Map of the fork of the Delaware River, ca. 1735
In 1735, members of Pennsylvania’s government defrauded the Lenape (or Delaware Nation) out of more than a million acres of land. The sons of William Penn, the founding colonial governor of Pennsylvania, claimed to have a treaty granting them a tract of land bordered by the distance a man could walk in a day and a half. They then hired runners who covered far more ground. This swindle became known as the Walking Purchase, a foundational example of Lenape dispossession decades before the American Revolution. This is just one example of the many ways, some administrative and others violent, in which Indigenous tribes in eastern North America were uprooted from their homelands—often being pushed to territories further west.
In this map of the Walking Purchase region, Nicolas Scull, a Pennsylvania provincial deputy surveyor, notes potential natural resources: timber, water, soil, meadows, and “a quantity of good land.”
Nicholas Scull, Map of the fork of the Delaware River, ca. 1735. 11 7/8 × 14 5/8 in. (30.2 × 37.1 cm). The Walking Purchase collection, The Huntington, Purchased by the Library Collectors’ Council, January 2020.