Daniel G. Brinton

“ Two years later, the Cayuga chief, John Hudson, said, at a council at Burlington, [184] "The Munseys are women, and cannot make treaties for themselves."
These were but repetitions of the famous diatribe of the Onondaga chieftain, Canassatego, at a council at Philadelphia, in 1742. Turning to the representatives of the Lenape, he broke out upon them with the words:—
"How came you to take upon you to sell land? We conquered you. We made women of you. You know you are women, and can no more sell land than women. ”

“ The analysis of a series of derivatives from the same root offers a most instructive subject for investigation in the Lenape. Not only does it reveal the linguistic processes adapted, but it discloses the psychology of the native mind, and teaches us the associations of its ideas, and the range of its imaginative powers. By no other avenue can we gain access to the intimate thought-life of this people. ”

“ As above mentioned, the turtle in its amphibious character and rounded back represented the earth or the land itself, as distinguished from water. Like the turtle, the land lies at times under the water and at times above it. The spirit of the earth was the practical and visible developmental energy of nature.
The medicine men, or conjurers, who professed to be in personal relations with this power, made their "medicine rattle" of a turtle shell (Loskiel) , and when they died, such a shell was suspended from their tomb posts (Zeisberger) . ”

“ The Indians almost universally believed the dry land they knew to be a part of a great island, everywhere surrounded [Pg 135] by wide waters whose limits were unknown. [228] Many tribes had vague myths of a journey from beyond this sea; many placed beyond it the home of the Sun and of Light, and the happy hunting grounds of the departed souls. The Delawares believed that the whole was supported by a fabled turtle, whose movements caused earthquakes and who had been their first preserver. ”

“ It was undoubtedly a fragment of this legend that the Swedish engineer, Lindstrom heard among the Lenape, on the Delaware, about 1650. They told him, or rather he understood them, as follows:—
"Once, one of your women (i.e., a white woman) came among us, and she became pregnant, in consequence of drinking out of a creek; an Indian had connection with her, and she became pregnant, and brought forth a son, who, when he came to a certain size, was so sensible and clever, that there never was one who could be compared to him, so much and so well he spoke, which excited great wonder ”

“ The form Tula has given rise to the strangest theorizing about this line, as, of course, the antiquaries could not resist the temptation to see in it a reference to the Tula or Tollan of Aztec mythology, the capital city of the Toltecs and the home of Quetzalcoatl.
The similarity of the words is purely fortuitous. The Lenape word tulpe means turtle or tortoise, especially, says Zeisberger, a water or sea turtle. In their mythology, as I have already shown (ante, p. 134) the earth was supposed to be floating on a boundless ocean, as a turtle floats on the surface of a pond. ”

“ David Zeisberger, the eminent Moravian missionary, [Pg 77] whose long and devoted labors may be accepted as fixing the standard of the tongue.
Before him, no one had seriously set to work to master the structure of the language, and reduce it to a uniform orthography. With him, it was almost a lifelong study, as for more than sixty years it engaged his attention. To his devotion to the cause in which he was engaged, he added considerable natural talent for languages, and learned to speak, with almost equal fluency, English, German, Delaware and the Onondaga and Mohawk dialects of the Iroquois. ”

“ The Lenape as "Women". A unique peculiarity of the political condition of the Lenape was that for a certain time they occupied a recognized position as non-combatants—as "women," as they were called by the Iroquois.
Indian customs and phraseology attached a two-fold significance to this term.
The more honorable was that of peace-makers. Among the Five Nations and Susquehannocks, certain grave matrons of the tribe had the right to sit in the councils, and, among other privileges, had that of proposing a cessation of hostilities in time of war. ”

“ The Montauk Indians of Long Island, a branch of the Mohegans, also worshiped these four deities, as we are informed by the Rev Sampson Occum; [136] and Captain Argoll found them again in 1616 among the accolents of the Potomac, close relatives of the Delawares. Their chief told him: "We have five gods in all, our chief god appears often unto us in the form of a mighty great hare, the other four have no visible shape, but are indeed the four winds, which keep the four corners of the earth." ”

“ Various other, tribes, not in their confederacy, and generally at war with them, spoke dialects of the same language. Such were the Hurons or Wyandots, between the Georgian Bay and Lake Erie, the Neutral Nation on the Niagara river, the Eries on the southern shore of the lake of that name, the Nottoways in Virginia, and the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. The Cherokees, found by the whites in East Tennessee, but whose national legend, carefully preserved for generations, located them originally on the head waters of the Ohio, were a remote offshoot of this same stem. ”

“ The turtle or tortoise is everywhere in Algonkin pictography the symbol of the earth. [226] From the earth, from the soil, all organic life, the whole realm of animate existence—ever sharply defined in Algonkin grammar and thought from inanimate existence—proceeds, directly as vegetable life, or indirectly as animal life. The earth is the All-Mother, ever-producing, inexhaustible. ”

“ It is needless for my purpose to enumerate the many small tribes which made up this great group. The more prominent were the Micmacs of Nova Scotia, the Abnakis of Maine, the Pequots and Narragansets, in New England, the Mohegans of the Hudson, the Lenape on the Delaware, the Nanticokes around Chesapeake Bay, the Pascataway on the Potomac, and the Powhatans and Shawnees further south; while between the Great Lakes and the Ohio river were the Ottawas, the Illinois, the Pottawatomies, the Kikapoos, Piankishaws, etc. ”

“ A legend common to the western Algonkin tribes, the Kikapoos, Sacs, Foxes, Ottawas and Pottawatomies, located their original home north of the St. Lawrence river, near or below where Montreal now stands. In that distant land their ancestors were created by the Great Spirit, and they dwelt there, "all of one nation." Only when they removed or were driven west did they separate into tribes speaking different dialects. ”

“ Those of the Delawares who fixed their abodes on the shores of the Atlantic divided themselves into three tribes. Two of them, distinguished by the names of the Turtle and the Turkey, the former calling themselves Unâmi, and the other Unalâchtgo, chose those grounds to settle on which lay nearest to the sea, between the coast and the high mountains. As they multiplied, their settlements extended from the Mohicanittuck (river of the Mohicans, which we call the North or Hudson river) to the Potomack. ”

“ Having united their forces, the Lenape and Mengwe declared war against the Alligewi, and great battles were fought, in which many warriors fell on both sides. The enemy fortified their large towns and erected fortifications, especially on large rivers and near lakes, where they were successively attacked and sometimes stormed by the allies. An engagement took place in which hundreds fell, who were afterwards buried in holes or laid together in heaps and covered over with earth. ”

“ These are the fundamental doctrines, the universal credo, of not only all the Algonkin faiths, but of all or nearly all primitive American religions.
This is very far from the popular conception of Indian religion, with its "Good Spirit" and "Bad Spirit." Such [Pg 68] ideas were not familiar to the native mind. Heckewelder, Brainerd and Loskiel all assure us in positive terms that the notion of a bad spirit, a "Devil," was wholly unknown to the aborigines, and entirely borrowed from the whites. Nor was the Divinity of Light looked upon as a beneficent father, or anything of that kind. ”

“ In the middle of the eighteenth century the remains of the Pompton Indians resided on the Raritan river. The boundaries of their territory were defined in 1756, at the Treaty of Crosswicks.
The Sanhicans occupied the Delaware shore at the Falls, near where Trenton now stands, and extended eastward along the upper Indian path quite to New York bay. Heckewelder says that this name, Sankhicani, means a gun lock, and was applied by the Lenape to the Mohawks who were first furnished with muskets by the Europeans. This has led some writers to locate a band of Mohawks at the Falls. ”

“ It is important for the ethnology of Pennsylvania, to understand that at the time of the first settlement the whole of the Susquehanna Valley, from the Chesapeake to the New York lakes, was owned and controlled by Iroquois-speaking tribes. ”

“ II. The Evil Manito, who now appears under the guise of a gigantic serpent, determines to destroy the human race, and for that purpose brings upon them a flood of water. Many perish, but a certain number escape to the turtle, that is, to solid land, and are there protected by Nanabush (Manibozho or Michabo) . [Pg 167] They pray to him for assistance, and he caused the water to disappear, and the great serpent to depart.
This canto is a brief reference to the conflict between the Algonkin hero god and the serpent of the waters, originally, doubtless, a meteorological myth. ”

“ Therefore, said they, when our ancestors saw the first white men, they looked upon them as divine, and adored them.
The Dutch travelers, Jasper Donkers and Peter Sluyter, relate a part of this myth as they heard it from New Jersey Indians in 1679. These informed them that all things came from a tortoise. It had brought forth the world, and from the middle of its back had sprung up a tree, upon whose branches men had grown. ”

“ No doubt, both lenno, which in Delaware means man, and len, in Lenape, are from the pronominal radicle of the first person né, I, we, mine, our. As the native considered his tribe the oldest, as well as the most important of created beings, "ours" with him came to be synonymous with what was esteemed ancient, indigenous, primeval, as well as human, man-like, par excellence. "We" [Pg 35] and "men" were to him the same. The initial l is but a slight modification of the n sound, and is given by Campanius as an r, "rhenus, homo." ”

“ Paints and Dyes. The paints and dyes used by the Lenape and neighboring Indians were derived both from the vegetable and mineral realms. From the former they obtained red, white and blue clays, which were in such extensive demand that the vicinity of those streams in New Castle county, Delaware, which are now called White Clay Creek and Red Clay Creek, was widely known to the natives as Walamink, the Place of Paint.
The vegetable world supplied a variety of dyes in the colored juices of plants. ”

“ The members of the confederacy were the Mohegans (Mahicanni) of the Hudson, who occupied the valley of that river to the falls above the site of Albany, the various New Jersey tribes, the Delawares proper on the Delaware river and its branches, including the Minsi or Monseys, among the mountains, the Nanticokes, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic, and the small tribe called Canai, Kanawhas or Ganawese, whose towns were on tributaries of the Potomac and Patuxent. ”

“ When the missionaries came among the Indians, the shrewd and able natives who had been accustomed to practice on the credulity of their fellows recognized that the new faith would destroy their power, and therefore they attacked it vigorously. ”

“ They are proofs of the oneness of the human mind, and nothing more.
As to the historical portion of the document, it must be judged by such corroborative evidence as we can glean from other sources. I have quoted, in an earlier chapter, sufficient testimony to show that the Lenape had traditions similar to these, extending back for centuries, or at least believed by their narrators to reach that far. What trust can be reposed in them is for the archaeologist to judge.
Authentic history tells us nothing about the migrations of the Lenape before we find them in the valley of the Delaware. ”

“ The dialect which the Moravian missionaries learned, and in which they composed their works, was that of the Lehigh Valley. That it was not an impure Minsi mixed with Mohegan, as Dr. Trumbull seems to think, [163] is evident from the direct statements of the missionaries themselves, as well as from Heckewelder's Minsi vocabularies, which show many points of divergence from the printed books. Moreover, among the first converts from the Delaware nation were members of the Unami or Turtle tribe, and Zeisberger was brought into immediate contact with them. ”

“ Their legends asseverated that at that time "the killing of a man was unknown, neither had there been instances of their dying before they had attained to that age which causes the hair to become white, the eyes dim, and the teeth to be worn away." ”

“ It does not form part of my plan to detail the later history of the Lenape. But some account of their number and migrations will aid in the examination of the origin and claims of the Walum Olum.
The first estimate of the whole number of native inhabitants of the province was by William Penn. He stated that there were ten different nations, with a total population of about 6000 souls. [203]
This was in 1683. Very soon after this they began to diminish by disease and migration. As early as 1690, a band of the Minsi left for the far West, to unite with the Ottawas. ”

“ None of the American colonies enjoyed a more favorable opportunity to introduce the Christian religion to the natives than that located on the Delaware river. What use was made of it?
The Rev. Thomas Campanius, of Stockholm, a Lutheran clergyman, attached to the Swedish settlement from 1642 to 1649, made a creditable effort to acquire the native tongue and preach Christianity to the savages about him. He translated the Catechism into the traders' dialect of Lenape, but we have no record that he succeeded in his attempts at conversion. ”

“ Loskiel, however, writing on the excellent authority of Zeisberger, states explicitly that the chief of each totem was selected and inaugurated by those of the remaining two. [80] By common and ancient consent, the chief selected from the Turtle totem was head chief of the whole Lenape nation.
These chieftains were the "peace chiefs." They could neither go to war themselves, nor send nor receive the war belt—the ominous string of dark wampum, which indicated that the tempest of strife was to be let loose. ”