Walking Purchase

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The Walking Purchase, also known as the Walking Treaty, was a 1737 agreement between the family of William Penn, the original proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, and the Lenape. In the purchase, the Penn family and proprietors produced a deed to claim that a 1686 treaty with the Lenape ceded an area of 1,200,000 acres (4,860 km2) in present-day Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania in colonial Pennsylvania, which included a western land boundary extending as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half - its namesake. The area is along the northern reaches of the Delaware River, on Pennsylvania's border with what was called, at the time, West Jersey. Encyclopædia Britannica refers to the treaty as a "land swindle". The Lenape appealed to the Haudenosaunee to their north for aid on the issue, but the Haudenosaunee refused their request, ultimately siding with the Penn interests. Nearly 300 years later, in 2004, a lawsuit was filed over the continuing dispute. In the case...

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