Into The American Woods

On the Pennsylvania frontier they were Germans and Irish, Delawares and Iroquois, with names like Weiser, Croghan, Shickellamy and Osternados. These were the "wood's men", at home in the woods, knowledgeable in the ways of the other, able to negotiate the thickets of cultural misunderstanding and mistrust. From the Quaker colony's founding in the early 1680s into the mid-1750s, they did the hard, dirty work that helped maintain the fragile "long peace" between Indians and colonists. But skilled as they were they could not prevent the colony's plummet from peace to war after 1750. The harsh lesson of the woods was the final incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared.