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Original Document
Teedyuscung's Speech at the Easton Treaty Conference, 1758.

At the 1758 Easton Treaty conference, Teedyuscung made his bid for securing a permanent Delaware reservation in the Wyoming Valley. The Iroquois of New York, however, insisted that they owned that land by right of conquest, and that the Delaware occupied it only at their pleasure. In a famous speech excerpted below, Teedyuscung pleaded with the Iroquois (whom he addressed as "Uncles" to the Delaware) to grant his people a permanent title to the land.


"Uncles,

You may remember that you have placed us at Wyomink, and Shamokin, Places where Indians have lived before. Now I hear since, that you have sold that Land to our Brethren the English; let the Matter now be cleared up, in the Presence of our Brethren the English.

I sit there as a Bird on a Bow; I look about, and do not know where to go; let me therefore come down upon the Ground, and make that my own by a good Deed, and I shall then have a Home for ever; for if you, my Uncles, or I die, our Brethren the English will say, they have bought it from you, and so wrong my Posterity out of it."


Credit: Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763 (1949; reprint Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 206.
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