as White Eyes' Town, near the Lenape capital of Coshocton, Ohio. By 1773 White Eyes served as Speaker of the Delaware Head Council, an important position and indication of his high reputation in the tribe. In 1774, the Lenape Grand Council, an association of chiefs, named White Eyes as principal chief of the nation. In the early 1770s, violence on the frontier between whites and Indians threatened to escalate into open warfare. White Eyes unsuccessfully attempted to prevent what would become Lord Dunmore's War in 1774, fought primarily between the Shawnee and Virginia colonists. He served as a peace emissary between the two armies, and helped negotiate a treaty to end the war. Revolution and death When the American Revolutionary War began soon after the end of Dunmore's War, White Eyes was negotiating a royal grant with Lord Dunmore to secure the Lenape territory in the Ohio Country. After the American revolutionaries forced Dunmore out of Virginia, White Eyes had to begin anew with the Americans. In April 1776, he addressed the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on behalf of the Lenape. Two years later he completed an alliance of the Delaware with the United States by a treaty signed in 1778 at Fort Pitt. It promised to establish a Lenape state, with representation in the American Congress, provided that the Congress approved. The treaty provided for the Lenape to serve as guides for the Americans when they moved through the Ohio Country to strike at their British and Indian enemies to the north, in and around Detroit. In early November 1778, White Eyes joined an American expedition under General Lachlan McIntosh as a guide and negotiator. Soon after, the Americans reported that White Eyes had contracted smallpox and died during the expedition. After his death, the Lenape alliance with the Americans eventually collapsed. The Americans by then had no interest in supporting a state under Lenape control. After his death, Gelelemend of the Turtle Clan became the principal chief of the Lenape as no other leader was qualified by clan. Assassination claim Years later, George Morgan, a US Indian agent, trader, and former close associate of White Eyes, wrote a letter to Congress claiming that the chief had been "treacherously put to death" by American militia in Michigan. Later documentation affirmed that White Eyes had been assassinated by an American militia officer on November 5, 1778. (Morgan had helped negotiate