Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/144

 116 Sloan's Architectural Revieiv and Builders' Journal. [August, LAND AS LAND VALUELESS TO THE INDIANS. Land is not valued by the American Indian, except to rove over. Therefore, if the parties were friendly, the mere occupation, by a white man, of a piece of ground, not in the actual use of an Indian, would be no offence. The Pro- prietary, then, in perfect, good faith, could have sold land to his colonists, upon a guarantee, before buying it of the Indians, as, according to Watson, must have been done in the case of the tract conveyed to the Welsh settlers, on the western side of the Schuylkill, as early as 1682-3, when the purchase from Shakkopoh and the other Sachems was not made till 1685. But William Penn was not the kind of man to carry this principle far, and would surely not have built his great city in the face of Indian claimants for the site. There was, it is true, rhe assumptive ownership of the Five Nations, settled, nearly twenty years afterwards, by the purchase, through Colonel Dongan, of the Iroquois claim to the entire State. The banks of the Delaware were settled, forty years -before the period of Penn's Treaty, and intermediately, by the Swedes, the Dutch and the English. Campanius gives ac- count of a treaty held with the savages by Governor Rising in 1654, its heads being much the same with those of Penn's great Treaty- The Quakers at Burlington, N. J., had made a treaty with the natives before the arrival of Penn. The neck of land formed by the con- fluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill was most likely, from good reasons, based upon the old records, more thickly inhabited than any part of the province, except, perhaps, the English settlements near the Falls,* opposite Trenton, N. J., and those of the Dutch, in the lower counties. The island of Tinicum, the Makerisk-Kitton, or Makerish-Hitton, 1vas ap- propriated to the Delaware, about these Falls. seat of the Swedes' government, is at no great distance from Philadelphia. Sven Schute had Swedish royal grants for Passyunk and Kinsessing [Kingsessing.] The English records of Upland, 1676 to 1681, are full of applications for leave to take up lands, for settlement, on the west side of the Delaware and the east side of the Schuylkill. There are even suits against those who disturb the pos- sessions of the old settlers. There is a petition from Lawrence Cock and twenty-three others, for leave to build a town somewhere below the Falls of Schuylkill. Lasse Andries and three others, of Moyamensing, ask leave to take up each twenty -five acres of marsh or meadow land in their neighborhoods. The Indian mention of "the little birds warbling on the sprays," at the time of the Great Treaty, proves very definitely, that the spot was near the accustomed habitations of man and not in the virgin forest, where all enoaginp; nature is still as death, the occasional screech of the eagle by day, by night the hoot of the owl, the scream of the cougar, and the howl of the wolf drearily vaiying the monotony The smaller inhabitants of the wild, birds, squirrels, and so on, are always quiet, except in the narrow belt of woods immediately beyond the permanent improvements of man. THE IROQUOIS. In the time of Penn the valley of the Susquehanna, on the southern border of Pennsylvania, was inhabited by a tribe of Iroquois This is proved historically by Campanius and Benjamin Franklin, and philological ly by Du Ponceau. Thej- were called Mengwes by the Delawares, Maquas by the Dutch, Minques by the Swedes, and Mingoes by the English. Mention is made that they were at variance with the Delawares, probably from the dissatisfaction of the latter with the workings of their "womanship"
 * As near as now known, the Indian name