Episode Details

In 1737, three runners set off through the Pennsylvania woods in a rigged footrace that stripped the Lenape of a million acres — and the men who lost their homeland were never once asked. This is the story usually told as a swindle. It is really something older: the story of the powerful deciding the fate of the weak between themselves, and informing them afterward. From the Walking Purchase and the Iroquois orator who ordered the Lenape off their own land — “you are women... remove immediately” — to the great collision in the Ohio country, where Britain and France prepared to carve up a continent over the heads of the nations who lived on it, this episode follows a hard truth up and down the chain of power. The same New Englanders who raged when their king traded away Louisbourg without asking them were doing the very same thing to those below them. And carrying the spark into the western woods is a hungry, half-frozen twenty-one-year-old major named George Washington — whose winter journey to warn off the French would make his name, and help start a war for the world.