Treaty: Lancaster, 1744

Early frontier history is a confusing mess of treaty after treaty with various tribes.  There were several reasons for this.  While surveying was a known science in that time, George Washington was a surveyor, the amount of land in question in any such treaty was often a vast and unknown quantity.  The way Natives reckoned the boundaries of their home ranges was often different than the way Whites did.  Further, settling the rights of one tribe by treaty often failed to dispose of the rights held by other tribes to that same stretch of land.  White ideas of ownership couldn't conceive of the idea that if the Iroquois Confederacy claimed land as its hunting range, the Shawnee, Cherokee and others often did the same.  Thus, treaties often had to be renegotiated and rewritten, with more confusion and, too often, more land ceded than what the tribes intended.

The Treaty of Lancaster of 1744 was one example.  The parties to the agreement were the colonial governments of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, and the Iroquois Confederacy/Haudenosaunee.  A treaty parley convened on June 25, 1744 in the county courthouse, and the treaty was drawn up and signed on July 4, 1744.  Ever since 1722, Virginia had agreed to recognize the Blue Ridge Mountains as the boundary of settlement.  However, successive governments had been unable to curb Settlers trespassing on Native land and the Iroquois, by 1744, were ready to go to war to protect their own.  The Governor of Virginia paid the Natives for the land occupied, which included the fertile Shenandoah Valley, but skirmishes continued.  Per the terms of the Treaty of Lancaster, the Iroquois believed they were giving up only the Shenandoah Valley east of the Allegheny Mountains.  The Virginians believed they were getting the entire Shenandoah Valley and land in the Ohio Valley southeast of the Ohio River.  And, again, settling with the Iroquois didn't dispose of any rights of the Shawnee, Cherokee or tribes who actually lived in this area. 

It would take several more treaties and years of continued frontier skirmishing to straighten out this mess.  The Treaty of Logstown in 1752, between the Iroquois Confederacy and Virginia granted Virginia rights to the entire Ohio Valley, but did not include the Cherokee, Shawnee and others.  The Treaty of Easton set the boundary as the Allegheny Mountains, as did the Proclamation of 1763.  That only lasted as long as the first Settlers who found their way over the mountains anyway.  In the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1768, the Iroquois gave up all claims to land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers.  No Shawnee or Cherokee leaders were consulted or informed.  It would take Lord Dunmore's War of 1774 and the Treaty of Camp Charlotte before the Shawnee ceded their claims to this same area.  It took two treaties, also signed in 1768, to settle the Cherokee claims.  No wonder the frontier was always on the fight.