As a child, most if not all of Tom Quick Jr.'s friends were Lenape. Again, it may be apocryphal, one of the embellishments in a legend that was never put to paper until a half-century after Quick's death, but it has long been believed that one of Quick's closest friends as a child was a young Lenape named Muskwink. The pair hunted and fished and traipsed the deer tracks through the rugged mountains and as they grew, they became as close as brothers. Whether the two were as close as the legend suggests is unclear, but it is likely that they knew each other.

It is certain that both grew up in a comparatively innocent time.

chapter continues

advertisement

William Penn

But as Tom Quick and Muskwink approached manhood, the winds were beginning to shift in the northern mountains of the Pennsylvania Colony. After William Penn's death, the proprietorship of the colony had been granted to his sons, young men who lacked both their father's temperance and his tolerance. At first, they adopted a kind of laissez faire attitude toward the colony, allowing their father's policies to continue more or less unchanged. But as is so often the case with heirs to great fortunes, the younger Penns soon found themselves with financial difficulties. By 1737, the Penns' fiscal woes were so severe that they and their agents decided to start hacking up the colony and selling off chunks of it. The problem was that much of the land they were selling had been promised by their father to the Lenape.

On their Web site, the Lenape nation, now based in Oklahoma, recounts what happened next.

"In order to convince the Lenape to part with the land, the Penns falsely represented an old, incomplete, unsigned draft of a deed as a legal contract. They told the Lenape that their ancestors some fifty years before had signed this document, which stated that the land to be deeded to the Penns was as much as could be covered in a day-and-a-half's walk."

"Believing that their forefathers had made such an agreement, the Lenape leaders agreed to let the Penns have this area walked off. They thought the whites would take a leisurely walk down an Indian path along the Delaware River. Instead, the Penns hired three of the fastest runners, and had a straight path cleared. Only one of the 'walkers' was able to complete the 'walk,' but he went fifty-five miles," according to the Lenape Web site.

By the time the Penns had finished redrawing the map, they had effectively cheated the Lenape out of a swath of pristine land as large as the present-day state of Rhode Island.

The infamous ploy — which came to be known as "The Walking Purchase" — had wounded the tissue of comity that bound the Indians and whites in Pennsylvania. It was only a matter of time before an infection took hold.

email print