Yumpu_Catalogue_Peacemaking

Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, the
Citizen with Too Much Memory Seeks Standing to
Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Wood
When I drive south on I -78, diagonal highway from New York to Harrisburg,
the Blue Mountain presses my right shoulder for miles, dividing coal
tipples from hex signs on barns, French and Indian territory from the
British colony. At Shartlesville in the parking lot of Roadside America, a
giant Amish couple on a spring wagon marks my ancestors’ settlement at
Northkill, the Hochstetler cabin, torched in 1757.
After the fire, Lenape and Shawnee warriors marched Jacob and two of his
sons for 17 days to the French Fort at Erie. Seven months later, Jacob
escaped, walked nine nights and days through forest, eating grass. At the
Susquehanna, he lashed logs with grape vines and floated south for four
days until British soldiers fished him out, nearly dead, at Fort Augusta or
Shamokin, now Sunbury, corporate headquarters of Weis Markets.
Growing up, we knew the Hochstetlers had guns but would not shoot; the
warriors killed Jacob’s wife, whose name no one recalls, because she
refused to share fruit with them. When we misbehaved, Dad threatened to
give us back to the Indians. We didn’t know that Christian Hochstetler kept
running back to his captors after he was returned to his parents. We didn’t
know Barbara Kauffman grabbed an ax and hacked the fingers of braves as
they tried to climb through her cabin window. The men ran screaming into
the forest.
Penn’s surveyors carved initials into the trunks of great trees—white oak,
black oak, red oak, hickory, and walnut—sighted a compass from the trunk of
the corner tree and stretched iron measuring chains to make boundaries.
Corner trees they called witness trees. When Shikellemy ruled the refugees
at Shamokin, he implored the Lenape, Seneca, and Tutelo to grow corn,
squash, and beans but to refrain from planting apples and peaches for fear
they would create a plantation.
During the French and Indian War, braves from the Forks of the Ohio, now
Pittsburgh, attacked six European families near a trading post on Penns
Creek, slaying 14 and capturing 28, among them the wife and children of