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The first major group of Indians to occupy the North Atlantic region spoke the Algonkian language. The last wave of Algonkians flowed into
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
New York shortly before the year 1000, and these Indians dominated the New York region for over three hundred years, despite the presence of some mound builders in the southwestern corner of the state. A branch of the Algonkians, known sometimes as Leni-Lenape or later as the Dela- wares, had their main center in eastern Pennsylvania, but related tribes occupied Long Island and the Hudson Valley. The strongest of these tribes in New York was that of the Mohicans, celebrated in James Feni- more Cooper's novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Another Algonkian tribe was the Wappinger, which lived on both sides of Long Island Sound.
The Iroquois, composed of several tribes, invaded upstate New York
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INDIANS OF
NEW YORK STATE
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Modern state boundaries
Map 2. Indians of New York State. (By Harold K. Faye from Exploring New York by Wainger, Furman, and Oakley, @ 1956 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.)
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ALGONKIANS AND IROQUOIS
about the year 1300. Apparently famines, wars, and internal strife forced some of the Indians living in the mid-Mississippi Valley to seek new hunting grounds. Small bands paddled up the Ohio and Allegheny Rivers and settled in western New York. This group became known as the Senecas, and it shared the land between the Genesee River and Skaneateles Lake with its easterly offshoot, the Cayugas. Other bands fol- lowing the watercourses south of Lake Erie became known as the Eries and the Susquehannocks, or Andastes. The Eries occupied the south- western corner of New York, but the Susquehannocks moved into the Susquehanna Valley in the area south from the Chemung Branch to Chesapeake Bay.
Other Iroquoian bands swarmed into the region north of Lake Erie. The Hurons, the most numerous subgroup, established two score villages in the Georgian Bay-Lake Simcoe district of Ontario. A fighting vanguard driving onward toward the mouth of the St. Lawrence met increasing resistance from the Algonkian inhabitants. Some of the Iroquois retreated to the Watertown region and still further south as Algonkian attacks in- creased in intensity. One group of the Iroquois emerged as the Onondagas and occupied hilltop sites west of Cazenovia Lake. In the late sixteenth century another band fled southward to the Mohawk Valley, named for them. The Oneidas, a branch of the Mohawks, set up their villages be- tween the parent stem and the Onondaga tribe. Finally the resident Al- gonkians were killed, expelled, or absorbed by the new tribes.
The basic social unit was matriarchal. The large family, made up of children, parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts, paid deference to the oldest woman in the family, who settled most disputes and exerted most authority. An Indian child took the name of his mother, a practical procedure in a society where the chase and the warpath often brought death to the males. Childbearing women of the privileged families nomi- nated the civil sachems, and they also had a voice in deciding matters of supreme importance to the tribe. All real property, both land and huts, belonged to the women. Compensation for a woman's life required twice the amount of wampum as that for a male's, convincing evidence of the high regard with which females were held.
NTIC OCEAN Tribal organization was complex and varied. Each tribe was made up of several families or of several distinct groups of families known as clans. For ex- ample, the Mohawks were divided into three clans- the Turtle, Bear, and Wolf. The Turtle was the most eminent clan, since it claimed descent from the first woman on earth. Custom ruled that young people had to marry outside the clan. This meant in effect that the
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
village of a clan included males from other clans. A common language and tradition cemented the feeling of kinship within the tribe.
Each clan and village had a governing council. The tribal council of civilian leaders was formed of representatives from the clan councils, who were nominated by the matrons of privileged clans, probably those of the original stock. After the council of women had made their selec- tions, the council of men generally approved their choice. The warriors, however, picked the chiefs who led them into battle. The chiefs kept their positions only as long as they retained the favor of the people.
The Iroquois tribes of central and western New York were unusual in that they formed a confederation noted for its strength. According to legend, Hiawatha, a member of the Onondaga tribe, was converted by the saintly Deganawidah, a Huron, who brought a message of peace and power from the Great Spirit. Hiawatha, giving up his cannibalistic prac- tices, agreed to spread the message among the Iroquois, who were wea- ried by dissension and warfare. After winning the assent of the Oneidas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Mohawks, Hiawatha "combed the snakes out of the hair" of Atotarho, the tyrannical chief of the Onondagas, and suc- ceeded in establishing the League of the Five Nations. This organization, founded about 1570, preserved a delicate balance between central author- ity and tribal autonomy. Each tribe ran its internal affairs and could make war only against nonmembers of the league. The main restriction was that no tribe in the confederation might make an offensive or defen- sive alliance against a brother nation. A joint council of fifty sachems met each year to discuss matters of common concern. The Mohawks and Oneidas had nine representatives each; the Onondagas, fourteen; the Cayugas, ten; and the Senecas, eight. Each tribe, however, voted as a unit and had its own special obligations and privileges within the con- federacy. The Onondagas, for example, kept the central council fires, while the Senecas nominated the two war chiefs of the league.
Any tribe or individual had the right to join the confederation or, to use the Indian phrase, come under the Tree of the Great Peace planted in the heart of the Onondaga territory. In 1715 the Tuscaroras, fleeing from the Carolinas, were admitted to limited privileges, and the confederation became known as the Six Nations.
The confederation did not enjoy great success during its first century of existence. Professor George Hunt noted:
The supposed unity of the League ... may be dismissed, for such unity never existed. In no war down to 1684 were all the tribes engaged, and intra- League war threatened again and again, actually coming to pass several times between the Mohawks and the upper Iroquois. Each tribe made war solely in its own interest, and the conspicuous feature of their League is its lack, not its possession, of political unity.
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Such a conclusion, however, discounts the intangible feeling of common purpose which united the Iroquois in the hope of universal peace. Admit- tedly the Five Nations often broke their pledge of peace within the league, but Hiawatha's concept of an ideal society in which all nations would eventually sit down under the Tree of Peace was a deeply cher- ished belief. The constitution of the Five Nations reads:
When the proposition to establish the Great Peace is made to a foreign na- tion, it shall be done in mutual council. The nation is to be persuaded by reason and urged to come into the Great Peace. If the Five Nations fail . .. after a third council . .. then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.
Most neighboring tribes, including many of Iroquoian stock such as the Hurons, Eries, and Susquehannocks, saw no advantage in joining the confederation and in fact regarded it with distrust. Ironically enough, the league of the Great Peace thereby became a cause of war.
The Indians of New York cultivated the arts of peace as well as war. They spent much of their time making earthen pottery, carving and chip- ping implements from stone and bone, weaving baskets and nets, tanning and curing skins, quarrying flint, and manufacturing bows and arrows. Since they moved their villages almost every decade, they became skilled in the construction of huts, lodges, and stockades.
The forest greatly influenced the life and customs of the Indians. Their clothing, food habits, methods of warfare, concepts of property, govern- ment, and even their religion reflected the forest setting. Village life in the forest was safer and more pleasant than the life of the isolated family. The men of the village could band together to protect their families from enemies and from hunger. The villages numbered from ten to fifty fam- ilies, or from fifty to 250 people. Each contained a long house in the cen- ter where councils and ceremonies were held, and around the long house was a rough circle of huts, usually one for each family. An Indian family cooked food and heated its hut with a small fire. They usually slept on hemlock boughs or skins on the dirt floors, although sometimes they had bunks made from bark. A palisade made of pointed logs enclosed the Iroquoian village; outside this barrier lay the cornfields which merged into the encircling forest.
The Indian men engaged in the more dangerous tasks of hunting and fighting, while the women cultivated their primitive crops and pre- pared food. After a new village had been founded, game gradually became more scarce, and as a result the men had to set out on long trips to secure meat. They hunted in groups because they needed pro- tection against human and animal enemies and because several men were needed to carry the kill back to the village.
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
After the braves had made a clearing in the forest by girdling the trees, the "matriarchs" of each family were allotted plots of ground. The women worked in groups, planting, weeding, or harvesting each plot in its turn. In the spring they planted a few kernels of corn in tiny mounds, using pointed sticks to break the soil. Later in the season they planted pumpkins, squash, and beans among the sprouting corn. The Iroquois of New York, in common with most North American aborigines, grew tobacco, which was smoked in the pipe of peace at the council fires. To supplement these cultivated crops, they gathered ber- ries, grapes, nuts, wild fruit, and even the bark of the sassafras root. The Indians near the seacoast added oysters and clams to their diet. The Green Corn Festival and other feasts noted by the Jesuits and explorers indicate that gluttony weighed lightly on the Indian conscience. Perhaps it foreshadowed the marked appetite for rum and whisky which rivaled disease and bullets as the destroyer of Indian civilization.
Although each village tried to be self-sufficient, the tribes welcomed traders offering flints, dried fish, birch canoes, tobacco, furs, and skins. The Indians carried on considerable trade with each other along well- established routes long before the white trader arrived. The trails usually followed ridges above the valleys. Modern engineers have often laid out highways along the same routes because the Indians were skilled in selecting the best and shortest paths. In general, the east-west paths were called paths of peace, whereas the north-south trails, which brought rival tribes into contact, became known as warpaths.
The religious beliefs of the Iroquois and the Algonkians were a curious mixture of pantheism, folklore, and witchcraft. As with most forest dwellers, their religion was largely a worship of nature. Birth, death, the blossoming of plant life, thunder, lightning-all inspired feelings of wonder, fear, and awe. To explain these mysteries, the Indians developed a hierarchy of unseen spirits, headed by the Great Spirit. These spirits filled all the creatures of this world, who were thus bound together in brotherhood by a common creator. Good spirits, especially the Great Spirit, caused the corn to grow bountifully and the enemy warriors to lose heart. When the Great Spirit was displeased, the cutworm ruined the corn and the plague descended upon the village. Two of their most important beliefs were that the virtuous would win favor in the eyes of the gods and that the soul would live on after death. The Indians tried diligently to keep the favor of the Great Spirit and held seasonal festivals of thanksgiving. The more important were the Maple Festival in the spring, the Strawberry Festival in the summer, and the Green Corn Festival in the autumn. Around the campfires they handed down their religious beliefs by song, legend, and ritual.
Education was informal and almost exclusively utilitarian. The older
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men taught the boys manual skills and hunting. The girls learned house- hold duties from the matrons. Oratory was highly prized as an art because it was useful not only in negotiating treaties but also in perpetuating traditions and religious myths.
The advance of European civilization created a social revolution among the American Indians, and its effect was greater than the oft-noted in- fluence of the forest and Indian upon the white man. Among the skills and practices brought by the whites were the ability to read and write, the organization of business, the use of the wheel (unknown to the Indian) and more complex machinery, and the development of urban living patterns. Inevitably Indian civilization and power broke down under the superior techniques and greater numbers of the white men. What is more remarkable was the ingenuity of such tribes as the Iroquois in adopting the techniques of their foes and in maintaining their dominant position in upstate New York for well over a century after the voyage of Hudson. In fact, the Iroquois reached the summit of their power after the Dutch, French, and British came to New York in the seventeenth century.
The demand by French, Dutch and British traders for beaver skins intensified the struggle for power among the Indians. The tribes of the Five Nations at first hunted the beaver within their own territory and exchanged pelts for goods with the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany), established in 1624. These hunting grounds gave out by 1640, and the tribes were forced to look westward for supplies. But the more numerous Hurons north of Lake Erie not only controlled the finest beaver country but also had established contacts with the Indians farther west in Illinois and Wisconsin. In addition, the Hurons commanded the western approaches to the seacoast via either the Ottawa-St. Lawrence or the Mohawk-Hudson gateways. Behind them stood the power of French arms.
To maintain their new standard of living, including firearms and whisky, the Iroquois tried to persuade the French and the Hurons to divert some of the fur trade to the Mohawk Valley. Meeting no success, they raided the brigades carrying furs down the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers to Montreal. In 1645 the French agreed to several concessions in order to buy off the Iroquois bands, but the next year the Five Nations were dismayed to see the great trading fleet float past their territory and go directly to Montreal. This violation of the agree- ment opened up a period of warfare and conquest between the Iroquois and the French that continued for over forty years.
The Mohawks and the Senecas decided in the 1640's to supplant the Hurons as middlemen in the fur trade with the western Indians. In the spring of 1649 a thousand braves struck the villages of Huronia. Fleeing
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in panic, thousands of Hurons took refuge on a small island and starved to death during the following winter. Having annihilated the Hurons, the Senecas and the Mohawks fell upon the Neutrals, a small tribe living west of Niagara Falls and potentially a rival in the fur trade. In 1654, after this victory, the Iroquois sent eighteen hundred warriors to storm the palisades of the Eries, who had incurred their anger by sheltering some Huron fugitives. During all these conquests the Iroquois took hun- dreds of captives, whom they treated with considerable kindness. In fact, a key factor in their success was the adoption of large numbers of prisoners who filled their ranks thinned by disease and warfare. Despite these impressive victories, the Mohawks and Senecas did not win complete control of the fur trade. In the north the Ottawas continued to collect furs from the western Indians and to run canoes to Montreal. Iroquoian bands in retaliation cut the Ottawa route and even besieged Montreal.
Meanwhile, fresh troubles beset the Five Nations. A plague swept through their villages in 1662, bringing death to hundreds. Scarcely had they recovered from this calamity when a French expedition destroyed the largest Mohawk village. In western New York the Senecas had to fight a rearguard action against the Susquehannocks, who were emulat- ing the Iroquois by seeking to divert the western furs, in their case to Philadelphia. The Senecas also had to weigh the maneuvers of the French, who sought to establish a post on the Niagara River. In 1687 the Senecas suffered a severe defeat when a French expedition attacked their villages. In the meantime the unity of the confederacy was being undermined by French missionaries, who made many converts among the Onondagas and Oneidas. To counter these moves, Governor Thomas Dongan of New York offered protection to the Iroquois and sent English traders into the Michigan and Wisconsin region.
As the Anglo-French rivalry for control of the interior of North America grew more intense and broke out into open warfare after 1689, the Iroquois swung toward a policy of neutrality. Chapter V, on imperial relations, will explore some of these maneuvers during the eighteenth century. With the skill and finesse of Old World diplomats, the chiefs threw their weight to the side granting them the most concessions.
Although after the Revolution the influence of the Indian became less evident, the early settlers learned a great deal from the Indians: how to clear the forests, how to hunt and trap game, and how to live in the wilderness. Farmers were quick to realize the value of corn, which has probably been the most valuable crop of New York farms since 1650. Traders and hunters in the colonial period, as well as turnpike, canal, and railroad builders in the nineteenth century, discovered that Indian paths were usually the shortest and best routes. New York colonists
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were stimulated to take the first steps toward co-operation with other colonies, as in the Albany Congress of 1754, largely because of the dangerous attitude of the Iroquois.
Perhaps the citizens of the new republican states learned something of the value of a confederation of equal states from the Iroquoian example. The governments established by both the Articles of Con- federation and the Constitution exhibit certain similarities to the League of the Five Nations. New Yorkers of the twentieth century remember their Indian heritage largely because of some five hundred place names of Indian origin between Montauk Point and Chautauqua Lake, including the names of twenty counties and twelve of the state's sixty-odd cities.
Chapter 2
The Dutch in New York, 1609-1664
We derive our authority from God and the West India Com- pany, not from the pleasure of a few ignorant subjects. -PETER STUYVESANT, 1653
NEW YORKERS, especially those living in the Hudson Valley, remember with affection their Dutch predecessors, although only a small percentage can claim Dutch blood. The story of Peter Minuit's purchase of Manhattan from Chief Manhasset with goods valued at twenty-four dollars and the legend of Peter Stuyvesant's storming about on his wooden leg have become part of a common tradition cherished even beyond the borders of New York. No doubt the warm-blooded nature and zest for living exhibited by the Dutch settlers inspires in us a warmer affection than does the dour rectitude of the Puritans of Massachusetts. The Calvinists of New Netherland were inclined-more so than those of New England -to regard the pleasures of this world as more substantial than the uncertain delights of the next. At Christmas they made merry with Santa Claus and chimney stockings a century before their fellow Calvinists to the east were ready to worship joyfully at the manger of the Christ child. They treated religious nonconformists with toleration long before the Puritans ceased their efforts to expel "heretics."
In 1664 Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrendered to the British about eight thousand subjects in the tiny settlements fringing New York Bay and dotting the banks of the Hudson River. After forty years of sporadic effort the Dutch West India Company had succeeded in planting there only a handful of traders and farmers, who were barely able to resist the raids of the Indians and the encroachments of Connecticut men.
The failure of the Dutch to supply many colonists was probably the most important reason for New Netherland's slow development. Why should men and women leave Holland with its stable republican govern-
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ment, its religious toleration, its thriving economy, for a life of danger in the rude settlements along the Hudson? As historian Dixon Ryan Fox puts it: "The failure of New Netherland is a testimony to the successful organization of life in old Netherlands."
The long Dutch revolt against Spanish religious persecution and political domination in the Netherlands ended when the Calvinist United Provinces achieved virtual independence in the truce of 1609. During the struggle Dutch captains had raided Spanish treasure ships carrying the gold, silver, and spices of Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines to Seville. The Dutch chartered companies to send ships around the Cape of Good Hope and established footholds in Ceylon, Java, the Moluccas, and other islands despite Spanish and Portuguese opposition. The di- rectors of the Dutch East India Company sought a shorter route to India and in 1609 directed the English mariner, Henry Hudson, to search for a northwest passage. It was on this voyage that Hudson guided the high-pooped Half Moon upstream to a point near Albany. Other ships followed during the next decade, but their captains made no permanent settlement. The Indians along the Hudson had only furs to offer, and the enterprising merchants anticipated greater profits in the trade of the West Indies and South America. In 1621 they organized the Dutch West India Company and received a monopoly of trade for twenty-four years along the shores of the Americas and in the Atlantic south of the Tropic of Cancer. The company founded New Netherland and made the first permanent settlement, at Fort Orange, in 1624. Al- though the company ruled the colony for forty years, its directors always regarded New Netherland as an incidental outpost among their far-flung activities. They spent most of their resources and manpower trying to capture Brazil from the Portuguese and in establishing colonies in Guiana and in the West Indies.
New Netherland-in fact New York throughout the colonial period- was largely a salt-water civilization, with its two most important settle- ments, Fort Orange and New Amsterdam, lying about 150 miles apart on the banks of the ocean-flooded Hudson, or North, River. The maritime origins and character of the colony had a great influence in molding the economy, determining the type of settler, and deciding upon the func- tions of government.
The skins of the beaver played a large role in the growth of New Netherland. A report to the Estates-General of Holland in 1638 stated, "Nothing comes from New Netherland but beaver skins, mincks, and other furs," showing that the Dutch had little other interest in the colony, and the Dutch West India Company always regarded the fur trade as its primary concern and took steps to ensure a steady supply of pelts. The company had not only to compete with the English traders in the
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A SHORT HISTORY OF NEW YORK STATE
Connecticut Valley and the Swedes in the Delaware but also to guard against unlicensed Dutch traders who bought furs illicitly and smuggled them out of the province without paying the proper duty to the company.
The Dutch were usually on excellent terms with the Iroquois, although they had many quarrels with the Algonkian tribes in the Hudson Valley. At first the company refused to permit the sale of guns to the Indians, but they relaxed this prohibition during the 1650's because the Indians were able to secure guns and powder from the French, the Swedes, and even from unlicensed Dutch traders. Furthermore, the Dutch recognized that the Iroquois needed arms in order to defeat the Hurons and that if the Iroquois could not secure control of the furs of the Great Lakes region, the Dutch merchants would lose their business at Fort Orange.
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