In 1776, as war broke out between the United States and Britain, both sides scrambled to bring the continent’s Indigenous peoples over to their side. A sliver of this history is narrated in the Jasper Yeates papers, held across the American Philosophical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and digitized as part of the Revolutionary City project. From July through December 1776, Jasper Yeates, a Lancaster-based lawyer, lived at Fort Pitt in present-day Pittsburgh, conducting diplomacy with various Indigenous nations. Yeates sought Indigenous allies who could aid in the war effort—or at least refuse assistance to the British side.
In this area, some of the United States’ closest Indigenous allies were the Lenape. The historic territory of the Lenape runs along the eastern seaboard and includes the land we now call Philadelphia. However, as settlers encroached on this land, the Lenape were pushed westward, into the Ohio Valley region.
Here, hoping to secure their territorial and political sovereignty, many Lenape leaders cultivated close relationships with settlers. For example, the Lenape leader White Eyes-–featured heavily in the Yeates papers-–sought to send a Lenape delegation to the court of King George III in 1773. By 1776, however, alliance with the Americans appeared as the more viable way forward. White Eyes appears throughout the Yeates papers, sending diplomatic communications to the Americans; intervening in the sale of cattle to the British; traveling to Detroit to invite the Wyandot, another Indigenous nation, to attend negotiations; and even giving a speech in Congress about the “Tree of Peace” tended by the Lenape and the United States.
This alliance, however, was short-lived. Building on the ties strengthened in 1776, White Eyes and other Lenape leaders negotiated the 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt, in which the United States pledged to create a fourteenth state run by the Lenape in return for their assistance in fighting the British. Within months, however, White Eyes was murdered by American militiamen, who falsely attributed his death to smallpox. Ultimately, repeated acts of violence by the Americans against their nominal allies pushed the Lenape over to the British side.
As a Digital Projects Specialist at the APS, I first came across this portion of the Yeates papers while correcting transcriptions for use in handwritten text recognition. As a non-expert in the period, however, I struggled to make sense of the history being described. For example, it took me some time to even recognize the presence of Lenape people in these documents. The Yeates papers call them by the name more commonly used by 18th-century settlers: the Delaware.
How, then, could I make this history more accessible to a non-expert audience? Over the past few months, I’ve worked on putting together a digital exhibit on the Yeates papers: “‘Indian War’ and Indigenous Diplomacy, 1776.” This exhibit is meant to serve as an accessible entry point into the documents, with some historical context, a cast of characters, and an interactive map showing locations mentioned by Yeates. The Yeates papers offer a valuable window into 18th-century Indigenous histories: of the Lenape, as well the Haudenosaunee, Mingo, Shawnee, Wyandot, and other Ohio Valley-based Indigenous peoples.
You can view this project—and look at scans of the documents themselves-–on the Revolutionary City portal. Related documents, including White Eyes’ speech to the Continental Congress, are also on display at the APS Museum through December 28th, 2025.