country could not, in 1686, have been accurately known, this seems not unnatural. But now, by a foul advantage of this omission, it was resolved to run the line, not by the nearest course to the river, which would have been eastsouth-cast, or parallel to that by which they set out, but by a north-east course for a hundred miles and more, till it struck the Delaware near the mouth of Lackawaxen Creek, far above Easton. A fortunate westerly bend in the channel enabled them to effect this, and to cover by their deed at least a million of acres, when, by a fairer computation, three hundred and fifty thousand should have confined their claim.1

Their best lands, and even their accustomed villages being invaded by this enormous fraud, the Indians on the Delaware evinced a decided inclination not to submit to it. To provide against any evil consequences on this head, a number of deputies from the Six Nations were, in 1742, invited to visit Philadelphia, nominally to transact public business of a mutual importance, but really to persuade them to overawe the Delawares into acquiescence in the chicanery that had been practised upon them. Accordingly, after having been conciliated with a few hundred pounds' worth of presents, they were requested to prevail on their cousins the Delawares to remove from the lands in the forks of the river, which, it was pretended, their fathers had sold and been paid for long before. The chiefs of this tribe being assembled in the council-chamber, were then earnestly addressed by the speaker of the Six Nations.

In homely but forcible phrase he reproached them with their misconduct. "They deserved," said he, "to be taken by the hair of their heads and shaken severely, till they recovered their senses and became sober. But how came you," he continued, "to take upon you to sell lands at all? We conquered you; we made women of you; you know you are women, and can no more sell land than women; nor is it fit you should have the power of selling lands, since you would abuse it. This land that you claim is gone through your guts: you have been furnished with clothes, meat, and drink by the goods paid you for it, and now you want it again, like children as you are! But what makes you sell lands in the dark? Did you ever tell us that you had sold this land? Did we ever receive any part, even the value of a pipe-shank, from you for it? ** For all these reasons, we charge you to remove instantly: we don't give you the liberty to think about it. You are women. Take the advice of a wise man, and remove immediately. You may return to the other side of Delaware, where you came from; but we do not know whether, considering how you have demeaned yourselves, you will be permitted to live there, or whether you have not swallowed that land down your throats as well as the land on this side. We therefore assign you two places to go, either to Wyomen or Shamokin. You may go to either of these places, and then we shall have you more under our eye, and shall see how you behave. Don't deliberate, but remove at once, and take this belt of wampum." Having thus satisfactorily closed all debate, the speaker summarily

ejected "his cousins the Delawares" from the apart

ment.1

It was impossible for the Indians to disobey so potent a decree, and they removed as they were bidden. But the acquirement of their fields, so inexpensive at the beginning, in the end cost very dear. From that moment, they were ready to listen to the overtures of the French, and to contemplate with no great displeasure the discomfiture of both the Iroquois and the English. For it was not within the bounds of human endurance unmoved to see their wives and little ones starving by their side, and to feel themselves the sharp pangs of poverty and famine, while the whites were feasting on the fatness of their ancient inheritance. It is useless to tell a rudely-reasoning and famishing barbarian, or, for the matter of that, a sage philosopher in the same condition, as did the deputies of the Six Nations at Philadelphia, that he or his ancestors had long ago sold the millions of acres along the Delaware, which they once occupied; and had enjoyed the full benefit of the two guns, six stroud-water coats, six blankets, six duffel watch-coats, and four kettles,' that were said to have been paid to them by William Penn. An undisciplined feeling of natural equity, stimulated perhaps by hunger, advised them that such a price, if the story of its ever having been paid at all were true, was a poor compensation for the abandonment of a region abounding at the time in game and yielding ready crops of maize and pumpkins, for their new and dreary homes. Conrad Weiser, that strange compound, to whom Indian

2

Thomson, p. 45.

2 Ibid, p. 19.

life and the Indian tongue were perhaps more familiar than English, gives a piteous account of their condition in the winter of 1737, when he passed from Tulpehocking in Pennsylvania on his way to New York. Scattered through the forests, they would fix their camps near a grove of sugar-maple trees, the juice of which constituted the only magazine of food upon which they could with any certainty rely. Here the children searched along the lowlands and the banks of streams for nuts and esculent roots,' or crowded weeping with their mothers around the traveller, in whose exhausted pouch yet remained a few crumbs of corn-meal. A handful of maize steeped in a pot of ash-lye to make a kind of soup, constituted to them a most luxurious but unwonted dish. In the meantime, the husbands and fathers of the party, disdaining to rob their families of the miserable pittance which preserved them from death. though not from starving, would range for weeks at a time through all the region between the Shamokin and the upper waters of the Susquehannah in fruitless search of game. By day he scouted through the dense spruceforests, beneath those evergreen boughs which the sun's rays rarely pierced; every sense painfully on the alert lest the tread of a deer or the distant flight of a mountain grouse should escape his observation; or lest, by a misstep, he should be cast headlong down some precipitous chasm, or slipping between treacherous logs, be chilled in the icy

"The turkey-pea has a single stalk, grows to a height of eight or ten inches, and bears a small pod. It is found in rich, loose soils; appears among the first plants in the spring, and produces on the root small tubers of the size of a hazel-nut, on which the turkeys feed. The Indians are fond of, and collect them in considerable quantities."-Hunter, 425.

torrent of the dark, deep-flowing streams. Cold and hungry, he would lie down at nightfall crouched beneath a pile of boughs, the snow drifting the while in fierce wreaths about his sleeping form; and in the morning awake, stiff and cold, to find his fire still burning in the hole, two or three feet deep, that it had melted during the night in the snow. With returning light, the labors of the chase are resumed. In vain he threads the Dia-dachlu or Wandering River (as he named Lycoming Creek); its fords at this season waist deep, its current swift and powerful and icy cold; or the fierce Oscohu, mountain-born, flowing between fringing maples. Carefully avoiding the weird ravine which superstition invested with mysterious horrors as the home of the Otkon, an evil spirit who delighted in blood and was only to be appeased by magical sacrifices, he would shudderingly gaze from the brow of a distant hill at the skulls which, bleaching in the winter's storms, declared at once the extent of the demon's power and the place of his abode. Then turning to the north, he penetrates to the summit of the hill where, according to tradition, pumpkins, corn, and tobacco first grew for the benefit of humanity; but only to find that they grew there no longer. Exhausted and weary, the poor wretch turns his face homewards, and with languid gait-sperans meliora -seeks his camp by the water-side; diverging perchance on the way to visit the beaver-dam at the confluence of the Towanda and Lycoming Creeks, where once within his own memory many pipes of tobacco had been smoked before "his grand-fathers the beavers." Now not a sign of their presence remained. To supply the insatia