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Hale's views on this question, the following quotation from the article mentioned is given: The country from which the Lenape migrated was Shinaki, the "land of fir trees," not in the West but in the far North, evidently the woody region north of Lake Superior.
Shinaki was somewhere in the great forest of Canada. Namaesippu means "Fish River," and must have been that part of the St. Lawrence between Lakes Erie and Huron. The Peace Mark was only one of the significant ways in which Indians painted their faces. The marks always meant as much to other Indians as the device on a knight's shield meant in the Middle Ages.
"That was the year the Lenni-Lenape came to the Grand Council, which was held here at Sandusky, asking permission to cross our territory toward the Sea on the East. They came out of Shinaki, the Fir-Land, as far as Namae-Sippu, and stood crowded between the lakes north of the river.
The Red Score of the Lenni-Lenape was a picture writing made in red chalk on birch bark, telling how the tribe came down out of Shinaki and drove out the Tallegewi in a hundred years' war. Several imperfect copies of it are still in existence and one nearly perfect interpretation made for the English colonists.
To save the game, we told him, which seemed to us reasonable; though I think from that hour we began to feel that the Tallegewi, with all their walled towns and monuments, had been put somehow in the wrong by the wild tribes of Shinaki. "We stayed on in the ravine, waiting on Ongyatasse's knee, until we saw the new rim of the Halting Moon curled up like a feather.
All the bands of Lenni-Lenape that were not too far in our territory had come hurrying back toward Fish River, and other bands, as the rumor of fighting spread, came down out of Shinaki like buzzards to a carcass. From Cool Waters to Namae-sippu, the Dark Wood was full of war-cries and groaning.
"We talked no more of the Council or of our errand, but as youths will, we talked of highness, and of big game in Shinaki, and of the ways of the Tallegewi, of which for the most part he was scornful. "Corn he allowed us as a great advantage, but of our towns he doubted whether they did not make us fat and Two-Talkers.
"Thus they had begun to come, few at first, like the trickle of melting ice in the moon of the Sun Returning, and at the last, like grasshoppers in the standing corn. They fished out our rivers and swept up the game like fire in the forest. Three Towns sent scouts toward Fish River who reported that the Lenape swarmed in the Dark Wood, that they came on from Shinaki thick as their own firs.
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