Shingas, an Unami sachem of the Lenape (also known also as the Delawares) represented his people during diplomatic negotiations with colonial powers in the Seven Years’ War from 1754 to 1763. During the war, Shingas and the Lenape shifted alliances, and sided with the French, earning notoriety for their guerrilla tactics and frontier combat. Shingas navigated the shifting alliances as a shrewd diplomat and military leader of a people at constant risk of invasion by colonial and Indigenous rivals.
Early Life
Shingas was born in southeastern Pennsylvania near the upper Schuykill River, one of seven sons. A part of the Turkey clan, his uncle Sassoonan was a Lenape leader who often negotiated with British colonial officials. After his uncle’s death, this brother Pisquetomen was considered his successor, but British colonial officials did not respect his authority. Emerging as a leader himself, Shingas and several of his brothers led other members of the Lenape nation west, past the Allegheny mountains in what was considered Ohio Country. The Lenape had been continually forced west over the previous two decades. With the Walking Purchase of 1737, the colonial government of Pennsylvania began to force Lenapes west, seizing millions of acres of their land. Instead of negotiating with the Lenape nation directly, members of the Onondaga Indians, members of the Haundeosaunee, negotiated with colonists as the primary native participants at the purchase. Now in Ohio Country, Shingas and other Lenapes had to navigate boundaries and diplomacy with the British and their Indigenous allies.
Logstown Treaty Conference of 1752
In 1752, at a multi-national council in Logstown, a Native American town in what is now western Pennsylvania convened. At this time, the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Six Nations of the Iroquois) outnumbered the Lenapes and were viewed as an important ally by the British. Often, the British minimized the voices of Lenape leadership during key treaties and attempted to coordinate with the Haudenosaunee instead. A multi-national council was an opportunity for the Lenapes to disrupt this status quo. After a year with no Lenape nation representative, Tanacharison the Half King of the Seneca selected a Lenape representative, choosing Shingas’s brother Tamaqua.
However, Shingas was already nominated as the sachem and representative by the Lenape people. Traditionally, Lenape towns appointed sachems to represent the community’s interests. Kinship groups were matrilineal, but sachems were predominantly male and non-hereditary leaders. Towns held land collectively and councils of elders and other townsfolk advised sachems, and sachems spoke for their people as diplomatic envoys and wartime negotiators. Given this selection, Tamaqua acted as his brother’s proxy. And even though he was absent from the conference, Shingas became sachem.
With his new role as sachem, European and colonial convoys treated him more closely to an absolute monarch than the intent of his role. They referred to him as “king” and offered him unilateral authority to negotiate for the Lenape when individual towns were loosely connected and often unfortified but united militarily against existential threats. Following the council at Logstown, the Lenape reaffirmed their tenuous alliance with the British and the Haudenosaunee.
Seven Years’ War
Both the French and English relied on the help of Indigenous people to perform reconnaissance missions before the start of the Seven Years’ War. On the Allegheny Expedition, George Washington relied on Lenapes to track French troop movements and monitor their forts. Acting under express orders from Virginia Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, Washington acted on behalf of the British imperial interests just as Shingas represented the interests of the Lenapes. Washington recounted, “I also persuaded King Shingas, to send out Rangers towards the River, to bring us News, in Case any French should come … Though King Shingas, and others of the Delawares, could not be persuaded to retire to our Camp with their Families, through the Fear they were in of Onondago’s Council, they nevertheless gave us strong Assurances of their Assistance.”1
Shingas and other native leaders initially worked with the British and their representatives, such as Washington, because neutrality seemed increasingly impossible. In the early days of conflict, Lenapes turned to their historical ties with British diplomats rather than with unfamiliar French traders, officials, officers, and soldiers. Shingas reaffirmed this alliance, and his people’s opposition to French settlements in February 1754: “I am glad to hear all our People here are of one mind; it is true I live here on the river side which is the French Road, and I assure you by these three Strings of Wampum that I will neither go down or up, but I will move nearer to my Brethren the English, where I can keep our Women and Children safe from the Enemy.”2
In exchange for helping against the French, Lenape leaders required a guarantee that the British would respect their sovereignty. However, communications with British General Edward Braddock created serious doubts that the British would follow through with their promises to no longer encroach on their land. Shingas feared that allegiance with the British was not to the benefit of the Lenape nation. In response, the Lenapes shifted their allegiance to the French and continued to move further west into Ohio Country.
Poorly protected colonial settlements speckled the landscape of the Ohio Country and were regular targets for raiding parties. Shingas led many of these groups and attacked poorly defended settlements whose inhabitants quickly knew him as “Shingas the Terrible.” British troops attempted to fight back against Lenape settlements, but were far less successful and at times actively detrimental to their own cause. These raids shifted power to the Lenape, and most white colonist fled their areas of control entirely by 1757.3 Shingas justified his actions by disparaging the initial imperial causes of the conflict. He was recorded as saying, “We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away and settle the country, or else why do you come to fight in the land that God has given?”4 What victims and rivals portrayed as senseless violence or savagery, Shingas believed to be essential to ensuring the preservation of his people and their ownership over their land.
In 1758, Indigenous and colonial leaders agreed on the Treaty of Easton, which brought an end to immediate hostilities between European settlers and native people in Ohio country. Shingas attended some negotiations and agreed to its terms along with other native leaders, but his brother Tamaqua most prominently represented the Lenapes.5 With this agreement, the British successfully captured Fort Duquesne without interference from Native Americans.
In the years following the Treaty of Easton, Pontiac’s Rebellion altered the geopolitical landscape of Ohio Country. British colonists pushed further west, and further into land controlled by Indigenous communities. When the British constructed Fort Pitt, it was a besieged by the Lenapes and it is possible Shingas participated. However, after the Treaty of Easton Shingas disappeared from the historical record with no confirmed cause or date of his death.
Matthew West George Washington University, revised by Zoie Horecny, PhD, 19 August 2025
Notes:
1. “Expedition to the Ohio, 1754: Narrative,” Founders Online, National Archives.
2. “George Croghan, February 2, 1754 “in Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, 1852.
3. Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, 6:398-399; Bond, ed., "Captivity of Charles Stuart”, 63 – 64, Quoted in Daniel P. Barr, “‘A road for warriors:’ The Western Delawares and The Seven Years War.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 73, no. 1 (January 1, 2006), 24.
4. Christian Frederick Post, 1710?-1785. The journal of Christian Frederick Post, in his journey from Philadelphia to the Ohio, on a message from the government of Pennsylvania to the Delaware, Shawanese and Mingo Indians settled there, and formerly in alliance with the English. Philadelphia, 1867. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/12007273/, 156 in Barr, 29. Post was a Moravian missionary to Indigenous people in Pennsylvania, and often served as an intermediary between the Delawares (Lenapes) to the colony of Pennsylvania, which likely motivated him to write a journal that advocated politically on their behalf and profiled their key leaders such as Shingas. It should be noted this quote is not directly source from Shingas, but from Post.
5. “The Minutes of a treaty held at Easton, in Pennsylvania, in October, 1758. By the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, and the governor of New-Jersey; with the chief sachems and warriors of the Mohawks, Oneydos, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, Tuscaroras, Tuteloes, Nanticokes and Conoys, Chugnuts, Delawares, Unamies, Mohickons, Minisinks, and Wapings.” Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N06429.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext, 13.
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“The Minutes of a treaty held at Easton, in Pennsylvania, in October, 1758. By the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, and the governor of New-Jersey; with the chief sachems and warriors of the Mohawks, Oneydos, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, Tuscaroras, Tuteloes, Nanticokes and Conoys, Chugnuts, Delawares, Unamies, Mohickons, Minisinks, and Wapings.” Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership, 2011, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N06429.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.
Post, Christian Frederick, 1710?-1785. The journal of Christian Frederick Post, in his journey from Philadelphia to the Ohio, on a message from the government of Pennsylvania to the Delaware, Shawanese and Mingo Indians. Philadelphia, 1867.
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