The World of William Penn by Richard S. Dunn & Mary Maples Dunn

Author:Richard S. Dunn & Mary Maples Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 1986-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

1. The Brandywine Delawares.

At the founding of Pennsylvania, there were perhaps five hundred Delaware Indians living on the Brandywine Creek in Chester County, whose attachment to what is even yet a marvelously beautiful country is not hard to understand. They ceded a region to William Penn in 1683 (see the purchase from Secetarius on map 12.1), but accepted his word that Indians and colonists should live together in a community of brotherhood. The Indians did not try to amalgamate with the English. Rather they wished to live nearby while preserving their own village society and customs. Today we might call it an effort at cultural pluralism. The Brandy-wines requested and received a reconveyance of a portion of their lands to be reserved for them forever. As they understood it, their reservation included the entire Brandywine Creek from its mouth to its headwaters on its west branch, together with a strip of land one mile wide on both sides of the creek.

Encroachment on the reservation began almost immediately after William Penn’s final departure from his province in 1701, and between 1702 and 1726 the whole reservation was consumed by colonials with the full knowledge and approbation of the provincial commissioners of property dominated by Secretary James Logan. Along the way, Logan acknowledged the Indians’ right to the land and offered grudging compensation, but when he discovered that their copy of Penn’s reservation grant had been destroyed in a cabin fire, he brushed them off and punished the colonials who had supported their claims. Made landless, the Brandywines migrated westward, some of them stopping off at the Susquehanna River, others continuing to the “Ohio country” (which included the Allegheny Valley).45 As late as 1751 an emigrant named Nemacolin told the story to Virginia’s agent Christopher Gist.46

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