USA > New Jersey > Essex County > Newark > A History of the city of Newark, New Jersey : embracing practically two and a half centuries, 1666-1913, Volume I > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46
"They bent down the boughs of saplings and interlaced them, covering this framework with bark quite thick enough to provide a warm shelter. Sometimes they made wattled huts, circular or cylindrical in form, thatched and with an inner wall of mats woven from long reed grass or from sweet flag stalks. Their bedding was the skins of wild animals, usually the garments they wore when abroad."
JERSEY INDIANS' CHARACTERISTICS-THE LENNI LENAPE RELIGION.
They were gentle, and received strangers with the most gra- cious hospitality. Samuel Smith, New Jersey's first historian, wrote of them in 1765: "None could excel them in liberality with the little they had, for nothing was too good for a friend."
But they kept strict watch over their tribal boundaries, as a rule. A Hackensack, for instance, could fish and hunt in Newark territory and none other. Other tribes of the Lenni Lenape and those of other peaceful nations had full right to traverse the Indian highways and to enjoy temporarily the privileges of the region, but they could not tarry long nor take the fish nor the game nor the fruits of the fields and the wildwood. It is pretty certain also, that no one family remained for any great length of time at any one spot, so Newark cannot be said to have belonged to any one man or small group of red men, since it was "possessed" only by the tribe; and as we shall see later, was disposed of to the settlers by the tribe, a few acting as the tribal representatives and who probably were the last natives to have residence here.
18
HISTORY OF NEWARK
The Lenni Lenape had a sincere belief in a Supreme Being, differing but little in its elements from that of the other savages throughout this section of the country. They had no comprehen- sion of a life to come such as the Christian religion teaches. The missionaries found it most difficult to get them to grasp the tenets of the faith they sought to teach them.
They were not at all inclined to admit that the whites were superior to them. They said they could tell from simply looking at the strangers from across the ocean that they were not an "original people" like themselves, who had come down from the beginning of time without contamination by an intermingling with races other than their own. The white men, said the Lenni Lenape, were clearly the result of the commingling of various bloods, which meant that they were bound to be troublesome. The Great Spirit had found it necessary to give the whites a Big Book (Bible) and to teach them to read it, so that they might know how to do as he wanted them to do, and how to leave undone the things he did not want them to do. As for the Lenni Lenape, they did not need such a book from the Great Spirit, since they knew his wishes out of their hearts.
"As they care nothing for the spiritual," wrote a Dutch ob- server, speaking of the period of 1621-1632, "they direct their study principally to the physical, closely studying the seasons. The women there are the most experienced star gazers; there is scarcely one of them but names all the stars [planets?]; their rising and setting. But Him who dwells above they know not."
They had ceremonies galore, by means of which they sought to placate the Evil One, and they had solemn festivals at various seasons of the year. There was the feast of the first fruits of the harvest, the feast after a period of good hunting, celebrations at weddings and at funerals. It is believed that many of these were held in the groves along the Yantakah, Yantacaw, or Third River, as we know it. They are said to have used a kind of incense, made by pouring water upon burning tobacco.
19
HISTORY OF NEWARK
There are two interpretations of the name Yantakah or Yanta- caw. By some authorities the word is understood to have signified to the Lenni Lenape, "extending to the tidal river," which faith- fully describes the stream as it flows into the Passaic. Others are inclined to believe that Yantakah is a crude combination of the native words for the ceremonial dances, the Kante Kaey, which they celebrated on the banks of the stream.
Few of the Indian place names for the Newark region have been preserved to us, most unfortunately. Students of the Lenni Lenape tongue do not explain the meaning of Passaic, to the satis- faction of modern minds. "Where it divides" is a strict transla- tion. This may describe the split or chasm at Paterson Falls. Weequahic, the little creek which for ages has served as a boundary line, first separating the domains of the Hackensacks and the Raritans, and afterwards as the place of division between Newark and Elizabethtown, and which now gives its name to a county park, means simply "the end or head of a creek or run."
MARRIAGE-TRAINING OF THE BOYS-MEDICINE MEN.
Marriage, while it was always gone through with much cere- mony, was apparently not binding, upon the men. They left the women for others when it suited them to do so, the wife taking the children. The only formidable thing about marriage among the Lenni Lenape was the name they gave it, "witach-punge- wiwuladt-poagan." They were very careful, however, not to per- mit the marriage of members of the same tribe. The men paid but little attention to their girl-children; they were kept about the mother and learned her simple but severe tasks of planting and hoeing the corn and beans, preparing the food and bearing heavy burdens when the family was on the move. But the boys were trained in the craft of the father with considerable care. They were early taught the use of the bow and arrow, how to attach the fish hook to the line, then how to fish; next they learned to spear fish and afterward were shown how to trap game and to catch fish in the streams by means of brush or bush nets. The
20
HISTORY OF NEWARK
use of the canoe came when the boy was well grown, and the handling of the stone hatchet in all its forms seems to have been reckoned as one of the more difficult accomplishments.
The Lenni Lenape had many good medicine men among them, who did much more than strive to exorcise evil spirits from the ill by weird dances and fantastic ceremonial. Sickness could not always be driven out by horse play and shouting, and one of the cure-alls was to give the patient a steam bath and then plunge him in the river. Twelve stones were heated to very high temperature, whereupon these were rolled into a small hut, usually constructed of bark and often lined with clay or mud. The patient squatted inside the hut near the stones, when water was poured upon the latter, the pouring being continued until the spluttering and sissing ceased. Then followed the cold plunge, which no doubt was the death of nearly as many as were cured, since this treatment was applied for about every ill the red man was heir to.
THE INDIANS AND "FIRE WATER"-INHUMANITY OF THE. DUTCH.
The settlers need have had no serious trouble with the Lenni Lenape. Indeed, the English had no wars with them in this State. But there were bloody struggles between the Dutch and the red . men, including our own Hackensacks, which could easily have been avoided had the whites given the savages considerate treatment. A Scotch settler at Perth Amboy, the homeland of the Raritans, who were next door neighboors of the Hackensacks, writing near the close of the seventeenth century says: "And for the Indian natives, they are not troublesome to any of us, if we do them no harm, but are a very kind and loving people; the men do nothing but hunt, and the women they plant corn and work at home."
There would have been much less bloodshed during the do- minion of the Dutch, had it not been for the white man's "fire- water," the same depressing story written through and through the records of the early colonization of this country. The Lenni Lenape had no word in their language for drunkeness. When they were thirsty they drank water, or the broth from their boiled meat.
21
HISTORY OF NEWARK
From the first appearance of the Dutch traders on Manhattan, the chiefs of the Hackensacks, the Navesinks on Staten Island, the Mohegans, the Raritans, the Tappans and other neighboring tribes on the western side of the Hudson, besought the newcomers not to sell their people rum. They quickly saw its baleful effects, and Oraton or Oratamy, the grand old sachem of the Hackensacks, was especially urgent and active in this first temperance crusade in New Jersey. From the all too scant record we have of his doings there is enough to stamp him as a remarkable character, straightforward and just in his dealings; possessed of a spirit of kindliness far beyond that of many of the white men with whom he had dealing. In "fire-water" he clearly saw the undoing of his people. On several occasions he visited the log houses of the Dutch on Manhattan and pleaded to have the selling or giving of liquor to the Hackensacks stopped.
Serious trouble did not come in East Jersey until 1640, when the Dutch colonists angered the Raritans. The natives were accused, although it is now believed without just foundation, of many thieveries, and the white men sent a punitive expedition to the Raritan region. A year later the Indians retaliated by descend- ing upon the scattered homes upon Staten Island, and destroyed the settlers with the fury and cruelty characteristic of the aborigines when the battle rage was on.
The Indians had now begun to lose confidence in the Dutch. The breach had been widened by the foolish policy of exacting tribute of maize, wampum and furs. This the red men resented; they saw no reason why they should play the part of slaves. The Dutch farmers were continually letting their cattle stray away and the Indians, now sulky, occasionally killed the cattle and horses. Neither understood the other, and the Dutch were exceedingly slow in getting to know the peculiarities of the native character.
The Dutch, or their rulers in Manhattan, resolved on war. At this time, the Hackensacks and neighboring tribes of the Lenni Lenape were in terror because of the incursions of the Iroquois, Mohawks and others of their copper-skinned enemies from the
22
HISTORY OF NEWARK
north. The Lenni Lenape in desperation appealed to the "Swanne- kins," as they called the Dutch, and gathered for protection where the Pavonia section of Jersey City now is. It was while they were encamped there to the number of several hundred, relying upon the Dutch promise of protection, that William Kieft, director-general of New Netherland, resolved to mete out swift punishment upon them.
THE PAVONIA MASSACRE.
Eighty soldiers were sent across the river from Manhattan in the darkness of a February night in 1643. They fell upon the unsuspecting natives as they slept. Their barbarities are well nigh indescribable. They murdered men, women and children alike. They tore the babies from the breasts of their mothers and threw them into the water, and when parents rushed in to save their offspring, forced them to drown together. They butchered infants as they lay pinioned to the boards used as rude cradles; and their wanton lust for killing was not satisfied until there was none of the savages living of those who had been unable to flee under cover of darkness. The dead numbered over eighty.
The war raged up and down the west bank of the Hudson. All the Lenni Lenape in what is now upper New Jersey put on their war paint, upwards of eleven tribes taking the field. They laid waste every settler's home, until the region was rid of the white folk as completely as before their first appearance. Peace was de- clared in the spring of 1643, but it did not last long as the natives now mistrusted every move of the white man. It is not at all probable that the fighting extended as far inland as the district on which Newark now stands, and the vague tales of a battle around a huge rock in what is now the Eagle Rock reservation, are scarcely to be credited. The Dutch were careful to keep near their base of supplies, Manhattan-once they came to realize what a terrible foe the red man could be when aroused. The war was not even carried as far as the Indian village at Hackensack, although the braves of the whole tribe took active part in it. In the fighting after the flimsy treaty of peace of 1643, fully seven of the tribes, chiefly of the Lenni Lenape, were enrolled.
23
HISTORY OF NEWARK
The Indians had become more crafty by this time; they ex- posed themselves very little, stealing up on the farmhouses and "bouweries" and firing the thatched roofs with flaming arrows or by hurling brands. Unlike the Dutch, they usually spared the women and children, taking them into captivity. Time and again they showed themselves more humane than their misguided antag- onists. We know this from accounts of the sanguinary proceedings left by Dutchmen who were not in sympathy with the high-handed methods pursued by Kieft. Actual peace was at last declared, and one of the signers of the treaty was Oritaney, or Oraton, chief of the Hackensacks.
THE LAST STAND OF THE LENNI LENAPE.
The second and last war in which the Hackensacks had any part broke out twelve years later, in 1655, and was the more terrible of the two. There were petty encounters during the long interval, which served to keep the Hackensacks and their neighbors more or less restive, and which really prepared the way for the last desperate struggle.
Hostilities came when a Dutchman who had an orchard on the hillside in what is now Hoboken, from which the Indians had pilfered considerable fruit, resolved to put a stop to the annoyance. He lay in wait for the offenders one dark night. When he saw someone approaching the orchard he fired, and killed an Indian girl. The savages at once lit their beacon fires and swarmed to the west side of the Hudson. They filled sixty-four canoes and went in pursuit of the unlucky Dutch fruit grower, who had fled to New Amsterdam. They searched that village until they found him, killing the Dutchman who had taken him in, and wound- ing the cause of the trouble in the breast with one of their arrows.
By this time the men of New Amsterdam had begun to assem- ble, and the red men ran to their canoes and put back to Hoboken. Soon the whole series of little settlements, from Weehawken to Staten Island, were in flames. Every house was burned. One hundred whites were killed, one hundred and fifty taken captives,
24
HISTORY OF NEWARK
and over three hundred more made homeless. In this war the Hackensacks and their allies seem to have been less humane than in the first. They fought with demoniac fury, as if they knew this was to be their last stand in this region against the white men. Peace was not made secure for several months, when the Indians demanded a ransom for the captives, which the Dutch paid. In one case the price was seventy-eight pounds of gunpowder and forty staves of lead, for a group of twenty-eight captives.
THE PASSING OF THE JERSEY INDIANS.
War, rum, and disease, much of the latter caused by excesses springing from indulgence in rum, had greatly reduced the number of the natives. It is believed also that many of them had before the last war made their flight westward to get away from the white man. In 1758 a counsel was called by Governor Bernard, of New Jersey, which resulted in the extinguishment by the Colonial government of all claims of the Lenni Lenape to lands in New Jersey, with the exception of the right to hunt and fish in all unenclosed lands. The Indians were, furthermore, provided with a reservation-the first in the whole United States-in Burlington county, on the Delaware. Three thousand acres were set aside for. their exclusive use, largely through the exertions of the Rev. John Brainerd, whose brother David, had previously worked as a mis- sionary, chiefly among the Susquehannas, and who had virtually given up his life for them, dying of consumption resulting from hardship and exposure. They called the place Brotherton.
The last of the Lenni Lenape in New Jersey remained quietly in their reservation until 1802, taking no part as a race in the stirring events of the War for Independence, although a few of their young men, who had become at least partly civilized, fought in Washington's army. The remnant of the original owners of the Jersey soil removed to a reservation near Oneida Lake, New York, in 1802, joining forces with another Indian race with whom their fathers had been friendly for generations. A few years later they were all transported to Fox River, Wisconsin, naming their new
25
HISTORY OF NEWARK
village Statesburg. In 1832 but forty of them were left, and about that time they sent one of their own men, a graduate of Princeton, to ask the Legislature to buy their ancient hunting and fishing rights which had not been cancelled. This was promptly done, the price paid being about $3,000.
This ended all formal connection between the State of New Jersey and the Indians. It is possible that if diligent search were made throughout the Indian reservations of the country a very few might be found who can lay fair claim to having Lenni Lenape blood in their veins.
The last one of the race in this State, of whom there is any- think like an authentic record, was an old woman, called "Indian Ann," who died in Burlington county about 1890. She claimed to be the daughter of a man, who, at the time of the removal of the Lenni Lenape to New York State, refused to go. There was but a small handful of the race in this section of New Jersey when Newark was founded, probably not more than five hundred. None of the Lenni Lenape had serious trouble with the English, from the time of their arrival, in 1664. Certain it is that the Hacken- sacks lived in amity with the settlers of Newark until the last little band of them went trailing sorrowfully away across the State to the reservation in Brotherton.1
The last surviving remnants of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians are now (1913) in Canada and in Oklahoma. A wealth of interesting material upon the New Jersey Indians is contained in "A Preliminary Report of the Archaeological Survey of the State of New Jersey, made by the Department of Anthropology in the American Museum of Natural History," issued by the State Geo- logical Survey, in May, 1913. The Archaeological Survey was created in 1912 by an act of the Legislature, and the report just referred to covers the first year's work of this new bureau. Nearly a thousand sites, camps, burial grounds and rock shelters have already been located. The Survey has not as yet (1913) made any investigations in Essex county.
' The principal sources drawn upon for the material in this chapter are Nelson's "New Jersey Indians" and Dr. C. C. Abbott's "Primitive Industry."
CHAPTER III. PURITAN UNREST-THE ENGLISH AND NEW JERSEY.
CHAPTER III.
PURITAN UNREST-THE ENGLISH AND NEW JERSEY.
T HE first white men to look upon the country we now call Newark are believed to have been a small boat's crew sent out by Henry Hudson at the time of his discovery of the river that bears his name, in September, 1609. John Coleman, in charge of the boat, left the Half Moon with orders to explore the region back of the Great River. He found his way into what is now Newark Bay, proceeded far enough to make sure that the Passaic did not lead to the Northwest Passage his chief was fruitlessly seeking, and started back. This first glimpse of the region was costly, for the white men became embroiled with the Indians who attacked them in canoes, and Coleman was shot dead by an arrow, which pierced his throat. The crew reported it had observed an "open sea," Newark Bay, after penetrating two leagues; and the following, taken from the Half Moon's log, is believed to refer to the country round about it as "pleasent with Grasse and Flowers and goodly Trees as any they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them." Somewhere in the sands of Jersey the bones of Coleman have crumbled away. If only the spot could have been found and its location preserved !
More than half a hundred years were to march by before settlement was to be made in the Newark region. The Dutch, partly because of their troubles with the Indians, did not attempt to make homes here. A few sturdy souls are thought to have set up their homes here and there along the upper Passaic and Hackensack rivers. They called this whole neighbor- hood Achter Col, or Kol, meaning "back of the Bay," thus describ- ing its location with reference to the upper harbor of New Amster- dam. They were slow and unprogressive, contenting themselves with drawing on the region for its fur-bearing animals and such wild products as could be gathered without much labor.
.
oh 30
HISTORY OF NEWARK
The English settlers on Long Island and in lower New England had their eyes on the Newark region for a quarter of a century before the actual settlement. As early as 1643 negotiations with a view to the establishment of a town thereabouts were entered into with the Dutch at New Amsterdam by a small group, believed to have been Long Island English, who were chafing under the heavy conditions the Dutch imposed upon them there. Nothing came of this proposition. These people had no doubt explored the "Achter Col" country on their own account and had grasped its great possibilities as a permanent abiding place. As their towns on Long Island were offshoots of New England they no doubt told their Puritan brethren on the Connecticut mainland of the attrac- tiveness of the land west of the Hudson and on the shores of a large inner bay where none abode but savages.
PURITANS LOOK TOWARD NEWARK REGION.
The Puritan pioneers on Long Island were for the most part bands of the most uncompromising and conservative Puritans, less liberal than the Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony and more closely allied with the Puritans of the New Haven colony, where a determined effort was being made to build up a theocratic form of government. In many instances they would permit no one to have any voice in public affairs unless he was a member of one of the Congregational churches. When the New Haven Colony-from whence the founders of Newark came-was established, in 1638, a "Fundamental Agreement" was drawn up and signed by all the settlers, binding themselves to three principles: 1. "That the Word of God shall be the only Rule attended unto in ordering the affairs of Government." 2. That they should "cast themselves into that mould and form of commonwealth which appeareth best, in reference to the securing of the pure and peaceable enjoyment of all Christ, His ordinances in the Church according to God." 3. "That the free burgesses shall be chosen from Church members, and they only shall choose magistrates and officers among them- selves to have the power of transacting all public civil affairs of the plantation."
31
HISTORY OF NEWARK
THE NEW HAVEN THEOCRACY.
From the above it will be seen that with these Puritans, Church and State were to be so closely bound together as to discourage all of different religious faith coming among them. They not only signed the "Fundamental Agreement" themselves, but they pledged themselves to compel all who might afterward enter the colony to stay, to subscribe to, or abide by it. You might, if you were not a Puritan, make your home in the New Haven Colony, but you must sign away all right to participate in government. They went further than the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth, who admitted others than Puritans to suffrage, for only upon such foundation could they conceive of a commonwealth that would satisfy their intense yearning for the purest form of government possible upon earth. All must be of one mind and heart, they said to each other continually, or there can be no peaceful and clean life of the kind that a good man's conscience urges.
The Puritans were reformers who had fought a losing fight for many years in England. They were the English expression of a "new idea" movement that had long been stirring in Europe. Since government by man alone was being proven a miserable failure so far as the great mass of the people were concerned, they argued that God, through His Church, must be man's guide if man was to approach the happy state on earth that God had made possible for him. The nations of the earth must inevitably become even as Sodom and Gomorrah unless the rulers governed con- stantly in the fear of God and in strict obedience to conscience, which was God's voice. All that they saw in the workings of government about them in England tended to convince them of the strength of their position. The New Haven Colony men were among the strictest adherents to this conception.
Disheartened and discouraged by the corruption and greed of the crown and its officers and adherents, despairing of ever being permitted to live their lives in the purity of faith they felt essential and without which they could see no hope for England's future, the Pilgrim Fathers, the first of the Puritans to migrate, had left
32
HISTORY OF NEWARK
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.