succeeded as hereditary chief, according to the matrilineal kinship rules. Captain Pipe likely spent his early years either at Custaloga's Town, along French Creek in Mercer County. He may also have lived at his uncle's other main village, Cussewago, at the present site of Meadville in Crawford County. Career The boy received the public name or nickname of Hopocan (meaning tobacco pipe). Captain Pipe, as the colonists called him, is first noted in historical records in 1759 among the warriors at a conference held at Fort Pitt, July 1759. Hugh Mercer, agent of Sir William Johnson, the chief British Indian agent in the Northeast, noted Captain Pipe among the attendees. Mercer had brought together the Six Nations of the Iroquois, as well as the Lenape and Shawnee, trying to secure their alliance with Great Britain during its Seven Years' War with the French (known on the North American front as the French and Indian War). The war lasted from 1754 to 1763. Custaloga was known to have moved his band from French Creek into what is now Ohio. There is some evidence that he may have returned to Pennsylvania to the Kuskuskies Towns, on the Shenango River near present-day New Castle. These four villages had earlier been inhabited by Seneca people of the Iroquois League, but by 1756 they were settled by Lenape displaced from further east during the French and Indian War. In 1762 the Lenape gave the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post permission to build a cabin on the Tuscarawas River at present Bolivar, Ohio. Hopocan was given the job of marking out the land to be given to Post. In 1765 the warrior was recorded at another conference at Fort Pitt, which about 600 chiefs and warriors attended; numerous women and children accompanied them. In 1768 he again met in a conference at Fort Pitt, held by George Croghan, a sub-agent of Sir William Johnson, British Indian Agent of the northeast and based in central New York. This meeting gathered more than 1,000 Iroquois, Lenape, Shawnee, Wyandot, and Mohegan together following the British victory over the French in the Seven Years' War. Britain proposed an Indian state to be reserved to Native Americans west of the Appalachians, and proclaimed it as off-limits to Anglo-American colonists. But the British colonial governments were unable to enforce restrictions against Anglo-American settlers in this area, who were determined to go to