T CHAPTER I THE INDIANS OF PENNSYLVANIA HE stream of American history flows from a source comparatively near-the arrival here of white men from Europe. In the year when Elizabeth of England died, 1603, no white man, it is safe to say, had ever seen the region which we call PENNSYLVANIA. Its vast woods, its great rivers, its unique mineral treasures, were then as unknown to the wisest geographer of the Old World as were the deepest jungles of Africa, or the farthest ice-floes of the polar seas. The opening years of the Seventeenth Century become thus the initial period for our narrative. The arrival of the white men, and the human experiences growing out of that epochal event, form the story which we have to tell. Yet Pennsylvania had its own inhabitants, a people who possessed no doubt a long and romantic history, when the ships of the white men came. They were tribes of that red race whom, since the voyages of Columbus, and because of his geographical error, we have called Indians. Their presence and influence form the background to all American history, and we must pause to consider them before we can intelligently proceed. We have some sources of knowledge concerning them as they appeared when the white men came: their own traditions, legends, and folk-lore; evidence afforded by their arms, implements, and utensils; descriptions of them by the white people who saw them early: and finally study of them under the light which we have gained concerning the life of similar primitive peoples throughout the world. Yet with the best efforts to utilize all these sources our knowledge of the Indians remains meagre and unsatisfying. It may be said, in brief, that the whole of Pennsylvania, in the year 1600, was the Indians' land. While they did not occupy it, in a strict sense of the word, they enjoyed its complete possession in the manner suited to their way of life; they hunted in the forests, fished in the streams, planted their little crops in the open spaces, and appropriated to their use whatever it might yield them of air to breathe, water to drink, food and shelter, enjoyment and pleasure, warfare and spoil. How many there were of them is wholly left to conjecture. It is agreed that they were few. A century later, an estimate attributed to William Penn supposed there were "ten Indian Nations" in the province, with "about six thousand" souls belonging to them. But this estimate seems too low for the end of the Seventeenth Century, and much too low for its beginning. The original printing of the estimate is in Oldmixon's "British Empire in America," published in 1701. Who then were these Indians of Pennsylvania? What was their origin? Whence did they come? These are questions most suitable for the archæologist and philologist. If we judge by the evidence of language, the Indians of Eastern Pennsylvania would seem to have come from a parent stock in the far northeast, beyond the St. Lawrence river. Yet they themselves preserved a tradition, which Heckewelder, the pious Moravian missionary, who labored amongst them in the Eighteenth Century, has handed down to us, that they came from the distant west, a region far beyond the Mississippi, and had reached the Delaware after a migration occupying many years, or even centuries, in the course. of which, as they passed through what are now the States of the Ohio Valley, they fought with and overcame tribes of that region, though these had desperately defended themselves in fortified places. This tradition is worthy of attention, but it is not a chapter of history. In the concise review that must be here given we shall consider first the Indians of Eastern Pennsylvania, describing them as they probably were when the white men settled on the Delaware, in the first half of the Seventeenth Century. These Indians were a simple and primitive people, not “savage" as to disposition, nor in the stage of development properly designated by that word. They had long possessed and used fire. They subsisted only in part by the chase and the fishery; they depended in part for their food on a systematic tillage of the soil. They had developed some arts of manufacture. Their arms and implements were mostly of the Stone Age, but they had begun to emerge from it. They had a political system well settled and effective. Their social usages were in many particulars well developed and strictly observed. They comprehended and in a degree regarded moral obligations, and their ideas of religion exhibited a glimmering of the highest truth. Along the Delaware river, on both sides, from the New York line and beyond-down to the sea, these Indians, afterwards called Delawares, called themselves Len-â-pé or Lenni Len-â-pé. By language, and presumably by blood, they were members of a great Indian family, the Algonkian, the most extensive in North America. Tribes of this widespread family "stretched from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Churchill river of Hudson Bay to Pamlico Sound in North Carolina." Though thus widely scattered, resemblances of language survived, and traditions of relationship were cherished among them all. Many of the Indian tribes with whom the history of the American people is most associated, many whose vigor and persistency of life have made them most familiar in our annals, are or were of this extensive group-Pequots and Narragansetts of New England, Mohegans of New York, Powhatans of Virginia, Shawnees, Miamis, Chippewas, Ottawas of the interior, and Arapahoes, Cheyennes, Blackfeet, and others of the Mississippi Valley and Far West. It was the Algonkian Indians whom the English-speaking explorers, landing on the Atlantic Coast in Carolina and northward, first encountered, and who received them almost uniformly in peace. Massasoit, the lifelong friend of the Plymouth Pilgrims; his son Philip, famous for his brave but Rock Carving of the Turtle Clan of the Iroquois Indians The rock is in the bed of the Ohio river at ineffectual resistance to white encroachment; Powhatan, forever conspicuous in the Virginia chronicle; and Pontiac and Tecumseh, who in the western country later struggled and failed like Philip to stem the white tide, were all Algonkian chiefs. It is conceded that in this Algonkian family the Lenâpé of the Delaware region were representatives of a parent stock. In the traditions common to all the tribes special dignity and authority were assigned them. Forty tribes, it is said, looked up to them with respect, and in the Algonkian great councils-if such were ever held-they took first place as the "Grandfathers" of the race, while the others were called by them "children," "nephews,' "grandchildren." That this precedence of the Lenâpé had any importance within the period of the white settlement can hardly be said. It seems true that the Algonkian tribes refrained from war with one another, and some writers speak of a "Lenâpé Confederacy." The Lenâpé of the Delaware region formed three sub-tribes. These were the Min-si, people of the stony lands, who lived in the mountain country, from about the Lehigh river northward into New York and New Jersey; the U-na-mi, down-river people, whose habitat may be regarded as extending from the Lehigh to about the Delaware State line; and lastly the U-na-lach-tigo, tidewater people, or people living near the sea, who occupied the land on the lower reach of the river, and on the bay. How far each of these roamed and claimed it is hard to say; the Minsi spread into New Jersey; the Unami had an uncertain hold beyond the Schuylkill, toward the watershed of streams flowing to the Susquehanna; and the Unalachtigo probably occupied most of the east shore of the Delaware river, within the present State of Dela ware. After the manner general if not uniform among the North American Indians, each of these sub-tribes of the Lenâpé had its animal type, its totem. That of the mountaineers was appropriately the Wolf, the central sub-tribe had the Turtle, and the Bay dwellers the Turkey. With the creatures which they thus adopted as their symbols they imagined themselves in some way connected by a mystic but powerful tie, and each member of the totemic fraternity was closely bound to every other one. But to the Turtle, and consequently his sub-tribe, they ascribed the greatest dignity, for they shared with peoples of the Old World the myth that a great tortoise, first of all created beings, bore the |