Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. From the Quaker colony's founding in the early 1680s into the 1750s, the shadowy figures of negotiators did the hard, dirty work that helped maintain the fragile "long peace" between Indians and colonists. But, skilled as they were in the alchemy of translation and negotiation, the go-betweens on the Pennsylvania frontier could not prevent the sickening plummet from peace to war after 1750. Bloodshed and hatred made them obsolete and taught the harsh lesson of the woods: the final incompatibility of colonial and native dreams about the continent they shared. Winner of the Bancroft Prize.

James H. Merrell
ISBN 0-393-31976-8
Soft cover