How Did Indigenous Lands Become Mennonite Farms? — John Ruth

First, he went to the school kill. Then he went to the Susquehanna. Then there were people who went to the Ohio. Every time the whites came right after them, took their land. And only when the Indians finally realized there was no way out of this, they were going to have nothing, is when they attacked.

And that's when the Mennonites tell the story, when the attacks start.

So, John Rhys, you've spent quite a number of years researching Anabaptist history, and you just published another book. You've published quite a few books over the years. There's a new one, relatively new, that came out called This Very Ground.

And it tells a side of the Mennonite story that I have never heard before, and I think is maybe, you know, part of our story that's, ooh, not as good and something that we haven't heard about that much. And I really want to get into that today, because I'm guessing it'll be a bit of a surprise to some people. So, first off, thank you for coming on the podcast this evening. And why don't we start with just an overview of what is the book about, and what did you find in your research?

Well, I began asking the question of why I lived where I lived, in a beautiful spot along a creek named a branch of the Perkioman Creek in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, 29 miles north of Philadelphia. And I realized that when I was little, I liked to play at being Indian. I had a bow and arrow, and I heard about the Indians, and I found that some of my friends went through phases where they enjoyed imagining themselves as Indians too.

But I hit me wrong. I was with a conservative Mennonite bishop in Lancaster County when I was writing their history, oh, 20 years ago, maybe. And he pointed to a field of corn where the corn stalks were so close together and thick that you could only harvest in low gear with good equipment. He pointed to that field, and I don't know why he said this, but he said to me, "Look at that," he said, "God got no glory when just the Indians were here."

And, hmm, hmm, so God could wait all those thousands of years until we got here. And I remembered at harvest services, we would always quote that verse from the Psalms that the Lord has given us since the lap of, I just forget the word lap, of luxuriant herbage and fields. And then I thought, well, who were those people? Because on the farm next to ours, they picked up hundreds of beautifully shaped points. Somebody had to get very good. And I had a neighbor who found 600 of those points in one field.

Like arrowheads, you're saying? Well, we call them arrowheads. And there were other tools that you could hoe. And the more I thought about that was, when Columbus's 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Azores came, I thought, you know, we as Mennonites lived on this land. We ought to say something.

In 500 years, you shouldn't let that go past without saying anything. So I thought, well, I wound up in Oklahoma where our Indians got to eventually. And I just walked out on the street and asked somebody, "Could you give me some, tell me to somebody, take me to somebody that this is about, I don't know, 2000 or something like the year 2000.

What would I have been? 70 years old already." And they led me to a couple, Lenape couple. The Lenapes were the indigenous people who lived in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware. They're called Delawares, but that's a European name because they had a group there.

The Delawares are the same as the Lenapes. Well, anyway, we brought this couple up for October 12, 1992, which was the 500th anniversary. And we took them to several churches and had them talk about themselves. And I took them to a place where they were still finding jasper points. And then we went to a big celebration in the National Cathedral in Washington, where the sound of powerful drums, they celebrated Columbus Day.

And the more I talked, well, what had happened then? A group of Indian Lenapes took a walk along the so-called walking purchase. I don't know if you ever heard that term, of 1737, when the last of our Lenape Indians gave up their land. 1737, you said? 1737. And there were markers along the path of that walking purchase. And when we got to one of them, the group I was with of Indians or interested people became angry and began shaking their rattles and spitting and yelling.

And I said to them, "What's that feeling coming from? What's that about?" It's not over in their minds, the loss of their land. And then I kept thinking and thinking and thinking. And it drove me then finally to go into Philadelphia to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and pull out actual documents and just sit there and read them.

Now, I'm a latecomer to this, honestly. I'm not a historian. And there for 50 years had been a growing accumulation of scholarly work on indigenous people. And we are in a peak of profuse publication of scholarship on the indigenous people and what they actually said and where they actually lived and what process was proceeded through by which they were delegalized from the land that they had lived on.

It's very much fermenting now. There's all kinds of societies, all kinds of people are interested in this. I'm a latecomer and not an expert. All I asked was the land that I live on. What was its story? Why am I living here? Fishing, swimming, skating, boating, trapping, farming, eating, born. My mom ate the eggs and the dandelion and the chicken, and I was born, formed in her womb.

Out of this, why don't I go to think about earlier stages? Why am I so preoccupied with my decade that it's a blank in my mind? I felt starved. So anyway, I found that I was just a latecomer and just an amateur where professionals had been working even at the university level for years. And so I drew on their scholarship in addition to going down to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and reading through the legal records there.

And what I wanted to know was, what was it like for those people to leave? When did they leave? Where did they go? And what was their experience? Now, what we call Indian Oklahoma was Indian territory. That's where you went when you couldn't go any further.

You couldn't stay in Ohio. You couldn't stay in Illinois. You couldn't stay in Missouri. Transit, you had to go to Indian territory. And there you were.

Well, I made contact with them because there was a Mennonite minister who was also a Navajo, not Navajo, I forget, Cheyenne, Lawrence Hart. And he had a big to-do in the year 2006 in which he invited people to listen to their story.

Where our General Custer, who came from a Mennonite background where I lived— Wait, General Custer came from a Mennonite background? Yes. His ancestry was Mennonite. And he himself could speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Wait, I've never heard that. No. Can we divert a little bit and hear a bit of that? Like, how close was he connected to the Mennonites? Well, he wasn't connected anymore. You know, like you can have Mennonite ancestry five generations ago and have no memory of it yourself. But it was probably closer than that for him, wasn't it? About four. Four generations? Yeah. That's wild. Okay.

He led the attack there that killed Black Kettle, who was the predecessor of Lawrence Hart. And anyway, as I put these factoids together, I began to have feelings about it. And so it fueled my curiosity. Can we know anything? And I found it, sure you can.

Scholars had been writing, but my story wasn't told. So here's what I found. That when the people that settled my acreage, the Clemenses, living from the Palatinate, who came over in the year 1709, on that boat was a letter, a small letter by William Penn, who was an old, disappointed man, but who had known Mennonites over the years. Really? Yes, he had. I didn't know that either. Well, no, we don't get that story. He had known Mennonites since 17— in fact, he probably had Mennonite relatives in Southern Germany, but let that aside. He had visited Mennonites and worshiped with them in 1677. Really? In the Palatinate, yes. He knew Mennonites in Germantown. He knew Mennonites in Heidelberg.

He knew Mennonites in Amsterdam. The sophisticated Dutch, the hobnailed boots on the farms of the Hofs in the Palatinate, the Swiss refugees that came up. And in this letter, which was not in the three-volume sophisticated collection of his correspondence, I found it otherwise, and I found the original in the archives in Philadelphia, in this letter. Oh, the original. He wrote to his secretary in Philadelphia, "Herewith come the Palatines, diverse Mennonists."

Diverse? He already knew we were different kinds.

Oh, yeah. Wow. You see, from 1663, when the first Mennonites came to Germantown, to 1708, they could not have communion because they came from five different places over there. They weren't united. So the first adjective that William Penn used to tell his secretary about Mennonites was diverse.

But the rest was complimentary. He said, "They are a sober people who will neither fight nor swear. Treat them with tenderness and love so that they will send over a good character." He wanted more of us. Undocumented. All he knew was we were Mennonites.

When I hear him talking about immigrants today, how terrible they are, they're all rapists and stuff like that, and a fear of Mennonites, my people couldn't even talk English either. And they had lost their properties at home. That's why they had traveled up to the Palatinate. Well, anyway, when I saw that William Penn on that boat was the couple that settled the ground that I grew out of, they got 690 acres. And I grew out of that. And that formed me. That DNA is still there. And only by curiously pushing and pushing did I get to that story. Well, I got there. And I read afterward, read the work of sophisticated historians, and I was shocked at how little I knew that they already knew, but I didn't know my own story.

So anyway, that's what pushed me. Now, when I had to do that, I said, "I got to learn where Gerhard Clemens came from." And I have to know, I found out that his father-in-law, Hans Stauffer, was born in Switzerland in the same year that William Penn was born in London.

So I've got a narrative, a twin narrative. Let's follow Penn and let's follow Gerhard Clemens, but let's put an Indian right beside him. What were they experiencing when my people were rejoicing in the new acreage and the woods and the peace and the freedom? What were the Indians doing right then? And make two chronologies. That's my story. Two chronologies side by side. As the Indians lose more and more, the Mennonites sink their roots more and more. And then thank God. Where nothing dwelt but beasts of prey, men as wild as they, God plants his people there and builds them towns and cities there. That's what Isaac Watts wrote.

Really? Yeah. I've never heard that before either. No, no. I wrote my thesis on him, Ndidi. And that's how I got that. Whoa.

But wow. So what I did was I went back to 1644 when Hans Stauffer, whose daughter came to him and bought the land where I live, Hans Stauffer was born, and when William Penn was born, and I take their stories side by side, side by side, no matter how difficult or abstruse it gets, I say what happened that year or that year or that decade. And I follow that. And when I get to the end of it, I have a different view of, in other words, so God doesn't care for the Jebusites, huh? Doesn't care for the people that Israel has chased off of Zion. And now we sit there and sing Sunday after Sunday, we're marching to Zion, let our songs abound.

And they're still mourning the loss of their land in Oklahoma. And I had to rethink. I don't care if it's radical or conservative or what it is. I don't care. Just know the story and relate to people. So when I had to move last month into a retirement home off of that land, the last person who would be with me as we walked down to the creek and sat there and talked was a Lenape Indian from Brattleboro. Really? From Bartlesville.

Wow. But anyway, in taking that naive narrative instead of a history of ideas or whatever, a macro culture, in taking my parochial little local narrative and following it just like an Amishman would, and following it, and what will it tell me? That's my book.

What will it? And what it tells me is that when William Penn came the first time to Pennsylvania, he came in 1682. He got the land in 1681. And you know why he got it? Because the king owed his family a debt. And you know what that debt was for?

A great military victory between England and Holland, the Battle of Lower Stoff. But anyhow. Interesting. So that money, and William Penn, when the Quakers were so persecuted in England, William Penn's dad was an admiral who was buddy with Charles II.

And Charles II's brother, James of York, who then became the king. They were buddies. They were social buddies. And what William Penn's dad did, whose name was also William Penn, the first, after the Battle of Lower Stoff, they'd spent a lot of money to fire a lot of cannons and defeat the king owed a lot of money. And William Penn's dad paid it for him. So the king owed William Penn a lot of money.

Never paid it. And William Penn got a bright idea as a Quaker. He said, "Our people are so persecuted. There's land over there in New Jersey. There's land west of the Delaware. Maybe the king would give me that instead of paying off the debt." He tried it with the king. The king said, "Yeah." He gave him the biggest spotch of land anybody ever got. Free.

In 1681. And on it, it says this on the document, with special reference to the Battle of Lower Stoff. That's why I'm giving you this land, because your dad had a battle in the English Channel and in the North Sea and won it for me, is basically what he's saying. So William Penn got Pennsylvania because the king owed his dad a military debt.

But William Penn knows Mennonites because he's traveled to Europe. And he's worshiped with them. Sophisticated Dutch, contrified Palatines, and he knows the Swiss. And then he finally comes over here himself. He gets the land in 1681. He comes in 1682. And we have the date of 1683 when an Indian remembers sitting down in the woods with William Penn and what they did, what they said, and made friendship that they thought would be forever, which lasted 70 years. And then it burst into flame.

And I talk about that narrative all the way through there and think, and I again and again quote what the Indian said at key points. As they were in the year 1709, when William Penn wrote that letter, and my ancestors, Clemenses, arrived, that year, the boy that had heard William Penn talk love for Indians in 1683 in the woods at Percy has left and is out at the school kill in the Susquehanna.

So you're saying that person had already been pushed out? He left. He left. Because there were so many people coming in. Yeah. Now, he wasn't driven. He wasn't driven out at that point. Economically, yes. Now, that young boy who was just a boy listening to William Penn never forgot that he died in the 1740s.

And he became the chief of our Indians, the Lenapes. They didn't use the word chief. I forget. I don't know what word they used. But here's the thing. First, he went to the school kill. Then he went to the Susquehanna.

Then there were people who went to the Ohio. Every time the whites came right after them, took their land. And only when the Indians finally realized there was no way out of this, they were going to have nothing, is when they attacked.

And that's when the Mennonites tell the story, when the attacks start.

Okay. So my head is spinning a little bit because I've just never heard any of this. Right. Why were the Mennonites going along with this? Were they just not really going to pay attention to what's happening, or were they genuinely ignorant of these things? Do we know at all? And then, like you said, we start hearing the stories much later when the Indians start attacking, for example. I mean, those are the only stories I've heard, at least. Can you speak into that at all?

Well, look, the Lenapes, after the Swedes and the Dutch came and the British took over in 1664, were so wracked by smallpox. It killed probably 80% of them, 275 or 80% of them. So they were only a remnant.

And they were really, in terms of your vision of reality, insignificant. And they gave up. So there was no relationship. There are exceptions, but the general picture is the remnant of the Lenapes were not even the only problem you had with them was to sign papers to give up more and more land. And they always did. They were given gifts. They were given guns, and they were given needles and tools and gunpowder and rum. And they were always signed, "Sure, sure, sure." And their idea in their brain and in their hearts was never that when they started talking with the whites, it was always on the basis, "We're going to live together." Not like up in New England or Virginia where there was blood.

William Penn, they said, "You're different. We're going to live together." And they both believed it. And when the Indians would come back from time to time to Philadelphia in order to negotiate, and I'll mention a couple of reasons why they did, they would always talk about love. Love.

We have more talk from the Indians about love than anything the Mennonites left on record.

But like in the book of Samuel and Kings and Chronicles, when David wanted the Jebusite hill of Zion, he said, "I'll have it. Thank you very much." And he drove them away, and they are no longer part of the story. And the Lenapes were not part of our story.

So God didn't care about them. He had to give us this land, and that was where God was interested.

And thank you, God, every time at Harvest Home and about how when we came here, we're in the prison. And one Indian said, one of Mennonite ministers said, and I saw this or dreamed I saw it, but I think I saw it on YouTube. He was showing some German tourists some land in Lancaster County blooming with there's nothing like Lancaster County hardly anywhere. He said, "I don't know if you can talk Pennsylvania Dutch or not." I can't. Well, he said in Pennsylvania Dutch to these Indian tourists, he said, "Now when we came here, there was nothing here."

There were Indians living there. The creek was named Conestoga and Peckway and Chickes and Allegheny. The names came from before, but he said there was nothing here. It doesn't even figure in your imagination. Well, this bugged me like it bugged Conrad Grebel to start thinking who was paying for his scholarship at the University of Paris.

Whose land am I enjoying so much? And my wife put the initials of our ownership of our land all around her fracture in our living room. And it started with WP 1684 when he bought it from the Indians, William Penn. And then all the Olivers and Landeses and Martins and all the names of the Ruths and so forth, but nothing about what was before for who knows how many thousand years. It was not even a I didn't have to think about that.

And I think, well, the Indians never forgot. They're still sad.

And that's a whole other story. But it's important for me to report that when the Indians left, I say Indians, and they use the word too, when they first moved from the Percy Elmwood where I lived and the Delaware, which is the eastern border, they moved to the next big river, which was the school kill.

And along the school kill and along that general area, they had about three pockets left. The Lehigh that came down from the north, the school kill, the Brandywine, and the Tulpa Hock. Now, those are all Indian names. So there were pockets of Indians left there.

The Quakers finessed the Indians out of Brandywine, businessmen, speculators.

Other Palatines that were not Anabaptists came down. They weren't happy in the Hudson River and took over Tulpa Hocken. The Indians protested. So they moved out to the Susquehanna. And they lived there. And then the white people came along and bought that land, and they found that they couldn't stay there either. And then they went to the Ohio, and they found they couldn't stand there either. And I read what the secretaries wrote. I mean, this was not original with me. University scholars had been at this papers long before I ever even dreamed of them. But I went and read them myself from my personal interest level. And here was Sassoon, this boy that sat and heard William Penn talk and never forgot it.

And he came back, for instance, from the school kill and said, "We have a question." In 1715, the first time he came as chief, he said, "How come some years we got good prices for our furs? Beaver were almost gone by then. But some next year we come and it's no. We don't understand that. That doesn't seem fair to us."

Well, they said, "You have to think like they think in Europe. Styles change. And when there's a fad on for beaver, that's when you get good prices. And when there isn't, you don't. You got to think like that." Well, you couldn't get that through a Lenape's head.

So what they did was, "Here are some biscuits and some rum and some gunpowder. We love you." "Oh, thank you very much," said he went on a spree with the rum and went home again. That's 1715. Then the next time they come back, they have questions about land. They said, "You never paid for this certain land." "Oh, yes, we did."

And so William Penn's secretary went to the archives, and he pulled out a whole bunch of deeds with these Indian signatures on them, these scratchings. And he showed them to him. Well, yeah, they recognize him. So he said, "You don't own any land anymore."

They thought they could come and dig cows and kill deer and live there with them. Well, that was a dream. So they just kept moving and moving and moving. And so what William Penn's secretary did in 1718 was he drew up legal procedure, drew up a quit claim. That was a legal document in which the Indians signed their names, "We own nothing here."

And he gave them more to eat and more, and they finally signed that too.

And that didn't settle things because that was in the white people's minds.

They made promises in their heads, and they never forgot them. And to them, that was more this writing a feather on a paper, by the way, they called William Penn feather. Penn. They called their name was feather in their language.

So they have to the white people said, "Now, you got to learn to think like we think." And I put in my book a document in which Penn's secretary sits down with Sassoon, and for it must have been an hour or so, spelled out the rationale. He says, "Now, you have to think like this."

Well, the Indians never did it get through their heads. What's fair is fair no matter if you write it with a feather, with a goose quill on leather or anything. That's not as real as the promise that we made that we will always be friends and have love with each other. So I go in my book, I find those words of love, and I write them in that book so that whoever bothers to read that book will at least see that and not have just these vague ideas in their heads of the Indians disappearing.

They disappeared with regret wherever they moved. And they still have that regret.

So I'm guessing a lot of people hearing this haven't heard this story, don't know this at all, and aren't familiar with what the Mennonites, like our ancestors, the process of where this came from. We were no worse than others. The Mennonites were no worse and sometimes better. Right. But we paid no attention to that drama. And it sounds more like an issue of perhaps ignorance or who knows. But well, sure, when there's savages that just shoot squirrels and are drunk a lot and are poor and barely living, is that what God wanted? God builds a beautiful country here and gave it to us. That's our dream. That's our rhetoric.

There's the whole idea of manifest destiny and some of that. Yeah, that's related. That's related where it's like, "Oh, see this wonderful thing we were given," while not quite maybe realizing. But today yet, if you talk to a lot of evangelical Mennonites, if you raise this kind of concern, this visceral concern, after all, they say, "Who have you been listening to this? That's wokeism. It's communism." I was going to say that I can about guess to within a high degree of accuracy the comments and feedback we'll get when we publish this. Right. Now, that means we're still going to publish it. But people are going to say, "Oh, that's just you've been drinking the liberal Kool-Aid or something crazy."

You know they're going to say that. Right. I know that. And I can't do anything about that except to lay on record. And I know that people who are curious enough will think. Well, so I'd like to drill in on that a bit. So as we hear this story, this is new for me. Right. I haven't heard this story. What should our response be?

I'm not there yet. I'm still drinking in the story. And I think their response will take shape in the people's consciousness as they think about it. And it will be a gradual process. Almost like a shaping process as we dwell with the story and it will find form. It will find form.

I cannot administer or strategize that form. There are all kinds of groups getting together and seminizing about it and strategizing. And it's not that I'm against them at all, except that's not where I am emotionally. I had to first understand the story and get some feeling about it. And out of that, you know when I was 92, I lived my life along a creek. I decided I wanted to find out where that creek started. It was high time.

And it sure was at Percy where Sassoon and heard because I lived along the Percy Elmwood Creek branch of it. And when I got to the source of that creek, I looked for a narrowing rivulet. I was looking for a narrative specificity that I could follow. And I wanted to see where it bubbled out of the ground, just like I wanted to go to see Conrad Grebel's letter. I wanted to go to the source. And when I got there, I found that it was not a matter of bubbling out of a specific. It was seeping up and gathering.

And that, I think, is how things gather in the human consciousness. It seeps up, and then it takes form. And then someone gives it a name and a language. And then it becomes concepts in our minds. And it becomes an algorithm, which then becomes a post. It becomes a thing somewhere. It takes form. And this is happening in our country. And by the way, the people that are making the most noise about helping the Indians can be very annoying to me.

They're very self-righteous. You can be a fundamentalist on the left as well as on the right. And to me, in my generation, I'm hearing the story. I'm getting the feeling. And when I talk like this, people ask me the same question. You say, "What are we going to do?" I don't know.

But I know one thing. I have struck up a relationship and a conversation with them. And I'm just a teeny part of that conversation. Other people are doing it all over. And something will happen. We'll cross thresholds of feeling. And in the meantime, we'll argue each other out of nowhere.

So I'm wondering how, say, a podcast like this can help inspire our audience to be more aware of our story, our history. And when I say that, I mean not just the parts that we like. No. Right. Could you speak into that? What would you like to see there?

Well, look, I did what I could by putting it down on paper and letting you hear Sassoon's words, not just the victorious conqueror's interpretation of history. And I ask myself, "What would Jesus in me must respect the Samaritan?"

And in the Old Testament, really, David says, "I want Zion." I'm sorry. They say, "You can't have Zion because that's where they keep the lame and the blind up there."

And David is quoted by the righteous writer, "I hate the lame and the blind. I'm going to get rid of them, and I will." And then, and more seriously, and here you have to be an adult. The writer of the Chronicles or Kings, I forget which, quotes God, referring to Zion, and says, "My name shall be there." And now we are all marching to Zion. Beautiful, beautiful to Zion. And the Jebusites are nothing but roadkill out of the way. And I'm not there. I don't think Jesus was there. Because when Jesus came to the temple at Zion, he kicked out the establishment business people.

And who came in? The lame and the blind. Oh, wow. That's the logic of the kingdom. The upside-down kingdom, I guess you could say, you know? Yeah. Kingdom logic. Yeah. And so that my adventure into this was not as an expert or a historian or anything. It's simply when I told this story a year or two ago, a man came up to me afterward. I'm sure most people were bemused by my talk. But one man came up and said, "You know, this is the first time I felt this viscerally."

So as we wrap this story up, what is something you would like to leave with the next generation? Maybe a word of advice or, yeah, anything really that you would like to leave them to perhaps help guard against the errors of the past?

To be honest, and this is not false humility, I don't feel much wisdom on this. I just feel curiosity and a willingness to hear out my story, the story that I had to search for as an amateur. Let me tell you a closing story that I tell at the end of my book.

This was told to me by a man named Marvin Kreker, who is from a Russian Mennonite background, who was with the Indians, I forget which Indians, out in Oklahoma also. And he told me this story. He said they used to tell this story that in the Cherokee land rush, somebody shot off a gun, and then you could race and plant your stake, and you could be a stake, what they call it. Anyway, that could be your homestead.

Mennonites lined up with the land rush, and they took off at the crack of a gun. And there was a story that came down of one Mennonite family. The man drove the horses, and the wife sat in a wagon with a stake. She was going to plant it when he picked out a place.

And he raced in there, free land, you know, Cherokee land, Indian land. Race in there, free land. Finally found the spot and turned around to his wife.

She had bounced out of the wagon somewhere back. He had to go back and find her. And where she landed, she put the stake. And that was the Mennonite homestead. You could tell that story as a Mennonite quilting, and everybody would be entertained. How God leads.

Tell that story to an indigenous person. Is it funny?

How about looking at it from that's all I did in the book. I tried to look at it from both sides.

That's all I could do. That's all I've done. Wish I'd have done a better job.

Yeah. I just want to thank you for the effort you put in to telling this story. And that can be the challenge of history, I guess, is there are sometimes not necessarily popular. Right. There's stories sometimes that we don't like, you know, and, "Oh, I don't really want to hear that," or, "I don't want to have to think about that."

And it's how our church got started. People were saying, "Things don't make sense here."

Conrad said, "Use the word. Check with the word. Go with it and form a church out of that." Think those things. Yeah. Anyway. Thanks for listening to this episode with John Ruth. If you found this interesting, you might want to watch this episode we did with John Roth, who explains some of the beginnings of early Anabaptism. And you can find that link down in the description below. All our content is over on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. And you can also sign up to our monthly email newsletter there as well. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.