Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
In the fall of 1758, more than 500 people gathered in Easton, Pennsylvania, to end a war. Not all of them were soldiers. Not all of them were English. Representatives of thirteen Native American nations — Lenape, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, and others — sat across from the colonial governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey at the junction of two rivers. What they negotiated over the following weeks would change the course of the French and Indian War and send ripples through American history for decades.
The agreement they reached was the Treaty of Easton. To understand why this treaty happened here, you have to go back twenty years. In 1737, William Penn’s sons orchestrated one of the most notorious land grabs in colonial American history.
Producing what historians describe as a dubious draft of a 1686 document, Thomas and John Penn claimed the Lenape had agreed to cede all land a man could walk in a day and a half. Rather than conduct a casual walk, colonial authorities hired three trained runners who covered more than 60 miles in the allotted time. The resulting claim seized approximately 1.2 million acres of Lenape land in the Lehigh Valley, encompassing what is now Easton and Bethlehem. When the Lenape protested, the Penn family enlisted the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to force them from their ancestral territory.
The Walking Purchase of 1737 didn’t just take land. It shattered the trust that William Penn had spent decades building — and it pushed displaced nations into alliance with the French.
By the mid-1750s, that alliance was costing British colonists dearly. Coordinated raids struck settlements across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia. Frontier communities burned. The colony of Pennsylvania, founded on Quaker principles of nonviolence, was uniquely unprepared for what followed.
The solution, colonial negotiators concluded, was diplomatic. In October 1758, Pennsylvania Governor William Denny and New Jersey Governor Francis Bernard convened a peace conference in Easton. More than 500 Native American delegates representing thirteen nations traveled to the frontier town. Conrad Weiser served as an interpreter.
Charles Thomson — later secretary of the Continental Congress — advised Lenape chief Teedyuscung, who used the conference floor to publicly accuse the Penn family of fraud over the Walking Purchase.
Governor Denny took a significant step: he agreed to negotiate directly with the Lenape, bypassing the Haudenosaunee proxy structure and rekindling a separate council fire with Teedyuscung’s delegation.
The treaty was concluded on October 26, 1758. Britain pledged to ban colonial settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains — a promise that would form the foundation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763.The military consequences were immediate. Word of the treaty reached the Ohio Country within weeks. The Lenape, Mingo, and Shawnee withdrew their support from the French.
Without indigenous allies, the French garrison at Fort Duquesne could not hold its position. On November 24, 1758 — less than a month after the treaty was signed in Easton — the French burned Fort Duquesne and abandoned it as General John Forbes’s army approached. The British took the Forks of the Ohio without firing a shot.
In November, Governor Denny announced to the Pennsylvania Assembly that a general peace had been secured at Easton.
The Treaty of Easton is one of the least-known turning points of the French and Indian War — and one of the most consequential. A diplomatic agreement in a small Pennsylvania river town ended a devastating frontier conflict, handed Britain control of the Ohio Valley, and established the framework for western land policy that would shape American expansion for generations.
Teedyuscung’s victory at the council fire, however, was incomplete. Under political pressure, he signed a release in 1762 acknowledging the Walking Purchase. The land was never returned.
The treaty was negotiated in Easton, Pennsylvania, at what is now Centre Square —the same public space where the Declaration of Independence was read aloud on July 8, 1776.
For more on the region’s history, visit northamptoncounty.org and historicbethlehem.org.
Information for this episode was provided by the Treaty of Easton primary minutes (Internet Archive / Evans Early American Imprints), Wikipedia’s Treaty of Easton and Forbes Expedition articles, the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia’s Walking Purchase entry, Kiddle’s Treaty of Easton summary, the American Revolution Podcast.
