Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/82

 K) A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. We have two ancient vocabularies of the Delaware, one in the description of New Sweden by Thomas Campanius, lately translated by M. Duponceau, and the other of the Sank- hicans, so called, by De Laet. They are almost identical and both are clearly Delaware. The settlements of the Swedes, on the river of that name, do not appear to have extended far above the present site of Philadelphia. The Sankhicans are placed by Campanius at the Falls of the Delaware. They are men- tioned by De Laet as occupying the western side of the Hud- son, as living along the bays and in the interior of the country, and, finally, as the upper nation on the Delaware known to the Dutch, and living eighteen leagues from the mouth of that river. The Delawares were subdivided into numerous small tribes, distinguished by local names ; and it is clear that one of those tribes named Sankhican by the Swedes and Dutch writers, lived up the Delaware where both place it; and that when De Laet speaks of them in the first passage, as inhabiting the western side of the Hudson, he extends the appellation of Sankhican to the Delawares generally. # At the same time when William Penn landed in Pennsyl- vania, the Delawares had been subjugated and made women by the Five Nations. It is well known, that, according to that Indian mode of expression, the Delawares were henceforth pro- hibited from making war, and placed under the sovereignty of the conquerors, who did not even allow sales of land, in the actual possession of the Delawares, to be valid without their approba- tion. William Penn, his descendants, and the State of Penn- sylvania accordingly always purchased the right of possession from the Delawares, and that of sovereignty from the Five Nations. The tale suggested by the vanity of the Delawares, and in which the venerable Heckewelder placed implicit faith, that this treaty was a voluntary act on the part of the Dela- wares, is too incredible to require a serious discussion. It cannot be admitted that they were guilty of such an egregious act of called the Mohawks by that very name " Sankhicani." It is therefore probable that the Maquas, in the course of the war, had a fort or a settle- ment near the Falls of Trenton, as they afterwards had one twelve miles from Fort Christina, and that, the place being accordingly called by the Delawares Sankhican, the Dutch and Swedes mistook it for the name of a Delaware tribe. De Laet's Sankhican vocabulary is at all events Delaware.
 * We learn however, from Mr. Heckewelder, that the Delawares