“We Are the Allegheny Indians, and Your Enemies …You Must All Die!” How Delaware Performative Violence Reshaped Politics, Diplomacy, and Western Settlement in Pennsylvania, 1754–56

During the early morning of October 16, 1754, Delaware warriors tomahawked Jean Jaques Le Roy to death and burned his body, took his children captive, plundered the house, and burned it to the ground. Not finished, the warriors went to the Leininger farm nearby, killed the men, and took Barbara and her sister Regina as prisoners.  By evening, the warriors returned to their camp “with six fresh and bloody scalps, which they threw at the feet of the poor captives, saying that they had a good hunt that day.” The violence continued throughout the next day as nine additional scalps were taken along with five more captives. Word spread throughout the backcountry alarming frontier settlers of the devastation, terror, and bloody struggle that was soon to become the legacy of western Pennsylvania during the first two years of the French and Indian War.  

The violent confrontation at Penn’s Creek and the many other successful Delaware raids on the land, crops, dwellings, and families of non-native peoples living along Pennsylvania’s frontier between 1754 and 1756 must be understood as the most effective way of considering how opportunities emerged for the Delaware to achieve more autonomy over their land, security, and diplomacy. In this context, violence along the Pennsylvania frontier reveals the successful strategies employed by natives to resist, deform, and restructure the imperial and colonial institutions that were created to control them.  Early American historians often equate violence on the frontier with racial, ethnic, or cultural conflict between natives and white settlers or as a romantic struggle of independent frontier families against savage Indian warriors who were bent on destruction, murder, and kidnapping.  Instead, Delaware performative violence was a way to reorder the colonial world in which they lived by reshaping settlement, initiating negotiations for loyalty, and redefining frontier political relationships.