Many early writers attest the passionate fondness of the Delawares for their ancestral traditions and âpéthe memory of their ancient heroes. The missionary, David Brainerd, mentions this as one of the leading difficulties in the way of "evangelizing the Indians." "They are likewise much attached," he writes, "to the traditions and fabulous notions of their fathers, which they firmly believe, and thence look upon their ancestors to have been the best of men."[232]
To the same effect, Loskiel informs us that the Delawares "love to relate what great warriors their ancestors had been, and how many heroic deeds they had performed. It is a pleasure to them to rehearse their genealogies. They are so skilled at it that they can repeat the chief and collateral lines with the utmost readiness. At the same time, they characterize their ancestors, by describing this one as a wise or skillful man, as a great chieftain, a renowned warrior, a rich man, and the like. This they teach to their children, and _embody it in pictures, so as to make it more readily remembered."_[233]
The earliest writer who gives us any detailed description of what these traditions were, is the Rev. Charles Beatty, who visited the Delaware settlements in Ohio in 1767. On his way there, he met a white man, Benjamin Button, who for years had been a captive among the natives. He related to Beatty the following tradition, which he had heard recited by some old men among the Delawares:--
"That of old time their people were divided by a river, nine parts of ten passing over the river, and one part remaining behind; that they knew not, for certainty, how they came to this continent; but account thus for their first coming into these parts where they are now settled; that a king of their nation, where they formerly lived, far to the west, left his kingdom to his two sons; that the one son making war upon the other, the latter thereupon determined to depart and seek some new habitation; that accordingly he sat out, accompanied by a number of his people, and that, after wandering to and fro for the space of forty years, they at length came to Delaware river, where they settled 370 years ago. The way, he says, they keep an account of this is by putting on a black bead of wampum every year on a belt they keep for that purpose."[234]