Unalachtigo

The Unalachtigo were the southernmost and least-recorded division of the Lenape, or Delaware Indians. Their name, a Munsee word often glossed as “people who live down by the water,” was applied to the Unami-speaking bands of west-central and southern New Jersey and the adjacent Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, including the Kechemeche of the Cape May peninsula.

Their coastal life leaned on the rivers, bays and ocean: men netted fish and dug clams, hunted deer in the pine woods with fire drives, while women raised maize, beans and squash.

Contact around 1600 was peaceful at first, but disease, land pressure and absorption into colonial settlements shrank the communities fast; the Kechemeche ceased to exist as a separate people by 1735. The survivors shared the general Lenape fate of the Walking Purchase of 1737 and the Treaty of Easton of 1758, before westward removals ultimately carried Lenape families to Oklahoma and Ontario.