The Lenape and Lehigh: Before the Valley Had a Name

Long before this valley had an English name, it had a Lenape one. The people who lived here called themselves the Lenni-Lenape, meaning the original people, and they had been in this watershed for centuries by the time European traders arrived. The Lehigh River you can see from the highway was their river too, a corridor for travel, a source of shad and eel, a landmark that divided their world into the familiar and the far away.

The Lenape who lived in the Lehigh Valley sat between two dialect groups: the Munsee speakers of the upper Delaware to the north, whose name comes from a place name meaning where stones are gathered together, and the Unami speakers to the south. Their villages were not fixed cities but seasonal patterns: summer longhouses near the water, winter camps back in the hills where deer and turkey were plentiful. The valley's geography made it one of the more hospitable places in the region, with rich bottomlands and a river that ran fast enough to keep clear all year.

Their political world was complex. The Lenape occupied a middle position in the northeastern tribal network, pressed into a tributary position by the Iroquois Confederacy to the north. William Penn had initially dealt with the Lenape through agreements meant to be fair, at least by colonial standards. His sons would not maintain that tradition.

By the seventeen twenties, pressure from European settlement was already pushing the Lenape westward. Missionaries would soon establish themselves along the Lehigh. Traders arrived. German and Scots-Irish settlers began claiming land in what the Lenape still regarded as home. The valley was filling with people who had entirely different ideas about who owned the ground beneath their feet.

What the Lenape lost here, and how they lost it, would become one of colonial Pennsylvania's defining scandals. That story comes next.