Walking Purchase: The Lenape, the Fraud, and the Road West

"As far as a man can go in a day and a half." That was the measure of the land, according to a deed from 1686 that Pennsylvania's proprietors produced half a century later, unsigned. In September 1737 the colony sent its walkers up a path cleared in advance, with horsemen carrying their supplies, and the Lenape who went along protested that the walkers ran. The fastest covered more than sixty miles. When the surveyors drew the line from where he stopped, the Lenape had lost some 1.2 million acres of their homeland along the Delaware and the Lehigh.

The first pages go back to around 1600, to a man fishing for shad below the falls of the Delaware, and to Lenapehoking, the country between the two great rivers, where every town had its own sachem and a sachem spoke only for the people who had agreed to let him. A council of women could name leaders and remove them. Europeans rarely grasped any of this, and the misunderstanding ran through every deed that followed, from William Penn's treaty at Shackamaxon to the walk itself.

After the walk comes the road west: the long protest over the fraud, the Ohio Country, the murder of Christian Lenape at Gnadenhutten in 1782, treaty after treaty and removal after removal, to Missouri and on to the Lenape nations of Oklahoma and Ontario.

Passyunk, Neshaminy, Manayunk: the old names are still on Philadelphia's bus stops, each one a line of Lenape describing the land beneath the pavement.