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Founding population

The Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania

The Indigenous people of the land that became Schuylkill County. Every claim is sourced; traditions are flagged as such. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview

Before any European deed, the mountains and valleys of the upper Schuylkill were the domain of the Lenni-Lenape — “the original people” — whom colonists called the Delaware, after the river the English had named for Lord De La Warr. They were an Algonquian-speaking people organized into three groups: the Unami (Turtle), Unalachtgo (Turkey), and Munsee / Minsi (Wolf); the interior bands that ranged between the Delaware and Susquehanna headwaters belonged largely to the Munsee. ★ The future Schuylkill County sat at the lightly-used inland margin of their world: a hunting-and-passage country of ridges and gaps rather than a zone of permanent towns, because the richer fishing and travel lay along the Delaware and Susquehanna rivers themselves. ★

Their tenure here ended not by a single conquest but by a layered dispossession — first their subordination to the Iroquois Confederacy, then the land sales the Iroquois made on their behalf, and finally the violence of the French and Indian War, which emptied the Blue Mountain frontier of natives and settlers alike. By the 1760s the organized Lenape presence in eastern Pennsylvania was gone, displaced westward in a migration that would end, generations later, in Oklahoma and Ontario.

Sources: Zerbey, History of Pottsville and Schuylkill County, Vol. 4, “Indian History” (annotated, Lykens Valley); Wikipedia — Lenape.

The land and its names

The river that gives the county its name is itself a palimpsest of languages. “Schuylkill” is Dutch — schuil-kil, “hidden creek/river” — reportedly applied around 1628 by the Dutch navigator Arendt Corssen, because the river’s mouth was screened by reedy islands. ★ The Lenape name was Ganshowahanna (variously Ganshowehanne), generally glossed “falling/roaring waters”; the downriver people also called it Manaiung (“place where we drink,” surviving as Manayunk). ✎ So the county’s defining river carries a Dutch name overlaying a Lenape one — “Schuylkill” is not, as is sometimes assumed, an Indian word.

The Lenape language is, by contrast, written all over the county’s map. The most authoritative guide is George P. Donehoo’s Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania (1928):

  • Mahanoy (City, Creek) — from Lenape Mahoni, “a lick” / “salt deposit,” a mineral lick where deer gathered. ✎ Not “where there is plenty to eat” — that gloss belongs to Mahantongo, below.
  • Mahantongo (Mountain/Creek, the county’s southern edge) — “where we had plenty of meat to eat,” i.e., good hunting grounds.
  • Nesquehoning (the Schuylkill–Carbon line) — næskahónink, “at the black lick.”
  • Catawissa (creek/town, northwest edge) — Gattawisi, “growing fat” / “pure water.”
  • Swatara (creek/gap, southwest) — “where we feed on eels.”
  • Tamaqua (eastern county) — tamàkwe, “beaver.”
  • Tulpehocken (the path and valley just south) — Tulpewihaki, “land of turtles,” the turtle being the sacred Unami clan animal.
  • Tuscarora (mountain/town) — by contrast Iroquoian, named for the Tuscarora nation added to the Confederacy in 1712; the name was transferred to the ridge. ✎

Sources: Wikipedia — Schuylkill River; Go Reading Berks — origin of “Schuylkill”; SRBC, Native American Waterbody and Place Names (Tech. Report 229, PDF); Wikipedia — Mahanoy City; Wikipedia — Mahantongo; Wikipedia — PA place names of Native American origin.

Trails, camps, and the archaeological record

The county was crossed, not settled. The authority on Indigenous routes — Paul A. W. Wallace’s Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (PHMC, 1971) — records two named paths through the county and no major Indian towns on them, only “sleeping places” (overnight camps): ★

  • The Tulpehocken Path (the Shamokin Path), the great Iroquois diplomatic road linking the Six Nations’ provincial capital at Shamokin (today Sunbury) down the Tulpehocken Valley to Conrad Weiser’s at Womelsdorf and on to Philadelphia. It ran northwest through Pine Grove Township; modern PA Route 501 approximates it. In 1742 the Moravian Count Zinzendorf, traveling it toward Shamokin and Wyoming, named a spring along the way “Pilger Ruh” — “Pilgrim’s Rest.” ★
  • The Nanticoke Path, the second inter-montane route connecting the Susquehanna and Delaware drainages. ★

Archaeology confirms the picture of transient use. The Pennsylvania Archaeological Site Survey records about 85 prehistoric and historic sites in the county, the largest share from the Late Archaic period, with toolstone reflecting the regional jasper, quartzite, and chert of the nearby Hardyston formation. A mid-20th-century find — a human face carved in bas-relief on a sandstone outcrop, reported by amateur archaeologist Francis Burke of Mar Lin — is now curated by the State Museum in Harrisburg. ★

The interior’s marginal status is stated plainly in the county’s own histories. Zerbey: the headwaters region “did not afford the attractions for the savages that were found in the valleys bordering the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers. These streams abounded with fish and furnished an easy means of travel.” ★ A long-told local memory of an Indian village in Swope’s Valley (Pine Grove Township), where “arrow points and spear heads have been found,” is reported by Zerbey himself as tradition, and he stresses Pine Grove “was never the permanent habitation of any Indian tribes.” ⚑

Sources: Paul A. W. Wallace, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (Internet Archive); PHMC State Museum — “This Week in PA Archaeology: Schuylkill County”; Lykens Valley — The Tulpehocken Path; Zerbey — “Indian History”.

Under the Iroquois: how the Lenape lost the right to their own land

The defining political fact of the Lenape in this region is that, by the early 18th century, they were subjects of the Iroquois (Six Nations). From 1728 the Onondaga Council stationed the Oneida chief Shikellamy (Swatana) at Shamokin “to preside over ye Shawanese and Delawares”; by about 1745 he was effectively vice-regent over all the Delaware and Shawnee of the Susquehanna country, and the indispensable partner of Pennsylvania’s interpreter-agent Conrad Weiser. Shikellamy converted to Moravian Christianity and died at Shamokin in December 1748. ★

Under this overlordship the Lenape “were denied the right to declare war or even to sell land.” The humiliation was made explicit at the Philadelphia council of 1742, when the Onondaga speaker Canassatego rebuked the Delawares to their faces. Zerbey preserves the speech:

“We conquered you, we made women of you, you know you are women… and can no more sell land than women. We therefore assign you to two places to go, either to Wyoming or Shamokin… and then we shall have you under our eye.” ★

The Delawares, Zerbey records, “withdrew in a sullen manner.” The consequence for Schuylkill County is direct: when the land was finally sold, it was the Iroquois, not the Lenape, who sold it.

Sources: Wikipedia — Shikellamy; Lykens Valley — Shikellamy; Wikipedia — Canasatego; Zerbey — “Indian History”.

The deed that took the county: the Six Nations purchase of 1749

✔ The master deed for Schuylkill County is the Six Nations purchase executed August 22, 1749, at Philadelphia. The grantors were the Six Nations (with assenting Delaware, “Shamokin,” and Shawnee signers); the grantee was the Penn family; the broker was Conrad Weiser; the consideration was £500. The boundary ran from the western end of Mahanoy Mountain (about twelve miles below the forks of the Susquehanna) northeastward “North 60° East about one hundred and ten miles to the mouth of Lackawaxen Creek on the Delaware.” It moved the province’s northern limit from the Blue Mountain crest up across essentially all of present Schuylkill County. ★

This correction matters and is settled by the documentary record: the 1732 purchase reached only the strip south of the Blue Mountain, and the 1737 “Walking Purchase” ran up the Delaware/Lehigh corridor to the east and does not properly cover the county. ✎ The widely-repeated claim that “Schuylkill County was part of the Walking Purchase” is geographically wrong; the county’s title rests on 1749. (A later ring of land, the 1768 Fort Stanwix purchase, brought in only the far northern tip of Union Township.)

⚑ The verbatim metes-and-bounds and the £500 figure rest on solid secondary synthesis; they are not yet confirmed against the primary Pennsylvania Archives, 1st Series deed text or Munsell (1881).

Sources: Wikipedia — Schuylkill County; Native American land cessions — Pennsylvania; Wikipedia — Canasatego.

Displacement by war: the Blue Mountain frontier, 1755–1758

The sale of 1749 opened the land to German and other settlers; within six years war drove them — and the last natives — out. After Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela (July 9, 1755) emboldened the French-allied Delawares, the Penn’s Creek massacre of October 16, 1755 (just northwest of the county) opened a chain of raids that depopulated the whole Susquehanna and Blue Mountain frontier. The raiders, one account notes, “sought revenge for treaties — such as the 1737 Walking Purchase — that had displaced their people from the Schuylkill Valley.” ★

By November 1, 1755, “no white man or woman was living in the Swatara region above the Blue [Mountain]” — the upper Swatara / Pine Grove frontier was abandoned. The clearest documented in-county killing came on June 8, 1756, when Felix Wuench was shot, run down, scalped and tomahawked while plowing near “The Hole” in Swatara Gap. ★ (The better-known Bloody Springs massacre of October 1, 1757, where the Spatz family was killed at a spring said to have run red, was just over the line in Berks County, but on the same frontier feeding the Schuylkill valleys.)

Pennsylvania’s answer was a line of log forts along the south slope of the Blue Mountain — part of the chain Benjamin Franklin organized from New Jersey to Maryland:

  • Fort Lebanon (built late November 1755 near Auburn, “in the Forks of the Schuylkill”; a 100-foot-square log fort), renamed Fort William in 1757. ★
  • Fort Franklin (1756, near Snyders, eastern Schuylkill County) — the in-county fort, only ~40 feet square; never relocated archaeologically despite a 1984 State Museum dig. ★
  • Fort Henry and Fort Dietrich Snyder (just over the line in Berks, anchoring the sector that defended the county frontier; Fort Henry garrisoned by Capt. Christian Busse). ★

With the settlers fled and the remaining Lenape long withdrawn, Zerbey’s elegy fits the documentary record: “With the settlement of the white people, the Indians gradually departed, leaving only their straggling bands to tarry in the region where they once ruled.” ★

Sources: Wikipedia — Penn’s Creek massacre; Wikipedia — Bloody Springs massacre; Schuylkill County Military History — French and Indian War; PHMC State Museum — Schuylkill County (forts); Fort Wiki — Fort Lebanon.

People

  • Shikellamy (Swatana) (d. 1748) — Oneida chief, Iroquois overseer of the Delawares and Shawnees at Shamokin; the linchpin of the system that governed the county’s natives. ★
  • Teedyuscung (c. 1700–1763), “King of the Delawares” — born near Trenton, briefly a Moravian convert, then war leader in the Wyoming Valley. Pressing the grievance of the Walking Purchase, he forced the Iroquois to acknowledge Delaware independence in 1756; the 1758 Treaty of Easton ended Delaware land claims in Pennsylvania. He was murdered April 19, 1763, burned in his cabin at Wyoming. The standard biography is Anthony F. C. Wallace’s King of the Delawares. ★
  • Canassatego — the Onondaga orator of the 1742 “we made women of you” rebuke and a party to the 1749 sale. ★
  • Sassoonan (Allumapees) — the principal Schuylkill/Susquehanna Delaware chief of the early 1700s, in the sachem line Zerbey records (Kekerappan → Opekasset → Tamminent → Sassoonan → Teedyuscung). ★
  • Conrad Weiser — Pennsylvania’s indispensable Indian interpreter from the Tulpehocken Valley, broker of the 1742, 1744, 1749 and 1754 treaties; he correctly predicted the 1755 settler exodus. ★

Sources: Wikipedia — Teedyuscung; Lykens Valley — Teedyuscung; Wikipedia — Conrad Weiser.

Where the Lenape went — and recognition today

The removal unfolded in stages: ordered after 1742 to Wyoming or Shamokin; pushed after the 1758 Treaty of Easton fully out of their eastern Pennsylvania claims; then west into the Ohio Country, and across the 19th century to Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and finally Indian Territory (Oklahoma), with a Moravian-Christian band settling in Ontario, Canada. ★

Their descendant nations are recognized today outside Pennsylvania: the Delaware Tribe of Indians (Bartlesville, Oklahoma), the Delaware Nation (Anadarko, Oklahoma), the Stockbridge-Munsee Community (Wisconsin), and in Ontario the Munsee-Delaware Nation and Delaware Nation at Moraviantown. ★

⚑ A recognition caveat important for a Pennsylvania local-history project: there are no federally recognized Lenape tribes in Pennsylvania today, and the federally recognized nations actively dispute “state-recognized” or heritage-group claims to Lenape identity — the Delaware Nation has formally resolved that it does not acknowledge non-federally-recognized groups. Any reference to a “modern Pennsylvania Lenape” organization should be framed accordingly.

Sources: Delaware Tribe — Removal History; Delaware Nation — History; Wikipedia — Lenape.

Open questions

  • The verbatim 1749 deed text (Pennsylvania Archives, 1st Series) and a direct read of Munsell’s Indian chapter, to quote the boundary and price exactly.
  • Whether any named Lenape individuals can be tied specifically to the Schuylkill headwaters (as opposed to Shamokin/Wyoming).
  • The full archaeological site inventory (PASS files, State Museum) for a map of camps and the Mar Lin petroglyph’s context.
  • The status and claims of present-day Pennsylvania Lenape heritage organizations, handled with the recognition caveat above.

Sources

Frequently asked

Was Schuylkill County part of the Walking Purchase?
No. The county's title rests on the Six Nations purchase of August 22, 1749. The 1732 purchase reached only the strip south of the Blue Mountain, and the 1737 Walking Purchase ran up the Delaware/Lehigh corridor to the east and does not properly cover the county.
Is 'Schuylkill' a Lenape word?
No. 'Schuylkill' is Dutch — schuil-kil, 'hidden creek/river' — reportedly applied around 1628 by the Dutch navigator Arendt Corssen. The Lenape name for the river was Ganshowahanna, generally glossed 'falling/roaring waters.'
Are there federally recognized Lenape tribes in Pennsylvania today?
No. There are no federally recognized Lenape tribes in Pennsylvania today; the descendant nations are recognized outside the state, in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. The federally recognized nations dispute 'state-recognized' or heritage-group claims to Lenape identity.

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