page_title: Delaware River
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Delaware River / History
caption_attribution_description: The Treaty of Penn with the Indians
context_page_description: The Delaware River is a major river on the Atlantic coast of the United States. It drains an area of 14,119 square miles in four U.S. states: Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Rising in two branches in New York state's Catskill Mountains, the river flows 419 miles into Delaware Bay where its waters enter the Atlantic Ocean near Cape May in New Jersey and Cape Henlopen in Delaware. Not including Delaware Bay, the river's length including its two branches is 388 miles.
  The Delaware River is one of nineteen "Great Waters" recognized by the America's Great Waters Coalition.
  The Delaware River rises in two main branches that descend from the western flank of the Catskill Mountains in New York. The West Branch begins near Mount Jefferson in the Town of Jefferson in Schoharie County. The river's East Branch begins at Grand Gorge in Delaware County. These two branches flow west and merge near Hancock in Delaware County, and the combined waters flow as the Delaware River south.
context_section_description: At the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the early 17th century, the area near the Delaware River was inhabited by the Native American Lenape people.  They called the Delaware River "Lenape Wihittuck", which means "the rapid stream of the Lenape". The Delaware River played a key factor in the economic and social development of the Mid-Atlantic region. In the seventeenth century it provided the conduit for colonial settlement by the Dutch (New Netherland), the Swedish (New Sweden). Beginning in 1664, the region became an English possession as settlement by Quakers established the colonies of Pennsylvania (including present-day Delaware) and West Jersey. In the eighteenth century, cities like Philadelphia, Camden (then Cooper's Ferry), Trenton and Wilmington, and New Castle were established upon the Delaware and their continued commercial success into the present day has been dependent on access to the river for trade and power. The river provided the path for the settlement of northeastern Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, and northwestern New Jersey by German Palatine immigrants—a population that became key in the agricultural development of the region.
caption: Benjamin West's painting The Treaty of Penn with the Indians' (1771–1772), depicts the 1683 peace treaty at Shackamaxon between William Penn and Tamanend, the chief of the Lenape's "Turtle Clan."  Voltaire referred to it as "the only treaty never sworn to and never broken."
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