Teedyuscung, ‘King of the Delawares’.

The room at Easton was crowded with governors, colonial officials, interpreters, and Native leaders when Teedyuscung rose to speak. He had come with grievances that had been building for years. Land had been lost. Agreements were disputed. His people had been pushed from places they had known for generations. And now the colonial government had to listen.

Teedyuscung was not born a king. The Lenape had no king in the European sense. Yet by the 1750s, this forceful and sometimes controversial leader had become known as “King of the Delawares.”

Teedyuscung had made himself impossible to ignore.

From New Jersey to the Pennsylvania frontier

Teedyuscung was born around 1700, probably near present-day Trenton, New Jersey. By the 1730s he was living farther west near the forks of the Delaware, part of the continuing movement of Lenape families away from lands increasingly occupied by settlers.

Around 1750, his life took a remarkable turn. Teedyuscung joined the Moravian Christian community at Gnadenhütten, where he was baptized and given the name Gideon.

But within a few years he had left the mission community. Gideon the Moravian convert would become Teedyuscung, the man colonial officials were calling the King of the Delawares.

A war comes to Pennsylvania

The frontier erupted after British General Edward Braddock's defeat in 1755. Lenape and other Native warriors attacked settlements across Pennsylvania, and Teedyuscung became associated with the resistance.

But he increasingly emerged as a negotiator between Native communities and colonial governments. Beginning in 1756, he appeared repeatedly at conferences at Easton and forced the question of why the Lenape had gone to war into the negotiations.

The answer, he insisted, was land

Teedyuscung accused Pennsylvania's proprietors of acquiring Lenape territory through fraudulent dealings. When officials sought to place the dispute before Sir William Johnson, Britain's superintendent of northern Indian affairs, Teedyuscung demanded that King George II himself hear the Lenape complaint.

He had learned how the British political system worked and was prepared to use its own hierarchy against colonial officials.

“King of the Delawares”

The title made Teedyuscung powerful, but it also made him enemies.

Lenape government was decentralized. Teedyuscung could not simply declare himself sovereign over every Lenape community. His position was further complicated by the Haudenosaunee Six Nations, who asserted political authority over the Lenape and referred to them diplomatically as “nephews.”

Teedyuscung pushed against those limitations

At Easton in 1758, he acknowledged the Six Nations as his “uncles,” yet insisted upon speaking for his own people. Attempts to diminish him apparently backfired. Afterward, Charles Thomson reported to Benjamin Franklin that “Teedyuscung, instead of losing has increased his Power.”

The man behind the diplomacy

The records give us unusual glimpses of Teedyuscung as a person. He could be forceful, theatrical, stubborn, politically shrewd, and difficult. Colonial observers also repeatedly recorded his heavy drinking.

At one session of the 1758 Easton conference, Teedyuscung arrived intoxicated and angrily demanded a missing letter containing a Native message. Yet those same negotiations show him maneuvering among governors and powerful Haudenosaunee leaders while defending his right to speak independently.

At another point he described carrying the message of peace far beyond Pennsylvania. “I spoke loud, and raised my Voice,” he told officials, saying that Native people as distant as the Miami had heard and answered him.

It is a rare moment in the historical record: Teedyuscung describing his own influence in his own words.

A homeland at Wyoming

Behind the diplomacy was a larger ambition.

Teedyuscung wanted a secure homeland for displaced Native people in Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, along the Susquehanna River near present-day Wilkes-Barre.

A community formed there, and Teedyuscung settled in the valley. But Pennsylvania, Connecticut settlers, the Six Nations, and Native communities all had competing interests in the region.

The Wyoming Valley represented the possibility of a place where his people might remain together. Teedyuscung never succeeded in making it secure.

The fire

Then, on the night of April 19, 1763, Teedyuscung's house in the Wyoming Valley caught fire while he was inside.

He died in the flames.

The fire has long been described as deliberate, but exactly who was responsible remains uncertain. Later accounts blamed Native enemies, while the Wyoming Valley was also at the center of bitter struggles over land and colonial settlement. The surviving evidence does not identify his killers with certainty.

The community Teedyuscung had struggled to establish did not become the permanent homeland he envisioned.

The man called “King of the Delawares” had spent the final years of his life trying to secure a place where his people could remain. He died inside that contested homeland before he could know whether it would survive him.

Learn More:

• Treaty of Easton, 1758 — Oklahoma State University
  Step inside the negotiations at Easton and encounter Teedyuscung in his own words as he confronts colonial officials and Native leaders.
  Explore the 1758 Treaty of Easton

• The Franklin Papers — Founders Online
  Follow Teedyuscung’s fight over Lenape lands as his demands traveled beyond Pennsylvania and toward the British Crown itself.
  Explore Teedyuscung in the Franklin Papers

• Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
  Discover the turbulent world Teedyuscung inhabited as war, diplomacy, and the struggle for Native lands transformed Pennsylvania.
  Explore Native Pennsylvania in Teedyuscung’s time

• Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
  Go beyond the famous treaties and discover the complicated man behind the name, including revealing moments from Teedyuscung’s negotiations at Easton.
  Read more about Teedyuscung and the Easton conferences

• Christian Frederick Post’s Journal — Project Gutenberg
  Travel through the Pennsylvania frontier in an eyewitness account of the Native communities, diplomacy, and conflicts that surrounded Teedyuscung’s world.
  Read Christian Frederick Post’s account

< Previous Lenape Leader Profile  | Next Lenape Leader Profile >