The Lenapé and their Legends

or Eastern Algo

s-The Nanticokes-The Conoys-The Sha

ederated

eake Bay, and in the basins of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, claimed near kinship

ich in the form Abnaki is now confined to the remnant of a tribe in Maine. The Delawares in the far West retain

various New Jersey tribes, the Delawares proper on the Delaware river and its branches, including the Minsi or Monseys, among the mountains, the Nanticokes,

itions of this tribe itself, but by the distinct assertion of the Mohegans and others, and by events within historical

Mohe

ibal name from maingan, a wolf, and Moheganick = Chip. maniganikan, 'country of wolves.'"[18] They, themselves, however, translate it, "seaside people," or more fully, "people of the gr

representatives of the nation in Kansas,[21] discovered that they had precisely the same phratries as the Delawares, that is the Wolf, the Turtle, and the Turkey, each subdivided into three or four

e Delaware Valley. Evidently, most of the tribes of Massachusetts and Connecticut were comparatively r

e of Long Island Sound, and whose council fire was where New Haven now stands, as Mohegans, while the Wapings or O

antic

nd the ocean, except its southern extremity, which appears to

" and is merely another form of Unalachtgo, the name of one of the Lenape sub-

with which the Nanticokes could fasten floating logs together to construct a bridge across a stream. In the Delaware dialect this was Tawachguáno, from taiachquoan, a bridge. The latter enables us to identify

father," and considered the Mohegans their "brethren."[24] That is,

s the extravagant consideration they bestowed on the bones of the dead. The corpse was buried for some months, then exhumed and the bones

thern Pennsylvania, about the middle of the last century, piously brought along these venerable relics, and fi

y a deteriorated form. It is characterized by abbreviated words and strong

loration of the Chesapeake. The most valuable is one obtained by Mr. William Vans Murray, in 1792, from the remnant in

ments of the whites and the attacks of the Iroquois they f

0. A few years after this occurrence bands of them began to remove to Pennsylvania, and at the middle of the century were living at the mouth of the Juniata, under the immediate control of the Iroquois. Thence they removed to Wyoming, a

ained on Goose creek, Dorchester c

Co

y called in the old records Conoys, Ganawese or Canaways, th

ac," and supposes them to have been the Kanawhas of West Virginia.[28] This is a loose guess. They were, in fact, none other than the Piscataways of So

fathers came from Piscatua to an island in Potowmeck; and from thence down to Philadelphia, in old Proprietor Penn's time, to show their friendship to the

found (1608) in numerous villages along the Patuxent and the left bank of the lower Poto

n Algonkin root, meaning "it is long" (Del. guneu, long, Cree kinowaw, it

ves from it are in use in the Delaware tongue. In the Cree we have the impersonal form, pakestikweyaw, or the active animate pasketiwa, in the sense of "the division or branch of a river."[31] The site of Kittamaqui

ar), who bore the title Tayac (Nanticoke, tallak, head chief) rule

rers found scarcely any inhabitants. In 1631 Captain Henry Fleet estimated the total number of natives "in Potomack and places adjac

sionary, Father Andrew White, but died the year after. When the English first settled at St. Mary's, the trib

f the Jesuits, in Rome. It would be a great benefit to students of Algonkin dialects to have his linguistic works sought out and published. How far his knowledge of the language extended is uncertain. In a l

The only word which has created doubts has been the name of "a certain imaginary spirit called Ochre."[35] It has been supposed that this was the Huron oki. But

s, as an English boy who had lived with that chieftain served as an inte

Susquehanna, and in 1744 they joined several other fragmentary bands at Shamokin (

Shaw

e attention of several writers, but it cannot be said that either thei

hen, in 1692, they first appeared in the area of the Eastern Algonkin

ed into four ba

Pikoweu, "he come

ng completion or perfection. This band held

scapo

licoth

as the Pikoweu, who occupied and gave their na

r the greater part of the area of Connecticut. Dr. Trumbull, however,[42] assigns a different meaning to their name, and a more appropriate one-Peguitóog, the Destroyers

the knowledge of the whites. On a Dutch map, drawn in 1614 or thereabouts, a tribe called Saw wanew is locat

und New York Bay in its simple geographical sense of "south" or "southern," and not as a

Sapo

ioned as living in Pennsylvania, attached to the D

a branch of the Great Pedee river in North Carol

s. Others, impressed by the similarity of Sa-po-nees to Pa-nis, have imagined they were the Pawnees, no

identified by them with the nation known to the English as the Cataw

ssiwi

e from South Carolina to the Potomac late in the seventeenth century, and in 1731 were settled partly on

e, and they were probably Algonkin neighbors of the Shawnees in their