1. The walk: how it really happened
The clause was real. A draft deed from 1686, of contested validity, referred to land “as far as a man can go in a day and a half” northwest from a starting point on an existing purchase boundary. The Lenape, who had lived in this region for thousands of years, understood the clause the way anyone would: a walking man, on existing paths, covering the kind of ground a walker covers in 36 hours. About thirty miles. Maybe a little more.
That is not what the Penns did.
The trail was prepared in advance
In the weeks before September 19, 1737, surveyors quietly cleared a straight path northwest from the starting point near the Wrightstown Meetinghouse through roughly forty miles of woods. There was no agreement with the Lenape that the route would be cleared. Once the path existed, the “walkers” would have a runway instead of a trail.
The walkers were runners
The Penns hired three of the fittest men in the colony. Edward Marshall was a hunter and trapper who hunted throughout the region; he was accustomed to running deer to ground. Solomon Jennings was a farmer near present-day Bethlehem. James Yeates, from neighboring Newtown, was known locally as a strong walker. The party was provisioned by horses carrying water, food, and changes of clothing along the cleared path, with the Bucks County deputy surveyor John Chapman riding alongside and the Bucks County sheriff Timothy Smith timing the proceedings.
Two of three collapsed
Solomon Jennings dropped out within the first half-day, broken by the pace. Early on the second day James Yeates collapsed on the trail; he was retrieved blind and exhausted and died three days after the walk ended. Edward Marshall, the only one to finish, ended at a marked chestnut tree near present-day Jim Thorpe roughly eighteen hours of actual walking after he started — about sixty-five miles. Lenape observers, walking alongside, complained throughout that this was not a walk in any honest sense. They were ignored.
Marshall was paid for his run in land, in the new tract that his own run had opened.