A sacred River, a measureless continent, a vibrant wilderness of deer and timber and shellfish; turkey and maize; wild rice, honey and fur and grapes. Such was the legacy of Chief Wingohocking and the tribe whose name he bore through the white man's century, deep within Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. The unending, beseechable spirits to animate the riches of the natives' continent were but the minor gods of the Wingohocking. The oak, whose boughs shaded their dead, the creek, who slaked the gray-thirsting bones of their ancestors, these were the greater of their gods, immediate and inescapable and life-giving - and like the minor gods, cryptic and inscrutable.

Sometimes the gods were willful and mischievous, like diminutive Matekanis, the game herder, who rode the back of a deer and herded game for them; or Mesingw, the Forest watcher, whose foreboding visage, engraved on the trunks of living trees throughout the Lands of the Peoples, (Lenapehocking) pervasively reminded the Wingohocking that the gods were always watching. Sometimes the gods were distant, like Kieselemukenku, the father creator, who rewarded good behavior, punished bad and frequently tricked the natives for the sheer enjoyment of it, heartily laughing in this latter enterprise with his friends, Badger and Matekanis. Sometimes the spirits were angry, sometimes mean. But always, hidden in the moist shadows of every glen and constantly whispering behind every rustling of the leaves, they lurked in the innocent consciousness of their native charges, the Wingohocking. It was not out of character for such primitive spirits to betray their charges. Indeed, the Wingohocking expected no less.

So it was neither surprising nor disconcerting to the Lenape natives along the coast to witness the arrival of the great god canoe of the Italian explorer, Verrazano, in what they did not know was 1524 of the Europeans' years. It emerged, fittingly, from the mists of the Dawn Waters, where dwelled Kieselemukenku, the father creator; from past the lair of the evil water serpent, Mexaxkuk and seemed, at first, a floating island. The encounter proved paradigmatic: In the abortive and drunken scuffle which ensued upon the sharing of European spirits - spirits of a different sort - Verrazano's men not only failed to capture what were to them merely taller specimens of the local fauna, but barely escaped with their lives.

The Wingohocking tribe dwelled far inland from this event. In warmer weather they camped along the flattened, sandy shores of a bow in the Lehigh River, tributary to the mighty Delaware. In colder weather they migrated to the protected valleys and canyons of the Father Mountains, not far to the west -safely inland from the burgeoning village of Philadelphia (nŽe Shackamaxon). So even two centuries after Verrazano, the inland Wingohocking could safely hazard laughter at the expense of their cousins of the coast: for what else, if not evil, could one have expected from a creature of a black god canoe, a friend, no doubt, of Kieselemukenku, the father creator, who did so enjoy his endless tricks upon his hapless Wingohocking and their parent nation, the Lenape? Laugh they could afford to do, since the more successful repetitions of the Europeans' first attempts at capture remained confined to the edge of the roughened waters of the Dawn Sea. Such forays were a dim threat to the provincial conscience of the Wingohocking, who had but to contend with rare travelers who braved the occasional rapids and relentless downflow of their River, to trap and to trade. It was beyond their imagining that the decimating plagues of smallpox and influenza which swept throughout the Lands of the Peoples, were the pervasive issue of such distant encounters.