Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/151

 1868 ] The Penn Treaty-Ground and a Monument to William Penn. 123 as to lead the descendants of those who knew him face to face, forty years after he became Proprietary, and "three years after his spirit had fled to a better world," to intercede for the pardon, without trial, of one Cartlidge, who had murdered, with circumstances of extreme cruelty, the first Indian ever killed in Pennsylvania by a white man. Other and worse murders followed. The second treaty is recalled by a re- mark of Dr. Franklin, who observes " of the Indians murdered at Conestoga, Shehaes was a very old man, having assisted at the second treaty, held with the Indians by William Penn in 1710." INDIAN RECOLLECTION ASD COMMEMORATION. At the time of the treaty of Fort Stanwix,* I was adopted into the family of a chief of the Tuscaroras, a cele- brated and distinguished warrior, who gave me one of his own names, Te- gochtias or Paroquet; and was "much pleased" with iny being one of the young- people of the country of the much- respected and highly-esteemed Onas, or Penn. — Judge Richard Peters Well pronounced, by Du Ponceau and Fisher, as a man worthy of the most unqualified credit in what he says of his own knowledge, the venerable Hecke- welder, an eye-witness, speaking of the Indian tribes of Pennsylvania, remarks their great aversion to holding treaties, save in the open air. He then proceeds to relate what the Indians themselves told him of the conduct of William Penn, who, " when he treated with them, " adopted the ancient mode of their an- cestors, and convened them under a " grove of shady trees, where the little " birds on their boughs were warbling "their sweet notes." This historian continues : " In commemoration of " these conferences, (* * * always to the "Indians a subject of pleasing remern- now stands. " brance,) they frequently assembled to- " gether in the woods, in some shady spot, "as nearly as possible similar to those " where they used to meet their brother " Miquon;* and there lay all his words, '• and speeches, with those of his descend- "ants, on a blanket, or a clean piece of "bark, and with great satisfaction, go "successively over the whole. This " practice, which I have frequently wit- nessed, continued till the year 1780, " when the disturbances which then took " place put an end to it, probably for- "ever." They had, in their strings and belts of wampum, an artificial memory, re- freshed by constant revision. — The Chief Ghesaont. Loskiel. Du Ponceau. Fisher. Thus it seems that the lapse of one hundred years— three generations — had not begun to obliterate the feeling of the thorough equity and goodness of Wil- liam Penn, stamped upon the minds of this strong and noble race, for it must be remembered that the Delawares — never weaklings — were originally of the fiercest ; were only restrained to the figurative " condition of the woman" by their sense of honor to their grand pre- servative compact ; that, in later years, the mediatorial office, being rendered useless by the presence of the whites and the totally altered state of the red men, the Six Nations were constrained, in formal treaty, figuratively, to return their relinquished, manly right of war, and that at this instant the warriors of the Lenape are more dreaded by the Western savages than any of all the tribes ; their very name being the squaw- nurse's frightening-word to her refrac- tory papoose, a thousand miles from their present seat beyond the Missis- sippi. And not unlikely their wise men still impress upon the hearts of the ar- dent youths of this fast dwindling nation the abiding sense of the perfect faith and unequalled virtue of William Penn.
 * Built ia 1758, upon the spot where Rome, New York,
 * Or, " Onas."