JUNE 23:

June 23, 1683:  Today, William Penn and Delaware Chief Tamenend will sign a peace treaty in Shackamoxon, Pennsylvania. Tamenend was also called Tammany. He was renown for his honor. The Tammany societies were named so in his honor. William Penn will purchase two plots of land from Chief Tamanend. The land will be on the Pennypack and Neshaminy Rivers, and between them. The land was purchased for a long list of supplies.
 
 

BACKGROUND:
 

From http://www.southamptonpa.com/tamanend.html
 

TAMANEND, A VILLAGE SACHEM

The historical facts about Tamanend are based on some eight documents from the first fourteen years of Pennsylvania history. To these facts we can add the little that is known about the Lenape Indians.

Tamanend spoke an Algonkian language which was quite different from that of the Iroquois to the north. Modern anthropologists estimate the population of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians to which Tamanend belonged as between 2,500 and 12,000. Their prescence rested light as a bird's wing over a vast region of forests and streams. It extended from north of the Raritan River across New Jersey to the ocean, and down into northern Delaware and all along the Delaware up to the Lehigh.

Tamanend lived in the forests between the Pennypack and the Neshaminy. Here the Indians hunted deer and beaver in the winter. In the warmer months they raised corn, beansm and squash in small clearings and fished in the Delaware for shad and herring. Tamanend's people lived in family groups, each family or clan making a temporary village of about fifty to a hundred persons. When the soil was exhausted and firewood was used up, they simply moved the village to another site.

In one of these villages - which one is unknown - Tamanend was the sachem or trusted spokesman. But each village ordered its own affairs in a very democratic and independent manner. Everyone had some part in any important decisions and these were made by consensus. The English exagerated the position of sachems and called Tamanend the King of the Delawares. Tamanend was nothing of the sort; he could not give orders like a king or feudal lord and the Lenape Indians had no overall tribal government

However, so great was the power of Tamanend's personality that Indians and English settlers remembered him for a hundred years. Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary and lifelong friend of the Lenape Indians, wrote about Tamanend years later: He was an ancient Delaware chief who never had an equal. He was supposed to have had intercourse with the great and good Spirit.

William Penn was greatly interested in the Indians and even before coming to America, he had established a policy of making honest agreements of peace and consent with the Indians. King Charles II had made Penn the absolute owner of the entire province, but Penn did not agree with the king that "the savages" had no more right to the land than did squirrels and rabbits.

In 1862 Penn arrived in America and quickly made it his business to get to know the Indians well. He even learned to speak the Lenape language and liked the melody of its words. The Indians called him Miquon, the word for quill in their language or Brother Onas, using the Iroquois word. Penn entered into cordial negotiations with more than twenty sachems becuase no single leader could speak for the Lenape people and that is how Penn got to know Tamanend.

TAMANEND AT PERKASIE, MAY 1863

In May 1863 Penn mounted his white horse and rode north to an Indian village called Perkasie, the presnet site of Silverdale in Hilltown Township, Bucks County. There Tamanend and his son, Yaqueekhon, received Penn with great hospitality at a feast of venison, roasted acrons, and boiled hominy. A short vigorous man of 39, Penn joine dthe young men in leaping and dancing to Indian singing and the beating of drums.

Penn began by winning the trust of the Indians for his purpose of establishing a league of peace and amity. Then he laid the groundwork for buying tracts of land. He wnated to make sure that all Indian claims to land were settled before he would take the next steps of surveying parcels of land and selling them to European immigrants. And Penn reserve dto himself exclusive rights; no settler was permitted to buy land from the Indians as they did across the river in New Jersey.

Penn's ideas of land as property for exclusive and personal use and the Indian concepts of the land as our mother were worlds apart. Furthermore Tamanend's people knew nothing about the English legal system of written deeds of sale and legal title to permanent land ownership.

For Europeans personal ownership of land was an intense and lifelong concern. The possibility of owning a big tract of of land was the magic of America. Buying land was the way for a European to gain personal liberty, to accumulate wealth and status, and to insure security in old age.

The Lenape Indians, however, already had liberty and security in their communal society where individual wealth was of little importance. To sell land was as incomprehensible to Tamanend as it would be to sell a bushel of tomorrow's sunshine.

Penn held many other meetings with Indians such as the one with Tamanend at Oerkasie. At these councils Penn must have given broad assurances to the Lenape Indians. For example, Indians remembered that they had been promised a strip one mile wide on ech side of the Brandywine for hunting. However, when they complained of mill dams stopping the migration of fish, the government officials could find no written records of the old agreement. Some historians conjecture that Penn's heirs may possibly have destroyed such records of promises made by William Penn in those councils with the Indians in the first years.

At any rate, Tamanend understood that sale of land to Penn did not mean driving the Indians out. And Penn instructed his surveyor never to disturb any of the few, widely scattered Indian farm plots and villages. So Tamanend had good reason to believe that his people could go on hunting for game and raising corn and beans as before. There seemed to be plenty of room for Indians and whites. And William Penn was confident that Indians and Europeans could live together in peace.

TAMANEND IN PHILADELPHIA, JUNE 1683

On Saturday, June 23, 1683, a month after meeting with Penn at Perkasie, Tamanend and five other sachems stood in the New Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia on Front Street near Sansom. Captain Lasse Cock, the Swedish interpreter held in his hand a deed of sale,, written in English on a sheet of paper. Cock explained in LEnape words what this English indenture or contract of sale said. I Tamanen doe grant and dispose of all my lands lying betwixt Pemmapecka and Nessaminehs Creeks and all along Neshaminehs Creeks to William Penn Proprie'r and Govern'r of PEnnsilvania etc his heirs and Assignes for Ever.

The Swede signed the deed as a witness and handed the pen to Tamanend. Bending over the table, Tamanend needed to fill his pen a second time to inscribe all of his mark, a snake coiled.

Tamanend stayed for several days as honored guest in William Penn's house and there was more feasting on Sunday. In the afternoon he sat in the pine board Meeting House while a visiting Quaker, Roger Longworth preached.

Once more Tamanend put his mark on a piece of paper. This was a receipt for the purchase price which for him was a delightfully generous stack of wares: 2 guns, 20 bars of lead, 25 pounds of powder, 6 coats, 8 shirts, 5 hats, 5 pair stockings, 5 caps, 20 handfulls wampum, 1 peck pipes, 10 tobacco boxes, 10 tobacco tongs, 2 kettles, 5 hoes, 6 axes, 16 knives, 100 needles, 2 blankets, 38 yds. duffields, 4 yds. stroudswater (blue & red woolen cloth), 10 glasses, 7 half-gills, 4 handfulls bells. As was proper for a sachem, Tamanend divided everything among his people with only the smallest share for himself. The women as keepers of Lenape history memorized all that Tamanend told them of pacts with William Penn and so preserved an accurate oral record for generations.
 

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>From http://www.geocities.com/pambies_indians/tammany.html
 

Tammany - A noted Delaware chief who was one of the signers of the deed to William Penn in 1683 for lands near Philadelphia.  His name appears on the document as Tamanen, although the Indian form of the name was usually spelled Tamanend. Tammany was held in high esteem among the Delaware of those days.  Many legends surrounded him and his fame extended to the whites, who began to call him "Saint Tammany."  As Patron Saint of America his name appeared on old calendars and Saint Tammany's Festival was celebrated on May 1 of each year.  In 1786 a Saint Tammany Society was formed by veterans of the Revolutionary War.  The society became so popular that it had thirteen state organizations.

In later years the Tammany Society continued to exist only as an eastern political organization.