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Over a million acres of land in northeastern Pennsylvania was claimed through the fraudulent “Walking Purchase” of 1737. After their father’s death in 1718, William Penn’s sons faced crushing debt and began selling vast tracts of land to speculators before they had cleared Indian title, against their father’s policy and practice. After failed efforts to convince Lenape leaders to cede these and other lands to them, they coerced them into an agreement. The transaction involved measuring land by the distance one could walk in a day and a half, hence the treaty’s name. The Penn engaged in trickery and the final tract in no way matched the area the Lenape leaders thought they were ceding. Lenape leaders protested before, during, and immediately after the “walk,” and the transaction is now known as the “notorious, “scandalous” or “infamous” Walking Purchase.

Starting at least by 1937, white settlers have retraced this notorious “walk” through long-distance commemorative journeys. In my presentation, I ask what it means to retrace thisnotorious path. Based on a study of historical accounts of prior walks and interviews with people who participated in a recent commemorative walk, I analyze walkers’ motivations and the meanings they offer behind these Walking Purchase pilgrimages. When we consider the walkers’ subject positions and view these pilgrimages through settler colonial and Indigenous studies literature, they resemble pilgrimages of atonement and white moves to innocence.

Andrea Lynn Smith is Professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College. Her latest book is Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

Memory in the Disciplines is an initiative of the Departments of Sociology and English, with support from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.