Brotherhood of Thieves

William Penn arrived in America in 1682 with the best of intentions. The 38-year-old nobleman, a devout Quaker, had been granted a charter a year earlier by King Charles II to create a colony on about 45,000 square miles of land just west of the Delaware River and north of Maryland. It was then the largest privately held tract of land in the New World. (In fact, Penn then became the largest private land owner in the entire world.) The king named this sprawling woodlands Pennsylvania—sylvania is derived from the Latin word for forest land—in honor of Penn’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn.

 

The younger Penn told friends he planned to conduct a “Holy Experiment” in his new colony in which European settlers of any religion would live in peaceful coexistence with the indigenous Lenape people, whom Penn called “fellow sons of God.” In a letter to the Lenape (pronounced Luh-NAH-pay), Penn acknowledged “the unkindness and injustice” they had suffered at the hands of previous colonizers, including “the shedding of blood,” and said he hoped to live “as neighbors and friends” with “your love and consent.”

 

“I have great love and regard toward you,” Penn wrote, “and I desire to win your love and friendship by a kind, just, and peaceable life.”

 

Among Lenape descendants, three hundred and forty years later, there is an appreciation for what Penn tried to do. “He had a genuine respect for our people,” says Adam Waterbear DePaul, a chief and tribal storykeeper of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and an adjunct professor of indigenous studies at Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pennsylvania. “It’s clear that his intent was to share the land, rather than just displace us.”

 

But Penn’s ambitious experiment would ultimately end in fraud, failure, and heartbreak. Financial and personal troubles forced him to leave his colony and return to England for most of his life. Three of his sons did not share his faith or his ideals, and after their father’s death, they stole much of the Lenape’s land in a shameless swindle known as “the Walking Purchase”—a pivot point in Pennsylvania history that triggered the forced diaspora of its indigenous people.

 

Before Europeans arrived in America, the Lenape—whose name means “the people” in their Algonquian language—had inhabited what is today all of New Jersey and nearby parts of Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware for more than 10,000 years. They were part of a more extensive nation of independent bands of Lenape with a shared language and customs: “Lenapehoking,” as they called their homeland, encompassed the lower Hudson Valley and western Long Island in present-day New York State, all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and northeastern Delaware.

 

An estimated 5,000 Lenape lived on both the east and west sides of the river they called “Lenapewihittuk”—later named the Delaware (derived from the title of English colonial administrator Thomas West, the 3rd Baron De La Warr). Their small, scattered communities of wigwams were situated along the many creeks and tributaries veining the land, with each group having its own leader, or sachem.

 

The native peoples had been trading goods and sharing the land with the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and other Europeans for a half-century—sometimes peaceably, sometimes with frictions that boiled over into bloody conflict. Given their uneasy relationship with previous settlers, the Lenape were receptive to Penn’s overtures of friendship and respect. But historians largely agree that his motives were not entirely altruistic.

 

“Penn was a jumble of contradictions,” says history professor Steven Harper, author of Promised Land: Penn’s Holy Experiment, The Walking Purchase and the Dispossession of Delawares, 1600-1763 (Lehigh University Press, 2006). “He’s torn between his Quakerism and his aristocratic English materialism. He wants to acquire land and wealth. And he truly does believe all this land that the Lenape have lived on for thousands of years is now his because the king signed a piece of paper and gave it to him.”

 

Still, to further his “Holy Experiment,” Penn offered to buy parcels from the Lenape rather than just seizing them. Legend has it that in 1682, Penn sat down with Lenape sachem Tamanend and other Lenape leaders at Shackamaxon—the present-day Fishtown neighborhood in Philadelphia—and signed a treaty that served as the foundation of his development of the Pennsylvania colony.

 

There is no historical evidence that such a large, single meeting took place. But ninety years later, artist Benjamin West created an iconic painting of this mythical gathering, Penn’s Treaty With the Indians, that solidified Penn’s legacy as a benefactor of the native people. (A Pennsylvania native, West spent most of his life in London, where in 1772 he was appointed historical painter to King George III, an appointment that came with a residence and a studio inside Windsor Castle.) The treaty meeting is also memorialized with a statue of Penn at Penn Treaty Park in Philadelphia. “Whether or not a large single meeting occurred,” Harper says, “it is clear that Penn did hold numerous meetings with the Lenape and negotiated to buy land.”

 

Penn purchased parcels from numerous Lenape sachems, extending from Philadelphia as far north as central Bucks County. He paid them in trade goods and food stuffs—oxen and farm tools, scissors and knives, clothing and blankets, tobacco and firearms, axes and fish hooks. To increase trust and good relations, Penn also spent time among them, joining in harvest celebrations, rituals, and games, and learning some of their language and customs. “Don’t abuse them, but let them have justice,” he wrote, “and you win them.”

 

In the early days of this relationship, the Lenape were indeed very friendly with Penn and the settlers who followed him on dozens of ships from the Old World. The native people shared food with the newcomers and instructed them how to grow corn, pumpkins, and beans in Pennsylvania’s rich soil. But as thousands of Scotch-Irish, English, and German-speaking settlers arrived, friction developed.

 

“There was a population explosion of settlers,” says Douglas Miller, the historic site director of Pennsbury Manor in Morrisville, Penn’s former home on the Delaware. “Many of them were squatting on land they didn’t pay for.”

 

Nicolas More, an English settler who was a close friend of Penn, warned him in a letter of the Lenape’s growing unease: “The Indians are Mutch displeased at our English settling upon their Land … saying that William Penn hath deceived them for not paying for what he bought of them.”

 

That might have been unintentional. Penn was born into wealth and privilege, but those attributes did not ensure a propensity for financial details. He lost money and went into debt developing the colony’s ports, roads, and other infrastructure. Penn also spent lavishly. In addition to his extensive estate and farm at Pennsbury, he maintained grand estates in England and Ireland. Penn “liked the finer things in life,” Miller says, “and lived beyond his means.”

 

Penn’s affairs back in England were no less messy. Two years after he arrived in Pennsylvania, he returned to England to attend to political, family, and financial difficulties, including a border dispute between Pennsylvania and Lord Baltimore’s Maryland. Penn remained in England for fifteen tumultuous years: After his benefactor, King James II, was overthrown, Penn was arrested twice (once for treason) but acquitted of any crimes. His first wife died, and he remarried.

 

In 1699, Penn returned to Pennsylvania for two years but then found it necessary to go back to England to deal with more problems. In 1708, he was briefly thrown into debtor’s prison in London. Following a massive stroke in 1712, his physical and mental health declined, and he died in 1718, land rich but cash poor. All told, William Penn spent just four years of his life in Pennsylvania.

 

I n the colony their father founded, three of Penn’s sons from his second marriage, John, Thomas, and Richard, burned through their father’s bequest. By the 1730s, the Penn brothers had fallen deeply in debt.

 

“They lived high off the hog,” says Terry A. McNealy, author of Bucks County: An Illustrated History (Bucks County Historical Society). “They sold off a lot of land, but they ran out of land to sell.”

 

To raise cash, the Penns wanted to sell land beyond the northern boundary of the family’s previous purchases in lower Bucks County—that is, land they did not own. The subsequent transaction would require a deception that put a final dagger in William Penn’s Holy Experiment.

 

James Logan, the Penn family’s secretary and agent, played a key role in creating the fraudulent scheme. In 1737, Logan told the Lenape that their ancestors had signed a treaty with Penn a half-century earlier, in 1686, in which William Penn had purchased more land north of the Penns’ current holdings. He showed the Lenape a document that, historians agree, was an unsigned, never-executed draft from that era. Logan told them the land had been “signed, sealed, and paid for.” He said Penn’s sons would now claim it, and that it would be measured off by a man undertaking a walk—a typical way that Native Americans measured land. In this case, the walk would be for a day and a half.

 

The Lenape, by now outnumbered by well-armed settlers and subject to their capricious and self-serving laws, reluctantly agreed. “The Lenape also didn’t think the Penns were asking for much,” Harper says. The walk, they believed, would extend in a narrow corridor about twenty-four miles north into Bucks County, parallel to the Delaware River, ending near Tohickon Creek.

But Logan and the Penns had cooked up an ambitious swindle. They recruited three of the finest athletes in the area—Edward Marshall, James Yeates, and Solomon Jennings—and paid them to run, not walk, for a day and a half. The man who ran the farthest was promised a bounty of land. The Penns hired people to scout and clear a path through the woods far to the north and west. They hired horsemen to carry food and water and small boats to help them cross streams. “It was like they were running a marathon,” Harper says, “with a whole support staff.”

 

At sunrise on September 19, 1737, the three men started their run from the Wrightstown Meetinghouse, a few miles north of Philadelphia. Bucks County Sheriff Timothy Smith went along on horseback as an official observer. Initially, Lenape observers also accompanied the white men, but they grew angry over what they called the “hurry walk” and dropped out in disgust. Not only were Penn’s men running, they veered in an unexpected direction: northwest into the Lehigh Valley.

 

After camping for the night, one runner, Marshall, continued for another half-day. He finally collapsed in exhaustion, about sixty-five miles from Wrightstown, at the southern edge of the Poconos in the Indian village of Mauch Chunk, site of the present-day town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

 

After some deceptive map manipulation was added to the fraud, the Walking Purchase had created a massive, triangular wedge of land encompassing nearly 1,100 square miles, or 1.25 million acres—approximately the size of Rhode Island. All this land, according to the agreement, now belonged to the Penns.

 

“The Lenape were incredulous,” Miller says. They protested to the Pennsylvania Legislature (which had been established by William Penn and the English) and filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court—to no avail.

 

“The Penns didn’t fight the Lenape for the land with weapons,” Harper says. “They fought them with documents and deception.”

 

One Lenape sachem, Lappawinsoe, expressed his frustration. In a complaint recorded in writing at the time, according to the Delaware Tribe of Indians, the sachem said that the runners “should have walkt … and not have kept up the Run, Run all day.”

 

Another Lenape chief, Tishcohan, of the Minisink tribe, rejected the purchase as fraudulent and ordered his people to stay on their land. The Lenape appealed to the Iroquois, who lived to their west in Pennsylvania and had cut deals with the colony’s rulers. But the powerful, well-organized Iroquois nation saw the Lenape as weak and scornfully told them they had been conquered by the white men and should leave their land.

 

Emboldened by the fraudulent “purchase,” hundreds of settlers poured in and began evicting the Lenape from their ancestral home. With great sadness and anger, most of the Pennsylvania Lenape began dispersing west in search of a new Continued on page 66 homeland. “That first forced removal led to a cascade of removals,” says Jeremy Johnson, cultural education director for the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma, one of the three federally recognized Lenape nations in the United States. “There was no single Lenape community or single Lenape sachem, so under extreme pressure, we fractured into many groups. It was a diaspora.”

 

The Lenape’s exile took them first to the Susquehanna Valley in central Pennsylvania, but again white settlers pushed them out. In the French and Indian Wars of 1754, the Lenape took their revenge by siding with the French against the settlers who displaced them, returning to kill dozens of them. For more than a century, the Lenape continued to be displaced westward amid fifteen broken treaties and conflict with white settlers, including a 1782 massacre of ninety-six Lenape in Ohio. Bands of Lenape briefly settled and then left Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and finally settled, about 1873, on federally designated tribal reservations in Oklahoma. Three Lenape groups went north and settled in Ontario, Canada.

 

Displacement of Lenape in New Jersey, New York, and Delaware took place more gradually over decades. Intermarriage, conversions to Christianity, and assimilation muted Native American culture and identity.

 

In his role as cultural educator of the Oklahoma Lenape nation, Johnson has several times taken members of his tribe to see their ancestral homeland near the Delaware River. “People are always drawn to the river first,” he says. “We are water people.”

 

He also brings his delegations to the marker on Durham Road in Wrightstown that denotes where the runners of the Walking Purchase began their historic fraud. On each visit, Lenape descendants stand at this fateful spot with heads bowed in somber silence. “There’s a real heavy feeling among us,” Johnson says. “To be removed from the place that was your homeland for thousands of years.… It’s just a tremendous loss.”

 

Nearly 300 years later, he says, “It’s still an open wound.”

 

William Falk, a former newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist and the founding editor-in-chief of The Week magazine, lives in Lambertville, where he is a trustee of the city’s Historical Society. This is his first article for River Towns.

The Walking Purchase was just one of many betrayals the Lenape suffered at the hands of American colonists. During the Revolutionary War, the Native American tribe suffered several more, including violent attacks and the loss of yet more territory.

 

By the start of the Revolution in 1775, most Lenape had been forced to disperse from their original homelands in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York, with most of them driven into western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Those who remained in the Delaware Valley had muted their Native identity, converting to Christianity and intermarrying. What little historical evidence exists indicates the Lenape in this region, like other Native Americans, were divided by the war: Some supported the British, some the rebelling colonists, and many stayed neutral in a fight they did not view as theirs.

 

The Lenape who had been forced to move west were heavily pressed to take sides. In 1778, the Continental Army planned to attack the British at Fort Detroit, Michigan, but to do so had to cross Lenape-inhabited land in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley. So the United States offered a deal: In return for $10,000 in trade goods, a fort for their protection, and “peace and friendship,” the Lenape would allow the army’s unimpeded passage. The treaty also called for the creation of a fourteenth state, inhabited and governed by Native Americans in the Ohio River Valley, with a representative in Congress. The treaty of Fort Pitt, as this deal was called, was the first signed by the United States with a Native American nation.

 

But the treaty broke down within a year, as Congress failed to honor its promises. Several embittered Lenape groups decided to support and even fight for the British.

 

The Continental Army then turned on the Lenape. The army and militias attacked Lenape settlements in Ohio. In the bloodiest of these massacres, soldiers and Pennsylvania militiamen slaughtered ninety-six pacifist Lenape who’d been converted by Moravian Christians at Gnadenhutten, Ohio.

 

During and after the war, virtually all Lenape were driven from Ohio, with some eventually finding refuge in Oklahoma and others in Ontario, Canada.

 

“The war was a disaster for the Lenape and other Native Americans,’’ says Maxine Lurie, a historian of the Revolutionary War in New Jersey and professor emerita at Seton Hall University. “In the end, it did not matter what side they were on or even whether they tried to be neutral.’’

 

Who has the right to call themselves Lenape? That highly charged question is at the center of a four-decade-long effort by the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania to be recognized by the state.

 

About 500 people belong to the tribal group, most of them descendants of Lenape who did not leave Pennsylvania after the Walking Purchase. To survive in a society that viewed Native Americans with suspicion and hostility, many sublimated their native culture and identity, converted to Christianity, and intermarried.

 

“For generations, we had to hide or assimilate,” says Adam Waterbear DePaul, a chief of the tribe, which in 1996 founded a nonprofit to support outreach and education programs focused on tribal culture. “We could not practice our culture or speak our language. State recognition would raise awareness that we’re still here. It would be incredibly valuable for our people.”

 

State recognition would open direct communication between the state legislature and the Lenape, who want a voice in policy issues that concern them, including environmental and historical preservation, education, and health services. More than 15,000 people have signed a petition calling on the state Legislature to recognize the Pennsylvania Lenape, but that effort has stalled. Delaware and New Jersey both recognize their own local Lenape tribes. In Pennsylvania, opposition to tribal recognition stemmed from the false belief it could lead to the creation of a casino in Bucks County. But only federal recognition opens the door to legal gambling, and DePaul says the local Lenape have “no interest in a casino.” More recently, he says, state legislators are worried that official recognition might be seen as a form of “identity politics” that would violate President Trump’s executive orders to dismantle all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

 

Three tribal nations in New Jersey do have state recognition. But the three federally recognized Lenape tribes in Wisconsin and Oklahoma actually oppose both state and federal recognition of any Native American group whose descendants remained in the Delaware Valley and assimilated. They argue that only tribes that can document a collective identity and lineage back to the nineteenth century have the right to claim Lenape identity. With limited funding, aid, and other resources available to Native American groups, competition among them is fierce.

 

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad blood between us and the federally recognized tribes,” says Lia “Watching Sparrow” Gould, a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Nation, headquartered in Bridgeton, New Jersey. “They think our ancestors surrendered their culture to stay on the land. But our culture wasn’t gone. It was sleeping. Now we are re-establishing it.” With or without state recognition, DePaul says, the descendants of the region’s indigenous people will continue to promote and celebrate their heritage.

 

“The government may not want to recognize us,” he says, “but we know who we are.”

 

Sprinkled throughout Bucks County are places whose names were derived from the language of the Lenape (which translates to “original people”). A sampling ...

 

Aquetong, from “Achewetonk,” meaning “the spring among the bushes.”

 

Cuttalossa, from “Quatalossi,” the name of an Indian village in this valley.

 

Lahaska, from “Lahaskeke,” meaning “place of much writing,” perhaps because a treaty or treaties were signed there.

 

Nockamixon, from “Nocha-miska-ing,” meaning “at the place of soft soil.”

 

Neshaminy, from “Nisch-hanne,” meaning “double stream” or “place where we drink twice.”

 

Perkasie, from “Pokesing,” meaning “where hickory nuts are cracked.”

 

Paunacussing, from “Paunakas-sing,” or “where the powder was given to us.”

 

Tohickon, from “To-Hick-Hanne,” meaning “the stream over which we pass by means of a driftwood bridge.”