I was surprised to find how correctly the old men of the tribe had preserved and handed down reminiscences of their former homes along the Delaware River. The flat marshy “Neck,” south of Philadelphia, between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, was pointed out to me by Mr. Anthony (who had never seen it before) as the spot where the tribe preferred to gather the rushes with which they manufactured rugs and mats. He recognized various trees, not seen in Canada, by the descriptions he had heard of them.

Such narratives formed the themes of many a long tale by the winter fire in the olden time. Like most Indians, the Lenâpé are, or rather were—for, alas! the good old customs are nearly all gone—inexhaustible raconteurs. They had not only semi-historic traditions, but numberless fanciful tales of spirits and sprites, giants and dwarfs, with their kith and kin. Such tales were called tomoacan, which means “tales for leisure hours.” They relate the deeds of potent necromancers, and their power over the machtanha, “those who are bewitched.”

It greatly interested me to learn that several of these tales referred distinctly to the culture-hero of the tribe, that ancient man who taught them the arts of life, and on his disappearance—these heroes do not die—promised to return at some future day, and restore his favorite people to power and happiness. This Messianic hope was often the central idea in American native religions, as witness the worship of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico, of Kukulcan in Yucatan, of Viracocha in Peru. Mr. Anthony assured me that it was perfectly familiar to the old Delawares, and added that in his opinion their very name, Lenâpé, conveys an esoteric meaning, to wit, “the man comes,” with reference to the second advent of their culture-hero.[[200]] This is singular confirmation of the fragmentary myths collected by the Swedish engineer Lindstrom in 1650, and by the Moravian Bishop Ettwein about a century later. These I have collected in “The Lenâpé and their Legends” (Philadelphia, 1885), and have discussed the general subject at such length in my “American Hero-Myths” (Philadelphia, 1882) that the reader will probably be satisfied to escape further expansion of it here.

Only in traditions does the “Stone Age” survive among the Delawares. In Mr. Anthony’s youth, the bow-and-arrow was still occasionally in use for hunting; but he had never seen employed arrow-points of stone. They were either of deer’s horns or of sharpened bones. The name for the compound instrument “bow-and-arrow” is manhtaht, the first a being nasal; and from this word, Mr. Anthony states, is derived the name Manhattan, properly manahah tank, “the place where they gather the wood to make bows.” The bow-string is tschipan: the arrow, allunth. The generic name for stone weapon is still familiar, achsinhican, and the word from which we derive “tomahawk,” t’mahican, is strictly applied to a stone hatchet. War-clubs were of several varieties, called apech'lit and mehitíqueth, which were different from an ordinary stick or cane, alauwan. Though the war-whoop is heard no more, its name remains, kowa'mo, and tradition still recalls their ancient contests with the Iroquois, their cruel and hated enemies, to whom they applied the opprobrious epithet mengwe (that is, glans penis).

Hunting is scarcely worth the name any longer on the Canadian reservations. The debated question as to whether the Lenâpé knew the buffalo attracted me. Mr. Anthony assured me that they did. It was called sisiliti, which he explained as “the animal that drops its excrement when in motion,” walking or running; though he added that another possible derivation is from siselamen, to butt against, from which comes sisejahen, to break in pieces by butting.

In former times a favorite method of hunting in the autumn was for a large number of hunters to form a line and drive the game before them. This was called p’mochlapen. This answered well for deer, but now little is left save the muskrat, chuaskquis, the ground-hog, monachgen, the white rabbit, wapachtques, the weasel, mani'tohumisch, and the little chipmunk, pochqwapiith (literally, “he sits upright on something”). For such small game, it is scarcely worth while running the risk of the bite of the blow-adder, pethbotalwe, and the much-feared “bloody-mouthed lizard,” mokdomus; though I suspect both are more terrible in tale than in fact.

In fishing, they appear to have known not only the brush-net and the spear, but the hook-and-line as well. The line, wendamakan, was twisted from the strands of the wild hemp, achhallap, or of the milk-weed, pichtokenna; and the hook was armed with a bait, awauchkon, which might be wecheeso, the ground-worm, literally, “he who extends and retracts himself,” or the waukchelachees, grasshopper, literally, “one that hops.” This corresponds with what the old Swedish traveler, Peter Kalm, relates in the first half of the last century. He describes the native hooks as made of bone or of the spur of a fowl.

They still gather for food the ptukquim, walnut, literally, “round nut;” the quinokquim, butternut, literally, “oblong nut;” and various berries, as the lechlochhilleth, the red raspberry, literally, “the berry that falls to pieces.”

Among utensils of ancient date and aboriginal invention seem to have been wooden dishes or bowls, wollakanes, made from the elm-tree, wollakanahungi; wooden mortars, in which corn was pounded, taquachhakan; and peyind, cups with handles. The art of pottery, which they once possessed, has been entirely lost.

Although now resident inland, they remember the manufacture and use of canoes, amochol. Some were of birch bark, wiqua, and were called wiqua-amochol; others were dugouts, for which they preferred the American sycamore, distinctively named canoe-wood, amochol-he.