When William Penn, the founding proprietor of the Quaker colony, bought land from the Delaware tribe, the extent of the purchase was limited to the distance a man could go in 1¹⁄₂ days. But, when the time came in 1737 for Penn’s son to measure this off, he did not have it walked off as the Indians had presumed it would be done. To cover the distance, the Quaker employed trained white athletes, runners! It was even suspected that the white runners may have used horses concealed along the route, that is, after they were out of sight of the Indians who panted along behind them full of Penn’s rum, according to some accounts. Things settled down rather quickly however when James Logan, that astute Pennsylvanian who guided the Indian policy of the colony, treated generously with the Iroquois to keep the Delaware in line. The Delaware, in fear of their fierce overlords in the north, vacated most of their lands east of the mountains and joined the equally unhappy Shawnee in the upper Ohio valley. There they listened malevolently to French traders and soldiers who promised a red-handed revenge. So successful was the Indian policy in general, however, that on the outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 between England and France, the Iroquois were cajoled into granting the English practically all the Ohio valley and sealing the bargain with an alliance to help protect the property against the French who were already there. In fact, commissioners from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, meeting with an Iroquois delegation around the council fire at Lancaster, obtained “a Deed recognizing the King’s right to all the Lands that are, or shall be, by his Majesty’s appointment, in the Colony of Virginia.” As far as the Virginians were concerned those lands by ancient charter stretched all the way to the South Sea, wherever that was, although they were willing to settle for the Ohio valley for the time being. Nor did the Quaker colony seriously dispute Virginia’s claim at the time, even though nearly all of the fur traders beyond the mountains, who were now aggressively competing with the French, were Pennsylvanians. Chief among these was George Croghan. He had not arrived in Pennsylvania from Dublin until 1741, but he was established in trade on the Ohio River well before King George’s War. By 1746 he had a number of storehouses on Lake Erie itself. From the bustling base of his operations in the 1740’s near Harris Ferry (Harrisburg) on the Susquehanna, and later from Aughwick farther west, he and his various partners directed effective attacks on French trade in the Ohio valley.