Conrad Weiser, 1696-1760. Friend of Colonist and Mohawk

Conrad Weiser, Pennsylvania's Indian ambassador, was one of the world's great Jack-of-all trades. Born in Germany, he grew up in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys of New York and as a youth lived several years in a Mohawk village where he learned the language. By the 1720's he had moved with his family to Pennsylvania where James Logan regularly began to employ him as an agent and interpreter. Trader, colonel in the French and Indian War, first President judge of Berks county and founder of Reading PA, a monk at the Ephrata Cloisters, pillar of the Lutheran Church, statesman, linguist, diplomat, woodsman were just a part of a long and distinguished career…but it was his work as an Indian agent that made his fame eternal.

His career introduces us to the whole colonial scene. Everyone knew him. Governors, churchman, and Indian chiefs all relied on his advise. The Iroquois named him Tarachiawagon, "He Who Holds The Heavens." He was at home on Society Hill in Philadelphia as well as at John Harris' Ferry on the Western Frontier. He knew the Shamokin Trail like a village main street and visited all distant Indian towns from Onandaga to Logstown. He went everywhere, saw everything and recorded in his journals the most important information of his day. He was as vital to the frontier provincial governments of the new colonies as George Washington was to Revolutionary War. Yet, through all the excitement of his public life, he remained a common man, who above all else, always longed for his wife, children, and the Tulpehocken home to which he came back to finally die.

664 pages, originally published in 1944, 6" x 9" paperback, notes, index, $29.95