Land Mad

Abstract

George Croghan first saw the Illinois Territory in 1765. There, after he was tomahawked and marched to Vincennes and Kaskaskia, he brokered peace with Pontiac before riding to Detroit to announce peace.He returned to New York, where he worked with Johnsonto imagine a fourteenthcolony that would have comprised today’s West Virginia and eastern Kentucky had it succeeded. Viewed by rebels as a Tory and warned to abandon his Allegheny River home, he took the oath of allegiance to the new nation in Philadelphia, but nevertheless was arrested. Croghan died in extreme poverty, his life a metaphor for the British experience in the thirteen North American colonies.