From Chester Penn proceeded, with some of his friends, in an open barge, in the earliest days of November, to a place about four miles above the mouth of the Schuylkill, called Coaquannock, “where there was a high bold shore, covered with lofty pines.”
Here the infant city of Philadelphia had been established, and Penn’s approach was hailed with joy by the whole population.
Immediately after his arrival in the “City of Brotherly Love,” Penn dispatched two persons to Lord Baltimore to ask of his health, offer kind neighborhood and agree upon a time of meeting. Penn then went to New York to pay his respects to the Duke, returning to Philadelphia before the close of November.
It was about this time that the “Great Treaty” took place at Shackamaxon. Tradition has persisted that a great treaty took place here under an elm tree, with William Penn, Deputy Governor Markham and others, and the representatives of the several Indian tribes of that and other localities.
Even if tradition errs in the details of this treaty, it is a fact that the Indians themselves alluded to “the treaty of amity and peace held with the great and good Onas” on all public occasions.
Onas was the Indian name for the Governor of Pennsylvania, and it is supposed that the “great and good Onas” referred particularly to William Penn himself.
It is also true that for a period of forty or fifty years the treaty Penn made with the Indians was not broken, and the land of Penn was preserved during all the time from the suffering of the scalping-knife, the tomahawk or the torch.
William Penn convened a General Assembly at Chester, December 4, 1682, of which Nicholas More, president of the Society of Free Traders, was chosen speaker.
During a session of four days this Assembly enacted three laws: (1) An act for the union of the Province and Territories; (2) An act of Naturalization; and (3) The great law, or code of laws, consisting of sixty-nine sections, and embracing most of the laws agreed upon in England and several others afterward suggested.
Penn, by appointment, met Lord Baltimore at West River December 19, where he was received with great ceremony, but their interview led to no solution of the vexatious question of boundary. The discussion lasted two days, but the weather became severely cold, precluding the possibility of taking observations or making the necessary surveys, so it was agreed to adjourn further consideration of the subject until spring.