The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley

By Jeffry D. Wert

In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley—including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians—from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage.

Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged— sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively—with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders—Iroquois as well as Dutch and English—the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801464591

Jeffry D. Wert

Jeffry D. Wert is the author of eight previous books on Civil War topics, most recently Cavalryman of the Lost Cause and The Sword of Lincoln. His articles and essays on the Civil War have appeared in many publications, including Civil War Times Illustrated, American History Illustrated, and Blue and Gray. A former history teacher at Penns Valley High School, he lives in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, slightly more than one hour from the battlefield at Gettysburg.

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To Lisa Darice Coley, 1957–2011

CONTENTS

List of maps

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chronology

Introduction: Politics and Society

1. Ties That Bound

2. Patterns of Diplomacy

3. Struggling with the Dutch

4. Living with the English

5. Friends and Enemies

6. In the Shadow of the Longhouse

7. Change and Continuity

8. War and Disunity

9. Disaster and Dispersal

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

MAPS

1. Native peoples of the Hudson Valley

2. Indian peoples of Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley

3. The middle Atlantic region in the mid-seventeenth century

4. Indian settlements on the upper Delaware

5. The Hudson and the Susquehanna valleys in 1771

PREFACE

On August 2, 1762, a local official of Dutchess County, New York, recorded the oral testimony of a thirty-six-year-old Hudson Valley Indian named David Ninham. This witness, who was in all likelihood identical to the later sachem (or chief) Daniel Nimham, described himself as a River Indian, of the tribe of the Wappingers, which tribe were the ancient inhabitants of the east shore of the Hudson River, from the city of New York to about the middle of Beekmans Patent, while another people called the Mahicans were the remaining inhabitants of the east shore of Hudson River; that these two tribes constituted one nation. Nimham said he could easily understand the language of his people’s Mahican neighbors, as it is very little different from the language of the Wappinger tribe, and added that he for some years had been living with the Mahicans in the Protestant mission community at Stockbridge, which was located in the northern Housatonic Valley in Massachusetts. This area was at the eastern limits of the country of the Mahicans, whose historic core territory straddled the northern Hudson Valley.¹

Recorded during the closing decades of the colonial period, at a time when the Wappingers and their neighbors had been in sustained contact with Europeans for more than 150 years, Nimham’s testimony points to both continuity and change in Native American political structures and relationships in the Hudson Valley area. Nimham could evidently not remember (or at least did not say) that in previous decades such other Native peoples as the Wiechquaesgecks, Kichtawancs, and Nochpeems had occupied the east bank of the Hudson, south of his own people’s homeland. These peoples had by then disappeared as functioning political groups or organizations, but Nimham had a clear sense of current territorial and political divisions and, if anyone had taken the trouble to ask, he might have been able to account for the past and present territorial claims of the Esopus Indians living west of the Hudson and those of their northern neighbors, the Mahicans of Catskill Creek. Although not as diverse as a century before, when it had been home to more than a dozen more Native groups, the Hudson Valley continued to house several distinct peoples in the late eighteenth century.

As Nimham’s testimony further shows, the Wappinger people had strong ties to their Mahican neighbors, a relationship in many ways typical of Native political and diplomatic life in the Hudson Valley. The Wappingers and the Mahicans were separate and politically independent peoples, but in Nimham’s deposition these groups were nevertheless described as so close that they constituted one nation, a choice of words that may have reflected Nimham’s own understanding of their relationship rather than merely that of a European interpreter or scribe (as Nimham understood and could speak English). The resettlement of Nimham and other Wappingers at Stockbridge was a recent development—less than a decade old in 1762—but this movement of population was an expression of far older patterns of predominantly peaceful and cooperative relations among Hudson Valley peoples. Nor was this the first time one Valley group had afforded neighbors and friends hospitality or shelter within its territory, and even given these people a share of its lands. (As one of several signatories to a Mahican land sale to English colonists in January 1763, Nimham himself appears to have been offered land among the Mahicans).²

Daniel Nimham’s account provides a glimpse into a world of Native interactions and relationships beyond the full understanding—or even ken—not only of modern scholars but also of European officials and colonists, both in the 1760s and indeed during the entire period of sustained contact between Hudson Valley Indians and Europeans. Except in times of crisis, few seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Europeans showed much interest in the doings of the Wappingers or other Hudson Valley peoples, and they were largely ignorant of how these groups interacted and related to one another. This was true of the Dutch, who founded the colony of New Netherland in the Hudson Valley in 1624, and even more true of the English, who conquered the Dutch province forty years later, renaming it New York. In a sense, the Europeans always remained at the fringes, not at the center, of a complicated and multifaceted Indian world.

In this book I reconstruct this now lost world, focusing especially on political relationships, ties of kinship, networks of exchange, and other forms of interactions among Native groups and peoples. By placing relations among Native peoples at center stage, this investigation highlights the importance of inter-Indian diplomacy and other modes of intergroup relations, and holds that these patterns of interaction formed an essential part of how the Native peoples of the Hudson Valley understood the world in which they lived. Ties to neighboring peoples were an important part of the outlook of the Indians of the Hudson Valley, and often informed their strategic, political, and military choices.

The evidence presented points toward the existence of a vast and complicated Native social and political world of diplomacy and interaction separate from the world of the European colonizers, and even from the sphere of intercultural relations created together by Europeans and Indians. Among themselves, and in relation to Indians in other areas, the Natives of the Hudson Valley maintained a coherent system of diplomatic relations based on fictive and actual kinship ties, channels of gift exchange and communication, and a series of customary practices that eased cooperative interaction. This social and political landscape was not static, but remained an important part of Native life into the Revolutionary years, and continued to function largely independently of European control. Indeed, colonial observers were only dimly aware of its existence, as they were at the periphery, not at the center, of this inter-Indian landscape.

Native American history neither began nor ended with first contact with Europeans. Diplomatic, political, and social exchanges among different peoples have a long history in North America. Indeed, intercultural frontiers existed for centuries before the Europeans arrived. Relations among separate Indian groups and peoples both predated European contact and continued to be of great importance long after colonization began. In this book I do not deny the importance of the colonizers, nor do I attempt to write these newcomers out of the story (which is neither possible nor desirable); I spend considerable time discussing the changing relations Hudson Valley Indians had with both the English and the Dutch. I propose, however, that much insight may be gained from examining how Indians interacted with other Indians, not just with Europeans, which has tended to be the focus of most research on Indians in the colonial period. Hudson Valley Indians lived in a world far too complicated to be described simply as a binary juxtaposition of Natives and newcomers.³

The choice of the Hudson Valley as an area of examination is driven primarily by evidence of abundant interactions among the Native peoples in this region in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Hudson Valley proper contained two main linguistic-cultural groups when the Europeans arrived. Munsee speakers inhabited the entire mainland around Manhattan Island, including the present county of Westchester and northeastern New Jersey, the entire Hudson Valley north to present-day Saugerties in Ulster County on the west bank of the Hudson and to the northern part of present-day Dutchess County on the east bank, and the Minisink country north of the Forks of the Delaware River. The Minisinks should perhaps not be called a Hudson Valley people, but they had close contact with groups living in this area and, at least in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, laid claims to land in the immediate neighborhood of the Hudson. They therefore appear frequently in the following pages. The Mahicans inhabited the Hudson Valley from the Munsee-speaking areas north to Lake Champlain, and also had a population concentration in the upper Housatonic Valley in present Massachusetts and Connecticut. The account in this book also includes the people of the western part of Long Island (generally believed to have been Munsee speakers). Central and eastern Long Island was inhabited by Quiripi-Unquachog and Montauk speakers, people who were culturally more closely related to populations in southern New England than to the Munsee and Mahican speakers on the western part of Long Island and the Hudson Valley proper. These Natives had only sporadic interaction with Indians living along the banks of the Hudson, and are therefore not part of this book, although their relations with their western Long Island neighbors are taken into account where appropriate. Peoples such as the Massapequas and Matinnecoks of western Long Island are thus considered to be part of the area covered by this book, while neighboring groups to their east such as Setauketts and Unquachogs lie outside of it.⁴

The Hudson Valley region (like any geographical focus) is, of course, a somewhat artificial category, but it is a category I believe people during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would have understood. The Hudson Valley was divided between members of two linguistic groups, and a number of studies of these Indians have followed the linguistic divide and treated them separately, sometimes describing the lower Valley as Munsee Country and its inhabitant as Munsees, as if they were something approaching a united people. There is a great deal of merit to studying these ethnic or linguistic groups, but, as Daniel Nimham’s testimony suggests, Native diplomacy and other forms of political and social relations frequently crossed linguistic lines, and for the purposes of this investigation it is natural to group Mahicans and Munsee speakers together. The term Munsee is not recorded until the eighteenth century, when it referred to former residents of Minisink country. I use the word Munsee only to describe these and other people specifically identified in historical records as such. I refer to Indian residents of the lower Hudson Valley as Munsee speakers. Many of these people would become Munsees when they resettled in Minisink country or other areas outside of the Hudson Valley during the colonial and early republican periods. These expatriates are among the ancestors of the Munsee people that exist today.⁵

Hudson Valley Indians also maintained ties to Natives in neighboring regions, and at times these relations could exercise a powerful influence on their political behavior. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the peoples of the Valley had more frequent interactions and tight social, political, and diplomatic relations with their immediate neighbors than with anyone else; when Hudson Valley Indians make their appearance among Indians living in New England or other adjacent or distant areas they appear more as supporting actors than as central players in local diplomacy and politics.

Sources and Methodology

European colonists and officials were normally quite unconcerned with the internal affairs of the Hudson Valley Indians, and, when they did take note of them, they often operated with vast generalizations. Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, in particular, were habitually inexact, and frequently grouped all Native people in this area under the general category River Indians, a term that sometimes referred specifically to the Mahicans and at other times to Hudson Valley Indians in general. Even when this was not the case, Europeans were only rarely interested in Native intergroup relations, and then only as far as these might in some way affect colonial society. These and other shortcomings of the source base present a formidable obstacle to understanding how the Natives of the Hudson Valley related to one another, but the evidence the Europeans produced still contains much valuable information and makes it possible to describe the contours of these patterns of inter-Indian interaction.⁶

A central premise of many arguments I make in this book is that Indians tended to deal with the colonizers as they did any other group of people. Accounts of diplomatic relations among Indian peoples are sparse, but Indian-European relations are better documented. I therefore treat records of interaction between Natives and newcomers as reflections of practices at work in Indian-Indian affairs. At its most simple level, this means that when leaders of different groups cooperated in negotiations with Europeans, I assume that they also worked together in other arenas. Beyond that, I see the Indian custom of addressing Europeans by kinship terms as a reflection of how they conceived of ties to other peoples in general. If sachems or other leaders sought to resolve conflicts by offering Europeans gifts, I take that as evidence of how they were accustomed to conciliating Indians with comparable grievances. In some instances, I suspect that Indian-European diplomatic records have preserved watered-down versions of Native customs. Although meetings between sachems and colonial officials sometimes contain references to Indian spirituality, these religious elements were likely far more prominent in inter-Indian negotiations, where both parties could draw on shared cosmological assumptions.

MAP 1. Native peoples of the Hudson Valley

MAP 2. Indian peoples of Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley

Although extant records are often Eurocentric, I assume that historic Indians were not. Because colonial Europeans were generally ill-informed of inter-Indian matters, the records they left behind tend to portray the actions of Indian peoples as reactions to initiatives undertaken by Europeans, discounting the importance of developments at work among Native groups. I have tried to rectify this inherent bias by discussing cases where developments that may at first glance seem to stem from European activities may equally well be interpreted as the result of inter-Indian interaction. Colonial records also have a tendency to portray Indians as easily manipulated. When Indians expressed grievances, both government officials and colonial interest groups often blamed scheming Europeans who supposedly used the Natives as dupes. If an Indian group resisted encroachments on their land, European officials and land claimants might accuse other Europeans of manipulating the Indians for their own purposes. Admitting that the Indians did feel wronged would invite uncomfortable questions not only about the legitimacy of particular transactions but about the colonial project itself. The sources thus often ascribe the motivations underlying disputes to European rather than Indian actors, but I assume that Native people operated from reasons of their own.

Plan for the Book

During the first decades of trade and colonization in the Hudson Valley, the Dutch showed little curiosity about the cultures of the Natives they encountered. For that reason, no clear picture exists of the political landscape of this area until the 1640s, when the potential for conflict between locals and newcomers began to escalate. Later Dutch and English records contain more information, but are still a far cry away from providing an adequate account of Native life in the Hudson Valley. Nevertheless, the evidence indicates that the Valley Indians belonged to multiple political groups or organizations headed by generally competent leaders capable of speaking for relatively large numbers of followers. In the introduction, I provide an overview of the political and social structures of the Hudson Valley during the first century of permanent contact with Europeans. I show that in spite of upheaval caused by colonization and demographic decline, the Native political structures in this area evinced considerable stability and continuity over time.

The Hudson Valley was home to several politically independent peoples, but strong ties linked these various groups to one another, forming a widespread network of diplomatic interaction. Actual kinship connections among individuals and fictive kinship connections at the collective level provided social and political glue that bound the Valley together. These kinship connections were reinforced by a shared religious-ceremonial life and widespread gift exchange networks. These connections are the topic of chapter 1. In chapter 2, I describe how Native diplomatic networks operated in practice. The Valley Indians maintained channels of communication and intelligence exchange, mechanisms for the regulation of territorial boundaries, and methods for resolving conflicts among members of different peoples. Although these peoples did not form a confederation or permanently constituted alliance, social, political, and cultural practices and customs nevertheless structured how they interacted with one another, and these interactions were predominantly peaceful and cooperative.

After the commencement of Dutch colonization in 1624, the Hudson Valley Indians initially attempted to integrate these newcomers into their established system of intergroup relations. This is the subject of chapter 3. The Natives found the Europeans unwilling to adapt to local custom, and relations between Dutch and Indians were therefore often marked by conflict and violence. Nevertheless, as the Dutch period came to a close in 1664, the Hudson Valley Indians had reasons to feel that they had scored at least some victories in their dealings with these foreigners, who at times seemed as if they were ready to acquiesce to Native practice. Indeed, the relationship between Indians and colonists still fell far short of domination of the latter by the former.

During the early period of English rule in the Hudson Valley, local Native populations increasingly had to acquiesce to many aspects of foreign rule, and at least acknowledge their dependence on the government of New York. How Hudson Valley Indians abandoned their claims to complete equality with the newcomers and began to describe the provincial governor as a father figure and protector is the subject of chapter 4. But the Indians’ acceptance of foreign domination was far from complete, and in reality colonial authorities often had little control over the affairs of the Natives. The English remained largely on the outside of the Native diplomatic system that continued to function in the Hudson Valley, and had little knowledge of its operation.

The Indians of the Hudson Valley not only interacted with one another but also with Natives in neighboring regions, and their ties to these groups influenced their political and strategic behavior. As I will show in chapter 5, especially important to Hudson Valley Indians were relations to the Susquehannocks to the west and the Iroquois to the north of the Valley. The Valley Indians had a periodically antagonistic relationship with the Iroquois, but they could hope to use their predominantly friendly relations with the Susquehannocks to counterbalance Iroquois power. The importance of interactions with neighboring peoples is especially noticeable during the years 1664–71, when many Hudson Valley Indians allied with New England peoples to their east in waging war against the Mohawks and other Iroquois, a campaign in part made possible by continuing hostilities between the Iroquois and the Susquehannocks.

The long period between the last decades of the seventeenth century and the mid-1700s was a time of great change in the Valley’s political makeup. These years saw widespread population movements, as Indians from other areas settled in the Valley and its immediate neighborhood and Hudson Valley Indians left their homeland for distant locales. The Native presence in the Valley was far less visible than before, especially after about 1700, when most of the peoples or political groups known from previous decades appear to have disintegrated. During these decades the Valley Indians were vulnerable to pressure both from the colonial authorities and from the powerful Iroquois (partners of the English). These developments are accounted for in chapters 6 and 7. Nevertheless, Hudson Valley Indians retained a great deal of independence from the Iroquois and the English alike, and if there were changes in the Valley’s political landscape, there was also continuity. Among those Native groups that continued to function as visible political organizations, older patterns of diplomatic, political, and social interaction continued to operate and remained an important component of the worldview of these peoples.

The 1750s and 1760s constituted a period of unrest among the Indians of the Valley, and the Native diplomatic system was weakened by the ongoing imperial and English-Indian conflicts that reverberated throughout eastern North America at this time. These conflicts caused fissures both within individual peoples and in relations among formerly closely allied groups. These developments were to a large extent the result of the migration of Valley Indians to other areas, especially to the west. Migrants came into contact with and were influenced by new groups of people, and the expatriates in turn exerted influence on their compatriots at home. In chapter 8, I show that those Indians who remained in the Valley were torn between their sympathy with Indians at war with the English in Pennsylvania and other western areas and their need to maintain peaceful relations with the European majority population at home. Faced with these pressures, some chose neutrality or alliance with the English, while others joined the war against these Europeans.

As the Hudson Valley entered the Revolutionary period in the 1760s and 1770s, the Valley’s old system of intergroup relations showed clear signs of weakness, due both to the divisions created by years of conflict and to an intensified drive by the English colonizers to deprive the Natives of their land. Hunger for land on the part of the English impelled a growing number of Indians to leave their homeland; an additional pull came from their relations to other Native peoples, who were actively encouraging Hudson Valley Indians to resettle in regions to the west. But those Indians who remained in their homeland still maintained some patterns of interaction familiar from earlier decades. It was ultimately the turmoil of the Revolutionary War that destroyed the old Indian political and social landscape. Although the Valley Indians initially attempted to maintain a posture of neutrality in the Revolutionary War, they ultimately found themselves forced to side with the British and their Native allies, as described in chapter 9. The warfare ultimately forced the remaining Hudson Valley Indians to leave the last of their old territories, and the social and political climate of the new republican era no longer had any room for independent Indian peoples.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated many academic and personal debts during the years since I first began my research for this book. I owe a particularly large debt of gratitude to the faculty in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. My advisor, Professor Aaron Fogleman, provided me with years of personal and scholarly advice. During the course of my studies, Aaron became not only an academic advisor but a good friend, and he and his wife, Vera Lind, let me and my wife, Shannon, stay rent free in their house for a year after I had finished graduate school and they were out of the country. This generous offer came as a sorely needed economic relief, and was made without hesitation, even though Aaron must have known than our laissez-faire approach to yard work meant that their lovely garden had regressed to a state of nature by the time they returned home. I would also like to thank Jim Schmidt and Sean Farrell for their help and encouragement, and my gratitude extends to all the faculty and staff in the History Department at Northern. The department kindly offered me a job as temporary faculty for a year while I was struggling to find an assistant professor position in a tight job market.

My thanks also go to the faculty and staff in the Department of History at the University of Iowa and particularly to Jackie Rand, who always believed in my scholarship from the beginning, as well as to Stephen Vlastos, with whom I have shared many pleasant conversations since I began at Iowa two years ago.

I also owe a professional debt to the many hard workers at the archival institutions where I conducted my research. My thanks go to the archivists and staff at the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark, the Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the New-York Historical Society in New York City, the Connecticut State Archives in Hartford, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. Among these many professionals I would like to single out Ken Gray at the Ulster County Archives in Kingston and Jim Folts at the New York State Archives in Albany for special thanks. I am also grateful to the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, and the British Library in London for permission to use microfilms of their manuscript holdings, and to the staff at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, for the use of their microfilm collections. I also appreciate the kind assistance of the New York State Library in allowing me to reproduce a map from their collections in this manuscript.

Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press deserves special mention for helping me see this book through to publication. Michael has been professional and helpful from the start, and he has done all he can to make the sometimes painful process of manuscript revision go as smoothly as possible. The anonymous reviewers enlisted by Cornell also deserve my thanks for their constructive criticisms and suggestions. I likewise tip my hat to the sharp pen of copy editor John Raymond. I also gratefully acknowledge Ethnohistory for their gracious cooperation in letting me include in this manuscript materials that appeared in an article published in their journal: Strange and Disturbing News: Rumor and Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley, Ethnohistory 58:1 (Winter 2011): 91–112.

My parents, Marit and Stein Midtrød, have always been a source of great support for me, and I thank my grandmother, Ingeborg Ødegaard, for passing on her love of history to me, even though she believes I came to it indirectly through her father, who passed away before I was born. Beyond my biological family, I would like to thank Mary Morse and Danette Oswood, who have been like sisters to me with their steadfast friendship. My wife, Shannon Coley, has been source of support in ways too many to name. She has patiently listened to my long expositions and monologues about Indians and Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and she has been my constant sounding board for successful and unsuccessful ideas. I have dedicated this book to my mother-in-law Lisa Coley, who welcomed me into her family as if I were one of her own and to our great sorrow passed away before this work reached completion.

ABBREVIATIONS

CHRONOLOGY

Introduction

Politics and Society

Their original homes lay far to the east, and by the early nineteenth century their memories of ancestral political divisions were growing dim. In the early 1820s, Unami-speaking Delaware informants told U.S. government investigators nothing of the Assupinks and Siconeses or other groups in the Delaware Valley who were the direct ancestors of their people. Perhaps they remembered but did not care to share, but other informants did stress the importance of older Native groups. Captain Chipps, a Canadian Munsee interviewed at Detroit in 1824, highlighted eight tribes; among these were both the Delawares and the Munsees, peoples that had consolidated from older groups during the colonial era, but also "Mo-hí-ga-ny or Stockbridge, Waùb-ping or Opossum, U-sópe-see or Esopus, and Scàh-ti-co." Charles Trowbridge learned that the Mauhēēkunee, Shōōpshee, Oāpingk or Oppossum, and the Skāāhteekoa were nations formerly residing upon the shores of the Atlantic. These peoples were all former residents of the Hudson Valley. The Mo-hí-ga-ny were the Mahicans, and the U-sópe-see or Shōōpshee and Waùb-ping or Oāpingk were their Esopus Indian and Wappinger neighbors. The Scàh-ti-co or Skāāhteekoa were the Schaghticokes, descendants of New England refugees who had settled in the Hudson Valley in the 1670s. The Mahicans persisted as a distinct people, and while the latter three had disappeared as separate groups, some people still remembered when the Hudson Valley was their home.¹

At least during the period of contact with Europeans, Hudson Valley Indians were part of multiple independent, and in some cases sizable, political groups, and they had effective leadership structures capable of providing a high degree of stability, even in the face of foreign invasion and war and massive depopulation. The surviving evidence points to the presence of political leaders capable of speaking for several hundred followers, even after foreign epidemics had decimated local populations. Together these leaders and their peoples created a sphere of sustained diplomatic, political, and social interaction that was surprisingly stable for almost two centuries following first contact with Europeans.

Groups and Population Numbers

During the centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, Hudson Valley Indians, like their neighbors in the upper Delaware Valley, maintained a dispersed settlement pattern. Excavations of Hudson Valley sites show no evidence of the large and compact villages or towns known from Iroquois areas, and the Hudson Valley Indians lived in hamlets or even smaller settlements, consisting of a few family longhouses or wigwams. Nucleated villages existed on western Long Island, but these may postdate the beginning of Dutch colonization in 1624. These findings perhaps indicate that Hudson Valley Indians had a somewhat looser political organization than their Iroquois neighbors, but as evidence from the early contact period suggests, Native political society did not end at the purely local or family level. A 1658 description of the area around Rondout Creek (near the future site of Kingston) in by West India Company (WIC) director Petrus Stuyvesant suggests that the Esopus Indians of present-day Ulster County on the west side of the Hudson lived in small and scattered settlements at a time when these Natives had a political organization capable of causing considerable difficulty for the colonizers. Their Wappinger neighbors east of the Hudson (in present-day Dutchess County) were likewise a coherent polity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but no Wappinger villages are known from historical records. Hudson Valley Indians maintained dispersed settlements long after the beginning of colonization. In 1679, Dutch travelers Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter observed small and scattered settlements consisting of a few houses near the Raritan River in central New Jersey, but found that the people living in these hamlets respected the authority of nearby sachems, who might live miles away. Political organizations could function effectively without compact settlements.²

The earliest written accounts of the political structure of the Hudson Valley are quite rudimentary. The first European observers simply categorized the locals according to their perceived attitudes toward the newcomers. In 1609, Robert Juet, Henry Hudson’s mate, drew a distinction between the apparently hostile Natives of New York Bay and the lower river and the friendly inhabitants farther upriver, noting the area near the Catskill Mountains as the place where we first found loving people. This distinction between hostile Natives below the Catskills and friendly ones above, echoed by Emanuel van Meteren in 1610, may map onto the geographical division of the Valley between Mahicans and Munsee speakers, but it is more reasonable to suppose that the reception the crew met with depended more on how they treated the locals. Initially, the coastal Natives were eager to trade and quite friendly to Hudson’s men. Trouble broke out when an exploratory party skirmished with some of the locals near the Narrows, but in the following days the crew again met people eager to trade, even after the Dutch had taken two hostages. The same held true for the downstream voyage after a stay with the Mahicans, until the killing of a Native man who was trying to steal a crewmember’s pillow near Stony Point triggered several acts of violence.³

Further Dutch trading and exploration expeditions in the years immediately following Hudson’s first visit yielded more differentiated descriptions of the Valley’s Native societies. The 1614 map Carte Figurative plotted several populations, placing the Manhattes, Wikagyl, Pacahmi, Woarnecks, and Mahicans on the east side of the river, and the Mechkentiwoom, Tappans, and Waronawanka on the west bank. The Sanichans appear to the south in present New Jersey, and the Iroquois and Susquehannocks (Minquas) are shown in their respective territories in the larger region depicted. A map of Nie Nederlandt from 1616 showed the Mahicans straddling the northern Hudson Valley. Authors writing during the first years of colonization provided further names, and some of the groups mentioned in the early documents (like the Mahicans and the Tappans) would play prominent roles in the following decades. Others, like the Wikagyl and Mechkentiwoom, never appear in later records, and their prominence on early maps may have been the result of Dutch confusion.⁴

Early Dutch observers produced no exhaustive description of the political landscape of the Hudson Valley. Writing in the early 1620s, Johan de Laet and Nicholas van Wassenaer spoke of a multiplicity of nations and languages, but gave no indication of the size of their populations or their territorial extent. De Laet held that chiefs or sachems were little more than heads of families, while Van Wassenaer claimed that many settlements would unite under one leader in wartime. In the 1650s, Adriaen van der Donck, who had lived in New Netherland for several years, noted multiple layers of sociopolitical organization, with chiefs of households, settlements, and tribes, but he operated with vast generalizations, and did not necessarily distinguish between Hudson Valley Indians, Iroquois, Susquehannocks, and New England peoples.⁵

The unclear descriptions of Native societies left by early observers have made it hard to arrive at a firm understanding of the political structures of the Valley. It is now clear that De Laet and Van Wassenaer overestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in this area and that Van der Donck was right that all Indians along the Hudson spoke some version of what he described as the Manhattan language group, which included the closely related and mutually intelligible Munsee and Mahican tongues. Subsequent scholarly explanations of political organization range from the absence of real political structures beyond extended family bands to large tribal organizations and confederacies with an essentially feudal structure spanning large parts of the Valley.⁶

Records from diplomatic contacts between Natives and Europeans provide the best guide to political structures in the Hudson Valley, and these accounts show no evidence of paramount leaders or large confederal structures. The first diplomatic meeting in New Netherland for which even a partial record exists (possibly held in late 1639 or early 1640) was attended by envoys from several peoples living on the lower Hudson and nearby areas who would figure prominently in Hudson