The Walking Purchase

This whole valley was Lenape country — the homeland of the people the English called the Delaware, after the river. And I want to tell you the plain, ugly story of how it was taken, because it's one of the most brazen swindles in American history, and it happened right around here.

By the seventeen-thirties, the sons of William Penn — Pennsylvania's founder, who'd had a decent reputation for dealing fairly with the Lenape — were hungry for land and short on scruples. So Thomas Penn produced a dubious old deed, maybe fifty years old, of questionable authenticity, that supposedly let the Penns claim land measured by how far a man could walk in a day and a half. The Lenape, understanding this the honest way, figured a day-and-a-half's walk meant a reasonable distance — a man ambling along a trail, resting, covering maybe forty miles.

The Penns had other ideas. They quietly cut and cleared a straight path through the woods in advance. They hired the three fastest long-distance runners they could find and trained them. And on the appointed day in seventeen thirty-seven, those men didn't walk — they ran, flat out, relay-style, along that prepared track, for a day and a half, covering something like sixty-five brutal miles, nearly double what anyone honest expected. And then the Penns drew the boundary not straight back to the river, but off at an angle that swallowed even more — grabbing something like a million and a quarter acres, including much of this valley, right out from under the Lenape.

They called it the Walking Purchase. The Lenape called it what it was — a fraud — and protested it for the rest of their time here, and history has agreed with them: it's remembered as one of the great land swindles of colonial America. Within a generation the Lenape were pushed out of this homeland entirely, and their descendants live now in Oklahoma, in Wisconsin, up in Canada — scattered far from this river that still carries their name. So when you hear this called the Delaware Valley, remember: that's the river's name and the people's name both, and the people were run off it — by men who cheated at a footrace. Drive it knowing whose ground it was.