Abstract
The American Revolution forever altered the political landscape of Western Pennsylvania and created new challenges for the region’s many inhabitants, regardless of their ethnicity. In the East, American colonists engaged in a more straightforward fight against the British empire for political liberty. In the West, factional divisions between the former colonies — now states — of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and a widespread thirst for American Indian lands in the Ohio Country, muddied the high ideals of the Revolution. When news of the war arrived at Fort Pitt in the spring of 1775, rival commissioners from Virginia and Pennsylvania soon recognized that their only option was to implore the region’s Indians — Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot — to remain neutral.