Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

(Nova Scotia). The Assembly, urged to grant the money by Governor
Thomas, slyly assuaged their consciences by voting a grant to New England of
the large sum of 3,000 pounds. The funds were to be spent by Thomas on
"bread, flour, wheat, or other grains" and it was well understood in the
colony that "other grains" meant nothing less than gunpowder.
In the meanwhile, Pennsylvania was storing up further trouble with the
Delaware Indians by completing the brutal eviction of the Delawares from
their lands in upper Bucks County. After having used fraud to claim the
"walking purchase," and having been thwarted by the Quaker Assembly in
imposing eviction of the Indians, the Pennsylvania government turned to the
aggressive overlords of the Delawares, the Iroquois—the long-term allies of
the English. At a conference in Philadelphia in 1742, the Iroquois agreed in
return for bribes to recognize the English purchase of Delaware Indian land.
The lordly Iroquois chieftain not only ordered the Delawares off their own
settled land, but also reviled these Indians, calling them "women," and
asserted that they had no right to sell their own land without consulting their
overlords. The Pennsylvania government was happy to make all future land
"purchases" from an Iroquois tribe that had no connection with and no personal
commitment in work and energy to the land. The Delawares complied
with the order, storing great bitterness in their hearts.
One of the most enthusiastic participants in King George's War against the
French was George Croghan, an Ulster Scot Indian trader in Pennsylvania.
Like John Conrad Weiser, also an Indian trader, the swindling, nearly illiterate
Croghan had a direct economic interest in liquidating his French competitors
in the Indian trade. Penetrating beyond the Appalachians into the French
territory of the Ohio Valley, Croghan stirred up the Indians to massacre his
French competition. Beginning by murdering five French traders at Sandusky,
the Croghan-directed Indians burned French settlements during 1747 and
murdered traders throughout the Ohio Valley. A fellow English trader well
summed up Croghan's activities: "Croghan . . . had at all times persuaded the
Indians to destroy the French ... by the presents he had made them . . . that
self-interest was his sole motive in everything he did, that his views were to
engross the old trade and to scare the French from dealing with the Indians."
Croghan, delighted with his Indians, sent a scalp of one of the murdered
Frenchmen to Governor Thomas, and boasted that the Indians would soon
seize the French port of Detroit. This hope proved vain, but Weiser and
Croghan persuaded the Pennsylvania government to grant a 400-pound
reward to the pillaging Indians—a gift hardly in line with Quaker principles.
It is no wonder that by the end of King George's War in 1748, George
Croghan had emerged as by far the largest Indian trader in Ohio and was
commonl·' called "the king of the traders." To keep these Indian allies,
Croghan led the proprietors in forcibly driving the squatters off their lands.
So enthusiastic was Croghan in going about his task that Thomas Penn was
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