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Probably few people knew Virginia’s western frontier better than Thomas Lewis when the United States declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776.

The extent of interactions he had with Native Americans before being appointed to negotiate the United States’ first formal treaty with them is unclear.

Lewis came from a family that settled in Augusta County in 1732, near what is now Staunton, and in 1746, while still in his twenties, he was appointed its first surveyor of Augusta County.

In colonial Virginia, a surveyor’s basic job was to transfer land from crown to private ownership, writes Ron Bailey in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal.

Author Sarah Hughes wrote in her book “Surveyors and Statesmen: Land Measurement in Colonial Virginia” that “after 1740, as large areas of the West were organized into counties, surveyors from the region’s colonial counties gained power and prestige in an unprecedented manner.

Although prestigious, the men named surveyors, including George Washington and Peter Jefferson – father of Thomas Jefferson – made their money in a difficult profession that required traversing some of the most unforgiving terrain in the region. Lewis worked and corresponded with both men.

Of the survey with Peter Jefferson, Lewis wrote: “It was with the greatest difficulty that we could get by – the mountains being prodigiously full of fallen timber and ivy as thick as they could grow, if intertwined that horse or man could barely make their way through. he. . . .”

On another occasion, while supervising the Fairfax line, Lewis wrote: “We carried all our baggage as it was getting dark. We were therefore obliged to camp on the bank and in a place where we could not find a plain large enough to pass through. a man to rely on. No firewood Except green or rotten pine, no place for our horses to eat.

Although he wrote about the challenges of surveying, Lewis did not write about the encounters he might have had with Native Americans.

“You think he must have encountered Indians from different tribes during all these investigations,” John Batzel, a descendant of Thomas Lewis, said in a telephone interview.

Batzel, of Roanoke, researched Lewis extensively about 10 years ago, compiling nearly 400 pages of information about his life. Batzel became interested in his five-times great-grandfather when he saw a tobacco tin Lewis once owned at auction. Although he couldn’t compete with the winning bid, it sparked his interest in learning more about his ancestor.

Finding out that Thomas Lewis and his younger brother Andrew were the chief negotiators of this first formal treaty between the United States and Native Americans was “an interesting find,” he said.

The Lewis brothers were chosen for the diplomatic mission just months after the United States signed its most important treaties with France, the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Having secured economic, diplomatic, and military support from France, the Continental Congress focused on gaining support from another former enemy closer to home, the Lenape Indians. Before the Revolution, the colonies fought alongside the British against French-aligned Indians, including the Lenape, also known as the Delaware Indians.

In 1778, the Continental Army needed Lenape support to cross its territory and attack the British at Detroit.

Congress “allocated $10,000 for goods and gifts to be given to Lenape leaders to demonstrate American goodwill,” according to an article on the newspaper’s website. National Museum of American Diplomacy.

Negotiations took place at Fort Pitt, now Pittsburgh, where the Lewis brothers met with three Native American representatives. A number of other U.S. officials were present to observe the negotiations, according to a text of the treaty. Pennsylvania was supposed to appoint two diplomats to participate in the negotiations, but did not do so.

“No one knows exactly what language the Lenape and Americans spoke during the negotiations, but it was most likely a mixture of Algonquian dialects and English,” the NMAD article states. “But both communicated using the diplomatic tools that had been established between indigenous nations and European nations when the American colonies were part of the British empire.”

Negotiations lasted several days, the article said, before the treaty was signed on September 17, 1778. The Lenape agreed to allow the Continental Army to pass through their lands, guide them to British positions and join the troops of the United States. .

The Americans promised to build a fort in Lenape territory for protection and promised trade goods. Additionally, the treaty provided for the eventual creation of a 14th state governed by Native Americans with a political representative in the U.S. Congress.

Author Eric Sterner called the treaty an “unbalanced relationship” article for the Journal of the American Revolutionwriting that it was an agreement “giving Americans permission to pass through the Delaware Territory when conducting military operations against the British, requiring Delaware warriors to assist the Americans when possible, and establishing an asymmetrical economic relationship, the terms of which were to be left to discretion. to Congress with the “advice and consent” of Delaware’s representatives.

But the United States failed to honor many conditions, and after the suspicious death of the Native Americans’ chief negotiator a few months later, the agreement collapsed and the Lenape sided with the British.

Although the Treaty of Fort Pitt failed, Lewis’s career in public service, which included representing Augusta County in four of Virginia’s five constitutional conventions following the dissolution of the House of Burgesses, continued and in 1779 he was appointed to help resolve a boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1788, two years before his death at age 71, Lewis became a delegate from Rockingham County, which was separated from Augusta County in 1778, to the Virginia Convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution.

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