Penn visits the Indians
William Penn won the love and the respect of the Indians of Pennsylvania. He visited them in their own towns and ate with them. He even took part in their athletic games and outran them all. Like Roger Williams, he believed that the Indians should be paid for their lands. Accordingly, he made them rich gifts and entered into solemn treaties with the chiefs.
Kind treatment produced kind treatment
At a treaty under a great elm tree on the banks of the Delaware, Penn said to the Indians: "We are the same as if one man's body were divided into two parts: We are all one flesh and one blood." In return the Indians said: "We will live in love with William Penn and his children as long as the moon and the sun shall endure." If the Indians admired a white man they said: "He is like William Penn."
The coming of the "Pennsylvania Dutch"
The news of the establishment of free government and free religious worship brought crowds of settlers from Germany. Hundreds of German families in the valleys of the Rhine and the Neckar escaped to "Penn's Woods," and there their children's children are to be found to-day under the name of the "Pennsylvania Dutch." Without boasting, William Penn could say that no other one man, at his own expense, had planted so great a colony in the wilds of America as he had. Few nobler men ever lived than William Penn. He died July 30, 1718.
QUAKER WAYS IN OLD PENNSYLVANIA
Believed in simple things
57. How Quakers Differed from other Colonists. The people who formed Penn's colony were unlike those of any of the other settlements. They did not wear gorgeous clothes and jewelry like the Virginia cavaliers. The men carried no swords or pistols. They were not stern like the Puritans. Games and social pleasures were not to be seen among them as in Dutch New Netherland.