Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence: The Diaries of the Moravian Mission to the Iroquois Confederacy, 1745–1755

The diaries produced by eighteenth-century Moravian missionaries are among the richest and most intriguing primary sources that survive from colonial North America. Mostly written in German, with notoriously difficult handwriting, they are also, if understandably, among the most underutilized. Katherine M. Faull’s translation of diaries from the mission to the multinational Indigenous community at Shamokin, at the confluence of the North and West Branches of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, makes a unique set of these diaries accessible to a broader public.As Faull notes in her introduction, the Shamokin diaries differ from other extant published Moravian diaries, in part because Shamokin “was not a mission settlement built by the Moravians” but rather a preexisting community with a long history, beginning as a Susquehannock, then a Shawnee, and finally “a primarily Lenape settlement and trading post,” under the oversight of the Six Nations of the Iroquois (5). In the words of missionary Joseph Powell, the Moravians encountered “so many languages that we find it very Difficult to learn anything, then it’s rare to hear two Indians talking in one language” (66). Moravian missionaries spent a decade as a part—clearly a peripheral part—of this diverse community between 1745 and 1755. The missionaries’ primary purpose at Shamokin was, as Faull notes, to honor an agreement with the Six Nations to provide blacksmith services.Cultures at the Susquehanna Confluence presents a vivid—if, like all Euro-American sources written about Native peoples, inherently and inevitably limited—portrait of this distinctive place and moment. It would make the perfect introduction to this rich Moravian source material for scholars, teachers, and students unfamiliar with the Moravians and their archives. And even for scholars well-versed in the Moravian archives, having a beautifully translated, accessible copy of an important set of mission diaries in book form is of immense value—for comparative purposes and as a tool for thinking through the many potential directions scholars have yet to take these sources.Like most academic texts, Faull opens with acknowledgments. Don’t skip by them. Though no longer than ordinary and not immediately distinctive, Faull’s acknowledgments—and acknowledgment, as an idea or practice—are the perfect way to ease into these diaries. They reveal a dense network of communities—scholarly communities, place-based communities in the Susquehanna Valley, Indigenous communities, university communities—that inspired Faull’s “physical, intellectual, and metaphysical journey into areas of Native American studies and history, cultural geography, community-engaged collaborative teaching, research and scholarship, public-facing digital humanities research, and environmental and heritage advocacy” (xi). All of those concerns and communities have left their imprint on the volume, albeit often lightly worn, or awaiting excavation within the text of the primary source itself. Thinking about the contemporary networks of learning and information exchange that shaped this text primed me, as a reader, to think about the historical networks the Moravians navigated and recorded—despite the fact that they often only partly or incompletely understood them.The mission diaries are full of detail—details about the natural world, about Indigenous communities and their dynamics within a particular moment in history, and about the structure, operation, and affective qualities of the Moravian missionary project itself. At the same time, as Faull acknowledges, those details come, in some respects, from a very narrow and specific Moravian perspective; reading the volume—and Moravian mission diaries broadly—can feel immensely frustrating, as they obscure or ignore Indigenous concerns and perspectives. However, the specific historical evidence within these diaries is not the only reason to read them; a vivid sense of place and time as constituted and constantly navigated by human beings in community emerges from the sum of all those details. Despite the limitations of a missionary perspective, that sense of place and time is immensely valuable for any student of the colonial American past.David Minderhout’s brief but effective opening essay, “Native Americans in Shamokin, circa 1748,” does an excellent job situating the diaries within the Indigenous history of the Northeast. Its contents will be unsurprising for specialists but immensely useful to other readers. Katherine Faull’s own excellent introduction primes readers to tap into the rich potential of the source: to struggle past the limits of the Moravians’ perspective and think through the richer environmental, political, and cultural histories they fitfully but vividly captured. Faull’s introduction also makes an important historiographical intervention in its own right, pushing back against a tendency to romanticize, sensationalize, or simply flatten out “this site of deep ambivalence on the Pennsylvania frontier” (5).The notes, glossary, and registers of places and individuals appended to the end of the volume are essential. They demonstrate Faull’s deep knowledge of this world and its myriad relevant contexts. I would have liked more: more notes, more detail, more explicit connections. Other readers may well find Faull’s approach admirably concise. The translation itself is excellent; Faull captures the feel of the original German in clear, accessible English.By coincidence, I picked up this volume at the same time as Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell’s wonderful new edition of the letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 2024)—which meant that I was primed to think about correspondence as literature and the quotidian as poetry. As Faull notes in her introduction, later, more widely distributed Moravian writings would “play a central role in the development of an American aesthetic imaginary,” influencing writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fennimore Cooper (10). It feels a little odd, even concerning, to savor the experience of reading eighteenth-century mission diaries, given how they can efface the voices and perspectives of Native people. At the same time, the many layers of landscape, presence of multiple diverse communities, and not least the deep spiritual meaning the missionaries themselves clearly placed on these diaries—as both a practice of writing and a way of fostering community—mean that the diaries reward being read and considered as literature. They are full of beautiful, revealing description. (Missionary James Hagen, for example, described the Susquehanna River as “no different to look at than a town full of houses; the rocks lie in the water, and the water flows crisscross between them [like a warp and weft],” 46.) By presenting these diaries as accessibly and transparently as possible, Faull’s volume underlines their complexity, both as literature and as an irreplaceable historical source.