The Edge Rover: The Life and Times of Mountain Man Isaac Slover

By Timothy E. Green

The Edge Rover chronicles the expansive life of Isaac Slover, a fur trapper who was born in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War and who ranged throughout the early American West. The variety and extensiveness of Slover’s encounters among Indigenous peoples and the Hispanic Southwest distinguish his experience from that of other “mountain men” of his time.

A lifespan from 1777 to 1854 meant that Isaac Slover saw a transformed America, and he endured through frequently shifting borders, particularly in what became the young country’s southwest region. Among his numerous adventures are a youth consumed by the Revolutionary War in Western Pennsylvania, then later farming in Kentucky, trapping and trading in New Mexico, and finally making his way to Southern California. Throughout, Slover sifted between cultures, jumped across borders, navigated conflict, and hid along the margins of history.

Sparse evidence documents Slover’s adventures, but what remains is meticulously compiled here for the first time by Timothy E. Green, who grew up with fireside tales of the mountain man’s exploits. At any given stage of his life, Isaac Slover can be situated at a critical juncture in the history of the West, roving beyond the edges and back again. The Edge Rover is therefore a welcome addition to early American West biographies, showing that boundaries, borders, and identities during this early period could be as fluid and wild as the land itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781682832141

Timothy E. Green

Raised below the Caprock Escarpment in Motley County, Texas, Timothy E. Green received his PhD from Texas Tech University; he taught literature and writing in colleges and universities for forty-six years before retiring from St. Edward's University in 2015. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Book preview

Illustrations

and Maps

Note: All chapter head illustrations are by John Wilson.

Illustrations

Fort Pitt, 1759

Flatboat on Ohio River, 1788

Plains Indian tipis

Comanche village

Arkansas River and Fountain Creek confluence

Spanish Peaks

Taos Pueblo and mountains

Trapping beaver

Mojave Desert

Lassoing grizzly

New Mexico and California friend William Wolfskill

Los Angeles, 1850

California mogul Abel Stearns

Maps

Isaac Slover’s Homesteads, 1777–1854

Route of Crawford Expedition, 1782

Route of Slover Family Migration, ca. 1790

Arkansas Territory and Three Forks Area, 1821

Louisiana Purchase and Mexico, 1803

Glenn-Fowler Expedition, 1821–1822

Isaac Slover’s Major Southwestern Trapping Expeditions, 1824–1828

San Bernardino Valley, 1845

Route of Stockton & Kearny Campaign, 1846–1847

Preface

Isaac Slover first muled his way into my consciousness during conversations with my father, Luther Green, sixty or so years ago. My dad was a voracious reader of westerns, often consuming two or three adventures in an evening under his reading lamp and his visor in an easy chair while the television’s cacophony of canned laughter, musical backgrounds, and chaotic human voices reverberated off the living room walls around him. He lauded the writings of Louis L’Amour and many others, but Zane Grey was his favorite. I never developed any taste for his western writers, but I enjoyed listening to him talk about them and their tales. At some point in my youth, probably at suppertime dessert when he stirred up a massive concoction of peanut butter, sorghum molasses, and butter on his plate, he mentioned between slurps that Zane Grey had written about one of our ancestors, John Slover, in his biographical novel, Betty Zane. My father’s mother was born Leona Mae Slover, a fifth-generation descendant of John (via Marion, William Alfred, Samuel, and Isaac). I did not follow up on my father’s Slover references. I assumed it was just a legend, a figment of romantic western imagination.

Years later, thumbing through a Slover genealogy prepared by Mabel Hadler, I saw the mention of not only John Slover and his Indian captivity but also Isaac, oldest son of John and alleged mountain man. At some point, I happened upon Andrew Rolle’s short biography of Isaac Slover in one of the Hafens’ anthologies of fur trappers and traders. Eventually, retired from forty years as an English professor, having written a smattering of literary criticism, poetry, and a book on the minority experience in the United States, I fell into the leisure and solitude afforded by the Covid pandemic and decided to entertain myself with the pleasures of special writing pursuits, beginning with a self-published memoir. Isaac Slover’s story kept percolating in my mind, so I tracked Isaac through the internet and books and grew more and more intrigued. What I found was messy, often contradictory, and usually unsourced, so I decided to set the record straight and write a well-documented essay for the enlightenment and enjoyment of family. I sought all the trustworthy information I could on Isaac Slover and read extensively about the places and contexts of his life. I was fascinated by the westering drift and expanse of his life—from the Revolutionary War in Western Pennsylvania to the US-Mexico War in California. As biographical and other historical information accumulated, it was clear that no essay could do justice to a man whose story seemed as engrossing and notable as that of many of the more lauded mountain men of his time. His illiteracy and his quiet, secondary roles on trapping expeditions kept him out of the limelight, yet there he was, smack dab in the middle of several major events and excursions of early western American history. He was shadowy, yes, and his story shot with holes, but his silhouette was intriguing and substantial enough to begin a biography.

Being unable to read and write, often content to remain anonymous, and often safely disguised in the records via alternate and mistranslated names (Cristobal Loba or Luis Loba or Juan Lobar or Cristobal Slover, etc.), Isaac Slover and his quotidian self slips through the fingers. The biographer hears whispers, finds crumbs, enters a few rabbit holes, sorts through rumors, is left with probabilities and uncertainties, and nevertheless tries to stitch together a credible, coherent, worthwhile life story. So it is, then, that the reader will find a few thin threads in this story, usually signaled by one of a variety of qualifiers. Probably, apparently, and may have—these terms creep into the text quite often. If they distract, disconcert, or strain credibility at times, I apologize. I try not to present any event without adequate evidence to reach a conviction about its probability. Yes, sometimes I will take you along a tightwire, but not unless I think there is sufficient tensile strength to sustain you and the story. You, the reader, will, of course, decide whether to walk thin lines or fall.

Despite the scarcity of biographical detail about some phases, Isaac’s life takes on special interest because of the variety and longevity of his westward journey. His fur-trapping years based out of Taos get the most attention, to the extent that his life gets much attention at all. But at every juncture of his life, he is found at a critical place and time in the history of the West. He may not be the star at any time, but he is busy backstage, a tireless rover. Therefore, I must stress the subtitle of this book, the Life and TIMES of Isaac Slover, for so much of the depth of his story emerges from the drama of the places and circumstances he encounters. He is both witness to and denizen of multiple frontiers. Just following his trail and trying to make sense of his exertions is an exploration of the American West, its ethnic and racial turmoil, its exploitation, its craziness, its revelation of humanity’s capacity for courage and endurance and savagery. If Isaac’s life sparks a few new reflections on our national identity, then his tale is worth the telling.

Acknowledgments

Encouragement keeps the juices flowing, and I am deeply indebted to a variety of folks who have juiced me up along the way. First, thanks to Lynna Longaro for a superlative edit of an early version of this book. Next, kudos to John Wilson for his magnificent cover illustration as well as the splendid chapter head images and maps. Then, several good friends—most of them wise in their best moments, especially if their spouses are on hand with corrective advice—have suffered through everything from my petty whining to my cosmic existential despair. Despite my insecurities and doubts, they have praised and prodded me onward. Their suggestions and comments helped me keep this biography sensible and shorn of most jargon. Lubbock’s greatest exile, Allan McMurtry, read and critiqued insightfully the manuscript and has listened patiently, often after disheartening golf debacles, to so many of my travails with Isaac and his enigmas. From Waco, Jack Schneider, who somehow manages to see the best in everyone, has offered wholesome praise and fired me up all along the way. Honored historian and dear colleague of many years, Paula Marks, from her perch in Vermont, has dispensed timely assurances and judicious advice that have kept me sane and on track. Up in Amarillo, Bud Joyner’s excitement about the story and its historical breadth gave me a tremendous boost.

Since this project has its origins in kinship, I especially treasure the encouragement of my siblings—Pat Scoggins, Ginny Green, and Andy Green. Their intense curiosity about Isaac has given me appetites to try to satisfy. At every stage in the process, they have cheered me on with the verve of Red Raider fans. Likewise, my accomplished daughters, Jolie Sanchez and Jordan Yu, have been amazed at their old man’s obsession with a long-dead mountain man and supported my efforts proudly and enthusiastically. Also, my incredible stepdaughters, Molly Contreras and Marcy Brooks, have encouraged me and listened kindly to my progress reports. Finally and most energetically behind me every page of the way has been my wife, Dorothy, who has asked every evening, after I have wrestled with Isaac’s ghost most of the day—What’s Isaac up to? All of you, thanks for being behind me through the toil. Any shortcomings are solely my responsibility, but trying to deserve your support has made what you hold in your hands much better than it otherwise would have been.

I must thank Travis Snyder for his advice and encouragement from our first communications. And I much appreciate the copyediting work and cordiality of Christie (Frabjous!) Perlmutter.

The Edge

Rover

Introduction

On a slope in the San Gabriel Mountains, seventy-

seven-year-old Isaac Slover lay dying. His buckskin was ripped, his flesh shredded, scalp torn off, legs shattered, one arm broken, body splattered in blood.¹ Alongside him sprawled a lifeless grizzly. A few minutes before, Isaac, trailed by a hunting companion, had wounded the animal and approached the underbrush to finish the job. His friend cautioned him. Before either could react, the large, enraged California grizzly lunged out of the dense foliage. The bear mauled Isaac with tooth and claw while his friend watched, helpless, unwilling to risk shooting into the fury. Finally, the bear slumped and fell, succumbing to his wound. When the friend was sure the bear was dead, he dragged Slover’s mutilated body away from the massive carcass and tried to tend to the grotesque injuries. The old hunter lasted two long, painful days.

Dying with Isaac Slover was a continent-long stream of memories. They ranged from his youth in Revolutionary War Western Pennsylvania to his final days now in Southern California in 1854, with stops along his westering way in Kentucky, the Arkansas Territory, and the Taos Valley. He had traveled longer in years and farther in miles and more often into humanity’s messes than almost any frontiersman of his time. His drift was always toward the edge. And almost every trek featured a gauntlet of privations and predators—on the one hand, thirst, hunger, cold, storms, and heat; on the other hand, rattlesnakes, wolves, grizzlies. More than anything, he knew beaver, how to find them, trap them, and prepare their fur for sale. At times, he made small fortunes off the pelts. At other times, he lost everything—and more than once almost his life.

In every land he roved, Indigenous societies held sway. Curious or generous or apprehensive or angry, these Shawnee, Osage, Cherokee, Comanche, Apache, Navajo, Ute, Mojave, and other Indigenous people crossed his trail. Sometimes, he breached cultural divides, fighting alongside Cahuilla Indians, marrying an Indian (Paiute probably), becoming a citizen of Mexico, switching from Protestant to Catholic. Often, he made dubious choices. He carried five of his children into hostile lands; then, he left them and headed west. After a controversial marriage in Taos to a young Genízaro (Hispanicized Indian) woman, he went on forays that took him away from her for months. His survival was often in doubt. He and his fellow trappers helped to break open the West and expose its possibilities while being complicit in its exploitation and a catalyst for ravenous Euro-American settlement. From the Plains to the Pacific, he committed all the signature sins we now attribute to a feverish expansionist spirit, ravaging buffalo and beaver and grizzlies and Native peoples to the point of extinction and disrupting ecosystems. He befriended other westering men—William Wolfskill, Ewing Young, Nathaniel Miguel Pryor, and William Pope—with whom he trudged through countless mountains, waterways, and deserts. Defying the pejorative stereotypes,² these young compatriots were not aimless misfits but industrious, ambitious trappers who would later become shrewd businessmen and influential civic leaders from Southern California to Oregon.

Ultimately, Slover never swerved from danger and violence. In California, he signed on as a quasi-mercenary and was provided land on the condition that he defend elite ranchers from horse-stealing, cattle-killing, and vandalism. When the US-Mexico War erupted, he took up arms, was captured by Mexican forces, and then exchanged during the Siege of Los Angeles. Circumstantial evidence points to his serving among the volunteers in the Kearny-Stockton forces who retook Los Angeles and concluded the war in California. In 1848, with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, he reverted to being an American citizen. Then, in 1854, at the age of seventy-seven, he succumbed one October day in the San Gabriel Mountains to the mightiest of North American beasts, the California grizzly.

Slover’s edge-roving includes an impressive resume of firsts and near-firsts. He was among the first handful of White men to cross the Indian-controlled plains and to trap the Southwest with Mexican permission, beginning with the Rio Grande and its San Luis Valley tributaries. Within a few years, he had meandered through all the southern Rocky Mountain waterways and the Colorado River basin as well as the Gila River basin of Arizona in quest of beaver and other fur-bearing animals. At Taos, he was, it seems, the first US citizen in New Mexico (Nuevo Mexico) to become a Mexican citizen and then to marry a local New Mexican. He was one of a trio who completed the first highly successful commercial trapping expedition out of Taos. Then he accompanied what was probably the first American party to reach California via the southern Gila River route.³ Clearly, Isaac Slover was present at the vanguard of Southwestern fur trapping, an occasionally lucrative but always daunting and dangerous enterprise, and stayed at it until its virtual demise in the late 1830s.

His groundbreaking jaunts were not all jubilant. Two years after Jedediah Smith first broached—despite the resistance of Mexican authorities—the potential of American overland penetration into California, Slover and the eight-member Pattie Expedition posed the prospect again, as much by accident as purpose. They came to the edge of death in the fiery sands of a Baja desert. Slover survived only to be arrested, along with his fellow trekkers, by Mexican officials in San Diego and lost a fortune in furs. However unsuccessful the two expeditions, when tidings of the Smith Expedition and the Pattie Expedition wafted back east by word of mouth and, eventually, by memoirs and reports, the overland accessibility and the economic potential of the West Coast were made apparent enough to entice more Americans to the far west.⁴

Perhaps, in this brief catalog of deeds and disasters, I seem to be exaggerating and glorifying Isaac Slover’s adventures and his stature. To be clear, he exists, at best, as a marginal figure in the frontier histories of Kentucky, the Arkansas Territory, the Southwestern fur trade, and the San Bernardino Valley. He slinks around at the back of things, an obscure subordinate, present but not prominent, buried in the ancillary clauses and footnotes of the annals. In trying to bring Isaac more to the forefront without exaggerating his role, I have relied on context, circumstance, and association to buttress the narrative. I have extrapolated from extant records and reports, never speculating without framing the approach clearly as such. I have tracked the elementary information of his life, as best I could, through the usual official sources (census data; military records; birth, marriage, and death records). And here I must pay tribute to the late Slover family genealogist, Mabel Hadler, who first unearthed key sources about this man and the entire Slover legacy. With these facts and the recollections of his contemporaries, augmented by the groundwork of local historians and the overarching work of superlative scholars, I have sought to give the life of Isaac Slover its deserved heft, flavor, and humanity.

He might have given us more to work with, but he was illiterate, and, sadly, no contemporary scribe had the foresight to ask him to recite his experiences and then transcribe the gamut of his perspectives and adventures for posterity. His death, ironically, remains the most reported event of his life. Yet he leaves a fascinating, if elusive, trail across a continent when unengineered nature and Indigenous societies still ruled. Following this trail, we may get not only an inkling of the grit and gumption of one persistent rover but also a glimpse of the complex and often transgressive cultural, political, and violent interludes in our nation’s westward transit.

Indeed, if he deserves another degree or two of fame in the chronicles for his endeavors, I should note his rather unique position in the complicated cultural milieu of the Southwest. But, first, to realize the scope and uniqueness of the man’s life, we must consider his origins and upbringing in Pennsylvania. In one sense, he was born into uncertainty by virtue of having a father who had been captured and lived among Indians for twelve formative years of his youth before returning to White society. Thus, Isaac’s father experienced both a heavy dose of cultural dissonance and an abrupt reversal of allegiance in the middle of a highly contested Northwest Territory. After several years as a budding warrior with the Shawnees, he was suddenly their enemy—a private in the Continental Army, then, a few years later, a scout for a Revolutionary War militia on a vengeful campaign against his former Indigenous brethren. The very people who had nurtured him into adulthood captured him again, brutally beat him, condemned him to death as a traitor, and prepared him for immolation. Isaac walked in the shadow of a traumatized father with a hybrid identity. How this affected young Isaac can only be imagined.

These complexities intimate what Isaac Slover was to face at every stage of his life—the confusions and anxieties of fluid, enigmatic cultural frontiers. In his westerly, continental journey, he was witness, perpetrator, and victim in the often violent vertigo of White-Indian and White-Mexican relations. From Western Pennsylvania to Kentucky to the Arkansas Territory to Taos to the San Bernardino Valley, he was, like all those in the first wave, an interloper, a transgressor, on Indigenous soil, constantly trespassing on the traditional homelands and hunting grounds, complicit in what would amount to a prolonged ethnic cleansing.

When Isaac settled in Taos, among Mexicans and Pueblos, he bridged the cultural gulf as best he could, but he, like other foreign newcomers, suffered the skeptical gaze of the established locals. As if to ameliorate or sometimes disguise his outsider identity, he converted to Catholicism, quickly sought naturalization, and married a local, a Hispanicized Indian (probably Paiute) woman. Still, the wariness of Hispanic residents manifested most vividly in the reactions of church and government authorities. The validity of his marriage was contested. Then, he tried to cope with the anti-foreigner rules of commercial trapping and trading in Mexico. The cultural friction Isaac faced in Taos and Southern California was another version of the cross-cultural tensions he had experienced since childhood. He roved the edges, the borders and cultural intersections created by a persistently westering people as they overlapped and ultimately overwhelmed the native inhabitants.

Isaac found in marriage, it seems, an anchorage that gave vital respite to his risky itinerant urges. His two wives—Peggy, to whom he was married from 1800 to 1816, and Maria Barbara, to whom he was married from 1823 to 1854—each served as a refuge, a still point where he put in abeyance his fierce compulsion to rove. However much a hunter at heart, Isaac was, in his twenties and thirties, also a farmer and family man. Peggy’s sudden death after childbirth in 1816 led, as we will see, to a major pivot in his life. Soon thereafter, he flung himself down the Ohio and Mississippi and up the Arkansas and Grand rivers to the treacherous Arkansas Territory with five children in tow. It seems like his bold effort to pursue a passion for the hunt, the rover in him, while still fulfilling a duty as a parent. The incompatibility of passion and duty materialized when he found his family in the middle of the intensifying war between Osage and Cherokee Indians, a war instigated and aggravated by the pressures of persistent Anglo westward migration. He relocated his children to a safer haven to the east, then turned solo, launching a new career, as it were, as a mountain man, a free trapper in the Southwest. But even there, in Taos in another country, he soon found new anchorage with a wife with whom he stayed married for the rest of his life, though his inveterate wanderings were surely, at times, a severe test of her loyalty.

Another prominent theme in Isaac Slover’s progress westward is the range of challenges he and his ilk faced living amid largely ineffective or absent civil

structures. Even in the state of Pennsylvania, the Slovers and their neighbors endured a tenuous legal and enforcement apparatus in addition to inept military operations by untrained, disorganized militias. In the new state of Kentucky (1792), the Slovers often lived hunkered down amid a slew of river pirates, roaming outlaws, and aggrieved Indians. Isaac’s father led—and Isaac played an auxiliary role in—efforts to form and implement a justice system, to survey and establish land ownership, and to develop a system of roads. In the Arkansas Territory (now Eastern Oklahoma) where Isaac moved, he and his children were far removed from social and legal structures and protected from violence only by themselves and an incipient military force at Fort Smith many miles and several days away. In Taos, Isaac dealt with a weak and inconsistent local government and undermanned military that remained suspicious of outsiders, even those who had naturalized, converted to the national religion, and married local residents, as Isaac had. Later, in California, he encountered a violent environment brought about by cultural collisions, the hasty, inhumane secularization of the missions as well as a minimally effective justice and law enforcement system. Of course, truth be told, Isaac was wary of populous areas and the taxes and regulations that came with them, as his friend, Judge Benjamin Hayes, noted.⁵ Regardless of his social preferences, Isaac often faced—and faced willingly, or at least with resignation—the chaotic and frequently violent consequences of living at or beyond the edge of a justice system.

Although he valued a haven—namely a wife and a hearth, a safe space insulated as much as possible from social encumbrances—Isaac’s deepest craving was undoubtedly the open space of the hinterlands. He leaned always toward the feral edges, the extremes where wonder gets entangled with hazard and passage is often contested by beast or foe.

Chapter 1

The Ordeals of the Father

Captivity, Transition, Recapture, Torture, Recovery (1755–1790)

Near Fort Pitt, the year after thirteen small colonies in North America declared their independence from British rule, Nelly Slover gave birth to her first child, a son that she and her husband John named Isaac.¹ The Western Pennsylvania territory in which Isaac entered the world was rugged, perilous terrain where disease and continuous warfare had disrupted Indigenous lives and where, in turn, angry, desperate Indians disturbed the travel, domestic affairs, and agricultural operations of White settlers. The father had seen both sides—as a White Indian named Mannuchcothee and now as a White man named John Slover.²

Isaac was probably born while his father was away, deployed with the Continental Army in its efforts to protect the local settlers from the Indians and British Rangers.³ With violence everywhere and childbirth always risky, Isaac’s survival was not a thing to take for granted. About one in ten children in the colonies did not live to the age of five.⁴ Some estimates indicate that between one-fifth and one-third of children did not live past their tenth birthday.⁵ Even if one lived to adulthood, life expectancy was only about thirty-five years.⁶ Every child, White or Indian, encountered a gauntlet of privations and dangers that included food shortages, frequent disease, unmerciful weather, and continual warfare. Dauntless and lucky, Isaac was destined to endure these perils and live a long and variegated life. His parents could not have imagined that this small lad was fated to be one of a very few to roll west at the frontal edge of national expansionism down the Ohio and Mississippi, up the Arkansas to the Rockies, across the Southwest, and through to Alta California. He would know Shawnees and Cherokees and Osage. He would be saved from a Comanche assault by Kiowas and Arapahos, marry an Hispanicized Indian, live as a Mexican, and along the way rove with the grittiest of the Taosean trappers and hunters.

The baby that was swaddled in wool blankets and furs in the rough-hewn cabin near Fort Pitt possessed a lineage traceable to France where his ancestors had lived as Protestant Huguenots before seeking refuge in the Netherlands from Catholic persecution in the sixteenth century. Probably Seloivre originally, the surname evolved into Seloover, Selover, Selovier, and Slover. The original Isaac Slover, whose variant of the surname became the most common American version, immigrated to the new continent in the early 1680s and settled in Delaware. His son, Abraham, was born in 1697 and married around 1720. Abraham’s son, Jacob (our Isaac’s grandfather), was born in 1731 in New Jersey. He later lived in Augusta County, Virginia, where his son John was born around 1755.⁷

As early as 1753 or 1754, Jacob Slover may have purchased one of the 224 separate plots of land that were sold along the New River by land speculator Thomas Walker, but the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754 delayed the settlement of the New River properties in southwestern Virginia.⁸ Jacob and his family finally decided to settle there in the early 1760s as the British were nearing victory. However, French-allied Ohio Indian societies were still not at all pacified. They often viewed the British as heavy-handed and imperious, especially in acting as though a victory over the French gave them possession of and control over traditional Indian lands. So another series of Indian attacks, often called Pontiac’s War after the Ottawa chief, broke out against the British. Indian warriors roamed the country, plundering, killing, and capturing British citizens. The Miami and other Ohio country tribes⁹ still considered the New River area their hunting grounds. Unfortunately, in 1763 or 1764,¹⁰ the Slovers, thinking a British victory ensured safety, moved there and built a cabin on what they considered their property.¹¹ Shortly thereafter, a group of Miami Indians found them trespassing on what they considered theirs.

The Miamis swooped down on the Slover’s New River home, restraining eight-year-old John Slover as well as his mother and younger sisters and plundering the house. Only Abraham, the oldest son, escaped, having spied the Indians coming and fled into the woods. Shortly after the Miamis departed with their abductees, Jacob returned home to find his family missing and the cabin ransacked. Hysterical, he gave a wild shout and sealed his death. The Miamis were still in earshot, and two of them rushed back to the Slover home, killing and scalping Jacob. They then headed to their homelands to the northwest, carrying their captives with them into Ohio.¹² Abraham, meanwhile, was taken in by neighbors.¹³ At least two of the youngest daughters died during the Miamis’ return to their territory. Some say they expired from hunger; some say they were inconsolable and screamed hysterically until the irritated Indians bashed their heads against a tree trunk, killing them.¹⁴

The Miamis, like other tribes native to the Upper Ohio River region (Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana), had been depopulated by smallpox epidemics and by continual war. They sought to boost their thinning numbers by means of abduction, and they were succeeding, to a remarkable degree. Historians estimate, for example, that more than a thousand Pennsylvania colonists (and around two thousand colonists overall) were being held in the Northwest Territory as Indian captives during this time.¹⁵ So the abduction of the Slovers was one of many attempts to replenish the Miamis’ numbers with, ordinarily, youth and women. Adult males were usually killed and scalped.

After his capture, John Slover remained with the Miamis for six years before he became the possession of a Delaware who, apparently, sold him around 1769 to a trader. Thereafter, for the final six years of his captivity, he lived among the Shawnees,¹⁶ who were probably the most formidable Indian society in the Upper Ohio River region at the time. In November 1764, about a year after John and his kin were captured, Colonel Henry Bouquet took British regulars, Pennsylvania provincials, and Virginia volunteers to the Muskingum River in Ohio to confront Shawnees and others and to demand the release of captives. Anxious to placate the British and halt further violence and encroachment, the Indians released sixty captives on November 15, 1764. Among them were John’s mother, Elizabeth, and his only surviving sister, who were then returned to Fort Pitt on November 28.¹⁷ John, as a prospective young warrior, was not returned by the Shawnees.

John grew into manhood among the Ohio Indians, learning their ways and Northwest Territory geography. He became fluent in the Algonquin-based languages of the Miami (Picts), Shawnee, and probably Wyandot (Huron), according to his 1782 narrative.¹⁸ During his teenage years with the Shawnees, he almost certainly participated, in some manner, in Indian attacks on White settlers and forts in the region in the late 1760s and early 1770s. It would have likely been impossible for him to live among the Indians and refuse to cooperate. It was also likely that John had often defended his Shawnee brethren and other Indian colleagues from the attacks of colonists. Captured at eight years of age, he would have gradually been transculturated.¹⁹ By the time he was a teenager, he was one of them, ready and willing to do what was expected of him.

The Ohio country as well as the entire Northwest Territory was undergoing drastic change in the years that John lived among the Miamis and Shawnees. By 1775, every Indian society in the region had been ravaged by incessant warfare, and out of necessity and in self-defense the remnants of those societies began to merge, leading to flux and discontinuities in traditional practices and allegiances. Additional disruption came from severed trade networks because many Northwest Indian societies had become more and more economically dependent on European American markets and goods during the eighteenth century. In addition to war and trading complications, Indian life was further impaired by recurrent epidemics and increasing alcohol addiction. Trauma became normalized. A warrior culture arose. Indigenous societies were aggrieved and angry. For all the death and dislocation, the Northwestern Territory, like most of the North American continent, was still Indian country. White towns from the Eastern Seaboard colonies to frontier villages in Western Pennsylvania were affected by the incessant warfare. Many Whites depended as much on commercial traffic with the Indians as the Indians did with them.²⁰ However beleaguered, tormented, and fragmented by White aggression, Indian societies remained a formidable presence. It would be the mid-1790s before White Pennsylvanians could go a day without fear of an Indian attack.

During the early 1770s, in the face of continuing White incursions into their traditional homelands, Ohio-area nations such as the Wyandot, Delaware, Mingo, Miami, and Shawnee formed alliances to resist further invasion. John Slover had ranged with the Shawnees and their allies in parts of Ohio with periodic journeys across the Ohio River to Kentucky, their traditional hunting grounds. The influential Shawnee leader, Cornstalk, advised his people against war, but he claimed that angry young Shawnees would not listen and made rogue attacks on Virginians. Whites, in turn, destroyed Indigenous villages along the Muskingum River. As White incursions continued, the Shawnees and others attended treaty talks and sought peaceful agreements with Whites, but conflicts persisted. In self-defense and retaliation, confederated tribes killed White interlopers, attacked frontier forts, raided White settlements in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and continued to shore up their population with abductions.²¹

When the Shawnees and some of their allies (Senecas, Delawares, and Wyandots) from the Northwest Territory engaged in treaty talks at Fort Pitt around October 1775, John Slover, now about twenty years old and a seasoned tribal member, accompanied the Indian representatives.²² What he saw at Fort Pitt was probably not especially intimidating to him or his Indian colleagues. There was the fort itself, but around it were only a few dozen log cabins housing a woebegone, haggard people who had barely endured an extremely harsh winter and a year of virtual famine.²³ Hardships and fear of more Indian outbreaks had driven hundreds to pack up their goods and head back east. And a persistent boundary conflict between Virginia and Pennsylvania erupted into devastating destruction of crops and property by John Connolly and his outlaw army, who sought to win the southwestern Pennsylvania region for their Virginia colony.²⁴

While White factions squabbled over boundaries, Indian leaders were being courted by the Second Continental Congress, which sought to establish more amiable relations with the tribes and lure them away from existing or prospective British loyalties.²⁵ To further these goals, Congress divided the frontier into three Indian departments; the central department was assigned the tribes west of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, and Patrick Henry were selected as commissioners to meet these Indians at Fort Pitt.²⁶ Franklin and Henry were later replaced.

John Slover accompanied a contingent of Shawnees led by Cornstalk, Nimwha (Cornstalk’s brother), and other leaders.²⁷ They were members of a faction that wanted to remain neutral in the conflict between Americans and British. During one of a series of sessions at the Fort Pitt treaty conference, Cornstalk told the commissioners that there is a bad Wind blown up and stated his hope that the White People will search into it.²⁸ Although the parties finally agreed to an extensive treaty, violence did not relent. There is no record of it, but John’s role may have been to serve as a translator at some of the meetings.

During the Fort Pitt negotiations, John apparently encountered, by chance, his brother Abraham, who had lived in the Pittsburgh area for a few years.²⁹ Somehow one of them recognized the other even though it had been twelve years since they had seen each other. Abraham, meanwhile, had been a private in the local Western Pennsylvania militia in 1773, according to records.³⁰ In February 1775, he was appointed constable and named to a local committee enjoined to choose a road route from Fort Pitt (temporarily called Fort Dunsmore) to Raccoon Creek.³¹ During the negotiations at Fort Pitt, Abraham convinced John to return to White society.³² At first, John resisted Abraham’s overtures; after all, most of his life he had been among the Indians. In recounting this experience (as dictated to Brackenridge), John states: I came in with the Shawnee nation to the treaty, and met some of my relations at that place, who solicited me to relinquish the life of a savage. This I did with some reluctance, this manner of life having become natural to me, inasmuch as I had scarcely known any other.³³ It is not clear exactly what argument convinced John to switch allegiances; perhaps Abraham made him see that the defeat or ultimate dispossession of the Indigenous peoples in the region was inevitable. Nor is it clear where John settled after he was redeemed, but it is likely he lived at first with or near his brother around Fort Pitt or nearby in Westmoreland County.³⁴ Within a couple of years of rejoining the White world, John married and enlisted in the Continental Army.³⁵ He could see war from both sides now.

After Isaac’s birth during the Revolutionary War in a nervous, beleaguered Western Pennsylvania, John and his wife, Nelly, were often apart while John served as a private in the Second Pennsylvania Battalion of the Continental Army from February 8, 1776, to March 31, 1777. Part of his battalion also served at times with the Third Pennsylvania Regiment under the command of Colonel Arthur St. Clair and, later, Colonel Joseph Wood.³⁶ If John was with St. Clair during this period, he may have been involved in the disastrous June 1776 Battle of Three Rivers, notable for strategic blunders committed by the Continental Army leadership and for the smallpox epidemic that devastated the American troops.³⁷ In the Fort Pitt area, most of the military activities focused on containing those Indians who allied with the British and on contesting the British Rangers who fought out of the Detroit area and encouraged and supported Indian attacks on the colonists. On a personal level, it seems likely that John would have experienced difficulties adjusting abruptly from Shawnee life to White life, from Indian warrior to Continental Army soldier, and from bachelor to married man. It would not be surprising if these transitional tensions—cultural, social, and psychological—affected John’s marriage and Isaac’s early years. Given his father’s transculturation into Indian life,³⁸ Isaac was probably educated as much in the mode of Indian ways as in White ways; surely, he felt caught sometimes between his father’s Indian-engrained behavior and habits of thinking and the mores of White society. Regardless, what seems evident is that John instilled in his son a deep passion for trapping and hunting and all their attendant skills.

During the late 1770s and the 1780s, as Isaac grew up, Western Pennsylvania continued to smolder with fear and wrath. The Indians had tried to fend off the advance of White hunters and settlers for several decades, and they were now joined by British Rangers, who were mostly colonial loyalists. White encroachment was not stymied. According to Colin Calloway, Independence unleashed a flood of settlers and speculators. Between 1775 and 1790, some eighty thousand non-Indians poured into Shawnee country.³⁹ Provoked by the