Written by Kenneth W. Milano Dec. 1, 2015, posted to http://www.starnewsphilly.com/.

This month we cel­eb­rated the 333rd An­niversary of Wil­li­am Penn’s Treaty with the Nat­ive Amer­ic­ans at Shack­amax­on (Penn Treaty Park), but just when did Penn’s Treaty ac­tu­ally take place?

Wil­li­am Penn’s mem­or­able treaty with Taman­end and oth­er Delaware chiefs un­der the “Great Elm Tree” at Shack­amax­on has al­ways been filled with ro­mantic in­terest. His­tor­i­an C. Hale Sipe tells us that Penn, un­armed, clad in his somber Quaker garb, ad­dressed the as­sembled Nat­ive Amer­ic­ans, ut­ter­ing the fol­low­ing words, which have been ad­mired ever since:

We meet on the broad path­way of good faith and good-will; no ad­vant­age shall be taken on either side, but all shall be open­ness and love. We are the same as if one man’s body was to be di­vided in­to two parts; we are of one flesh and one blood.

The reply of Taman­end is said to be equally noble:

We will live in love with Wil­li­am Penn and his chil­dren as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars en­dure.

There is no ac­tu­al re­cord of the “Great Treaty,” the treaty made fa­mil­i­ar to many by Ben­jamin West’s paint­ing and Voltaire’s al­lu­sion to it “as the only treaty nev­er sworn to and nev­er broken.” The sym­bol­ism of the “Treaty Tree” has laid its mark on the Amer­ic­an land­scape as cen­tur­ies of artists have looked to it for in­spir­a­tion.

The lack of agree­ment among his­tor­i­ans as to the time when the event took place also adds to the con­fu­sion of its au­then­ti­city. Most ac­counts claim that it took place in late Novem­ber 1682, shortly after Penn ar­rived in the colony. “Un­der the shel­ter of the forest,” to quote the Amer­ic­an his­tor­i­an George Ban­croft, “now leaf­less by the frosts of au­tumn, Penn pro­claimed to the men of the Al­gon­quin race, from both banks of the Delaware, from the bor­ders of the Schuylkill, and…even from the Susque­hanna.”

Some his­tor­i­ans ac­tu­ally place the date of the treaty as June 23, 1683, when Penn pur­chased two tracts of land from Taman­end and his as­so­ci­ates, with the as­sump­tion that the trans­ac­tion and the Great Treaty took place at the same time and place, even though a treaty of “amity and friend­ship” need not have in­cluded an ex­change of land.

His­tor­i­an Howard Mal­com Jen­kins makes men­tion of Penn’s Treaty in his mul­tivolume work on Pennsylvania, “Pennsylvania, Co­lo­ni­al and Fed­er­al,” pub­lished in 1903:

The In­di­ans pre­served the tra­di­tion of an agree­ment of peace made with Penn, and it was many times re­called in the meet­ings held with him and his suc­cessors. Some of these al­lu­sions are very def­in­ite. In 1715, for ex­ample, an im­port­ant del­eg­a­tion of the Lenape chiefs came to Phil­adelphia to vis­it the Gov­ernor. Sas­soon­an—af­ter­ward called Al­lummapees, and for many years the prin­cip­al chief of his people—was at the head, and Opess­ah, a Shawnee chief, ac­com­pan­ied him. There was “great ce­re­mony,” says the Coun­cil re­cord, over the “open­ing of the calu­met.” Rattles were shaken, and songs were chanted. Then Sas­soon­an spoke, of­fer­ing the calu­met to Gov­ernor Gook­in, who in his speech spoke of “that firm Peace that was settled between Wil­li­am Penn, the founder and chief gov­ernor of this coun­try, at his first com­ing in­to it,” to which Sas­soon­an replied that they had come “to re­new the former bond of friend­ship; that Wil­li­am Penn had at his first com­ing made a clear and open road all the way to the In­di­ans, and they de­sired the same might be kept open and that all ob­struc­tions might be re­moved.”

Men­tion­ing that the peace was first made upon Penn’s com­ing to the colony would place the Peace Treaty in 1682 rather than 1683—would Penn really wait from Oc­to­ber 1682 to June 1683 to make treaty with the Nat­ive Amer­ic­ans?

In 1720, Gov­ernor Wil­li­am Keith, writ­ing to the Iroquois chiefs of New York, noted, “When Gov­ernor Penn first settled this coun­try he made it his first care to cul­tiv­ate a strict al­li­ance and friend­ship with all the In­di­ans, and con­des­cen­ded so far as to pur­chase his lands from them.”

And in March 1722, the co­lo­ni­al au­thor­it­ies sent a mes­sage to the Senecas, writ­ing, “Wil­li­am Penn made a firm peace and league with the In­di­ans in these parts near forty years ago, which league has of­ten been re­peated and nev­er broken.”

In fact the Great Treaty was nev­er broken un­til the Penn’s Creek Mas­sacre of Oc­to­ber 16, 1755.

Ac­cord­ing to the his­tor­i­an C. Hale Sipe, the Great Treaty was “pre­served by the head chiefs of the Turtle Clan of Delawares for gen­er­a­tions.” On March 24, 1782, Chief Kill­buck is said to have lost the his­tor­ic wam­pum that con­tained the treaty that Taman­end and oth­ers had made with Penn one hun­dred years pre­vi­ously. He had been forced to flee to Fort Pitt to es­cape death at the hands of the Scotch-Ir­ish set­tlers from Charti­ers Creek who at­tacked him and oth­er friendly Delawares at Smoky Is­land, also called Kill­buck’s Is­land, in the Ohio River, near Fort Pitt.

The Great Treaty at Shack­amax­on, as Sipe states, oc­cu­pies a “high and glor­i­ous place in the In­di­an his­tory and tra­di­tions of Pennsylvania and the Na­tion. Though the his­tor­i­an labors in vain to es­tab­lish the date, the fact of the treaty re­mains as in­spir­ing to us of the present days as it was to the his­tor­i­ans, paint­ers, and po­ets of the past.” For artists around the world, Penn’s Treaty be­came a sym­bol and an in­spir­a­tion that would keep them busy for cen­tur­ies after.

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