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The Hurry Walk

The conclusion of the Walking Purchase on September 20, 1737

A colony founded on fair dealing hired the three fastest men it could find and turned a land treaty into a footrace. In a day and a half they walked the Lenape out of their homeland — and it was all perfectly, deliberately legal.

7 chapters · 12 sourcesBy HistoraiPublished September 20, 2026

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c. 1730s CE

The Forks of the Delaware

Lenape homeland: Lenapehoking
Where the Lehigh meets the Delaware
Penn's colony known for fair dealing

Ada: Where the Lehigh River folds into the Delaware — near what's now Easton, Pennsylvania — there was a place the Lenape called home. Green valley, good hunting, villages along the water. They called their whole homeland Lenapehoking, and this piece of it they called the Forks.

Theo: And this is Penn country, right? William Penn's Pennsylvania.

Ada: It is. I'm Ada, that's Theo, and this is Historai — where today a colony famous for keeping its word turns a land deal into a footrace, and does it all perfectly legally.

Theo: Perfectly legally is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Ada: It is. Because William Penn really did earn that fair-dealing reputation with the Lenape back in the sixteen eighties. The trouble starts after he's gone.

c. 1730s CE

A Deed From the Drawer

1686 deed: 'as far as a man could walk in a day and a half'
No signatures, no legal formalities
James Logan drives the scheme

Ada: William Penn dies in seventeen eighteen. His sons, John and Thomas, inherit the colony — and a mountain of debt. They need land they can sell, fast. And the Forks is exactly the land they want.

Theo: So how do you take land from people your own father made a point of dealing with honestly?

Ada: You find a piece of paper. In the seventeen thirties the Penns produce a deed dated sixteen eighty-six. It claims the Lenape once agreed to sell land as far as a man could walk in a day and a half.

Theo: A day and a half of walking. That's the whole measurement?

Ada: That's it. Starting near Wrightstown, at the line between the Neshaminy and the Delaware. And here's the catch — the deed had no proper signatures, no legal formalities. The original Lenape parties were long dead or gone.

Theo: So it might not even be real.

Ada: Scholars still argue. Some say it's a genuine unsigned draft that was never finalized; others say it's an outright forgery. Either way, the man driving the scheme knows exactly how to use it — the provincial secretary, James Logan.

Theo: And Penn himself once wrote something that fits this uncomfortably well, didn't he?

Ada: He did. William Penn wrote that a man would deserve the name of wise if he outwits them in any treaty about a thing they understand. His sons took the advice.

August 1737 CE

The Map That Lied

Meeting at Stenton, Logan's estate
Doctored map mislabels the Lehigh as Tohickon Creek
Lenape expected ~forty miles; signed Aug 25, 1737

Ada: August seventeen thirty-seven. Logan and Thomas Penn bring the Lenape sachems to Logan's estate, Stenton, near Philadelphia. Nutimus, the leader at the Forks. Lappawinzo. Tishcohan. Manawkyhickon.

Theo: The same men Gustavus Hesselius painted, right? Those portraits from seventeen thirty-five.

Ada: The very same faces. And at Stenton, the agents lay out a map. A doctored one. It mislabels the distant Lehigh River as the much nearer Tohickon Creek, and draws a short, gentle dotted line for the walk.

Theo: So the Lenape are looking at a map that quietly shrinks the whole thing.

Ada: Exactly. They figured a man walks maybe forty miles in a day and a half at a reasonable pace. And they're assured they won't be pushed off their own settlements. That's the promise.

Theo: Forty miles for a normal walk. That sounds almost fair.

Ada: It would be — if the word walk meant what they thought. Reluctantly, they sign. The final signing is in Philadelphia on the twenty-fifth of August, seventeen thirty-seven — believing they've sold a short walk's worth of land.

September 19, 1737 CE

Ye Hurry Walk

Three trained runners start at a chestnut tree, 6am
Trail pre-cleared, boats and horses staged
Jennings drops out; ~44 miles by day one's end

Ada: Dawn, the nineteenth of September. Near the Wrightstown Friends Meetinghouse, three men put their hands on a chestnut tree. Edward Marshall, James Yeates, Solomon Jennings.

Theo: Three men. Why three, for a walk?

Ada: Because these aren't walkers. They're the fastest runners the Penns could hire, trained for months. The sheriff, Timothy Smith, is timekeeper. Six in the morning, he gives the word — and they run.

Theo: Wait. The deed said walk. They're running?

Ada: A dead run. Better than four miles an hour, all day. And it was rigged in advance — the trail secretly cleared, underbrush cut back, horses carrying the supplies, boats pre-placed to ferry them across the streams.

Theo: So none of the friction of an actual journey. That's not a loophole, that's a production.

Ada: The Lenape had a name for it. Their interpreter, Moses Tatamy, gave it to us — they called it ye hurry walk. Marshall reportedly swung an axe as he went, just to keep his arms driving.

Theo: And the Lenape witnesses are watching this happen.

Ada: They are. About nineteen miles in the first two and a half hours. Jennings gives out, exhausted, drops away. The Lenape witnesses — John Combush, Joe Tuneam, and a third man — turn back in disgust. They can see exactly what this is.

Theo: Where does day one even end?

Ada: At Hockendauqua Creek, near modern Northampton. Around forty-four miles — already past everything the Lenape imagined the whole thing would be. And there's still half a day to go.

September 20, 1737 CE

The Line Drawn Crooked

Yeates collapses; only Marshall finishes
~65–70 miles in about 18 hours
Closing line drawn NE, not east — 1.2 million acres

Ada: Day two, the twentieth of September. Dawn, and it's raining hard. They push over the Blue Mountains. Around noon, Yeates collapses — leaving only Marshall.

Theo: One man left, out of three.

Ada: One. And the agents let him keep going two extra hours, claiming there'd been a delay that morning. He finishes near present-day Jim Thorpe. Accounts differ on when — some say around noon, others about two in the afternoon.

Theo: And how far did he actually cover?

Ada: Sources say sixty-five miles; others say seventy. In roughly eighteen hours. They marked the endpoint with five oak trees carved with Penn's name and the year, seventeen thirty-seven.

Theo: So the walk's over. That's the land, right?

Ada: No — here's the second swindle. To close the boundary, a surveyor is supposed to draw a line from the endpoint back to the Delaware. The Lenape expected it to run due east, at a right angle. Instead the surveyor ran it northeast, at about forty-five degrees, following the river's curve.

Theo: Which balloons the whole claim northward.

Ada: Far north, past the Blue Mountain toward the Delaware Water Gap. The final total — over one point two million acres. Roughly twelve hundred square miles, taken in a day and a half.

1738–1755 CE

You Are Women, Now Leave

Iroquois Canassatego berates and expels the Delaware, 1742
Delaware forced toward Shamokin and the Ohio
1755: 50+ settlers killed — including Marshall's family

Ada: The Delaware refused to accept it. They wouldn't leave the land north of the Tohickon. Nutimus went to Philadelphia in November of seventeen thirty-eight, exchanged gifts, kept protesting. Protest letters followed around seventeen forty — though scholars debate whether those were truly the Delawares' words or drafted by white men egging them on.

Theo: So the Penns have the paper but not the ground. How do they force it?

Ada: They call on the Iroquois — the Six Nations — who claimed a kind of conquest-authority over the Delaware. At a Philadelphia conference in seventeen forty-two, the Onondaga speaker Canassatego takes the final payment, then turns on the Delaware.

Theo: Turns on them how?

Ada: He tells them they're women, with no right to sell land. In his words — you are women; take the advice of a wise man and remove immediately. He orders them out, toward Shamokin and the Wyoming Valley.

Theo: And they go.

Ada: Many go west — to the Susquehanna, to Kittanning, to Logstown on the Ohio. Embittered. So when the Seven Years' War comes, the Delaware side with the French. By seventeen fifty-five, more than fifty settlers are killed within the purchase bounds — including Edward Marshall's own wife, his eldest daughter, and his son.

Theo: The walker's family. The land came back around to him.

2004–2019 CE

A Swindle Goes to Court

Britannica calls it a 'land swindle'
2004 lawsuit dismissed as nonjusticiable
2019 Lenape Healing Journey retraced the route

Ada: Historians don't soften it — Britannica flatly calls it a land swindle. And it wasn't only a matter for the history books. In two thousand four, the Delaware Nation sued Pennsylvania over three hundred fourteen acres of that seventeen thirty-seven land.

Theo: After all that time. How did that go?

Ada: The court dismissed it. It ruled that even if the fraud allegations were true, Penn had the sovereign authority to take the land. Upheld on appeal; the Supreme Court declined to hear it in two thousand six.

Theo: So the fraud is basically conceded, and it still doesn't matter legally.

Ada: That's the whole grim elegance of it. It was engineered to be legal. In twenty nineteen the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania walked the route again — a Walking Purchase Healing Journey. And the interpreter who gave us the name for it, Moses Tunda Tatamy — there's a town called Tatamy on the map to this day.

Theo: When I look back at this — the fair-dealing father, the debt-ridden sons, the doctored map, the runners, the crooked line — every single step was a choice to bend an honest reputation into a weapon.

Ada: That's what stays with me. Fairness became the disguise. The Penns didn't break the rules — they wrote them, and then ran through the gap. And a day and a half of dishonest walking cost a people their homeland.

Theo: If any of this makes you want to stop us and ask something — go ahead, any time, that's what we're here for.

Ada: There's one thread we barely touched — what became of those Delaware who marched west to the Ohio, and how that anger came back in the war. That's a whole episode of its own, a tap away.

Theo: This was Historai — where history answers back.

Research record