Heckewelder in 1785, from a Nanticoke chief living in Canada; the other taken in 1792, by the late William Vans Murray, and sent by him to Mr. Jefferson. It was taken from an old woman called Mrs. Muberry, the widow of their last chief, who lived at Locust Necktown, Goose Creek, Choctank River, Dorset County, Maryland. The village consisted of five wigwams and two board houses. The few surviving Indians spoke exclusively their own language among themselves. That particular tribe called itself Wiwash. Winikako, the last great Sachem, died about 1720. The tribe consisted then of more than five hundred souls.[1]
Captain Smith, in the year 1608, sailed from James River to the head of Chesapeake Bay. He found the western shore deserted from the Patapsco upwards. The Tockwoghs or Nanticokes were fortified east of the Susquehanna to defend themselves against the Massawomeks, the name given by the Chesapeake Indians to the Five Nations. And he met, at the head of the bay, eight canoes full of those Massawomeks, on their return from an expedition against the Tockwoghs. Two days higher up the river lived the Susquehannocks, amounting to near six hundred warriors, and who were also "pallisadoed in their towns to defend themselves from the Massawomeks, their mortal enemies."
In the years 1730-1740, the Five Nations complained, that the inhabitants of Maryland encroached on their lands. The treaty of Lancaster, in the year 1744, was held principally for the purpose of settling those differences, and also the claim set up by the same Indians to the western parts of Virginia. The Maryland commissioners there stated, that the Susquehanna Indians, by a treaty above ninety years since (1654), had yielded to the English the greatest part of the lands possessed by Maryland from Patuxent River on the western, as well as from Chocktank River on the eastern side of the great Bay of Chesapeake. It would seem from that declaration, that the Nanticokes were, in those early times, included by the government of Maryland in the general designation of Susquehanna Indians.
To this Canassatego, the Onondago chief, replied, that they acknowledged the validity of the deed, "and that the Conestogoe or Susquehanna Indians had a right to sell those lands to Maryland, for they were then theirs; but since that time,
- ↑ Mr. Vans Murray's Letter to Mr. Jefferson.
