Already La Salle had taken his fleet of canoes down the Mississippi River and had placed the arms of France on a post at its mouth in April, 1682, only a few months before Penn reached his newly acquired colony.Thus in the same year in which the Quakers established in Pennsylvania their reign of liberty and of peace with the red men, La Salle was laying the foundation of the western empire of despotic France, which seventy years afterwards was to hurl the savages upon the English colonies, to wreck the Quaker policy of peace, but to fail in the end to maintain itself against the free colonies of England.
While they were building houses in Philadelphia, the settlers lived in bark huts or in caves dug in the river bank, as the early settlers in New Jersey across the river had lived.
Pastorius, a learned German Quaker, who had come out with the, English, placed over the door of his cave the motto, "Parva domus, sed amica bonis, procul este profani," which much amused Penn when he saw it.A certain Mrs.Morris was much exercised one day as to how she could provide supper in the cave for her husband who was working on the construction of their house.But on returning to her cave she found that her cat had just brought in a fine rabbit.In their later prosperous years they had a picture of the cat and the rabbit made on a box which has descended as a family heirloom.Doubtless there were preserved many other interesting reminiscences of the brief camp life.
These Quakers were all of the thrifty, industrious type which had gone to West Jersey a few years before.Men of means, indeed, among the Quakers were the first to seek refuge from the fines and confiscations imposed upon them in England.They brought with them excellent supplies of everything.Many of the ships carried the frames of houses ready to put together.But substantial people of this sort demanded for the most part houses of brick, with stone cellars.Fortunately both brick clay and stone were readily obtainable in the neighborhood, and whatever may have been the case in other colonies, ships loaded with brick from England would have found it little to their profit to touch at Philadelphia.An early description says that the brick houses in Philadelphia were modeled on those of London, and this type prevailed for nearly two hundred years.
It was probably in June, 1683, that Penn made his famous treaty with the Indians.No documentary proof of the existence of such a treaty has reached us.He made, indeed, a number of so-called treaties, which were really only purchases of land involving oral promises between the principals to treat each other fairly.
Hundreds of such treaties have been made.The remarkable part about Penn's dealings with the Indians was that such promises as he made he kept.The other Quakers, too, were as careful as Penn in their honorable treatment of the red men.Quaker families of farmers and settlers lived unarmed among them for generations and, when absent from home, left children in their care.The Indians, on their part, were known to have helped white families with food in winter time.Penn, on his first visit to the colony, made a long journey unarmed among the Indians as far as the Susquehanna, saw the great herds of elk on that river, lived in Indian wigwams, and learned much of the language and customs of the natives.There need never be any trouble with them, he said.
They were the easiest people in the world to get on with if the white men would simply be just.Penn's fair treatment of the Indians kept Pennsylvania at peace with them for about seventy years--in fact, from 1682 until the outbreak of the French and Indian Wars, in 1755.In its critical period of growth, Pennsylvania was therefore not at all harassed or checked by those Indian hostilities which were such a serious impediment in other colonies.
The two years of Penn's first visit were probably the happiest of his life.Always fond of the country, he built himself a fine seat on the Delaware near Bristol, and it would have been better for him, and probably also for the colony, if he had remained there.But he thought he had duties in England: his family needed him; he must defend his people from the religious oppression still prevailing; and Lord Baltimore had gone to England to resist him in the boundary dispute.One of the more narrow-minded of his faith wrote to Penn from England that he was enjoying himself too much in his colony and seeking his own selfish interest.Influenced by all these considerations, he returned in August, 1684, and it was long before he saw Pennsylvania again--not, indeed, until October, 1699, and then for only two years.
