The riverside village of Logstown (1726?, 1727–1758) also known as Logg's Town, French: ChiningueCharles Augustus Hanna, The Wilderness Trail: Or, The Ventures and Adventures of the Pennsylvania Traders on the Allegheny Path, Volume 1, Putnam's sons, 1911 (transliterated to Shenango) near modern-day Baden, Pennsylvania, was a significant Native American settlement in Western Pennsylvania and the site of the 1752 signing of the Treaty of Logstown between the Ohio Company, the Colony of Virginia, and the Six Nations, which occupied the region. Being an unusually large settlement, and because of its strategic location in the Ohio Country, an area contested by France and England, Logstown was an important community for all parties living along the Ohio and tributary rivers. Logstown was a prominent trade and council site for the contending British and French colonial governments, both of which made abortive plans to construct forts near the town.Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1651–1817 Cambridge studies in North American Indian history, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Logstown was burned in 1754 and although it was rebuilt, in the years following the French and Indian War it became poor and was eventually abandoned.
Location
Logstown is located in Harmony Township, about 14 miles northwest of the Forks of the Ohio (now in downtown Pittsburgh) in an area on the east bank of the Ohio River opposite Aliquippa. The site is also due north of the Pittsburgh International Airport. Today the site is marked with a stone bearing a brass plaque placed there by the Fort McIntosh chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1932, memorializing the visit of Major George Washington to the town in November, 1753.National Park Service, "Reconnaissance Survey, The Washington Trail 1753," Park Planning and Special Studies, Northeast Region. US Dept. of the Interior, August 2019"Logstown Historical Marker," Historical Marker Database
Etymology
A few sources claim that in 1747 the French built about 30 log cabins, some with stone chimneys, on a plateau above the original Logstown village,Charles William Dahlinger, The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine. Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1969. and that these log cabins supposedly gave the town its name.Jeffrey Snedden, "Names still exist, but the places don’t," The Times Online, Posted Dec 6, 2016 However, George P. Donehoo says that the name "was probably due to the fact that large numbers of logs were left upon the flat after the floods in the Ohio River."Donehoo, George P. A History of the Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania. Papamoa Press, 2019.George P. Donehoo, "A Few Facts in the History of Logstown," The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania., 1918. Pp 259-264
Donehoo and several other sources report that the original Lenape name of the village was Maughwawame,Thwaites, Reuben Gold. The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest, Vol I 1634-1760. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1908 which translates to "extensive flats."
The French referred to the town as "Chiningue" which Father Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps notes was their designation and not a Native name: "We called it Chiningue, from its vicinity to a river of that name." Donehoo says that chiningue is a French word for beaver, but also suggests that it may be a corruption of ochenango, a Seneca word meaning "large bull thistles."
Early history
The original village was settled by Shawnees, possibly as early as 1725Chester Hale Sipe, "The Principal Indian Towns of Western Pennsylvania," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, v. 13, no. 2; April 1, 1930; pp. 104-122 or 1730Chester Hale Sipe, The Indian chiefs of Pennsylvania, or, A story of the part played by the American Indian in the history of Pennsylvania: based primarily on the Pennsylvania archives and colonial records, and built around the outstanding chiefs, Butler, Pa.: Ziegler Print. Co., Inc., 1927 on low-lying land less than a mile north of present-day Ambridge in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.Agnew, Daniel, "Logstown, on the Ohio: a historical sketch," originally published by Myers, Shinkle & Co., Pittsburgh, PA, 1894 The population grew as groups of Lenape, Cayugas, Senecas, and Shawnees migrated west into the Ohio River Valley seeking to escape a smallpox epidemic in 1733 and a drought in 1741, creating a multi-ethnic community.Helen Hornbeck Tanner and Miklos Pinther, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Civilization of the American Indian series; v. 174. 1st ed. Norman: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1987; pp 40-41.Richard S. Grimes, "The emergence and decline of the Delaware Indian nation in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio country, 1730--1795," Doctoral Dissertation, Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, West Virginia University, 2005 In August 1744 the town's population increased significantly when Kakowatcheky arrived with his band of Shawnee warriors and their families from Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania.Paul A. W. Wallace, Indians in Pennsylvania, DIANE Publishing Inc., 2007, p. 127. Kakowatcheky is sometimes credited with founding Logstown.John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of The Indian Nations who once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States, Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1881. Another early resident was Opessa Straight Tail, who moved to Logstown some time before 1750.Stephen Warren, Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America, UNC Press Books, 2014 The town's population varied from approximately 200 to 500 people. In 1749 Céloron de Blainville observed fifty cabins housing about sixty warriors,O. H. Marshall, C. B. Galbreath, Andrew Arnold Lambing, and Joseph Pierre de Bonnécamps. 1921. Expedition of Celoron to the Ohio country in 1749. Columbus, O.: The F.J. Heer Printing Co. suggesting a population of 200 to 250 total, while in late 1758 George Croghan noted forty houses for about one hundred and twenty warriors, suggesting a total population of 350 to 500.
In late April 1745, the Pekowi Shawnee leader Peter Chartier and about 400 Shawnees, including Meshemethequater and Neucheconeh, stopped at Logstown to visit Kakowatcheky and to try to persuade him to join them. Chartier was angry with the Provincial government of Pennsylvania for their failure to control the sale of alcohol in Shawnee communities, and his plan at that time was to bring as many Shawnees as he could over to French protection. He was on his way to Lower Shawneetown to address the Shawnees living there. Kakowatcheky, however, refused to join him, and Chartier and his people left Logstown after a brief stay.
Most sources agree that the main section of the town was built on the broad, flat floodplain along the east bank of the Ohio River, with a few structures located on the west bank. Gardens and cornfields were planted on both sides of the river, on fertile, alluvial flatlands, where the town's residents cultivated maize, beans, squash, gourds, tobacco, and sunflowers. One source states that "in the year 1752...the Shawanese Inhabited Loggs Town, on the West Side of the Ohio, and tended Corn on the East Side of the River."Bausman, Joseph Henderson. History of Beaver County, Pennsylvania: And Its Centennial Celebration, vol. II. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1904. On the east bank of the river, a few homes were built on a grassy terrace above the floodplain, the so-called "upper town."James B. Richardson, Ronald C. Carlisle, Ohio River Environmental Assessment: Cultural Resources, Dept of Anthropology, Pittsburgh University PA, Oct 1977
In 1747, the Six Nations Confederacy Haudenosaunee sent two headmen as emissaries to live in Logstown and supervise the Haudenosaunee allies: Tanacharison,Kenny A. Franks, "Tanacharison," American National Biography Online, Oxford University Press 2021William A. Hunter, "Tanaghrisson," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 3, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 15, 2021 a Seneca, and Scarouady, an Oneida.Sipe, C. Hale, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania, 1929, Telegraph Press, Harrisburg. Tanacharison oversaw the Delawares and Scarouady supervised the Shawnees.
Visit by George Croghan, 1748 The provincial government of Pennsylvania was anxious to keep Native Americans in the Ohio Valley from being influenced by the French. As early as 1731, agents from Montreal had visited communities along the Ohio River, distributing goods and urging the tribes to send emissaries to Quebec to establish alliances. On September 18, 1747, George Croghan wrote to Thomas Lawrence in Philadelphia, a member of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, that one of his men, who had just come "down from ye Woods," had informed him that "the Indians at this side of the Lake Erie are making war very briskly against the French, but is very impatient to hear from their brothers, ye English, expecting a present of powder and lead; which, if they don't get, I am of opinion, by the best accounts, that they will turn to the French." In November 1747 Scarouady and other Haudenosaunee leaders visited Philadelphia to sign the "Treaty Between the President and Council of the Province of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Indians,""A Treaty between the president and Council of the province of Pennsylvania, and the Indians of Ohio: held at Philadelphia, Nov. 13. 1747," printed by Benjamin Franklin promising a military alliance against the French in exchange for supplies and trade goods. The Council obtained £200 worth of goods and sent Croghan to Logstown in April, 1748 to cement the terms of the treaty and secure the tribes' loyalty to the British. Conrad Weiser was to follow in August with more gifts. Croghan met in council with 1500 men at Logstown, and finding the Council's gifts insufficient for all of them, he added an additional £224 in powder, lead, knives, flints, brass wire, and tobacco from his own stock. This gesture was influential in maintaining the alliance between the British and the Ohio tribes.Volwiler, Albert T. George Croghan and the Westward Movement, 1741–1782. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1926
In late July, fifty-five representatives of the Six Nations, Delawares, Shawnees, Nanticokes, and Twightwees met at the courthouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and signed a peace treaty with the Pennsylvania Provincial Council.A Treaty held by commissioners, members of the Council of the province of Pennsylvania, at the town of Lancaster, with some of the chiefs of the Six Nations at Ohio, and others, for the admission of the Twightwee Nation into the alliance of His Majesty, &c. in the month of July, 1748. This treaty guaranteed commercial access to tribes across the Ohio Valley as far west as the Wabash River, an unprecedented diplomatic achievement for the English. Edward G. Everett, "Pennsylvania's Indian Diplomacy 1747-1753," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol 44 (September 1961), pp. 241-56.Joseph Solomon Walton, 1900, Conrad Weiser and the Indian Policy of Colonial Pennsylvania Philadelphia: G.W. Jacobs & Co., 1900
Visit by Conrad Weiser, 1748