Chert: A Lenapi Story

It was somewhere in the early 1930’s when Fred had his tenth birthday. His parents were keen to celebrate the milestone with a cookout, grandma’s famous fry bread and a pumpkin cake that his mom made. They were at home with family and friends.

When it was time for gift giving, his grandma or ‘ma-ma’ gave him his birthday present. Fred was a bit confused. An old small leather pouch with bits of sharp, shiny black rock in it.

She told him to keep it safe, that it was very important and that he would one day understand.

They lived a pretty simple life in a community of native people, but it wasn’t until some time later that Fred realized these were not his people.

In late 1942, ma-ma was experiencing the last days in her current form and her home was full of people who cared deeply and held her in the place of honor she deserved. They took turns visiting with her. She imparted her wisdom and shared a memory with each of them.

When Fred sat beside her bed, she asked him if he still had the pouch. He shook his head as a tear rolled out of one eye down his cheek. She told him that the stone in that pouch was from the place of his ancestors. When they were forced to move west, her mother gave it to her.

Ma-ma told him: “Someday you will remember. Someday you will undertake a journey. Someday, with the help of others, you will find the place where our spirit lives.” He hugged her gently and cried until his mother took his hand and led him out of the room.

Fred didn’t have an easy life when he left the reservation, but with the help of his family, he was one of the first from his community to attend college and he graduated with honors. Armed with a degree in civil engineering, he found work and progressed in his career to the point where he eventually ran his own very successful firm. His mission was to give professional opportunities to disadvantaged youth and he received numerous honors and awards for those efforts.

In 1986, Fred received a message from someone who believed they were related to him.

In fact, she was a sister who he never knew he had. She grew up in the Arapahoe basin and his community was Shoshone, but they were actually both Lenape. Her name was Julia and he met with her in Denver. She had a few friends with her and after exchanging introductions, she made it clear why she’d gone about tracking him down.

She and her friends wanted to find the place of their spirit and hoped he would have some insight. Before leaving the house that day, something told him that he should take the pouch with him. He’d been it’s thoughtful caretaker for a long time and something deep inside told him that maybe this was the beginning of the journey his ma-ma spoke of.

Julia, Fred, Matthew and Jim shared their memories and what they learned of their ancestral home from their families. In the midst of conversation, Fred remembered the pouch and reached down his shirt. He pulled it out and rolled the cord over his head, freeing it from his neck. He placed it on the table before the others.

He opened the draw cord carefully and spilled the contents onto the table. When he told them the story of the pouch, their eyes lit up. After lunch, they headed to the University of Colorado Boulder where Julia worked. She knew a woman who ran the geology department and asked if she’d have time to take a look at the stones in the pouch.

Upon careful inspection and a consultation with another professor, they concluded that there were only two places in the US where this stone could have come from. They were a unique form of micro-crystalline sedimentary stone called chert. There were very small deposits of this dark purplish-black colored chert near the Delaware River north of Wilmington and near the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia. Early native cultures used it to make tools for cutting, arrowheads for hunting and flint for fire starting.

Over the course of the next two years, the four of them reached out to many organizations in the Delaware Valley, hoping to narrow down their search with the desire and intention to visit the place of their ancestors.

I was standing in front of my house throwing the Frisbee back and forth with my friend Justin when Mr. Goldsboro pulled up on his bike. He was my favorite teacher. If it weren’t for him, my passion for writing wouldn’t exist, but at that time I was just a kid about to graduate high school.

Being the president of the local historical society, he received a phone call from Julia. Having ruled out Delaware, they contacted him. They also sent him a few bits of chert from Fred’s pouch. Knowing that I was a rock-hound and local adventurer, Mr. Goldsboro came over to show me the stones and ask if I’d seen any like them anywhere.

At first glance, I knew exactly where they came from.

Mr. Goldsboro asked if I could show him. I agreed. I told him he’d need to go home and put on some long pants and a pair of boots. He was pretty excited and told me he’d be back in a flash. I ran inside and told my mom that I was going on an adventure with Mr. Goldsboro. She smiled.

There’s a little place just off the Schuylkill River where the first Welsh settlers created a small community in the New World. It was tucked into the folds of a small creek valley. Well hidden from the Schuylkill, but only a mile from it remained the scant remnants of this community.

This was my playground. It was full of flaky metamorphic schist which bore pockets of my birth stone, garnet. Thousands of beautiful deep red soccer ball shaped crystals between the size of a dime and a quarter and rods of black tourmaline in scarce quartz pockets.

Not only did I do my first prospecting there, but my friends and I spent a lot of time hunting for crayfish and sitting statue still to watch the deer.

After leading Mr. Goldsboro through the brush beside the creek for about a mile, we came to the place he was looking for. There was an exposed pocket of chert under a huge fallen tree which wasn’t there the year before. He reached down and picked up a handful of stone.

His other hand reached down into his pocket and placed Fred’s chert next to it. It looked like a match. The color was spot on.

He put a handful of it into his other pocket and put Fred’s chert back into the small envelope it came from. As we walked out, he explained to me that the Welsh were the first European people that the Lenape ever encountered and it happened right there. The Welsh didn’t know that the area they chose was a seasonal Lenape encampment. Seeing how the Welsh settlers and the Lenape were both peaceful, they began to trade and a bond of friendship formed between them. Mr. Goldsboro’s ancestors were among the Welsh who established the Gladwyne community in the early 1600’s.

The next week, he went to the geology department of the University of Pennsylvania and asked them to compare the two samples. The tests they ran confirmed that Fred’s chert and the chert from Gladwyne were a molecular match.

When he contacted Fred, Julia, Matthew and Jim and told them the news... they were ecstatic. They began to plan their visit right away and Mr. Goldsboro agreed to be their guide. The day they arrived, Mr. Goldsboro picked them up from the airport and took them out to lunch. He took copious notes as they told him the stories that led them here.

Being a local historian, they helped paint a picture he didn’t have anywhere near enough knowledge to. He was every bit as excited as they were. After lunch, he asked if they wanted to go see the creek valley their ancestors called home. They couldn’t wait.

Once they arrived in the Gladwyne creek bottoms, the four of them were simultaneously overcome by a similar feeling. Mr. Goldsboro watched as they found a clearing, put a small ceremonial blanket down and began a short ritual. In the midst of the ritual, a box turtle appeared out of nowhere. It was huge. Well over 100 years old and easily the largest one that Mr. Goldsboro had ever seen.

It walked past him, onto the blanket and into the circle between Fred, Julia and the others.

It stopped there, right in the middle for a long moment, then continued on its way. To them, it was a sign of great importance. They looked at each other and cried. At the end, Fred dumped the contents of his pouch into the chert deposit they came from many moons ago.

As he stood beside the creek, listening to the water fall over the rocks...

Fred (Deer of Hidden Creek) Billings, knew he’d found his spirit home.