John Lederer - Biography

Biography

Lederer was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1644. He studied medicine at the Hamburg Academic Gymnasium.

Lederer immigrated to Virginia in 1668. By this time he spoke French, Italian and Latin in addition to German, but had to learn English. Believing that the riches of California lay just beyond the mountains west of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, colonial governor of Virginia, commissioned Lederer to make three expeditions into the Appalachians between 1669 and 1670. Berkeley wanted him to find a passage to the West and the Indian Ocean, which Europeans believed was a few weeks' travel away.

On March 9, 1669, Lederer left Chickahominy, an Indian village near the headwaters of the York River, and traveled northwest to Eminent Hill. During this expedition, lasting until March 24, he and the three members of his small party became the first Europeans to crest the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the first to see the Shenandoah Valley and the Allegheny Mountains beyond.

In May 1670 Lederer left Fort Charles (now Richmond, VA) and followed the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains south into what is now North Carolina. He was accompanied by Major Harris, commanding twenty white men, and five Indian guides. Twenty-one members of the party turned back, but Lederer pushed on with Jackzetavon, one of his five Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock guides. They explored North Carolina to the Catawba River near what is now Charlotte. They returned to Virginia by mid-July, when they reached Fort Henry (now Petersburg, VA), a frontier post on the Appomattox River.

On August 20 of that year Lederer and Col. John Catlett set out on the third expedition. They departed from Robert Talifer's (surname may have been Taliaferro or a variation of this prominent family) house, at a small settlement south of the Rappahannock River. They followed the Rappahannock River valley north, where Lederer noted "vast herds of red and fallow deer which stood gazing at us". Unable to cross the Blue Ridge by horseback, they left their mounts with some Indians in the party and climbed the mountains by foot. From the heights, they sighted the Appalachian Mountains beyond the Shenandoah Valley.