Promised Land

The Walking Purchase of 1737 marked the end of negotiated boundaries in Pennsylvania, both geographical and cultural. Dispossessed by the fraudulent purchase and the conspiratorial diplomacy before and after it, Delawares chose variations on several responses, including migration, negotiation, conversion, and violent retribution. This book sensitively reconstructs their world from the time Europeans arrived on their shores to their geographical and ethnic annihilation from the Delaware Valley in the 1760s. Focusing on the Walking Purchase as the central event in this declension narrative, the book observes the transformation of a fragile if generally peaceful middle ground, habitable by Delawares and English on negotiable terms, to an English colony determined to possess a boundless landscape by fraud and force. Stephen C. Harper teaches at Brigham Young University.