Walking Purchase

The Walking Purchase, also known as the Walking Treaty, was a 1737 agreement between the family of William Penn, the original proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, and the Lenape native Indians. In the purchase, the Penn family and proprietors produced a deed to claim that a 1686 treaty with the Lenape ceded an area of 1,200,000 acres (4,860 km²) in present-day Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania in colonial Pennsylvania, which included a western land boundary extending as far west as a man could walk in a day and a half, which led to its name.

The area is along the northern reaches of the Delaware River, on Pennsylvania's border with what was called, at the time, West Jersey. Encyclopædia Britannica refers to the treaty as a "land swindle".^[1] The Lenape appealed to the Iroquois Indian tribe to their north for aid on the issue, but the Iroquois refused their request, ultimately siding with the Penn interests.

Nearly 300 years later, in 2004, a lawsuit was filed over the continuing dispute. In the case, Delaware Nation v. Pennsylvania, the Delaware Tribe, one of three later federally-recognized Lenape tribes, and its descendants in the 21st century claimed 314 acres (1.27 km²) of land included in the original purchase in 1737, but the U.S. District Court granted the Commonwealth's motion to dismiss. It ruled that the case was nonjusticiable, even if the Delaware Nation's allegations of fraud were factually accurate. This ruling was upheld through several appeals in the United States courts of appeals, which culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court refusing to hear the case, thereby upholding the lower courts' decision.