The Lenape and the Schuylkill: A River People's Country

The Schuylkill River bends around the western edge of Reading with such quiet authority you might not notice it at first, just a dark thread between the city streets and the hills beyond. But that river was here long before the city, long before any European name was attached to this valley, and its original inhabitants understood it in ways that no map ever captured.

The people who lived along this stretch of the Schuylkill were the Lenape, also called the Delaware by European newcomers. Their name for themselves, Lenni-Lenape, means something like "the original people" or "real people." They had occupied the watershed of the Delaware and its tributaries, including the Schuylkill, for centuries before contact, moving through the landscape in seasonal rhythms: summer camps near the water where fishing was rich, winter hunting territories inland where deer browsed in the hardwood forests.

The Schuylkill, whose name comes from the Dutch for "hidden river," ran through the heart of their world. Shad and eel moved up it in spring. Its bottomlands produced the soil that fed their gardens of corn, beans, and squash. The Lenape maintained networks of trails, trade connections stretching from the Hudson River south to the Chesapeake, east to the Delaware Bay, and west toward the Ohio country. The Berks County valleys were not wilderness to them; they were home.

When William Penn arrived in the sixteen eighties and began negotiating land arrangements, the Lenape in southeastern Pennsylvania were his primary counterparts. Penn dealt with them through purchase agreements, attempting a different colonial model than his neighbors. That model did not survive his death. His sons took a very different approach, and the Lenape world along the Schuylkill would never recover from what followed.

The river is still here. Most Lenape now live far away, in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, though Lenape communities remain in Pennsylvania.