The Walking Purchase: Pennsylvania's First Land Fraud

William Penn spent thirty years negotiating treaties with the Lenape that were, by the standards of colonial land acquisition, genuinely unusual. He paid for land. He learned enough of the Lenape language to speak at council. He called the Lenape his brothers in correspondence and meant something closer to what the word implied than most colonial administrators did. When he died in seventeen eighteen, the relationship between Pennsylvania and the Lenape people was more intact than almost anywhere else in the British colonial world.

His sons had different priorities.

Thomas and John Penn came to Pennsylvania in the seventeen thirties facing significant debt and found a possible solution in an old, disputed document, a deed from sixteen eighty-six that specified a land grant extending as far as a man could walk in a day and a half. The Lenape remembered agreeing to something modest, perhaps about forty miles of territory along a branch of the Delaware River. The Penns saw an opportunity.

In August of seventeen thirty-seven, they organized what would become known as the Walking Purchase. They hired not ordinary walkers but trained runners, men who had spent months conditioning themselves for the task. They cleared the path in advance, cutting brush, marking the route, staging food and horses along the way. When the walk began on September nineteenth, the runners covered seventy miles in the allotted day and a half, more than twice what a realistic walking pace would have achieved. Then the Penns drew a line perpendicular to the endpoint, extending to the Delaware River, enclosing approximately twelve hundred square miles of the Delaware River valley.

The Lenape protested. They sent delegations. They argued that the Penns had violated the spirit and the terms of any legitimate agreement. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which had political authority over the Lenape in colonial law, sided with the Penns in exchange for separate concessions. The Lenape had no legal remedy they could exercise. By seventeen fifty-eight, the last Lenape communities in eastern Pennsylvania signed the Treaty of Easton and moved west. Their descendants are the Delaware Nation, headquartered today in Oklahoma and Canada. Pennsylvania has no federally recognized tribe residing in the state.