The Quaker Promise

Wholesome family gatherings, homemade peanut butter and lots of love. That's what was promised initially by William Penn. The natives saw things from a different point of view. Roger Simmons, as the whites called him, was a Delaware chief, set to gain about 50 pounds sterling from Penn for lands held by for at least 500 years by his tribe. His real name wasn't Roger at all, but was easy for the Quakers to remember. He looked like a Roger. He lived simply off the land, as was well known at the time. By comparison, 50 pounds of sterling today could supply a family with food for a week. Back then, 50 pounds didn't mean shit to a tribe of Indians. "They didn't even have a money economy for Christ's sake," says one modern scholar. Christ's sake was what the Quakers relied heavily upon. They later forced the Indians at gun point to take the fucking worthless money and also pay the Quakers back in grand meals of food. Roger and his wife, Marlene, scrounged up what they could. This was hard on them all, considering they didn't even have any land to gather from. Everything they took they had to pay back to the peace loving Jesus freaks. The Quakers, they called themselves. If they only knew then that Wolford Brimley would become their spokesperson they probably wouldn't have acted so arrogantly. So, with that, the Quakers took over their land, gave Roger and his family the final parting gift of smallpox inoculation, and parted ways with them for good, satisfied that they had done fair business. This is the Quaker way, above all. Roger, in reflection, realized that the universal cultural rotation had occurred, and that the tribe was better off dead.