1737 -- WALKING
              PURCHASE

Few know that merchant Nicholas Dupui played a highly significant role in the infamous Walking Purchase.  Here's the backstory.  Despite all of his earlier misgivings, after the sudden and unexpected departure of his neighboring Shawnee tribe, Dupui had no choice but to endeavor to foster a positive relationship with the area's remaining indigenous population, the Delaware Tribe.  Eventually, this led to the establishment of a sincere and lasting friendship with local Lenape chief Lapowingo.

In time, an arrangement was reached, gifts were provided, and Nicholas Dupui compensated the Delaware for the land upon which he had settled (all the while innocently believing that Pennsylvania's Proprietor had already secured such land for the Commonwealth -- otherwise, why would the Penn's land agent, William Allen, be entitled to payment for the registration of Dupui's real estate holdings)?  That the Lenape sold the land to Dupui was ultimately confirmed in a complaint pertaining to the Walking Purchase later lodged by the Delaware Indians:

All this is Our own Land Except Some tracts We have disposed off.  The Tract of Durham, The tract of Nicholas Depuis, The Tract of Old Weiser We have Sold But for the Rest We have Never sold & We Desire Thomas Penn Would take these People off from their Land in Peace that we May not be at the trouble to drive them off for the Land."

Thus, through his friendship with Lapowingo, Dupuis inadvertently became privy to a closely guarded Proprietary secret -- Lapowingo had revealed the fact that the Penn family had never actually purchased land from the Delaware Indians.  Astounding!  This was a game-changing moment.  Without a confirmed real estate sale from the Lenape to the Penns, there could be no valid property Title Chain, and such a state of affairs was not a matter readily to be tolerated!

One might wonder why the impoverished Thomas Penn had ever even agreed to the Walking Purchase.  Let's face it, any such purchase would necessarily involve the outlay of capital which the Proprietor only had in short supply   ...and why bother making a purchase at all when his land agent had long been selling off parcels up and down the Delaware River that had cost the Colony not even a shilling?  In short, as no payments had ever been tendered to the indigenous land owners, why would Thomas Penn actively derail what utterly amounted to a low-risk, absolutely pure-profit scam?

Enter Nicholas Dupui. 

Dupui had the Proprietor by the short and curlies.  If word ever got out that Penn and his agents knowingly had engaged in fraudulent land transactions, a debtors' prison in England awaited; the lawsuits alone would have been ruinous.  And so, on 29 March 1737, Dupui found himself (along with Delaware Chief Lapowingo), discussing the issue with Thomas Penn.  It was at this very meeting in Philadelphia that the notion of the Walking Purchase was first broached to the Delaware Indians:

The Prop'r (by the Interpreter) told Lapowingo that as father had always been kind to the Indians and purchased & paid them for their Lands he did not take it well that they should Sell to any other people because as it was unjust so to do.  A Law of the Province was provided to prevent the same and render such purchases void and therefore to continue the Friendship that had always subsisted between the Prop'rs and the Indians it would be necessary to fix the bounds of the former purchases by walking out the distances according to the Deeds passed by the Indians to the late Prop'r.