The Lenâpé and their Legends

The Lenâpé and their Legends
Daniel Brinton

Daniel G. Brinton

The Lenâpé and their Legends

PREFACE

In the present volume I have grouped a series of ethnological studies of the Indians of Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, around what is asserted to be one of the most curious records of ancient American history.

For a long time this record – the Walam Olum, or Red Score – was supposed to have been lost. Having obtained the original text complete about a year ago, I printed a few copies and sent them to several educated native Delawares with a request for aid in its translation and opinions on its authenticity. The results will be found in the following pages.

The interest in the subject thus excited prompted me to a general review of our knowledge of the Lenape or Delawares, their history and traditions, their language and customs. This disclosed the existence of a number of MSS. not mentioned in bibliographies, some in the first rank of importance, especially in the field of linguistics. Of these I have made free use.

In the course of these studies I have received suggestions and assistance from a number of obliging friends, among whom I would mention the native Delawares, the Rev. Albert Anthony, and the Rev. John Kilbuck; Mr. Horatio Hale and the Right Rev. E. de Schweinitz; Dr. J. Hammond Trambull, Prof. A. M. Elliott and Gen. John Mason Brown.

Not without hesitation do I send forth this volume to the learned world. Regarded as an authentic memorial, the original text of the Walam Olum will require a more accurate rendering than I have been able to give it; while the possibility that a more searching criticism will demonstrate it to have been a fabrication may condemn as labor lost the pains that I have bestowed upon it. Yet even in the latter case my work will not have been in vain. There is, I trust, sufficient in the volume to justify its appearance, apart from the Red Score; and the latter, by means of this complete presentation, can now be assigned its true position in American archaeology, whatever that may be.

CHAPTER I

§ 1. The Algonkin Stock.

Scheme of its Dialects – Probable Primitive Location

§ 2. The Iroquis Stock.

The Susquehannocks – The Hurons – The Cherokees

§ 1. The Algonkin Stock

About the period 1500-1600, those related tribes whom we now know by the name of Algonkins were at the height of their prosperity. They occupied the Atlantic coast from the Savannah river on the south to the strait of Belle Isle on the north. The whole of Newfoundland was in their possession; in Labrador they were neighbors to the Eskimos; their northernmost branch, the Crees, dwelt along the southern shores of Hudson Bay, and followed the streams which flow into it from the west, until they met the Chipeways, closely akin to themselves, who roamed over the water shed of Lake Superior. The Blackfeet carried a remote dialect of their tongue quite to the Rocky Mountains; while the fertile prairies of Illinois and Indiana were the homes of the Miamis. The area of Ohio and Kentucky was very thinly peopled by a few of their roving bands; but east of the Alleghanies, in the valleys of the Delaware, the Potomac and the Hudson, over the barren hills of New England and Nova Scotia, and throughout the swamps and forests of Virginia and the Carolinas, their osier cabins and palisadoed strongholds, their maize fields and workshops of stone implements, were numerously located.

It is needless for my purpose to enumerate the many small tribes which made up this great group. The more prominent were the Micmacs of Nova Scotia, the Abnakis of Maine, the Pequots and Narragansets, in New England, the Mohegans of the Hudson, the Lenape on the Delaware, the Nanticokes around Chesapeake Bay, the Pascataway on the Potomac, and the Powhatans and Shawnees further south; while between the Great Lakes and the Ohio river were the Ottawas, the Illinois, the Pottawatomies, the Kikapoos, Piankishaws, etc.

The dialects of all these were related, and evidently at some distant day had been derived from the same primitive tongue. Which of them had preserved the ancient forms most closely, it may be premature to decide positively, but the tendency of modern studies has been to assign that place to the Cree – the northernmost of all.

We cannot erect a genealogical tree of these dialects. It is not probable that they branched off, one after another, from a common stock. The ancient tribes each took their several ways from a common centre, and formed nuclei for subsequent development. We may, however, group them in such a manner as roughly to indicate their relationship. This I do on the following page: —

Cree,

Old Algonkin,

Montagnais.

Chipeway,

Ottawa,

Pottawattomie,

Miami,

Peoria,

Pea,

Piankishaw,

Kaskaskia,

Menominee,

Sac,

Fox,

Kikapoo.

Sheshatapoosh,

Secoffee,

Micmac,

Melisceet,

Etchemin,

Abnaki.

Mohegan,

Massachusetts,

Shawnee,

Minsi, }

Unami, }

Unalachtigo,}

Nanticoke,

Powhatan,

Pampticoke.

Blackfoot,