Introduction In May 1672, while traveling north through the English colonies in eastern North America, the founder of Quakerism George Fox and fellow missionaries arrived in New Castle, the small capital of the Delaware colony inhabited mostly by Dutch and English colonists. The town stood on the west bank of the river that the Lenapes, the Native Americans who dominated the region, called the Lenapewihittuck (now Delaware River). Fox and his companions quickly crossed the river, hiring Lenape guides who led them through the fertile lands of what is now southwestern New Jersey and the Pine Barrens farther east. Fox wrote to Friends in England that as they "passed through the woods, sometimes we lay in the woods by a fire and sometimes in the Indian cabins, through the bogs, rivers, and creeks and wild woods we passed. I came at last and lay at one Indian king''s house and he and his queen received me lovingly and his attendants also and laid me a mat to lie upon, a very pretty man and then we came to another Indian town where the king came to me and he could speak some English and he received me very lovingly and I spake to him much and his people and they were loving." Fox and his associates called the Lenapes'' territory the "Indian Country," recognizing the Natives'' sovereignty over the land. They described to colleagues in England a land still dominated by Lenapes despite the settlements of Swedes and Finns along the river, the Dutch/English town of New Castle, and Quaker villages of Middletown and Shrewsbury near the Atlantic shore. The hospitality of Lenapes saved Fox and his companions from sleeping under the open sky in terrain they considered a "wilderness.

" The Quaker leader distinguished between the settlements of Lenapes who treated him "lovingly" and the "wild woods" full of bogs and rivers to cross, recognizing the Lenapes'' authority while appreciating their kindness. He spoke several times to the Natives about religion but reported no success in convincing them to Quakerism. They rejected his spiritual authority as he depended on them for food, direction, and shelter. The Quaker missionaries proceeded to visit Friends in New England, returning to Lenape country in September 1672, when they again traveled safely through the region by respecting the Lenapes'' power and following their rules. This time, with Lenape guides, they took the more usual route across New Jersey from Manhattan to Matinicum (now Burlington) Island, moving steadily from point to point "through many Indian towns, and rivers, and bogs." They traveled through territory the Lenapes protected carefully against European settlement or passage without guides. Indeed, one night the party "found an old house, which the Indians had forced the people to desert." The Quakers learned later of several Lenape murders of Europeans in the area the previous year.

The travelers safely crossed the Lenapewihittuck once again with the help of hired Lenapes and their canoes, then rode thirty miles south "and came at night to a Swede''s house, and got a little straw and lay there all night." With another guide they proceeded to New Castle, where government officials offered lodging and space so that the missionaries could hold a Quaker meeting before departing for Maryland. The Lenapes'' firm grip on south and central New Jersey is clear in a map from 1673 created by a merchant named Augustine Herrman, who had settled in New Amsterdam in 1644 and then established his plantation, Bohemia Manor, on the Maryland eastern shore in 1661. Herrman labeled the country from the Lenapewihittuck to the Atlantic Ocean as "at present inhabited only or most by Indians," and he drew Lenape towns adjacent to many rivers and streams emptying into the Lenapewihittuck and the sea. Various Lenape people populated the territory as illustrated in the map (see Figure 1), including the Cohanseys, Mantes, and Armewamese, who had sold some of their lands to Europeans but retained much of New Jersey as their own. It was through this territory that, with the Natives'' guidance and permission, Fox''s party had crossed. Notwithstanding its acknowledgment of the Natives'' continued presence and power in the region, Fox''s report to English Friends about his journey through Lenape country helped to establish the mythology that the early Delaware Valley was a wilderness inhabited by generally friendly Indians and some scattered colonists. From his few weeks in the region, Fox described a segmented society, with Lenape towns entirely separate from Swedish, Dutch, and English villages.

In this short time he learned little about the society the Lenapes, Swedes, Finns, and other Europeans had built together since European arrival, and he thus gave the impression to William Penn and other Friends in England that the Lenapes'' domain was ripe for Quaker colonization. Fox''s narrative has given impetus to the legend that the Delaware Valley was a blank slate on which Penn and the Quakers first brought peace and justice to the Lenapes. For the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania, their descendants of the mid-eighteenth century, and historians in subsequent centuries, Delaware Valley history began in 1681 when Penn received his charter from Charles II. In creating and perpetuating this founding myth, colonists and scholars have credited Penn with efforts to form an open, tolerant society that dealt honestly and amicably with the Lenapes and other Natives. He pledged to pay a fair price for their land and to avoid the bloodshed that destroyed Native and European settlements elsewhere in eastern North America. Like other founding myths that ignored the history of Native Americans prior to European colonization, the Pennsylvania legend wiped away the Lenapes'' own history prior to contact with Europeans as well as the sixty-five years of exchange, conflict, accommodation, and alliance between the Natives and the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and English. Native Americans kept alive evidence of past events through spoken narratives rather than written documents, and most European settlers had little interest in recording the oral history of the original inhabitants. The colonists who described the Lenapes and their culture were more interested in their current practices and condition than the ways in which their society had evolved over the past fifty to one hundred years.

Similarly, the Quakers consulted Swedish and Dutch records primarily to demonstrate early European settlement in what is now Delaware to combat Lord Baltimore''s claim to the region based on his 1632 charter. The Swanendael (Valley of the Swans) whaling station and plantation, founded by the Dutch in 1631 but quickly destroyed by the Lenapes, provided key evidence to support Penn''s case for ownership of the Lower Counties. Beyond the needs of the boundary dispute, however, Penn''s colonists had little curiosity about the society the Natives and earlier European settlers had built. Like English colonists in Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay, the Friends wove a creation myth of exceptionalism, claiming for themselves a special relationship with the Lenapes based on Quaker principles of justice, peace, religious freedom, and respect for people of different backgrounds. Because of this mythology, the Lenapes are often portrayed as a weak people lacking the numbers and fortitude to defend their homeland. The prevailing narrative ignores the period from 1615 to 1681 when the Lenapes dominated trade and determined if, when, and where Europeans could travel and take up land. Besides the Swanendael incident, no major conflict between Natives and Europeans occurred in Lenape country to rival those in other regions, such as the Anglo-Powhatan wars and Bacon''s Rebellion in Virginia, the Pequot and King Philip''s wars in New England, and the Kieft''s and Esopus wars in New Netherland. With the massacre at Swanendael, the Lenapes established their primacy and never lost it until after Penn received his colony in 1681.

This portrayal of the Lenapes as a powerless nation gained momentum soon after the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737, when William Penn''s sons Thomas and John Penn, with James Logan, convinced the Iroquois to undercut the Lenapes'' protests of land theft by asserting they were under Iroquois control. In 1742, building on earlier similar allegations that the Lenapes denied, the Onondaga sachem Canasatego called the Lenapes "women" who refused to fight but rather depended on the Iroquois for protection. Mythology created in the mid-eighteenth century to subjugate the Lenapes and divest them of their remaining territory in eastern Pennsylvania reinforced the earlier legend of the benevolent William Penn to suggest that Lenapes had never controlled their country economically or politically or had any substantial impact on the evolution of Delaware Valley society. Most recently, the historian Bernard Bailyn has suggested that, before 1681, Lenapes lived in "bands of less than 50 related individuals, little more than extended families," much smaller than adjacent Native communities that ranged from as high as 2,000 among some Iroquois to two or three hundred among other Algonquians. Bailyn''s use of the word "bands" rather than "towns" or "nations" underscores his claim that the Lenapes lacked any coherent government. In fact, the sizes of Lenape towns and their political organizations were consistent with those of many other Native societies of eastern North America. Bailyn further argues that the Lenapes were "hunters and gatherers," despite ample evidence that they grew corn and other crops. Painting with a broad brush, Bailyn characterizes the Finns, who formed a large percentage of the region''s European population, as "barbarous, uncivilized frontier peoples" who participated in Sweden''s expansion "overseas, to the land of equally barbarous peoples, the Lenapes, o.