Peter Chartier

As an early advocate for Native American civil rights, he joined other chiefs in opposing the sale and trade of alcohol in indigenous communities in the Province of Pennsylvania.

The Quaker trader Edmund Cartlidge wrote to Governor Patrick Gordon on 14 May 1732: I find Peter Chartiere well inclined, and stands firm by the interest of Pennsylvania, and very ready on all accounts to do all the service he can.

[26]In September and October 1732, Chartier and Cartlidge served as interpreters during a conference in Philadelphia attended by Opakethwa and Opakeita, two Shawnee chiefs, with Thomas Penn, Governor Gordon, and the 72-member Pennsylvania Provincial Council.

[29] Because the law was poorly enforced in the frontier society, and the penalty was light—a fine of ten pounds and confiscation of any illegal supplies—traders continued to use rum to barter for furs.

Rum, brandy and other distilled beverages had become important trade items, frequently served in diplomatic councils, treaty negotiations, and political transactions and had become part of Native American gift-giving rituals.

Alcohol made men less reliable hunters and allies, destabilized village economics, and contributed to a rise in poverty among Native Americans.

[31]On 24 April 1733 the Shawnee chiefs at "Allegania" sent a petition to Governor Gordon complaining that "There is yearly and monthly some new upstart of a trader without license, who comes amongst us and brings with him nothing but rum ..." and asking permission to destroy the casks of rum: "We therefore beg thou would take it into consideration, and send us two firm orders, one for Peter Chartier, the other for us, to break in pieces all the [casks] so brought.

In a letter of 20 March 1738, addressed to Thomas Penn and Acting Governor James Logan, three Shawnee chiefs stated: All our people being gathered together, we held a council together, to leave off drinking for the space of four years, and we all in general agreed to it, taking into consideration the ill consequences that attend it and what disturbance it makes, and that two of our brothers, the Mingoes, lost their lives in our towns by rum, and that we would live in peace and quietness and become another people ...

On 6 June three traders testified to the Pennsylvania Provincial Council that two other men had been killed, and that they had been told by the Shawnee to leave their territory or risk death.

He wrote to the Pennsylvania Assembly alleging that Chartier's Shawnee ancestry resulted in his having a "brutish disposition ... and it is not to be doubted that a person of his savage temper will do us all the mischief he can.

He established a trading post on the Allegheny River about twenty miles upstream from the forks of the Ohio near the mouth of Chartiers Run, at what became Tarentum.

They claimed to authorities that they had been robbed on the frontier on 18 April: ... as they were returning up the Allegheny River in canoes, from a trading trip, with a considerable quantity of furs and skins, Peter Chartier, late an Indian Trader, with about 400 Shawnese Indians, armed with guns, pistols and cutlasses, suddenly took them prisoners, having, as he said, a captain's commission from the King of France; and plundered them of all their effects to the value of sixteen hundred pounds.

[3]George Croghan, another trader, later testified that Chartier had set free a Black servant, possibly a slave, who was traveling with Dunning and Tostee.

[40] The Pennsylvania provincial council issued an indictment against "Peter Chartier of Lancaster County ... Labourer [who], being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil ... falsely, traitorously, unlawfully and treasonably did compass, imagine and intend open war, insurrection and rebellion against our said Lord the King."

Chartier's landholdings in Pennsylvania, totaling some 600 acres, were seized and turned over to Thomas Lawrence, a business partner of Edward Shippen, III.

[41] Chartier and his people recognized that, by defying the Provincial Governor and accepting French patronage, they had to leave Pennsylvania, which was under British control.

[42] In June an anonymous Frenchman visited Lower Shawneetown, sent by Paul-Joseph Le Moyne de Longueuil, commandant at Detroit, to take charge of captives Chartier was presumed to have taken when he robbed traders Dunning and Tostee.

The Frenchman observed Chartier trying unsuccessfully to persuade the leaders of Lower Shawneetown to accept French alliance: They held a council to...hear the reading of Longueuil's letter.

[44]This Frenchman watched the Shawnee who had accompanied Chartier performing a two-day "Death Feast," a ceremony conducted before abandoning a village.

[3]: 134 Fighting with Iroquois and Chickasaw and an outbreak of smallpox[6] led them to move south to the Coosa River in 1748,[48] where they founded the village of Chalakagay, near what is now Sylacauga, Alabama.

[46][3] In May 1749 Antoine Louis Rouillé, the French Foreign minister, wrote: "[Chartier's] band, after ascending a part of the river of the Cherakis, decided to go and join the Alibamons, where it appeared to have behaved well.

[3][53][54] In July the Pennsylvania Provincial Council appointed a commission to meet with the Shawnee who had returned, and instructed them: As to the Shawonese you are to enquire very exactly after their conduct since the commencement of the War, and what lengths they went in favor of Peter Chartier; where he is; and what he has been doing all this time; and be careful that these people acknowledge their fault in plain terms, and promise never to be guilty of any behaviour again that may give such reason to suspect their fidelity.

[3] In a letter to Conrad Weiser dated 23 June 1748 Anthony Palmer, President of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, said, "...they relented, made acknowledgment to the Government of their error in being seduced by Peter Chartier, and prayed they might be permitted to return to their old Town.

According to Lyman C. Draper, the band, then numbering about 190, ...made their way down Cumberland River, the women, children, aged and disabled men, in canoes, and the warriors as a guard along shore; intending to rejoin their brethren, who were now located on the Ohio, chiefly at the Lower Shawanoe Town, at the mouth of the Scioto; but when they entered the Ohio, the heavy spring flood was rolling down, against which their progress was so slow and tedious, that they stopped a few miles below the mouth of the Wabash, at the present locality of Old Shawneetown, Illinois.

[3]: xv Chartier's decision to join the French and to lead his community out of Pennsylvania sparked fears that Native Americans would attack British settlements.

As a result, the Pennsylvania provincial government finally took measures to comply with the repeated requests of Shawnee leaders to control the practice of trading rum for furs.

On 7 May 1745, shortly after Chartier had announced his defection to the French, Lieutenant-Governor George Thomas issued a proclamation stating: Whereas frequent complaints have been made by the Indians, and of late earnestly renewed, that divers gross irregularities and abuses have been committed in the Indian countries, and that many of their people have been cheated and inflamed to such a degree by means of strong liquors being brought and sold amongst them contrary to the said laws, as to endanger their own lives and the lives of others ...

[59]Thomas strengthened the law against the sale of rum in indigenous communities, doubled the fine to twenty pounds, required a surety bond of one hundred pounds from anyone applying for a license to trade furs with Native Americans, required that the goods of traders traveling to indigenous communities be searched, and gave ...full power and authority to any Indian or Indians to whom rum or other strong liquors shall be hereafter offered for sale contrary to the said laws, to stave and break to pieces the cask or vessel in which such rum or other strong liquor is contained.

He discovered valuable lessons in movement and reinvention and ... turned Shawnee histories of migration and violence toward adoption of a new racial consciousness for Indian peoples in the eastern half of North America.

Frustratingly independent, Shawnee migrants made deliberate choices based on the realities of Indian slavery, intertribal warfare, and access to European trade goods.