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 THE NANTICOKE INDIANS OF INDIAN RIVER,

DELAWARE

By WILLIAM H. BABCOCK

There are two remnants of Indian population in eastern Dela- ware, not far from the coast, — the so-called Moors of Kent county and the more southerly Nanticokes on Indian river in Sussex county.

Of the former I can speak by report only, not having visited them. According to an old legend they are the offspring of Moors shipwrecked near Lewes ; a more romantic version gives them only one Moorish progenitor — a captive prince who escaped from his floating prison and found wife and home among the half-Indian population alongshore. There are said to be two or three hundred of these people, clustering mainly around Ches- holm, a hamlet and railroad station a few miles south of Dover. The Philadelphia Press for December 1st, 1895, presents a series of portraits which, if accurate, go far to sustain the contention of the Nanticokes that there is not much in common between the two peoples ; but their intercourse is too slight and infrequent for their judgment to be conclusive. They consider the Chesholm people to be a mixture of Delaware Indians with some Moorish or other foreign strain. According to their tradition the Nanti- coke and Delaware tribes were often at war in the old time, and even yet there would seem to be a barrier of rather more than indifference between them.

The Nanticokes themselves are not more than fifty or sixty in number at home ; that is to say, in the sandy pine-land country which lies between the northeastern shore of Indian river and the coastline, comprising approximately the two county subdivisions

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