White Eyes - Migration and Career

Migration and Career

After the war, when European white colonists began settling near the Lenape villages around Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania, the Native Americans moved further west to the Muskingum River valley in present-day eastern Ohio. By this time, many Lenape had converted to Christianity under the influence of Moravian missionaries and lived in villages led by them. The missionary towns also moved to the Muskingum, so that the Lenape, both Christian and non-Christian, could stay together. Though not a Christian, White Eyes ensured that the Christian Lenape remained members of the larger community.

In the early 1770s, Lenape attacked the Philip Doddridge family farm, along the shores of Chartier's Creek near Statler's Fort (Washington County, Pennsylvania), killing some members of the nine-person extended family and capturing others. They carried away three young daughters and a son, and the grandmother. The five-year-old girl Rachel Doddridge was known to have been adopted into the tribe. As a young woman, she married White Eyes, who had become chief. Her cousin Philip Doddridge reported seeing her as an adult at a trading post, but, thoroughly assimilated, she was not interested in a reunion with her British relatives.

White Eyes established his own town, known as White Eyes's Town, near the Lenape capital of Coshocton, Ohio. In 1774, the Lenape Grand Council, an association of chiefs, named White Eyes as principal chief of the nation.

In the early 1770s, violence on the frontier between whites and Indians threatened to escalate into open warfare. White Eyes unsuccessfully attempted to prevent what would become Lord Dunmore's War in 1774, fought primarily between the Shawnee and Virginia colonists. He served as a peace emissary between the two armies, and helped negotiate a treaty to end the war.