Christian Frederick Post (an anglicanization of Christian Friedrich Post) (1710
Polish Prussia - 29 April 1785
Germantown, Pennsylvania) was a missionary of the
Moravian Church to the
indigenous peoples of the Americas who played a brief but significant role in Colonial diplomacy.
Biography
He came to
Pennsylvania in 1742, and worked at forming groups of German heritage into a church federation, but was unsuited to the task. His facility in learning the native languages suited him better to organizing native groups.
Between 1743 and 1749 was a missionary to the Moravian Indians in
Province of New York and
Connecticut Colony
The ''Connecticut Colony'' or ''Colony of Connecticut'', originally known as the Connecticut River Colony or simply the River Colony, was an English colony in New England which later became Connecticut. It was organized on March 3, 1636 as a settl ...
. His and his co-workers' activities were viewed with suspicion by the settlers: he was expelled from New York and Connecticut once, and another time he was jailed in New York for seven weeks.
[
He returned to Europe in 1751, and thence was sent to Labrador, but afterward he came again to Pennsylvania, and was again employed in the Indian missions. Following the 1755 Penn's Creek Massacre, in 1758 he undertook an embassy in behalf of the Pennsylvania Colony to the Delawares and Shawnees in Ohio. He established an independent mission in Ohio in 1761, where he was joined in 1762 by John Heckewelder; but the Pontiac War forced them to abandon the project. In January, 1764, he sailed for the Mosquito Coast, where he labored two years, and he made a second visit there in 1767. He afterward united with the Church of England. He was elected to the American Society in 1768.][Bell, Whitfield J., and Charles Greifenstein, Jr. ''Patriot-Improvers: Biographical Sketches of Members of the American Philosophical Society''. 3 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997, II: 104—10.]
He retired in 1784, leaving the Miskito Indians to live in Germantown.[
]
Family
He was married three times. His first two wives were native converts: Rachel, a Wampanoag, married him in 1743 and died about 1745, and Agnes, a Delaware, married him in 1747 and died in 1751. In 1763, he married Mary Margaret Stadelman Bolinger who survived him, dying in 1810. He had four children with his native wives; all died in infancy.
Notes
References
Further reading
* This tells the story of his 1758 mission during the French and Indian War.
External links
Last resting place in Germantown, PA., at findagrave.com
Pennsylvania state roadside marker noting how Post's friendship with the Indians and the threat of Forbes' army on Pittsburgh led to the collapse of the French presence in the western territories (and thereby by inference the dominance of English as the spoken language in the expanding colonization).
Site on the early history of Western Pennsylvania including a segment on a marker denoting the location of the Kuskusky, Kuskuskies Amerindian village where Post is said to have concluded a treaty with the Native Americans residing there under King Beaver
Tamaqua or Tamaque, also known as The Beaver and King Beaver ( – 1769 or 1771), was a leading man of the Unalachtigo (Turkey) phratry of the Lenape people. Although the Iroquois in 1752 had appointed Shingas chief of the Lenape at the Treaty ...
( Tamaqua).
Notes on the park near Slippery Rock, PA, where the marker locating the spot where Post met with King Beaver is found.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Post, Christian Frederick
1710 births
1785 deaths
American Protestant missionaries
People of Pennsylvania of Pontiac's War
American people of the Moravian Church
Moravian Church missionaries
People of colonial Pennsylvania
18th-century American Episcopalians
Protestant missionaries in the United States