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Friday, May 16, 2003

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The year 1737 was a low point in a history full of them for the Delawares.

The sons of William Penn pulled off the "walking purchase," a rip-off in which they used a questionable 1685 agreement that ceded land as far as a man could walk in a day-and-a-half to claim the entire region between the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers. They got speedy runners to make the journey on cleared pathways, vastly extending the affected territory. The Delaware Indians lost 1,200 square miles of land.

The next year, Moses Tumba Tetamy, a member of the tribe who was an interpreter for Presbyterian missionaries, was granted a 315-acre tract on the forks of the Delaware River in Northampton County.

Ironically, the obscure 1738 grant made in the wake of the loss of tribal land is the basis of the claim announced Wednesday by the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe to land now occupied by Binney and Smith, maker of Crayola crayons.

The Oklahoma-based tribes say that grant, though made to an individual rather than a tribe, gives them claim to a 315-acre tract and a wedge into opening a casino in Pennsylvania.

Tetamy, an interpreter who converted to Christianity and married a white woman, became the first Indian landowner in the commonwealth.

"It's not unprecedented to extend [land claims] from an individual to a whole tribe," said Dennis J. Whittlesey, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who has researched the Delawares' claims. "In Indian society and life, there was almost no such thing as a notion of private land ownership. There was communal ownership and communal sharing."

The tribe that called themselves the Lenape -- "the People" -- lived in what is now New Jersey at the time Europeans arrived in the New World; the Europeans dubbed them the Delaware, after the river they had named for Lord de la Warr, the governor of the Jamestown colony.

The Lenape were massacred by the Dutch, forced off their land by the British, and were living under the domination of the Iroquois federation in Eastern Pennsylvania at the time of the walking purchase.

Tetamy's claim was temporarily lost only a few years after it was granted when the Iroquois ordered the Delawares out of their land, said Richard Grimes of Regent Square, a graduate student at West Virginia University who is writing his dissertation on the Delaware in the 18th century. Tetamy reapplied for a grant but was refused by the governor. He eventually settled in New Jersey.

In a last effort to maintain their home in Pennsylvania, the Delawares tried to undo the walking purchase, appealing to the British in the late 1750s to get their land back. Sir William Johnson, superintendent for Northern Indian Affairs for Great Britain, presided over the talks between the proprietors of the disputed land and the Delawares.

The main interpreter for the proceedings until his death in 1761 was Tetamy.

As often happened, the British insisted on a single leader to speak for the entire group, while the decentralized Delawares tried to argue that no one chief could speak for them.

Nevertheless, one did. Teedyuscung, who apparently was pressured by all sides and was often inebriated, represented the Delawares.

After several years of negotiations, Johnson ultimately ruled against the Delawares, citing among other arguments affidavits from the runners that they had not violated the agreement in any way, Grimes said. But Johnson ordered the commonwealth to compensate Teedyuscung and some other Delawares. Teedyuscung agreed to quit all claim to the land in 1762.

Tetamy's family was given claim to the 315 acres after his death.

Whittlesey said that claim stands, despite the document signed by Teedyuscung.

"The walking purchase case is an entirely different case," he said. "We're also working on the walking purchase case. But by virtue of the patent that was issued [to Tetamy] the title was not and could not have been extinguished by that process."

A whole group of Delawares lived on Tetamy's land throughout the rest of the 18th century, Whittlesey said.

They were evicted in 1802. That action would have been illegal at that point, Whittlesey said, because of a law first passed in 1790 that mandated congressional approval for any transfer of Indian land.

The descendants of Tetamy were forced to move west in a pattern that was repeated over and over in the Delawares' brutal history of displacement.

The Delawares had established themselves in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio after their loss of land in Eastern Pennsylvania. They lost most of their Ohio Valley lands after the American Revolution. From 1801 to 1808, the Delawares were invited by other Native American groups to go to Indiana. By 1818, they were being removed from Indiana territory, and went to Missouri. In 1828, they were forced to relinquish their remaining land and move to Kansas. In 1866, most moved to Indian territory -- the current state of Oklahoma -- where Cherokees gave them land.

The Delaware live in two areas of Oklahoma now, Anadarko and Bartlesville. Splinter groups from that long, slow, forced migration are scattered from Ontario to Pennsylvania to Ohio.

Staff writer Cindi Lash contributed to this article.