George Croghan
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George Croghan (c. 1720 - August 31, 1782) was a prominent American colonist and early advocate of westward expansion. He was an experienced Indian agent and fur trader. His name is also seen spelled as Crogan and Crowgan, and is said to have been pronounced with a silent g.
George Croghan was born in Dublin, Ireland around 1720, moved to Colonial America in 1741, and became a fur trader in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. By the mid 1740s, at a time when there were few English-speaking people beyond the Appalachian Mountains, Croghan was a leading trader in the Ohio Country. At the outset of the French and Indian War, French forces occupied the Ohio Country and expelled or arrested all British merchants. Croghan's budding business empire was ruined. He subsequently led a group of eight Indian scouts during the ill-fated Braddock Expedition in 1755. Afterwards he moved from Pennsylvania to New York in 1756 and became a Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs under Sir William Johnson.
Croghan led a group of speculators, including Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin in land schemes in the Ohio Country, the Illinois Country and New York.
In 1764, while in England, he claimed that his infuence had previously won him a 200,000 acre (800 km²) land grant from the Iroquois and asked that the Governor of New York be instructed to issue patents for this land. Crogan was turned down by the Board of Trade because of the size of the grant and because it would not meet "the terms of the Proclamation of 1763." However on September 6, 1765, Croghan was awarded a much smaller 10,000 acre (40 km²) grant in New York.
In 1765 while on a mission to talk with Pontiac his party was attacked while on the Ohio river. Five of his party were killed and he took a hatchet wound to the head. He was captured and taken 250 miles up river, but his captors changed their mind and asked him to arrange a peace conference.
Croghan managed to get the grant from the Iroquois renewed by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, but then attempted to locate that grant on the upper Ohio River.
By 1785, 40,000 to 50,000 acres (160 to 200 km²) of Croghan's Otsego lands were sold at auction to William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper), from Burlington, New Jersey.
Croghan's grandson, Augustin Prevost of Cooperstown, New York was aboard the Liverpool packet Albion when it went down in the September Gale of 1822.
[edit] Further reading
- Merrell, James H. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: Norton, 1999. ISBN 0-393-04676-1.
- Volwiler, Albert T. George Croghan and the Westward Movement, 1741–1782. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1926.
- Wainwright, Nicholas B. George Croghan: Wilderness Diplomat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
