George Croghan

Indian agent, born near Dublin, Ireland. He went to Philadelphia (1741), where he learned Indian languages and soon built a trade empire on the Pennsylvania frontier. When the French and Indian War (1754) ruined his trade, he became the deputy superintendent of N Indian affairs (1756–72). In 1766 he brought about the treaty which ended Pontiac's revolt. During the American Revolution he was unjustly suspected of Loyalist sympathies, and he also lost the fortune he had accumulated through trading and land speculation.

George Croghan was born in Dublin, Ireland around 1720, moved to Colonial America in 1741, and became a fur trader in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. By the mid 1740s, at a time when there were few English-speaking people beyond the Appalachian Mountains, Croghan was a leading trader in the Ohio Country. Afterwards he moved from Pennsylvania to New York in 1756 and became a Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs under Sir William Johnson.

Croghan led a group of speculators, including Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin in land schemes in the Ohio Country, the Illinois Country and New York.

In 1764, while in England, he claimed that his infuence had previously won him a 200,000 acre (800 km²) land grant from the Iroquois and asked that the Governor of New York be instructed to issue patents for this land. However on September 6, 1765, Croghan was awarded a much smaller 10,000 acre (40 km²) grant in New York.

Croghan managed to get the grant from the Iroquois renewed by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, but then attempted to locate that grant on the upper Ohio River.

By 1785, 40,000 to 50,000 acres (160 to 200 km²) of Croghan's Otsego lands were sold at auction to William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper), from Burlington, New Jersey.

Croghan's grandson, Augustin Prevost of Cooperstown, New York was aboard the Liverpool packet Albion when it went down in the September Gale of 1822. George Croghan and the Westward Movement, 1741–1782. George Croghan: Wilderness Diplomat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.