The Lancaster Treaty of 1744 ─ With Related Documents

The Lancaster Treaty of 1744 offers students a close look at colonial-Indian relations in North America. The treaty minutes offer some of the best historical evidence of Iroquois perspectives on colonial power and diplomacy. James Merrell uses the treaty minutes, published by Benjamin Franklin shortly after the end of the negotiations, to illuminate critical issues in the mid-eighteenth-century struggles between and among Indians and colonial empires. These issues, including competing colonial claims, land use and tenure, diplomacy, and cultural exchange, bring complex colonial worlds to life for students. Accompanying the treaty minutes are four documents by European and colonial observers who visited the Iroquois before, during, or after the treaty negotiations, shedding further light -- and some ambiguity -- on Indian-white relations in this period. A list of major figures, a chronology of events, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index further enable students' exploration of this event.

JAMES MERRELL (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University) is Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College. An award-winning scholar of American Indian history, Professor Merrell has published a number of books and articles, including Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (1999), winner of the 2000 Bancroft Prize for history and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Indians' New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors From European Contact through the Era of Removal (1989), winner in 1990 of the Bancroft Prize, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, and the Merle Curti Award.