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The 200+ Year Displacement 1660-1867
Between 1660 and 1867, the Lenape were pushed steadily from Lenapehoking. War, colonial expansion, disputed land agreements, broken treaties, and forced removal scattered communities westward and northward, eventually creating the six distinct Lenape nations and communities that endure today.
The Displacement Begins
The Lenape dispersal began within Lenapehoking itself. By the 1660s, decades of disease, warfare, and Dutch settlement had already weakened and displaced communities around Manhattan, the lower Hudson, and northeastern New Jersey. In 1664, the English seized New Netherland and renamed New Amsterdam New York, accelerating English settlement around New York Harbor and across northern and central New Jersey.
Pressure came from several directions. English settlers moved into northeastern New Jersey and south of Raritan Bay, while settlements expanded along the Raritan Valley. At the same time, English and Quaker settlement grew along the Delaware River in West Jersey and Pennsylvania. Lenape communities increasingly shifted away from the coast and major colonial settlements toward the interior, upper Delaware, and Susquehanna valleys.
These were not yet the great migrations to Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and Indian Territory. They were the first contractions of Lenapehoking: communities moving from one part of their homeland to another as colonial settlement closed in around them. By the early 1700s, that internal displacement was becoming a larger westward movement, accelerated dramatically by the Walking Purchase of 1737.
Delaware Tribe of Indians
The Long Road West: 1660–1867
As Lenape families were pushed out of Lenapehoking, much of the population initially moved west together. Through the early 1700s, the Lenape remained a broadly connected people, with families and communities regrouping along the Susquehanna and farther west. The separate paths that would eventually lead to today's six Lenape communities had only begun to emerge. Mounting colonial pressure kept the migration moving, and by the mid-1700s large numbers had reached western Pennsylvania and the Ohio country, where they attempted to rebuild beyond the advancing colonial frontier.
Ohio offered no lasting refuge. War, American expansion, and repeated land cessions drove the western Lenape farther into Indiana. It was during this period that the migration began to fracture into distinctly different paths. One group eventually moved south and west, becoming ancestors of today's Delaware Nation at Anadarko, while others went north into Canada. The main western body, ancestors of today's Delaware Tribe of Indians, continued west. In 1818, the Treaty of St. Mary's surrendered their Indiana lands and sent them across the Mississippi into Missouri.
But the frontier kept catching them. After only a brief period in Missouri, the Delaware were again compelled west, reaching what is now northeastern Kansas in the early 1830s. There they built farms, communities and businesses and remained for roughly three decades. Yet American settlement, railroads and federal pressure steadily consumed their Kansas land. By the 1860s, the Delaware once again faced the choice that had followed them for generations: surrender more land or move.
In 1867, the long migration reached Indian Territory. The Kansas Delaware moved south into the Cherokee Nation in present-day northeastern Oklahoma, establishing the community centered today around Bartlesville. From people who had once lived along the Atlantic coast, they had crossed Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Kansas, rebuilding repeatedly along the way. Their descendants form today's Delaware Tribe of Indians, the largest of the six surviving Lenape communities, with more than 10,000 extolled members.
The Delaware Nation:
A Different Road West
For more than a century, their story was part of the larger Lenape migration. Driven from Lenapehoking, Lenape families moved through Pennsylvania and into the Ohio country, repeatedly rebuilding as colonial settlement overtook them. But after the American Revolution, the road divided. Around 1789, one Lenape community separated from the main western body, seeking a different future beyond the expanding United States. This was less a single dramatic political rupture than a different survival strategy: while one body remained on a more northerly western route, these families moved toward Spanish-controlled territory west of the Mississippi.
In 1793, that choice became tangible. Spanish Louisiana granted the group land near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which they shared with Shawnee. Because they were absent from the main Delaware body, they became known as the “Absentee Delaware.” For a time, Cape Girardeau promised distance from the American frontier. It did not last. By 1815, they had been forced from Missouri and were moving south and southwest, establishing communities in Arkansas while others pushed toward Spanish Texas.
Then the migration became an extraordinary sweep across the southern frontier. Delaware families moved through Arkansas and into Texas, eventually forming communities near the northeastern Texas border and around Nacogdoches. Governments changed around them: Spanish territory became Mexican, Texas became an independent republic, and then, in 1845, part of the United States. In 1854, some Absentee Delaware were placed on the Brazos Reservation, but even there they found no permanent refuge. Delaware Nation's history records that its ancestors were removed within Texas several times.
By about 1873, the long road finally reached the Anadarko country of Indian Territory. The surviving Absentee Delaware settled among the Wichita allotments in what is now southwestern Oklahoma. They had crossed international borders, survived repeated removals and watched nations rise around them, yet maintained a separate political identity from the other Delaware body. Known for generations as the Absentee Delaware and later the Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma, in 1999 they formally adopted the name Delaware Nation: a sovereign Lenape nation whose separate path had begun more than two centuries earlier.
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