Commentary: Mementos Of People No Longer Here

By: James G. Wiles , For The Bulletin
02/26/2007

Anyone who has ever looked into Paul A. Wallace's Indian Paths of Pennsylvania (1965) has been struck by this thought: Gee, there must have been a lot more Indians here than they told us about in junior high school. And therein lies one of the hottest controversies in Native American studies: How many Indians were here in 1492?

The map in the Inquirer last week showing where the murders of 2006 occurred in Philadelphia has reminded me of the truism that Pennsylvania and Philadelphia are full of Indian place names - but no Indians.

I've put a selection of local Indian names in the accompanying table.

Surprised?

The picture is even more compelling when the focus is widened to the whole commonwealth. Except for the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, all of Pennsylvania's major rivers have Indian names. Eight Pennsylvania counties have Indian names. In Philadelphia, most of the creeks and several neighborhoods have Indian names.

Kingsessing, Tacony, Shackamaxon, Tioga, Juniata, Allegheny, Manayunk, Erie, Wissahickon and Wissinoming are all recognizable as Indian words. Some of these names are the Indians' own names for a place and describe a characteristic of its geography. Others, like Manayunk, memorialize an event which occurred there.

A few Indian place names,like Wingohocking and Secane, were actually given to the location by the Europeans to commemorate a well-known Indian leader.

Still others, like Susquehanna, Shawnee or Nanticoke are the names of the Indian people who once lived there.

A few Philadelphia locations bear an Indian name which is not recognizable as such and whose meaning has been lost.

Pennypacker (Pemecacka) and Cobbs Creek (Kakauskonk) are examples of this. The explanation, according to George P. Donehoo's Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania (1928), lies in the fact that successive waves of colonists spoke different languages. As the Indian sounds were transliterated from Swedish to Dutch, German and English, the original word disappeared.

Place names are not the only part of Philadelphia's Indian heritage. Many of our major thoroughfares are, in fact, former Indian trails. Broad Street and Route 611 (York Road) follows the former Lenni-Lenape Path. The Lenni-Lenape Path ran from the Indian village of Passyunk and across today's New Jersey to Newark Bay.

Frankford Avenue, once the King's Highway and today Route 13, began as the Falls Path to the falls of the Delaware (Sanckhicam or Chiepicring) at Trenton (Maskekitong). Our Ridge Avenue, which becomes Ridge Pike, was the Indians' Perkiomen Path. (Indian trails often followed dry ridges.) Germantown Pike, Butler Pike and, farther out, parts of Routes 191 and 212, follow the Minsi Trail. The Great Minquas Trail ran through West Chester to Atglen and Gap.

The Native American people who were here when the Europeans came called themselves the Lenni-Lenape, which means, affectingly, the "original people."

They were divided into three tribes and occupied the area which today comprises New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. The English called the Lenni-Lenape people the Delaware.

The open country which became the site of Philadelphia was in the territory of the Turtle (Unami) tribe. Their capital was Shackamaxon, site of today's Kensington.

Wallace's map of Pennsylvania is filled with a thick web of Indian paths and trails. And, as we've been discussing, Indian place names abound. Yet, the standard textbook, William Cornell's Our Pennsylvania Heritage (8th ed. 1983), says that "[m]ost historians agree there were not over 20,000 Indians [in Pennsylvania] at any one time."

Ray Thompson, in his book, The Walking Purchase Hoax of 1737 (1973), is far more sympathetic to the Indians. Yet, Thompson, too, states that the entire Lenni-Lenape people numbered about 15,000.

The last 40 years of scholarship have exploded this consensus. Journalist Charles C. Mann summarizes this in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005).

The problem with the Indian population numbers we were taught in school, Mann says, is that, while accurate for 1700, those numbers reflect the small remnant of the Native Americans who survived the catastrophic pandemics caused by the European diseases that the white men brought to North America. In the 200 years between 1492 and the foundation of Penn's Woods (Pennsylvania) in the 1680s, probably in excess of 90 percent of the Lenni-Lenape died of smallpox, yellow fever, measles, influenza and other European diseases.

If correct, this hypothesis means that, by the time William Penn arrived, the plethora of Indian place names and the Indians' trail network (which, for 100 years or more, supplied the colonialists' roads) were a survival from an Indian population which was gone. In other words: the original Lenni-Lenape population of the tri-state area may have numbered as much as 200,000.

European diseases, of course, continued to kill Pennsylvania's Indians after the First Fleet arrived. So, especially after 1763, did the Europeans.

But the Indians were already in motion. After the Walking Purchase of 1737 cheated the Lenni-Lenape of 1,200 square miles in Bucks, Northampton, Carbon and Lehigh counties, most Indians withdrew in disgust. They re-settled west of the Appalachians, in the disputed grounds between the British and the French.

After the British expelled the French from North America in 1763, the British initially reserved the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi as Indian Territory. In 1783, the American Revolution expelled the English, and the Indian Territory was opened up by Congress to be carved into new states.

The last Indian reservation in Pennsylvania, for the Seneca, disappeared in 1950 to make way for a new dam. Today, there may be 5,500 Pennsylvanians who can claim Indian descent. There are still a few Lenni-Lenape in Oklahoma and Canada.

So, their names on our landscape are their only monument.

James G. Wiles is a Philadelphia lawyer.

Local Indian Place Names

Name Meaning

Conestoga "place of the inverted pole"
Conowingo "at the rapids"
Conshohocken "place of pine lands,"
"long land"
Juniata "projecting rock"
Manayunk "where we go to drink"
Passyunk "a level place," "in the valley"
Perkiomen "where there are cranberries"
Poquessing "the place of mice"
Punxsutawney "gnat town"
Shackamaxon "place of chiefs"
Skippack "pool of stagnant water"
Susquehanna "the long reach river,"
"muddy water"
Tamaqua "bear mountain"
Tacony "at the woods"
Wissahickon "catfish stream"
Wissinoming "where we were frightened"

Sources: George P. Donehoo, Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania (1928); Ray Thompson, The Walking Purchase Hoax of 1737 (1973).

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Last updated on March 06, 2007