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  • Making History:Documenting the 1737 Walking Purchase
  • Steven C. Harper (bio)

Several popular accounts tell how, in the summer of 1737, the Pennsylvania proprietors negotiated with four Delaware sachems for land west of the Delaware River that could be traversed by a walker in day-and-a-half. When the walk was executed in September, the hired walkers traveled more briskly and northwesterly than the Delawares assumed they would. Indeed the ablest walker covered more than sixty miles, resulting in Delaware complaints.

Such popular retellings of the story contribute to a folk consciousness where there is too much certainty about what exactly happened. There is little demand for someone to cloud this story, whose so-called facts are already well known. As William Heller wrote, "there is no doubt the Indians honestly believed they had been betrayed, but the facts lead us to believe that there was no intention on the part of the whites to demand only what their deed called for."1 Delaware complaints did not match these facts. They were therefore sincere but mistaken and considered too simple to understand such sophisticated things. [End Page 217]


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Figure 1.

Francis Jennings was first to notice that the facts in this case are not what they seem. In 1970 he published an iconoclastic article titled "The Scandalous Indian Policy of William Penn's Sons: Deeds and Documents of the Walking Purchase."2 That is a significant story, but another set of deeds and documents of the Walking Purchase unfold another chapter, one that emphasizes Delawares as active agents in history and the concerted suppression of it. Delawares were almost absent from the popular narratives and only passively concerned in Jennings's focus on the Penns' policy. Did it have to be that way? Were Delawares passive? Did Delawares actively influence historical outcomes? Did they have a story to tell? In the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Quaker Collection at Haverford College repose a few precious documents in which Delawares speak for themselves. Most of these have only recently been published under the editorship of Alden Vaughan in Early American Indian Documents . These precious sources reveal Delawares as actively, outspokenly involved in all that led to, comprised, and followed the Walking Purchase.3 Moreover, not until a rapidly-deteriorating map in the Penn Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania is read in the [End Page 218] light of these Delaware accounts can the facts of the Walking Purchase be recovered. The Delawares documented their story, but it was quickly buried under the considerable weight of the official story, a tale based on actual events but crafted carefully by James Logan and his accomplices under the auspices of the Penns. That is a historical fact.

Informed by more than a half-century of negotiating land deals with Europeans, Delawares in 1682 marked a deed offered by agents of William Penn. That act created between Neshaminy Creek and the Delaware River something close to what Richard White called a "middle ground," a shared landscape where both natives and colonists were free to come and go. There were ominous undertones in the document. It reflected Penn's assumption that the landscape could become privately-possessed, alienable land.4 The deed invited its readers to envision boundaries by referring to "a certaine white oak," "gray stones over against the Falls of Dellaware River," and a "white oak marked with the letter P standing by the Indyan Path."5 It called on such natural features to facilitate its readers' visualization of a boundless landscape in terms of the subjective geometry to which they were accustomed. Most tellingly, it assigned the subdivisions to individuals, as in "John Wood's land."6 But the Delawares negotiated until Penn's agents added an amendment that ensured them the ability to "freely pass Throu" the land "with out molestation[n]."7 When Delawares marked deeds, including this 1682 deed and the 1737 Walking Purchase, they consistently intended to signify "a relationship commencing rather than a deal closing."8

By February 1684, colonists were encroaching too much on Delawares. Tammany, the legendary sachem, forbade further settlement, threatening to burn the homes...

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