The Walking Purchase: A Swindle Measured in Running Shoes

In September of seventeen thirty-seven, three men set out from the banks of the Delaware River to walk a boundary line. The Lenape chiefs who watched them go expected a casual walk, maybe thirty miles in a day and a half. What they got was something else entirely.

The Penn family (William Penn had died in seventeen eighteen, leaving his sons Thomas and John in charge of the colony) claimed to have found an old treaty from sixteen eighty-six granting the Lenape's cession of as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half. Historians have since concluded the document was almost certainly a forgery or, at best, an unsigned draft never agreed to by any Lenape leader. But in seventeen thirty-seven, it was presented as binding.

Thomas Penn hired three of the fastest runners in the colony. He had a path cleared through the brush days in advance. He stationed relay teams with horses carrying food and water. The Lenape representatives who accompanied the walkers grew furious as the men ran. They protested that this was not walking. The Lenape later said the runners would not sit down to smoke, would not rest, would not behave like men on a walk. One runner died from the effort. Another barely survived. The winner covered about seventy miles.

The boundary line drawn at right angles from that endpoint stripped the Lenape of most of the Lehigh Valley, approximately one million two hundred thousand acres. Most Lenape were forced off their lands within five years. The Iroquois Confederacy, which the Penns had enlisted as pressure, told the Lenape they had no right to complain.

The resentment that built from this dispossession fueled Lenape participation against the British during the French and Indian War twenty years later. The colonists had broken something that could not easily be fixed. The valley that is now Allentown, the farms and roads and cities built on this land, sits atop that unresolved history.