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The Travels of the Shawnee Indians of the Poconos
By John L. Moore
The distance from Shawnee-on-Delaware in eastern Pennsylvania to Wyandotte, Okla., is nearly 1,220 miles. In terms of time, the distance is much greater.
The Shawnee people once had a village at Shawnee-onDelaware. They left more than two centuries ago and headed west. Today, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma has its headquarters near Wyandotte, Okla., a small village near the Oklahoma-Missouri state line. That’s also where the tribe owns and operates the Indigo Sky Casino, just off Interstate 60.
The Shawnee didn’t leave the Upper Delaware Valley for the express purpose of moving to Oklahoma. The history of these people is much more complicated than that. Their travels took them to Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, and even Texas.
When the French and Indian War began in the mid-1750s, many Shawnees sided with the French. By war’s end, they had moved west of the Appalachian Mountains. They were soon joined by other eastern tribes such as the Delawares, who were originally known as the Lenni Lenape.
The Shawnees sided with the British during the American Revolutionary War. In June 1782, they fought alongside Delaware warriors and a detachment of British Rangers during a battle along the Sandusky River in northwest Ohio. The battle ended with the defeat of an invading force of nearly 500 Pennsylvania militia soldiers. During the Revolution, the Shawnee also fought vigorously against white settlers who settled in Kentucky.
The Revolution temporarily slowed the westward migration of would-be pioneers in the new United States. When the war ended, white pioneers surged across the mountains and into Indian territory.
This influx pushed the Native Americans farther west. By 1815, an estimated 1,200 Shawnees had settled west of the Mississippi River in eastern Missouri, according to author Carol A. Lipscomb.
“They were joined by a large band of Delawares, and the two tribes became closely associated. In 1822 a band of the Missouri Shawnees, numbering about 270 families, migrated south into
← Tecumseh was a Shawnee leader in the Midwest. Killed in battle during the War of 1812, he sided with the
British and opposed the western expansion of the U.S.
↑ Recreation on and along the Delaware River has become a popular pastime at Shawnee on Delaware, the site of a Shawnee Indian village during the 1700s.
Texas, which was then a part of Mexico,” Lipscomb said in an article posted on “The Handbook of Texas” website.
Mexican authorities gave the Shawnee permission to live along the Red River. “The Shawnees became allies of the Cherokees and other immigrant tribes living in Texas, and all enjoyed a generally peaceful relationship with Mexican officials and a growing number of Anglo-American settlers,” Lipscomb said.
When Mexicans waged war against the Comanche Indians, Shawnee warriors fought alongside them. “In 1832 a party of Shawnees, led by Chief John Linney, defeated a band of Penateka Comanches at Bandera Pass, west of San Antonio,” Lipscomb said.
After Texas won its independence from Mexico in 1835, the new republic pressured Native American residents to leave. “The government agreed to provide transportation and supplies for the relocation,” Lipscomb reported. “… By early 1840 most of the Texas Shawnees had moved north of the Red River into Indian Territory.” In time, Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma. Today, there are three federally recognized Shawnee tribes in Oklahoma. They are: the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, with headquarters at Wyandotte; the Shawnee Tribe, with headquarters at Miami; and the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, with headquarters at Shawnee.
These tribes are separate political entities.
The name Shawnee is a modern form of Shawanos or Shawanese, according to the Rev. John Heckewelder, a
Moravian missionary who spent many years among the Indians in Ohio and other mid-western regions during the late 1700s. The Lenape was a related tribe. “Shawaneu, in the Lenape language, means the south,” the missionary said. “We commonly call them the Shawanese.”
Traditions that elderly Indians told Heckewelder about the origins of the Shawnee placed the tribe in Georgia and Florida. In time some migrated north to Ohio and were eventually invited by the Lenape to move to eastern Pennsylvania. Heckewelder said that Shawnees who came to Pennsylvania “settled principally at and about the forks of Delaware,” where the Lehigh River joins the Delaware at Easton. As time passed, many Shawnee moved “to Wyoming on the Susquehanna, where they resided for a great number of years.”
In his 1928 book, “Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania,” George P. Donehoo reported that "although the Shawnee from the south came into the province in 1698,” some of the Shawnee from Ohio had settled on the Upper Delaware “before the arrival of those from the south at the mouth of Pequea Creek" on the lower Susquehanna River.
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↑ Texas blogger Joe Herring Jr. says the dirt road shown in the photo is a wagon trail that leads through Bandera Pass west of San Antonio in Texas. Shawnee warriors fought Comanche Indians here in 1832.
↑ Historical marker at Bandera Pass, west of San Antonio (Photo courtesy of Larry D. Moore)
Some of these Shawnee eventually left Pequea Creek and moved upriver, relocating in the Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna’s North Branch.
Donehoo identified one of the Shawnee chiefs who moved to the Delaware as Ohio-born Paxinosa. "He was probably among the Shawnee who came from the Ohio at an early date to trade on the Upper Delaware and finally settled in the Minisink country," Donehoo said.
Paxinosa was living in the Wyoming Valley when the French and Indian War began in 1754. The elderly man returned to Ohio several years later, Donehoo said.
At least four place-names reflect the Shawnee’s fleeting presence in Pennsylvania: Shawnee on Delaware and Shawnee Mountain Ski Area in Monroe County, the village of Paxinos in
19th century artist George Catlin came upon these Shawnee Indians living west of the Mississippi River in 1831. He identified them as, from left, Káy-te-qua (“The Female Eagle”), a young girl who was daughter of the chief; Pa-te-cóo-saw (“The Straight Man”), a celebrated hunter; Lay-law-she-káw (“He who goes up the river”); an aged chief; and Ten-squa-tá-way, the Shawnee Prophet.
a. — Lay-law-she-káw (He who goes up the river); an aged chief, having the rims of his ears separated and elongated. b. — Káy-te-qua (The Female Eagle); a young girl, daughter of the chief. c. — Pa-te-cóo-saw (The Straight Man); a celebrated hunter. d. — Ten-squa-tá-way (The Open Door); the celebrated “Shawnee Prophet,” brother of Tecumseh; he is blind in his right eye, and represented with his “sacred string of beans” in one hand and his “miraculous fire” in the other.
The remains of a once numerous and powerful tribe, many times removed, and now living west of the Mississippi. 1831.
Catlin was a Pennsylvania native, born in Wilkes-Barre in 1796. During the 1830s, the artist traveled throughout the American West in search of Native Americans to draw and paint.
Traveling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin wrote about and painted portraits that depicted the life of the Plains Indians. His early work included engravings, drawn from nature, of sites along the route of the Erie Canal in New York State. Several of his renderings were published in one of the first printed books to use lithography, Cadwallader D. Colden's Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York, and Presented to the Mayor of the City, at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals, published in 1825, with early images of the City of Buffalo
By 1800, most Delaware Indians had left Pennsylvania, headed for western territories that include the present-day state of Oklahoma.
Descendants of the Lenni Lenape Indians who had welcomed William Penn and sold land to him in the 1680s, these Indians found themselves forced to relocate many times.
↑ Taken around 1900, photo shows a group of Shawnee hunters. (Courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.)
Northumberland County, and Shawnee State Park in Bedford County. The state park is close to a place that was known in the 1700s as the Shawnee Cabins. Shawnee people stopped there as they migrated from South Carolina to Ohio, Donehoo said.
An age-old difficulty in writing about the history of Native Americans is that much of the information about them was reported and interpreted by non-Indians who didn’t understand or appreciate their culture and their past.
The Oklahoma Shawnee tribes use their websites to post their own version of American history.
“The Shawnees are an Eastern Woodlands tribe pushed west by white encroachment,” declares the Shawnee Tribe.
In part, the Absentee Shawnee Tribe uses its website to explain its name: “The Absentee Shawnee Tribe gained their ‘absentee’ distinction because their groups were not present at the signing of the 1854 treaty for a Kansas Reservation. Instead of settling on surplus lands in Kansas, these Absentee Shawnees had opted to migrate into Indian Territory (Oklahoma) or Mexico territory (Texas).” The Eastern Shawnee Tribe has the most elaborate historical account:
“The areas of their occupation centered around today’s states of Alabama, the Carolinas, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, & the Virginias. Their historic geographical territories were mountainous regions, dense forests, and scattered prairies. … Their loss of their homeland has given the Shawnee the reputation of being wanderers, but this was by necessity, not choice.”
The website describes the Shawnees as “a highly mobile, wideranging, nomadic people who lived in traditional dwellings of the Shawnee called ‘Wigiiwa.’ Their men were known as hunters and warriors and their women as planters and gatherers.
“During the summer the Shawnee gathered into villages of bark-covered long houses, with each village usually having a large council house for meetings and religious ceremonies. In the fall they separated to small hunting camps of extended families. Many important Shawnee ceremonies were tied to the agricultural cycle: the spring bread dance at planting time; the green corn dance when crops ripened; and the autumn bread dance to celebrate harvest.”
↑ The Shawnee Presbyterian Church at Shawnee on
Delaware retains the name of a Native American tribe that left the Poconos more than two centuries ago.
↑ Catahecassa was a principal chief of the Shawnees in Ohio during the early 19th century. Also known as
Black Hoof, he encouraged hundreds of Shawnees to migrate to Kansas from Ohio.
John L. Moore continues to pursue his lifelong interests in Pennsylvania’s colonial history and archaeology. The Northumberland writer has published 13 nonfiction books about Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries. His most recent book, “Murder of Killbuck Island,” is the fifth volume in his ongoing Revolutionary Pennsylvania Series. It is available in bookstores and online at the Sunbury Press Bookstore. Over the years John has participated in archaeological excavations of Native American sites along the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers. A professional storyteller, he specializes in telling historically-accurate stories about real people and actual events in Pennsylvania history. These include the true story of Frances Slocum, a 5-year-old girl who lived as a Native American after being kidnapped by Indians during the American Revolution. Frances Slocum State Park near Wilkes-Barre was named for her.
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THE SHAWNEES DURING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
By John L. Moore
The Shawnee Indians and other pro-British tribes living along the Sandusky River in northwest Ohio –the Delawares, Mingoes, and Wyandots–knew the Pennsylvania militia was coming. They intended to stop them.
The date was June 4, 1782, which quickly became a significant date in the history of the western theater of the American Revolutionary War.
The 465 militia soldiers didn’t know it yet, but as they crossed the prairie, a detachment of British Rangers from distant Fort Detroit arrived to reinforce the Indians.
The fighting began during the afternoon and continued until dark. Both sides kept their positions throughout the night.
In the morning, neither side mounted a full-scale attack. At daybreak, the Indians and the rangers “commenced firing, which we kept up pretty briskly till we found the enemy did not wish to oppose us again,” said Lieutenant John Turney, a British officer. “However, we kept firing at them whenever they dared show themselves.”
In turn, Lieutenant John Rose, an officer in the Continental Army who accompanied the militia, speculated that “the enemy’s intention was evidently to cause us to waste our ammunition.” As the day progressed, “they kept maneuvering …, trying to make small numbers look large.”
At one point, the Pennsylvanians “made two attempts to sally, but were repulsed with loss,” said Turney, the British officer.
According to Rose, although “the firing began early on the 5th,” the rangers and the Indians “did not venture an attack.” This was because “the enemy had received so severe a blow the preceding evening that he … contented himself to annoy us at a distance. We were so much encumbered with our wounded and sick that the whole day was spent in their care and in preparing for a general attack the next night.” Later in the morning, the militia leaders decided to strike the Indians, “but our intentions were frustrated by the arrival of a large body of mounted rangers and 200 Shawnees in the afternoon,” Lieutenant Rose said.
According to Lieutenant Turney, the Shawnees numbered significantly fewer than 200, but their arrival had strategic importance. “About 12 o’clock, we were joined by 140 Shawnees, and had got the enemy surrounded,” he said.
At one point during the day, the militia commander decided to attack. The plan called for “a party of 150 men mounted on the best horses” to strike the Indians’ left flank at the same time as 50 foot soldiers charged the warriors in front of a small strip of woods. But when Colonel William Crawford, the commander, explained the plan to his field officers, “the proposal was laid aside,” Rose said.
Throughout the afternoon, Rose noted that he saw “the number of horsemen among the enemy increase visibly.”
As the militia soldiers prepared to spend a second night on the battlefield, the warriors and rangers suddenly discharged their weapons in a way that terrified the Pennsylvanians. “At sunset, the enemy fired off their guns all round by way of (a rifle salute known as) a feu de joie,” Rose said.
The Indians and British taking part in this salute discharged their firearms one at a time but in rapid succession so the firing ran up and down the line. Since the Pennsylvania camp was nearly surrounded, the shots were fired all around it. Militia troops
THE SHAWNEE CASINOS
By John L. Moore
All three federally recognized tribes of the Oklahoma Shawnee have casinos.
The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma owns and operates the Indigo Sky Casino & Resort, located near Wyandotte, Okla.
“The net income from Indigo Sky Casino and all other Eastern Shawnee businesses helps to provide essential services such as health and social care, education, housing, career and other programs to the citizens of Eastern Shawnee Nation,” the tribe says on its website.
In partnership with the Chickasaw Tribe, the Shawnee Tribe opened the Golden Mesa Casino in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 2019.
The Absentee Shawnee Tribe has two: the Thunderbird Casino at Norman and the Thunderbird Casino at Shawnee. Each is described as “an enterprise of the Absentee Shawnee.”
The casinos all offer slot machines and table games.
found the experience unnerving. “This political stroke of theirs had that effect it was intended for,” Rose remarked.
In early evening, “a body of 150 Shawnees advanced quite openly … on the common road in our rear,” and camped “to the south in the rear upon our left,” Rose said.
So many warriors had arrived to reinforce the Indians that the militia officers realized the Indians had become “vastly superior to us in numbers,” Rose said. When they “kept pouring in hourly from all quarters … prudence dictated a retreat.”
The American withdrawal, which quickly became a rout, gave the victory to the Indians.
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