Land Swindle: The Pennsylvania Walking Purchase

There were many ways unscrupulous land speculators could take land away from unsuspecting Native tribes.  Some did not bother to consult the tribes at all, as we saw with the Yazoo Scandal in Georgia.  Others might use coercion, liquor or mistranslation to force Natives to give up their land, as may have been the case with the Treaty of Payne's Landing in Florida.  Still others resorted to outright fraud.  We'll look at one such case here:

William Penn (1644-1718), was known for his honest dealing with the Delaware/Lenape tribe and they did respect him.  His sons were a different matter.  They wanted to expand the Penn family land holdings in Pennsylvania and were willing to go to any lengths to do so.  In 1737, John and Thomas Penn produced what they claimed was a deed from 1686 between their father and Delaware leaders promising to sell a tract of land beginning at the junction of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, near modern-day Easton, Pennsylvania, and extending as far as a man could walk in a day and half.  Today, sources differ as to what this document was.  It might have been an unsigned agreement between the elder Penn and Delaware leaders, or it might have been a forged land deed.  Who really knows? 

The Penns' land office agent, James Logan, produced another map misrepresenting the Lehigh River as Tohickon Creek, and including a dotted line which showed a path that a man could feasibly walk in the allotted time.  Believing that the land requested wasn't as much as they originally feared, the Lenape/Delaware agreed.  They believed that a man could only walk about 40 miles in a day and half, anyway.  Logan, working on behalf of the Penns, hired three of the fastest runners in the colony, who ran as far as they could in a day and half starting on September 19, 1737.  Only one runner finished the race.  The Sheriff conducting the marathon then claimed all the land east of the finish line and ending at the Delaware River.  The resulting land claim was 1,200,000 acres of land in what is now Pike, Monroe, Carbon, Schuylkill, Northampton, Lehigh and Bucks Counties, an area about the size of Rhode Island. 

The Delaware leaders were aghast, to put it mildly.  Chief Lappawinsoe is supposed to have said that, "the white runners should have walked along by the Delaware River or the next Indian Path to it...should have walked for a few miles and then have sat down and smoked a pipe, and now and then have shot a squirrel and not have kept up running all day."  In other words, the Settlers had showed their greed and disrespect of the Delaware by conducting the walk as a footrace and demanding so much land.  The Delaware appealed to the Iroquois, who had overall control of the area, but the Penns had thought of that angle.  They had persuaded the Iroquois, likely with more liquor and trade goods, not to get involved.  Lappawinsoe and his people had to leave the contested area, crowding into the Shamokin and Wyoming Valleys, where they clashed for space with other dislocated tribes and bands.  They later drifted to the Ohio River Valley and never trusted the Pennsylvania government again.

In 2004, descendants of the Lenape/Delaware brought suit in federal court seeking reparation for this fraudulent land deal.  While the District Court agreed that the original documents and method of procuring the land was likely fraudulent, but decreed the case non-justiciable on technical grounds.  The Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the trial court's ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.