someone who despised history classes in high school and practically fell asleep during college history courses, I must admit that I immensely enjoyed this fascinating read.” ~ Catherine Felegi, Cranford, N.J., writer, editor, and blogger at: cafelegi.wordpress.com

David Zeisberger

Excerpt:
Friday, July 3: “We spent a very noisy night. The confusion and noise never ceased, and the drinking was kept up all night long. There were about 200 drunken people in the town.” The residents of the town were using their canoes to ship rum from Oswego on Lake Ontario.

Zeisberger and Cammerhoff decided that they would get as much rest as they could and depart for Onondaga as early as possible in the morning. “I remained in our hut very tired,” the bishop wrote. “In the evening, when I left our prison for a short time, I could scarcely walk as I had eaten very little for several days. During the afternoon, my faithful David tried to make some tea for me.” To obtain water, Zeisberger walked to a spring half a mile away with an empty kettle. “On his way back with the kettle of water, several of the drunken savages caught him and drew him into a house, took his kettle, (and) drank the water.”

With a determined effort, Brother David managed to regain possession of the kettle and returned to the spring to refill it. “But some drunken savages pursued him again,” Cammerhoff said. “He … ran too quickly for them and gained the hut, but by a long circuit through long grass. David then boiled the water with much trouble and fear, and we refreshed ourselves with some tea, the only nourishment I had taken in two days.”

“Towards evening, David went out once more, and on his return a troop of drunken women came rushing toward him. Some were naked, and others nearly so. In order to drive them away, he was obliged to use his fists and deal out blows to the right and left. He climbed up a ladder, but when he had scarcely reached the top, they seized it and tore it from under his feet, but he regained our retreat in safety.”

This same day the brother of an important chief came to visit the Moravians. The man “was still sober,” the bishop reported. “We … told him of our intention to start early tomorrow morning and gave him a piece of tobacco and several pipe stems to present to the chiefs when they were sober. We asked him to tell them that we deeply regretted having come such a long distance without being able to talk to them.”

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Warriors, Wampum, and Wolves
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
86 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065181
ISBN-10: 1620065185
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Warriors-Wampum-and-Wolv…

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/

Unintentional germ warfare dooms many Native Americans

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Settlers, Soldiers, and Scalps, the seventh of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
Barbara Leininger and Marie LeRoy were teenage girls living along Penns Creek in central Pennsylvania in 1755 when an Indian war party captured them and carried them off to western Pennsylvania. This occurred early in the French & Indian War. For several years, the teenagers lived as Delaware Indians. Sometimes they had little to eat, and “ … we were forced to live on acorns, roots, grass and bark,” they said later.

After three years, they escaped from their captors and fled on foot across the forests of Ohio and Pennsylvania, eventually reaching the safety of the British fort at Pittsburgh.

The first-person narrative they dictated to a Philadelphia newspaper after their 1759 escape was one of many first-person documents that author John L. Moore uses to tell the true stories of real people in this non-fiction collection of articles that is part of the Frontier Pennsylvania Series.

Other accounts in the book tell how and why Native Americans took the scalps of their foes, kept written records of their wartime exploits, and employed fire as a weapon when hunting for deer.

The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.

What Others Say:
“The people of 18^th century frontier Pennsylvania – settlers, soldiers, and Indians alike – march across these pages in a human drama that we can understand, but more importantly feel almost 300 years later. Moore lets the actors describe themselves in their own words: the misunderstandings, conflicts, family tragedies, deaths, diseases, hunger, wars, and the simply mundane business of their everyday lives. Our storyteller takes just as much care in describing the Indians’ daily slog, quarrels, family life, customs and mores as he does their sometimes friends – and sometimes rivals – the European settlers. Both groups formed intertwined threads in a single frontier web.

“When he describes a famous campaign in the French & Indian War, Moore deftly uses his sources to make General Braddock’s doomed expedition come to life. Incidents of friendly fire, frightened European soldiers used to fighting in open spaces but never in woods, slow progress as an army builds a road (!) into the mountains – mile by mile – are all described as if patiently carved into oak to make woodcut prints.” ~ Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas, bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer

Excerpt:
On the Susquehanna River, Dutch colonial officials reported in 1661 “a great mortality from smallpox among the Minquas,” Indians who were also known as the Susquehannocks.

In 1663 Swedish colonists recorded that “smallpox raged terribly among the Indians” along the lower Delaware and “ill-disposed people advised them to leap into the river and bathe themselves, whereby many perished.”

A combination of sickness and warfare destroyed Indian communities along the lower Hudson River. Indeed, an English colonist named Daniel Denton reported that when the English had conquered New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed the town New York, Indians in the vicinity were living in six towns. But by 1670, the year of Denton’s report, “they are reduced to two small villages.” Their reduction pleased Denton. “Where the English come to settle,” he remarked, “a divine hand makes way for them by … cutting off the Indians either by wars … or by some raging mortal disease.”

Wherever the Europeans settled in the Middle Atlantic colonies, diseases they unwittingly brought with them devastated native people who lived in the region. Consider the events that occurred along the New Jersey side of the Delaware River in the late 1670s. English colonists purchased land from the Indians, traded with them, and established the village of Burlington. Soon after, smallpox swept through native settlements and killed many. The settlers, who were Quakers, became fearful when they realized some Native Americans believed that the newcomers had deliberately exposed them to the disease. These Indians wanted to start a war against their new neighbors.

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Settlers, Soldiers, and Scalps
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
86 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065167
ISBN-10: 1620065169
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Settlers-Soldiers-and-Sc…

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/

Mother cannibalizes her child to survive in the wilderness

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Cannons, Cattle, and Campfires, the fifth of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
Author John L. Moore serves up a miscellany of fascinating depictions of obscure but authentic people and situations in this non-fiction book about the Pennsylvania Frontier between 1743 and 1778.

We meet Sassoonan, an elderly Delaware Indian chief who lived at the Forks of the Susquehanna River. His position made him custodian of the tribal records, which consisted of belts of wampum. Wampum was also a form of currency, and Sassoonan regularly used this wampum to buy rum from the traders who brought it to town.

While visiting an Indian town on an island in the Susquehanna River, the Rev. David Brainerd held his Bible as he hid in the bushes, out of sight of the bonfire and the Native Americans who danced around it. The missionary believed that the Indians were attempting to summon Satan and, as he later wrote in his journal, he intended to “spoil their sport.”

It was January 1756 as General Benjamin Franklin led a column of infantry soldiers and mounted troops into the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Bethlehem and Easton to erect a series of log forts along strategic forest paths. Hostile Indians watched Franklin’s force as the men erected the stockade walls. Ever curious, Franklin himself used his watch to see how long it took two of his men to fell a pine tree.

Mary Jameson was a 15-year-old frontier farm girl when she helped her mother cook breakfast over the hearth in the family’s log house one cold morning in April 1758. The Jamesons don’t know it, but by lunchtime their cabin would be on fire, and all but two of the eight members of the Jameson family would be the prisoners of an Indian raiding party.

WHAT OTHERS SAY:
“Moore’s tales bear fascinating titles. Who could fail to be intrigued by “Camp Followers Displease Militia Chaplain,” or by “Benjamin Franklin Leads Militia Into Bethlehem,” or by “Chaplain’s Rum Draws Troops To Daily Worship”?

Some of the descriptions Moore takes from his original sources are fascinating, even 250 years later. For example, Benjamin Franklin observes: The Indians “dug holes in the ground about three feet in diameter, and somewhat deeper. … They had made small fires in the bottoms of the holes, and we observed among the weeds and grass the prints of their bodies, made by their laying all around, with their legs hanging down in the holes to keep their feet warm. … This kind of fire, so managed, could not discover them, either by its light, flame, sparks, or even smoke.” What an image!

One unusual tale is “Even Indians Become Lost, Hungry In Forest.” This is the chilling story of an Indian mother who, with her three children, was trapped in an early blizzard in 1739 on a mountain near present-day Lock Haven while traveling the Great Shamokin Path. The gruesome details were recorded by Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, and Moore passes them on to the reader without comment.

~ Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas, bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer

Excerpt:
1739
As winter approached in 1739, an Indian woman who lived west of the Allegheny wanted to visit relatives or friends. She decided that she and her three children would walk across the mountains to the Delaware Indian town at Big Island.

She failed to anticipate that winter would set in early and would bring much snow. She and the children had reached the West Branch, but were still far west of Big Island when she realized they couldn’t go on.

“She began with putting herself and her children on short allowances (of food) in hopes that the weather might become more moderate or the snow so hard that they could walk over it,” Heckewelder said.

“She strove to make her little store of provisions last as long as she could by using the grass which grew on the river’s edge,” he wrote. The woman also boiled the bark from certain types of trees in order to make them digestible.

But the snow kept falling, and soon it was six feet deep. She found as much wood as she could and built a campfire. If its flames kept her and the children from freezing to death, it also served as a weapon. There were “wolves hovering about night and day, often attempting to rush into her little encampment,” Heckewelder said. When they approached, she repelled them “by throwing out firebrands to them.”

The day came when all their food was gone, and “her situation at last became intolerable,” Heckewelder said.

Desperate, she decided to kill her youngest child and feed its flesh to its siblings “in order to preserve the others and herself from the most dreadful death,” Heckewelder wrote. She thought she could stave off starvation until the weather broke. But the wolves were also starving, and, “getting the scent of the slaughtered child, became more furious than ever before …”

The woman prayed to the Great Spirit for rescue, “but still the danger increased, the horrid food was almost exhausted, and no relief came,” Heckewelder said.

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Cannons, Cattle, and Campfires
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
102 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065129
ISBN-10: 1620065126
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Cannons-Cattle-and-Campf…

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/

Benjamin Franklin leads troops through the wilderness from Philadelphia to Bethlehem

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Forts, Forests, and Flintlocks, the fourth of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
As the officer in charge at Hyndshaw’s Fort in the Pocono Mountains, Captain John Van Etten knew that few Indian war parties raided the settlements during the snowy winter months, but that warm spring weather often signaled the sudden onslaught of Indian attacks.

The captain himself was wary, and he made it a point to keep his troops on their guard. He had good reason for this. The morning of May 7, 1757, for instance, he learned that while on sentry duty during the night, some of his men had observed “that the dogs kept an unusual barking and running to a particular place … ” With daylight, the soldiers ventured out to investigate “and found that an Indian had stood behind a tree about 25 yards from the fort. Being told, I went to see and found it true, his tracks being visible enough to be seen.”

John L. Moore’s non-fiction book contains true stories of Van Etten and other real people caught up in the struggles that took place all along the Pennsylvania frontier throughout the 1700s. Other chapters tell how:

Blacksmith Anton Schmidt repaired guns for Indian hunters who came to the Moravian mission at Shamokin. He knew Chief Shikellamy, the Iroquois territorial governor who lived in the town at present-day Sunbury. When Shikellamy died in 1748, carpenters at the mission made a wooden coffin for him, and Schmidt was one of four men who carried the old chief to his grave. Seven years later, as Indian attacks shattered the long peace that William Penn had established in 1681, the blacksmith guided a small military force headed by Benjamin Franklin from Philadelphia over muddy country roads to Bethlehem, where the Moravian Church was based. Franklin’s column included a wagon carrying firearms for settlers to use against enemy Indians. It also transported equipment for building stockade forts in the mountains.

Major James Burd, the commandant at Fort Augusta, welcomed a delegation of Iroquois leaders. In March 1757, they came down the Susquehanna River’s North Branch in a fleet of fifteen canoes and three flat-bottom boats. The visitors ““informed me that there was 800 French and Indians marched from Fort Duquesne against this fort, and they were actually arrived at the head of the West Branch of this river, and were there making canoes and would come down as soon as they were made.” To Burd’s relief, no such invasion ever occurred.

Captain Patrick Work, a Pennsylvania officer who in October 1757 was marching his troops along a forest trail that crossed Peters Mountain north of present-day Harrisburg. As they reached the top of the ridge, “the advance guard, consisting of a sergeant and 12 men, discovered a party of Indians … Our party advanced supposing them to be friends until they came within about a hundred yards, when the Indians fired upon them, which was returned briskly by our men.”

The author uses journals, letters, official reports and other first-person accounts to portray the frontiersmen and the events and conflicts in which they were involved. The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.

Excerpt:
January 1756
In January 1756 Benjamin Franklin was in Northampton County preparing to lead a column of Pennsylvania soldiers into the mountains to fortify strategic passes north of Bethlehem. “Just before we left Bethlehem, eleven farmers, who had been driven from their plantations by the Indians, came to me requesting a supply of firearms, that they might go back and fetch off their cattle,” Franklin reported. “I gave them each a gun with suitable ammunition.”

A steady rain began as Franklin’s men moved out, “and it continued raining all day,” he said. By the time the troops stopped for the night and took shelter in a barn, “we were … as wet as water could make us.”

Writing years later in his autobiography, Franklin remarked, “It was well we were not attacked in our march, for our arms were of the most ordinary sort, and our men could not keep their gun locks dry.”

Franklin said that the farmers hadn’t been as fortunate. The Indians had met them along the road and killed ten of the eleven. “The one who escaped informed that his and his companions’ guns would not go off, the priming being wet with the rain,” Franklin said.

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Forts, Forests, and Flintlocks
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
106 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065136
ISBN-10: 1620065134
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

For more information, please see:
http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Forts-Forests-and-Flintl…

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/

Young Mary Jemison abducted by Indians near Gettysburg

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Pioneers, Prisoners, and Peace Pipes, the third of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
Histories can be two-dimensional; these contain information strung along timelines. Other histories are three-dimensional, fleshing the basics out with descriptions and explanations. And then there are the four-dimensional histories, best savored slowly. ‘Pioneers, Prisoners, and Peace Pipes’ falls in this last category.

John L. Moore’s four-dimensional tales draws the reader into a world long gone in such a way that the reader gets lost in a distant place – with no desire to leave. This master story teller has discovered hidden eddies of history. He artfully weaves original source material into accounts that still touch the heart. There is the couple coming home to find their children kidnapped and their home ransacked …  There is a husband searching for a lost wife, and – years later – finding and being reunited with her.  There is a 16-year old man/boy lost in a military adventure, captured by the enemy, and spilling all he knows during polite but businesslike interrogations. The settings are all over Pennsylvania; the times are the late 1700s. All true stories. And if these stories all seem weirdly contemporary; it’s simply because people have always been – people.

Readers will have their favorites in this collection of 11 true American historical vignettes. Among mine: ‘Boy soldier nearly starves in the woods’ … This tale starts, “Michael La Chauvignerie was a 16-year-old French soldier who left his home in Canada during the summer of 1756, bound for the Ohio Country. Michael didn’t know it as he left Montreal and sailed up the St. Lawrence River, but he had embarked on the first leg of a prolonged and complicated adventure that would take him to Philadelphia and, ultimately, to the Caribbean Sea.” Maybe you could stop reading at this point – but I had to continue. And rest of La Chauvignerie’s true story delivers!

Elsewhere in “Pioneers, Prisoners, and Peace Pipes” the words of chastened but wise Ackowanothie ring true today, almost 250 years after they were uttered: “Your nation always showed an eagerness to settle our lands. Cunning as they were, they always encouraged a number of poor people to settle upon our lands. We protested against it several times, but without any redress or help. We pitied the poor people; we did not care to make use of force, and indeed some of those people were very good people, and as hospitable as we Indians … but after all we lost our hunting ground, for where one of those people settled, like pigeons, a thousand more would settle, so that we at last offered to sell it … and so it went on ‘til we at last jumped over (the) Allegheny hills and settled on the waters of Ohio. Here we thought ourselves happy.” Poor deluded Delawares!

Good history, in my opinion, makes one think. And think. And think. It also makes one feel. And emotion is the secret of “Pioneers, Prisoners and Peace Pipes.” Moore brings one face to face not just with facts (as important as they are), but with a larger and richer four-dimensional reality infused with feelings. He gently reminds us that humans without emotions have never existed, and that history without that dimension is not history, but simply a cheap cardboard imitation. “Pioneers, Prisoners and Peace Pipes” is four-dimensional work crafted with love. Enjoy it!

Thomas J. Brucia is a bibliophile who lives in Houston, Texas. His favorite subjects include European and Asian history. Many of his reviews appear on Amazon.com

Excerpt:
April 1758
As was their custom, the Bards rose early on the morning of Thursday, April 13, 1758. Spring was a busy time on a frontier farm. Among other crops, their farm produced flax, which Catharine spun into linen for use in making homespun cloth. The winter had been mild, and this year spring had come extra early. Richard prepared himself for a hard day’s labor, knowing that two young men—Samuel Hunter and Daniel McMenomy—were already at work in his fields. Catharine tended first to their baby, seven-month-old John, and then to the needs of some visitors, who included Richard’s cousin, a Pennsylvania soldier named Thomas Potter, and an eleven-year-old girl, Hannah McBride.

The Bards and their guests were unaware of Indian warriors who lurked in the woods little more than three hundred yards away. It was around seven o’clock when Hannah, who had gone outside and was standing in front of the house, saw the Indians approach. The girl “screamed and ran into the house,” Bard said later.

Six Indians rushed the house, and several got inside. The warriors “were naked except the breech cloths, leggings, moccasins and caps,” Bard said. One warrior carried a large cutlass, which he swung at Thomas Potter. Potter wrested the sword away from the Indian and raised it over his head to swing at the man, but “the point struck the ceiling, which turned the sword so as to cut the Indian’s hand” without killing him.

As Potter and the Indian struggled over the sword, Bard grabbed the pistol “and snapped it at the breast of one of the Indians, but … it did not go off. At this, the Indians, seeing the pistol, ran out of the house.”

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Pioneers, Prisoners, and Peace Pipes
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
102 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065143
ISBN-10: 1620065142
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Pioneers-Prisoners-and-P…. (http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Traders-Travelers-and-To…)

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/

Intoxicated Indians dance for naturalist John Bartram

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Traders, Travelers, and Tomahawks, the second of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
As he traveled across the Pennsylvania Frontier in 1743, naturalist John Bartram didn’t know what to expect when he accepted an invitation to spend the night in the cabin of a white man who traded goods for furs with the Indians. The cabin was near the native town of Shamokin (present-day Sunbury) along the Susquehanna River. “About midnight, the Indians came and called up him and his squaw,” Bartram wrote later. “She sold the Indians rum. … Being quickly intoxicated, men and women began first to sing and then dance round the fire.”

Bartram is one of many early Pennsylvanians that people this colorful non-fiction work. Others include Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvania Colony’s Indian agent; William Penn, the colony’s visionary founder;Madame Montour, an interpreter who was the daughter of an Algonquin mother and French father; and Major General Edward Braddock, who led British troops against the French army in the Ohio River Valley.

Author John L. Moore raises and answers many questions about who the frontiersmen and natives were and what they did. What was William Penn’s colony like in its early days? How did the Lenni Lenape Indians living in Penn’s colony obtain their food? What did they eat? How did they get along with Penn, and how did Penn get along with them? Why did Penn’s sons recruit athletic young men to walk the boundary of land the Lenape weren’t especially interested in selling?

These true stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers. They chronicle many aspects of a nearly forgotten past.

The Iroquois, for example, claimed the land along the Susquehanna and its tributaries by right of conquest of the Susquehannocks. They regarded the Juniata River Valley as prime hunting land. During the late 1740s they became distressed to see white settlers cross the Susquehanna and begin to build homesteads in territory they hadn’t sold and had intended to reserve for themselves.

In May 1750 a posse of magistrates and lawmen sent by Gov. James Hamilton rode up the Juniata and began evicting the squatters. Iroquois representatives accompanied them and forced the Pennsylvanians to set fire to the cabins of the homesteaders.

Eventually, the Indians left the Susquehanna Valley. White settlers who subsequently ventured into the upper Susquehanna during the 1780s came into a region that was still remote and desolate. The forests and fields of Pennsylvania still teemed with game, and one of these whites, Philip Tome, became a professional hunter. He let his dogs chase deer, used torchlight to hunt at night, and kept written records. One year, “every time I saw a bear, I marked it down, and in a month I counted 43,” Tome said.

Excerpt:
July 1743
To be sure, a Philadelphia naturalist named John Bartram wrote about his encounters with venomous reptiles as he and his companion followed the Tulpehocken Trail west and north from Reading during the summer of 1743…

“At this place we were warned by a well known alarm to keep our distance from an enraged rattle snake that had put himself into a coiled posture of defense within a dozen yards of our path. … He had been highly irritated by an Indian dog that had barked eagerly at him, but was cunning enough to keep out of his reach or nimble enough to avoid the snake when he sprung.”

Bartram kept careful notes as he traveled. The night of July 6, for instance, he recorded that his party camped “in a fine vale, where we … were grievously stung all night with small gnats, so I slept very little.”

On July 8, a full five days after leaving Philadelphia, Bartram and his companions reached the Indian town of Shamokin, now the site of Sunbury, along the Susquehanna River. “It contains eight cabins near the river’s bank right opposite the mouth of the river’s West Branch,” he wrote.

The Indians welcomed the travelers. “As soon as we alighted, they showed us where to lay our baggage, and then brought us a bowl of boiled squashes cold.” Bartram, who had not spent much time among the Indians before this, viewed the meal as “poor entertainment.” The naturalist was in the first week of a two-month journey to visit Iroquois leaders at Onondaga in upstate New York, and he had plenty of time to learn to appreciate native hospitality. In his own words: “Before I came back, I had learned not to despise good Indian food.”

That night, “I quartered in a trader’s cabin, and about midnight, the Indians came and called up him and his squaw, who lay in a separate part where the goods were deposited. … She sold the Indians rum. … Being quickly intoxicated, men and women began first to sing and then dance round the fire.”

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore has participated in several archaeological excavations of Native American sites. These include the Village of Nain, Bethlehem; the City Island project in Harrisburg, conducted by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission during the 1990s; and a Bloomsburg University dig in 1999 at a Native American site near Nescopeck. He also took part in a 1963 excavation conducted by the New Jersey State Museum along the Delaware River north of Worthington State Forest.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Traders, Travelers, and Tomahawks
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
110 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065174
ISBN-10: 1620065177
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Traders-Travelers-and-To…

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/

Who killed Jack Armstrong along the Juniata River?

SUNBURY, Pa. — Sunbury Press has released John L. Moore’s Bows, Bullets, and Bears, the first of eight volumes in the Frontier Pennsylvania series.

About the Book:
Jack Armstrong died violently along the Juniata River in early 1744.

Armstrong was a rough-and-tumble frontier trader whose sharp business practices antagonized one Indian too many. He and two men who worked for him traveled into the woods in early 1744 and never came out again. Word soon crossed the frontier that all three had been murdered. Obscure, but richly detailed documents tell how and why Iroquois Indians living along the Susquehanna River at present-day Sunbury developed evidence that exposed the Native Americans involved in Armstrong’s murder.

John L. Moore’s nonfiction book contains true stories of Armstrong and other real people caught up in the struggles that took place all along the Pennsylvania frontier throughout the late 1600s and 1700s. The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.

Other chapters tell how:

A colonial-era witch trial.

The Philadelphia jury in Margaret Mattson’s 1683 witchcraft trail delivered a split verdict. She was acquitted of bewitching her neighbors’ cows, but found guilty of being known as a witch. Presiding over the trial was William Penn, who let Margaret go home after her husband and son posted a bond for her “good behavior.”

Moravian missionaries who traveled along the Susquehanna River’s West and North Branches during a famine in 1748 found many Indians sick with smallpox and suffering from starvation. The people in one native town were boiling tree bark for food. In another village they were cooking grass.

Early in the French & Indian War, an influential Iroquois chief known as “The Belt of Wampum” urged Pennsylvania officials to build a fort on the Susquehanna River at the native town called Shamokin, present-day Sunbury. “Such Indians as continue true to you want a place to come to and to live in security,” The Belt said in early 1756.

Frances Slocum, a small girl kidnapped by Indians from her home along the Susquehanna River during the America Revolution, spent most of her adult life as a Miami Indian. In 1839, her brother Joseph and his daughters traveled from Pennsylvania to Indiana to visit her. They traveled by stage coach, canal boat and horse-drawn railroad during their 19-day journey west.

Anecdotes throughout the book describe how Native Americans and Europeans hunted bears, ate bear meat, and used bearskins for blankets and mattresses.

Excerpt:
February 1744
By the early 1740s, an Indian trader named Jack Armstrong, who operated out of Lancaster County, had developed a reputation for employing sharp and even antagonistic practices in his dealings with the Delaware Indians who lived, hunted, and trapped along the Susquehanna and the Juniata Rivers. Some of the trader’s white friends had even cautioned him about being overly harsh with his Indian customers and especially about angering them. If Armstrong wasn’t particularly likeable, he was nevertheless a successful trader and a well-known frontier personality. But as hard and tough as Armstrong was, events that occurred along the Juniata River during early 1744 proved that one of his customers, a Delaware Indian known as John Musemeelin, was tougher, harder, and more ferocious.

Armstrong’s story begins in early 1744 when the trader and two men who worked for him, James Smith and Woodworth Arnold, loaded their string of pack horses with trade goods—gun powder, gun flints, lead bullets, glass beads, scissors, woolen blankets, combs, little bells, and other items. For such goods, native trappers would eagerly swap the skins of deer, bears, beavers, elk, otters, foxes, raccoons, and wildcats.

Shikellamy

The three men headed north and followed the trail along the Susquehanna, and then, well north of present-day Harrisburg, swung west and headed out the Juniata toward the Allegheny Mountains. That was in February. By late March and early April, as spring came on, a rumor swept across the frontier: Armstrong and his men had disappeared and weren’t ever coming out of the woods.

As it turned out, all three had been murdered. Since the killings took place in Indian Country—well beyond what was then the western boundary of Pennsylvania—an Indian chief conducted the first official inquiry in the case. Indeed, records of the Pennsylvania colony contain a detailed account of this chief’s investigation into the disappearance and murder of Jack Armstrong. The account itself was dictated by Chief Shikellamy, an Oneida who represented the Iroquois Confederacy at Shamokin and who led the investigation that exposed the killer. Located at the forks of the Susquehanna River, Shamokin was the largest Indian town in what is now Pennsylvania. Shikellamy subsequently had the man arrested and incarcerated. Conrad Weiser, a Pennsylvania German who was the colony’s Indian agent, recorded Shikellamy’s narrative.

About the Author:
John L. Moore, a veteran newspaperman, said he employed a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about long-dead people in a lively way. He said his books are based on 18th and 19th century letters, journals, memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as interrogations, depositions and treaties.

The author is also a professional storyteller who specializes in dramatic episodes from Pennsylvania’s colonial history. Dressed in 18th century clothing, he does storytelling in the persona of “Susquehanna Jack,” a frontier ruffian. Moore is available weekdays, weekends and evenings for audiences and organizations of all types and sizes.

Moore has participated in several archaeological excavations of Native American sites. These include the Village of Nain, Bethlehem; the City Island project in Harrisburg, conducted by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission during the 1990s; and a Bloomsburg University dig in 1999 at a Native American site near Nescopeck. He also took part in a 1963 excavation conducted by the New Jersey State Museum along the Delaware River north of Worthington State Forest.

Moore’s 45-year career in journalism included stints as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; as a Harrisburg-based legislative correspondent for Ottaway News Service; as managing editor of The Sentinel at Lewistown; as editorial page editor and managing editor at The Daily Item in Sunbury; and as editor of the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal in Bethlehem.

Bows, Bullets, and Bears
Authored by John L. Moore
List Price: $9.99
5″ x 8″ (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
96 pages
Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1620065112
ISBN-10: 1620065118
BISAC: History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic

http://www.sunburypressstore.com/Bows-Bullets-and-Bears-9…

Cover artwork by Andrew Knez, Jr.  For more information about Andrew’s work, please see:http://www.andrewknezjr.com/