Tishcohan, defender of Lenape Lands

By the 1730s, the world Tishcohan had known was disappearing around him.

Settlements pushed farther into Lenape country. Forests were cleared, roads crossed old paths, and land that generations of Lenape families had hunted, planted, and traveled was increasingly measured, mapped, and claimed by strangers.

Tishcohan was already an older man when he emerged prominently in Pennsylvania's colonial records. A respected Lenape sakima, he belonged to a generation of leaders trying to preserve their people's land and independence while negotiating with a colonial population growing larger every year.

Unlike many Lenape leaders of this period, we know what Tishcohan looked like. Around 1735, Swedish-born artist Gustavus Hesselius painted him from life, leaving us one of the rare surviving contemporary portraits of an eighteenth-century Lenape leader.

The Penns return

William Penn had built his relationship with the Lenape around diplomacy, negotiation, and promises of fair dealing. But Penn died in 1718, and the Pennsylvania inherited by his sons was a very different place. The Penn heirs were under growing financial pressure and deeply in debt, while land had become increasingly valuable as settlers pushed steadily northward. Acquiring more land meant more property the Penns could sell.

By the 1730s, the Penn family was pressing Lenape leaders to recognize an old claim to a huge tract of land north of Philadelphia. The claim rested on an unsigned 1686 draft deed from a sale that apparently had never been completed. Yet the proprietors maintained that Lenape ancestors had already agreed to sell territory extending as far as a man could walk in a day and a half.

The original deed was nowhere to be found

Tishcohan and other Lenape leaders repeatedly questioned the claim. Meetings and negotiations continued for years. Maps were produced. Old documents were invoked. Colonial officials insisted that an agreement had been made.

Finally, in August 1737, Tishcohan and several other Lenape leaders placed their marks on an agreement intended to settle the dispute.

Then Pennsylvania put the agreement to the test.

A walk that wasn't a walk

The Lenape expected a walk. The Penns prepared a race.

The route was scouted and cleared beforehand. Strong runners were selected. Supplies and horses were positioned along the way. When the Walking Purchase began on September 19, 1737, the men pushed forward at a pace designed to cover as much territory as physically possible.

In a day and a half, they traveled roughly sixty miles.

Pennsylvania then drew the boundary in a way that dramatically enlarged the territory being claimed. The result stripped the Lenape of an enormous area of the Delaware and Lehigh valleys.

Tishcohan and other Lenape leaders protested.

They believed they had been deceived.

Tishcohan Stays

For Tishcohan, the argument was not abstract. The land being claimed contained places where Lenape families were still living.

He refused to simply leave

Tishcohan reportedly encouraged his people to remain on the disputed land even as Pennsylvania officials insisted that the Walking Purchase had extinguished Lenape title to it. For a time, some Lenape communities did exactly that.

But the balance of power was changing rapidly. Settlers continued arriving, colonial authorities enforced Pennsylvania's claims, and pressure on Lenape communities intensified.

The Walking Purchase became one of the great betrayals in the history of Pennsylvania's relationship with the Lenape. It also helped destroy the trust that had once distinguished relations between William Penn and the Lenape from many other colonial encounters.

A leader at the turning point

Tishcohan lived at a moment when negotiation was becoming increasingly unequal.

He had participated in councils, challenged colonial claims, placed his mark on agreements, and attempted to protect the land his people still occupied. Yet he faced a colonial government that possessed something earlier generations of Lenape leaders had not confronted on this scale: the population, legal machinery, and physical power to impose its interpretation of an agreement after the negotiations were over.

Within a generation, much of the Lenape presence in eastern Pennsylvania would be pushed westward.

Tishcohan's story therefore reaches beyond the Walking Purchase itself. His life captures the moment when diplomacy between two peoples was increasingly replaced by the power of one to control the other.

A final chapter

Nearly 270 years later, the Walking Purchase returned to federal court. In 2006, the Third Circuit described the transaction as a “massive fraud” against the Delaware Nation, yet ruled that Thomas Penn possessed sovereign authority to extinguish Lenape aboriginal title. The decision did not validate the questionable 1686 deed; instead, it held that Penn's intent and sovereign authority were sufficient to extinguish aboriginal title despite the fraud surrounding the Walking Purchase.

Discover more…

1. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery — Tishcohan
Come face to face with Tishcohan in Gustavus Hesselius’s extraordinary 1735 portrait, painted during the Lenape leader’s lifetime.
View Tishcohan at the National Portrait Gallery

2. Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — The Walking Purchase
Explore the deception behind the 1737 Walking Purchase and Tishcohan’s role in negotiations that transformed the Lenape homeland.
Explore the Walking Purchase

3. William J. Buck — “Lappawinzo and Tishcohan, Chiefs of the Lenni Lenape”
Go back to 1883 for an early historical account devoted specifically to Tishcohan and Lapowinsa, their portraits, lives, and appearances in colonial records.
Read Lappawinzo and Tishcohan

4. Commonplace — The Brothers Hesselius and the American Mystery
Discover the fascinating story behind the artist who painted Tishcohan and Lapowinsa and why these 1735 portraits remain so striking nearly three centuries later.
Read Overcoming Nausea: The Brothers Hesselius and the American Mystery

5. Smithsonian American Art Museum — Tish-co-han
See how Tishcohan’s image lived on in the nineteenth century through this richly colored 1837 lithograph, now preserved by the Smithsonian.
View Tish-co-han at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

6. New York State Museum — Beyond Manhattan
Follow Tishcohan beyond Pennsylvania and into a lesser-known chapter involving Lenape history, place names, and colonial-era land records in the greater New York–New Jersey region.
Read Beyond Manhattan — New York State Museum PDF

7 Delaware Nation v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 446 F.3d 410 (3d Cir. 2006)
Read the federal appeals court decision that called the 1737 Walking Purchase a “massive fraud,” while nevertheless concluding that the Delaware Nation’s aboriginal rights to the disputed land had been legally extinguished.
Read the full 2006 court opinion — Justia

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