George Croghan
George Croghan (c. 1718 – August 31, 1782) was an Irish-born fur trader in the Ohio Country of North America (current United States) who became a key early figure in the region.
[7][8] Emigrating from Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1741, he had become an important trader by going to the villages of Indigenous Peoples, learning their languages and customs, and working on the frontier where previously mostly French had been trading.
Beginning in the 1740s and following this appointment, Croghan amassed hundreds of thousands of acres of land in today's western Pennsylvania and New York by official grants and from Native American purchases.
[9] Western Pennsylvania became the focal point in August 1749 when Croghan purchased 200,000 acres from the Iroquois, exclusive of two square miles at the Forks of the Ohio for a British fort.
While working to keep the Ohio Indians neutral during the Revolutionary War, Croghan served as Pittsburgh's president judge for Virginia and chairman of its Committee of Safety.
Brant's sister Molly was a long-term consort of Sir William Johnson, so Croghan was doubly connected to influential British and Mohawk families in the East.
Celeron de Bienville led a 1749 expedition to claim the Ohio Valley for France and drive out the English traders; Governor James Hamilton (Pennsylvania), sent Croghan to Logstown to investigate.
[28] Days before Celeron reached Logstown, its chiefs sold Croghan 200,000 acres (810 km2) in the area, excluding 2 square miles (5.2 km2) at the Forks of the Ohio reserved for construction of a British fort.
Biographer Wainwright said gaining this huge amount of land was "a momentous event in his [Croghan's] life,"[29] a gross understatement of its impact on history, namely the otherwise unlikely penetration of Virginia into Ohio Country.
Immediately after the conference, a French force led by Charles Langlade made a Raid on Pickawillany, killing a few British traders and 13 Miami, including Old Briton.
With Montour at his side and in command of 100 Indians on an overlooking hilltop, Croghan witnessed in July 1758 General James Abercrombie's calamitous frontal assault on Fort Ticonderoga.
Afterward Croghan wrote Johnson that he feared a similar "thrashing" for Gen. John Forbes advance forces nearing Fort Duquesne, unaware that Major James Grant had been defeated five days earlier.
He then joined Forbes on November 20 with fifteen Indian scouts in his usual role at the head of the military column, likely the first to see that the French had burned Fort Duquesne to prevent it being used by the British.
During 1761 and 1762, Croghan negotiated preliminary treaties with thirteen western tribes on behalf of the British Crown, gaining their acceptance of its assumption of rule in areas ceded by the French.
He galloped to Lancaster where word reached him that his business partner Col. Clapham had been killed in the region's initial attack, their Sewickley Creek trading post burned along with Croghan Hall near Pittsburgh, and that Fort Pitt was under siege.
"[49] The Lords of Trade declined Croghan's request to transfer his Indian grant of 200,000 acres (810 km2) from the Ohio to the Mohawk River valley, refused to compensate traders for war losses, or to permit an Illinois colony.
But the Lords agreed to free the Indian Department from military control and to consider moving the Proclamation Line of 1763, which was intended to prevent westward settlement by British colonists and keep peace with Native Americans, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Ohio River.
Bouquet, traveling east after his victorious 1764 Ohio campaign, was outraged to learn in a letter from Croghan to McKee that the Indian Department was now independent of local military control.
Further incensed when the report was confirmed, Bouquet called Croghan "illiterate, imprudent [or "impudent," sources vary], and ill bred" in a letter to British General Thomas Gage complaining of the agent.
Seen as a 1765 prelude to the Revolutionary War, Croghan's first shipment of Indian presents and trade goods to Pittsburgh provoked armed rebellion by frontiersmen led by James Smith.
[56] In a conference on July 13, Croghan reconciled the Ottawa, Piankashaw, Miami, Ouiatenon, Mascouten, and Kickapoo Indians to British rule, a peace confirmed shortly afterward in a grand council that included Chief Pontiac.
The principals journeyed to Detroit, where Croghan conducted an even larger conference that brought the Potawatomi, Ojibway, Wyandot, and Wea tribes into the British economic orbit, with Pontiac "playing an important part in the proceedings.
He built a six-chimney "hutt" and had Croghan Forest's 100,000 acres (400 km2) surveyed in September 1768 prior to final discussions by Sir Johnson with the Six Nations of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
[64] As noted above, before completion of the Fort Stanwix Treaty in November 1768, the Six Nations sold Croghan 127,000 acres (510 km2) in New York bordering Lake Otsego, plus numerous tracts for his friends.
[15] It was made out by Lord Dunmore aboard a British warship on the James River, signed a few days after Washington had assumed command of the Continental army besieging Boston.
Samuel Wharton sent encouraging news about Vandalia, including the arrival of a large shipment of goods for gifts to the Indians and land payments, temporarily stored at Georgetown because of Dunmore's War.
Ordered to take lodgings in town, where he was kept under constant supervision by two British officers, Croghan learned that Monckton Hall was burnt after the battle of Germantown, "another severe financial blow.
G. Crist concludes that, given the Gaelic origins of the surname, the pronunciation was “Crone," his evidence is less than conclusive: a financial account that one of Croghan's clerks labeled as "Crohan and Trent;" and "a Frenchman who recorded his name as "Croan," apparently the way it sounded.
Descendants have used the hard "g" pronunciation favored by Croghan scholar Margaret Pearson Bothwell, but Crist dismisses them and "the practice in Ireland today," where the name is pronounced "CROG-han."
'"[89] A study of Crogan's dialect by Michael Montgomery, a linguist specializing in Irish, written more than thirty years after Crist, does not find the name pronunciation dispute worth mentioning.
