William Penn was an English writer, religious thinker and Quaker who was an advocate of democracy and religious freedom known for his amicable relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans who lived Pennsylvania at the time but relations took a swift turn for the worse when his family took control and demanded more area from the Native Americans who, not ones to argue with armed men at a meeting, agreed to a deal which would give over some of their land in the West of the area to the expanding colonists, as much land as a man could walk in a day.
Known as the Walking Purchase, the Native Americans put that distance at about 40 miles but the Penns hired the three fastest runners and set them off and they got to 70 miles which they somehow unfairly rounded up to equaling 1876 square miles (calculator's hadn't been invented yet obviously) and they have been arguing over it ever since.
Why is an English woman concerned with Pennsylvania you may ask? Well because last year i became an honorary Pennsylvanian after getting onto the Democrat email list and regularly receive updates on what Jo Biden (when he's awake) and his gang is doing and it always comes with a request for a donation from 'your area'.
This got me wondering where did they think i was because my area is the UK and last time i looked at an atlas (admittedly quite a while ago), the UK was not an area in the USA.
Another email cleared it up as it was from the computer of John Fetterman, the Candidate for Pennsylvania, who is asking people from my area, from Erie to Pittsburgh to Scarnton to Philly to contribute $10, $25, $50, $100 or $250.
As a non-yankee doodle i obviously contributed a big fat nothing but i did offer something more valuable than financial help to Mr Fetterman, i advised that in his picture he was obviously trying for serious and statesmanlike and i am sure he was a lovely man but to be fair it makes him looks like the sort of person i would phone the police about if i saw you hanging around my car. Try for a smile rather than the 'You wanna keep those kneecaps?' glare.
I then wished him good luck in his upcoming election and signed off with a cheery Go Steelers!! (in whatever sport it is that they play)
2 comments:
the american political parties do not care where anyone lives, but especially the leftist democrat party. they just want to radically change american government and the american way of life - think more like cuba or venezuela.
fetterman is a disaster which doesn't bode well for the voters, the state, the nation, or the lame republican that couldn't beat fetterman in an election.
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by the way, regarding the european colonists and the first nations. the first nations would claim thousands of miles of uninhabited territory.
here is one example. circa 1845, mexico was offering land in texas to immigrants. yes, mexico took the land from the first nations with force and were now offering it to settlers. so, many germans, trying to escape years of military conflict in europe, came to texas and established towns such as kerrville, new braunfels, boerne, fredericksburg, schulenberg, et al.
there are books and diaries about the original settling of the texas hill country by these german settlers. stories about an UNINHABITED land, where the settlers would work for years to clear fields, build homes, plant crops, raise animals, and generally establish communities. only to be confronted by apaches or commanches, after years of not seeing any of these first nations peoples, who were now claiming the land as theirs.
it didn't go well for the first nations. mexico sent troops to help their settlers. the commanches had mostly killed off or pushed out the apaches by this time, and now the mexican army was doing the same to the commanche.
eventually, the few remaining first nations in the area signed a peace treaty with the people of fredericksburg, tx. it was the only treaty between europeans and the first nations that was never broken.
while the europeans were brutal towards the first nations, far more brutal than the americans, this idea that the first nations owned the land is bogus. it was almost all uninhabited land.
oh look, an apple tree that has never been picked. i think i'll have an apple out here in the middle of nowhere. in fact, i will prune the tree and fertilize it. nice. after years of work, there are more apples and they taste better now tool. Hey, i'll plant a pecan tree and a peach tree to go with my apples.
then a few years later, as i'm eating a pecan pie with an apple tart and a peach cobbler, someone shows up and asks, "did you eat apples from my apple tree?" did you plant trees on my land. they are all mine.
bullshit!
how bad you wanna try and stop me from eating those apples dude?
i understand why the first nations acted like they did. i understand why the european settlers acted like they did. i understand why the mexicans acted like they did.
life is tough.
its tougher when you are in the early stages of the stone age, and come face to face with nations in the early industrial age, and they have no open land, and you claim to own millions of miles of unused land...
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