DELAWARE INDIANS; tribes that occupied the drainage of the river Delaware and the shores of Delaware bay, eastern United States. They called themselves Lenape or Leni-Lenape, and were an association or confederacy of three Algonkin tribes, the Munsee, Unami and Unalachtigo. Their speech seems to have been more similar to the Algonkin dialects of Ohio valley than to the adjacent ones of the Atlantic coast, and their own tradition, in the Walam Olum, brings them out of the west. They were friendly to the whites; but, conquered in 1720 by the Iroquois and their lands more and more encroached on by the English settlers, they began to move westward, successively to central and western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Kansas and Okla homa, with branches in Wisconsin and Ontario. They mixed with other Indian remnants in these migrations and the survivors con tain much tribally alien blood. Though not particularly powerful or aggressive at the time of discovery the Delaware were accorded an honorific pre-eminence by the other eastern Algonkins and were called "Grandfathers." See D. G. Brinton, The Lenape and their Legends (1885).