Captain Pipe, as the colonists called him, is first noted in historical records in 1759 among the warriors at a conference held at Fort Pitt, July 1759.
These four villages had earlier been inhabited by Seneca people of the Iroquois League, but by 1756 they were settled by Lenape displaced from further east during the French and Indian War.
[4] In 1762 the Lenape gave the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post permission to build a cabin on the Tuscarawas River at present Bolivar, Ohio.
In 1768 he again met in a conference at Fort Pitt, held by George Croghan, a sub-agent of Sir William Johnson, British Indian Agent of the northeast and based in central New York.
This meeting gathered more than 1,000 Iroquois, Lenape, Shawnee, Wyandot, and Mohegan together following the British victory over the French in the Seven Years' War.
Britain proposed an Indian state to be reserved to Native Americans west of the Appalachians, and proclaimed it as off-limits to Anglo-American colonists.
[3] During the American Revolution, Captain Pipe tried to remain neutral; he refused to take up arms against the rebels even after General Edward Hand killed his mother, brother, and a few of his children during a military campaign in 1778.
[3] Failing to distinguish among the Native American groups, Hand had attacked the neutral Lenape while trying to reduce the Indian threat to settlers in the Ohio Country, because other tribes, such as the Shawnee, had allied with the British.
In 1778 Captain Pipe was with White Eyes and Killbuck, contemporary Lenape leaders of the Turkey Clan, when they signed the first treaty between the Continental Congress and Native peoples.
He demanded their Ohio Country warriors assist the Americans in capturing Fort Detroit, and threatened them with extermination if they refused.
Also in 1778, Pipe and the members of his tribe who supported war, departed from the Tuscarawas area and relocated to the Walhonding River, about fifteen miles above the present site of Coshocton, Ohio.
Captain Pipe became the leader of Lenape who supported the British and moved his people to the Tymochtee Creek near the Sandusky River.
Seeking vengeance for the Gnadenhutten Massacre, in which nearly 100 Lenape were killed, the warriors marked Crawford for death by painting his face black after capturing him in battle.
When they conducted ritual torture of Crawford before killing him, American witnesses say the soldier begged Simon Girty, a Loyalist interpreter, to shoot him.
[3][5] Captain Pipe continued to resist white settlement of the Ohio Country (which by then the United States called the Northwest Territory).
During this time, he also resided at "Birds Run" and "Indian Camp", communities served by Ohio State Route 658, and "Flatridge", all three villages about 10 miles NW of present-day Cambridge.
[3] By the 1810s and 1820s, Captain Pipe realized his people had little chance against the Americans and began to negotiate treaties with the United States government.