author
Christian Frederick Post
d. 1785
A Moravian missionary and peace envoy, he became known for difficult journeys into Native American territory during the French and Indian War. His journals offer a rare first-hand look at colonial diplomacy, travel, and cross-cultural encounters in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and the Ohio country.
1 Audiobook
Journals of Conrad Weiser (1748), George Croghan (1750-1765), Christian Frederick Post (1758), and Thomas Morris (1764)
by George Croghan, Thomas Morris, Christian Frederick Post, Conrad Weiser
About the author
Born in Prussia around 1710, Christian Frederick Post immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1742 and joined the Moravian mission world centered in Bethlehem. Sources describe him as especially gifted at learning Native languages and building relationships with Indigenous communities, which shaped the work for which he is best remembered.
Post served as a missionary among Native peoples in New York and Connecticut, and later took on a brief but important diplomatic role in colonial Pennsylvania. In 1758, he traveled west as a peace messenger to Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo leaders in the Ohio country during the French and Indian War. Those dangerous journeys became the basis of the journals now associated with his name.
He spent much of his life in Pennsylvania and died in Germantown on April 29, 1785. Today he is remembered less as a polished literary figure than as a witness to frontier history whose writing preserves moments of negotiation, conflict, and uneasy attempts at peace.