http://www.kancoll.org/books/gregg/gr_ch04_1.htm It was generally supposed at the time that there was a great number of Comanches and Arrapahoes among this troop of savages; but they were principally if not altogether Blackfeet and Gros Ventres. We afterward learned that on their return to the northern mountains, they met with a terrible defeat from the Sioux and other neighboring tribes, in which they were said to have lost more than half their number. Northern Plains Indians from Canada and Montana in Southwest Oklahoma, ain't supposed to happen in popular history but it did. I'm recalling a case in that same era where some Crows from Montana accompanied some Oklahoma Kiowas into Mexico far enough south to see Tropical forests.
'Nother example of the speed of change on our Frontiers: Lets take a hypothetical Delaware Indian dying at age 75 in the year 1820 along the Red River in Northeast Texas.
That guy could have been born on the Upper Delware in far Eastern Pennsylvania in 1745. Might as well have him spend his childhood in the polyglot town of Oquaga, on the upper Susquehanna in NY State on the southern fringe of Iroquoia.
Fascinating place, members of many tribes plus numerous Whites. One of those Indian towns with a church and sawn-timber houses. A health spa of sorts where Whites would go to seek Indian cures. Joseph Brant (the famous Rev War Mohawk) spent much time there, met his mixed-blood wife there.
Our Delaware would have probably grown up speaking a few languages, very possibly including English.
Anyway, as a kid our hypothetical Delaware would have seen Iroquois War parties travelling through on foot to attack the Cherokees, 500 miles away. He would have been 10 years old when a raiding party of French and Shawnees famously captured a teenage Mary Jemison not far from what was to become the Chambersburg Pike, west of the new settlement of Gettysburg, and he would have been 14 when Washington screwed up at Fort Necessity, 300 miles to the west of Oquaga at the start of the French and Indian War.
He could have been present at Braddock's Defeat on the Monongahela and would have been eighteen at the time if he was among those rifle-armed Delawares defeated by Bouquet's Scottish Highlanders at the Battle of Brushy Run in 1763.
Later that decade, in his twenties he would probably be living in the Ohio Country, living in a Euro-style cabin, armed with contemporary weapons, dressing in clothing made from trade cloth and ornamenting himself with German silver (as he would have been doing his whole life).
Likely he would have been among those Indians collectively trading an incredible 300,000 deer skins a year at Fort Pitt on the forks of the Ohio at present-day Pittsburgh. And active in transporting/trading the reciprocal flow of trade goods into the back country.
Our guy would have been 33 years old when the Delaware tavern keeper, trader and Delaware Chief White Eyes travelled to Philadelphia to make a treaty with the Continental Congress in 1778 to form a short-lived alliance, ending when White Eyes hisself was likely murdered by one or more militia members in the American force he was guiding against the British in Michigan.
We can certainly put our guy across the Mississippi and fomally settled in Missouri with the Absentee Band of the Dleawares by 1798 at age 53. The intervening twenty years would have occasioned frequent moves and travels. Very possibly our guy would have crossed the Mississippi before 1780, in his thirties, when many of his Ohio Country Shawnee neighbors picked up and moved west to escape the enroaching White Frontier.
Seventy-five in Frontier terms should not be considered inordinantly old, or at least not dotage, I believe Daniel Boone was in his eighties when he ascended the Missouri and possibly the Yellowstone. Nana the Chiricahua Apache was in his seventies when he was literally running rings around the cavalry in the 1880's, likewise John Burns "the Old Hero of Gettyburg", when he took up his old War of 1812 Springfield musket to join the Union position on Culp's Hill.
Likewise Sequoya, the famoulsy literate Cherokee, was 76 years old and not unduly worried when his companions left him alone and on foot somewhere in the Texas Hill Country in 1843 while they walked to Mexico to procure horses to replace the ones that had been stolen (by Indians). Unworried enough that he refused the kind offer of a travelling party of Delawares who came across him to "deliver him to his own front door".
So our guy, born well before the F&I War on the Delaware, could very possibly have made it at least as far as Santa Fe and back before he died. American traders were putting feelers out for that as early as 1812. Not impossible he coulda made it clear to California and back either, we know there were Oklahoma Delawares who did that around that time.
Birdwatcher
