A dig into Leechburg’s history reveals nicknames, costumes, and lots of wishful thinking

In the Leechburg I knew, a 100-foot serpent, translucent and full of rage, surfed the Kiskiminetas River.

According to a woman at my church, located 40 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, the beast was a “leviathan” — a Biblical-era demonic Nessie. I was 8 or 9 years old, learning to see into a realm that my church said was populated by angels and demons. 

The other people in town didn’t see what we saw. To them, Leechburg wasn’t filled with invisible spiritual beings, but had ghosts of another sort: floundering mills, empty storefronts, and incomplete legends. The town’s history is filled with the names of people who own or owned property. Some of the owners are well-known and others are almost anonymous, leaving lots of space to speculate. A legendary town founder might be as real as a leviathan.

While drafting essays for my book on identity and self-discovery, Nobody’s Psychic, I revisited the religious “vision training” I underwent in the 1990s and wondered about its relationship to my life today. As a writer, I’m expected to ground my memories in general historical context, but all I knew about Leechburg was spectral. Lacking information, but possessing a library science degree, I began researching Leechburg’s history in expert fashion: I went to Google and typed “Leechburg history” into the search bar. What returned to me was what I vaguely knew: In 1850, David Leech humbly renamed the town after himself. There were salt mines, railroads, canals, and mills. Bridges, then floods.

What is less known, maybe less knowable, is what happened before Leech made himself a burg. In a book commemorating Leechburg’s 150th anniversary, Joseph Kantor imagines the area before European settlement as “pristine,” with “sunlight glittering on the Kiski [River], lush forest overhanging the swift current. Game was likely plentiful and the flooding of the river made the soil rich.” He admits, though, this is all fantasy.

Even in 1822, only eight white families lived in the area. The area wasn’t far from an Indigenous town of unknown Tribal affiliation, but — by all accounts — no native groups took up the site of Leechburg as a permanent dwelling. One could make the case that native people were using the land even if they didn’t live on it. Foraging grounds, fishing shores, and hunting woods all come to mind. But do you have to use something to make it yours? Nobody needed to work the land for the land to be working on somebody.

And we want to imagine it, don’t we? We, who look like the King’s traitorous subjects, want to imagine the land as “pristine,” “lush.” We borrow this desire from the men who arrived on ships and said “It’s empty” into the eyes of living people. This desire is where the real emptiness is.

Empty like the address bar of a web browser, waiting for its cue. 

More typing and clicking led me to John Walker, who surveyed the area in 1773. The following year, he sold a portion of the land to Joshua Elder. Nearly 10 years later, Elder reportedly sold that portion to Delaware Indian Chief White Mattock for five pounds, 10 shillings.

“Delaware” comes from an honorific title given to colonial Virginia governor Sir Thomas West, known as Lord de la Warr III. When Captain Samuel Argall explored present-day Delaware, he passed the name along in honor of West. Encroachment by and violence from European settlers forced many Unami- and Munsee-speaking Lenape peoples — called “Delaware” by white settlers — towards the western frontier, the area of Fort Pitt and Ohio. Some headed north into New York and Ontario.

William Riley Trout, a Leechburg area resident born in 1829, was the first person to report Delaware Chief White Mattock’s land purchase. His knowledge was passed along in a 1916 book of local history by T.J. Henry. Henry writes that Trout, “a local historian of note, was of the opinion [that White Mattock] had taken out patents for land after the manner of the white man. White Mattock had taken up the site of Leechburg.”

Henry and Trout refer readers to an 1883 text by Robert Walter Smith, which is said to confirm this story. But Smith’s book contains no reference to a Delaware Chief named White Mattock, just a presumably European man named White Matlock. The three history buffs were wrong on several accounts. Their errors open up as doors to another time, to an adjacent America.

In the late 1700s, a group of European settlers formed an organization for hyper-patriotic, very American Americans. With no irony in their colonial hearts, they named themselves “The Sons of King Tammany,” later “The Sons of St. Tammany,” after Tamanend — a Lenape leader known to white settlers as “Tammany.”

Historian Phillip J. Deloria argues that the selection of a Native American mascot like Tamanend wasn’t random. White Americans have repeatedly donned Native American costume — literally or ideologically — for political projects. For instance, during the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794) a group of white anti-taxation rebels penned a pseudo-declaration under fictitious Native pen names and published it in the Pittsburg Gazette as a message from the “Six United Nations of White Indians.”

Tamanend emblematized the “wild” spirit that white settlers hoped would keep government interference in check. They wanted an icon who was a potential menace to “the powers that be,” made from corpuscles of unalienable aboriginal sovereignty. Tamanend, the man, may or may not have seen himself as any of those things. As the Tammanies grew, the Lenape people themselves were pushed further west and north by people who sought to copy them to death. These copyists would dress in “native” garb, smear their faces with paint, and pass a ritual pipe as a sign of brotherliness.

A 1798 New York City directory lists the local Tammany chapter’s “sachems” — a term for a traditional Lenape leader (the NYC chapter would later become a byword for the city’s machine politics). Among them was a 53-year-old watchmaker, silversmith, brewer, and steel manufacturer. In 1783, he purchased 192 acres of land along the Kiskiminetas River, right where Leechburg would one day be. His name is inscribed in the land patent books, in that heavily-slanted, thin-lined 1700s script we know from Declarations of things: White Matlack. In a bit of flourish, the scribe crossed not only his T’s but his L’s, too. The second “a” was left ambiguous. To a quick eye, “Matlack” looks like “Matlock,” maybe even “Mattock.” Property deeds in Leechburg often copied this misread, showing White Mattock as a once-upon-a-time owner.

Getting what you want has a way of not lasting. Less than a century after the United States declared its independence, settlers began to worry that the true American way of life was being forgotten. Focused on history, patriotism, and charitable causes, the Improved Order of Red Men “painted itself as a gathering of historians, the worthy keepers of the nation’s aboriginal roots,” according to Deloria. Like the Tammanies, they dressed in costume. Unlike the Tammanies, they didn’t think of Native people as a symbol of political power, but as touchstones for a good, old, natural, all-American, meat-eating, firework-firing past that never was. Local chapters of the Order took on “tribal” names and used faux-Indigenous jargon. The Order also revived the legacy of early Tammany members like White Matlack.

Between 1875 and 1906, at least two chapters of the Improved Order of Red Men were established in the Kiskiminetas Valley. Somewhere in this timeframe, William Trout told T.J. Henry the tale of Chief White Mattock, Delaware real estate innovator. If Trout, the touted expert on Natives, joined one of those “improved” tribes, it might explain why he told Henry that Matlack-turned-Mattock was a sachem or chief. Matlack was a Tammany, the kind of man that many white men of Trout’s generation idolized: a skilled craftsman, a rebel against the crown, a patriot to his ruin. Trout would have wanted to celebrate Matlack’s story, to place him at the center of town. Perhaps Trout was like me — looking for a Leechburg he never knew, but wished he had.

Or perhaps Trout didn’t even know about White Matlack, but his fantasies took hold in a bit of unclear handwriting. Trout could have read the property records too fast, read “White Mattock” in place of “White Matlack.” “White Mattock,” like “Crazy Horse.” Stereotypes about Native names did the rest. Just describing things, all sparkling, lush, rich.

We who look like White Matlack used to imagine a White Mattock to tell us who we are, how we got here. That’s the way of the Tammanies and the Improved Order: fill yourself up with stories from elsewhere, stories you’ve misunderstood. It’s wrong, we now say, and we know it doesn’t work. We’re aware that we’re seeing the Quaker Oats man wearing gemstone turkey feathers from JOANN Fabrics. We see the clipped coupons, the strip mall, and sewing projects-to-be-abandoned. The question — What is Leechburg to me? — disappears behind the whites of town history. But, then, they turn transparent, too. I see the question again. It’s still there.

I wanted to know a Leechburg untouched by religious delusion. White Matlack and William Trout wanted to know a perfect America that never went wrong. Centuries apart, we’re still looking for unquestionable origins, but our origins are in the questions themselves, in the need to make an emptiness at the center of our history.

This article was adapted from an essay in Nobody’s Psychic: Finding & Losing Yourself, forthcoming September 2025 from the University Press of Kentucky.

This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.