The Saint Who Never Applied

Tamanend, Chief of Chiefs of the Turtle clan of the Lenni-Lenape, negotiated one of the few treaties in colonial history that actually held. Voltaire called it the only treaty never sealed by an oath and never broken. He fed William Penn venison and roasted acorns, and Penn, to his credit, got up and danced.

Then Tamanend died, and things got strange.

By the 1770s, colonists had declared him Saint Tammany, patron saint of America, and were celebrating his feast day on the first of May. They wore bucktail hats. They gave the whoop. They danced, as one observer noted, "in the style of those people." John Adams attended a Tammany Day in Philadelphia in 1777 and wrote home to Abigail about it. The next year, George Washington held one at Valley Forge while his troops were starving. In 1790, the New York Tammany Society greeted a real Creek Indian delegation at the docks while wearing ersatz Native American clothing. One does wonder what the Creek delegation made of the hats. Within a generation, the society had become a political machine. Within two, it belonged to Boss Tweed. A Lenape chief who brokered peace over hominy and wampum had become the namesake of the most corrupt political organization in American history.

But none of that existed yet on the day he sat with Penn at Shakamaxon, offering acorns.