One of the most noted agents of communication between the white men and the Indians, was Conrad Weiser, a native of Germany, who came to America in early life, and settled, with his father, in the present Schoharie county, New York, in 1713. They left England, in 1712, and were seventeen months on their voyage! Young Weiser became a great favorite with the Iroquois Indians in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys, with whom he spent much of his life. Late in 1714, the elder Weiser, and about thirty other families, who had settled in Schoharie, becoming dissatisfied by attempts to tax them, set out for Tulpehocken, in Pennsylvania, by way of the Susquehanna river, and settled there. But young Weiser was enamored of the free life of the savage. He was naturalized by them, and became thoroughly versed in the languages of the whole Six Nations, as the Iroquois confederacy in New York were called. He became confidential interpreter and special messenger for the province of Pennsylvania among the Indians, and assisted in many important treaties. The governor of Virginia commissioned him to visit the grand council at Onondaga, in 1737, and, with only a Dutchman and three Indians, he traversed the trackless forest for five hundred miles, for that purpose. He went on a similar mission from Philadelphia to Shamokin (Sunbury), in 1744. At Reading he established an Indian agency and trading-house. When the French on the frontier made hostile demonstrations, in 1755, he was commissioned a colonel of a volunteer regiment from Berks county; and, in 1758, he attended the great gathering of the Indian chiefs in council with white commissioners, at Easton. Such was the affection of the Indians for Weiser, that for many years after his death they were in the habit of visiting his grave and strewing flowers thereon. Mr. Weiser's daughter married Henry Melchoir Muhlenburg, D.D., the founder of the Lutheran Church, in America.
Contributed by: Nancy.
Source: Our Countrymen; or Brief Memoirs of Eminent Americans. Illustrated by One Hundred and Three Portraits by Lossing and Barritt, by Benson J. Lossing. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1855, p. 251.