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The Dutch, Deal-Making, and The Defeat of the Delaware, or What Became of New York’s Native Americans
November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.
Not far from where my mother grew up is a body of water with the distinction of being the longest named geographical feature in the United States. Are you ready? It’s Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. My grandmother taught me that word. It’s spelled just like it sounds. And I’ve still probably got it wrong. Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. It’s a word from the Nipmuc language, and the lake’s promoters used to claim that it meant something along the lines of, “I fish my side, you fish your side, nobody fish in the middle.” That Pidgin wording is considered disrespectful nowadays. So a better way to put it might be “no man’s land”. “No man’s land.”
I’ve always found it significant, though probably unintentionally so, that the name my Southern father and Northern mother gave me, “Travis”, means in some derivation of archaic French, “at the crossroads” as I am clearly some sort of cultural cross-breed of their respective regional strains. And for most of my life now, I have made my home in the region that is BETWEEN New England and the South both doctrinally and geographically.
The region to which I refer is of course New York. Times Square is the most famous crossroads in the world. 42nd and Broadway is renowned as a place of great change. For instance, all the naked native people have been replaced by a Naked Cowboy. Take it from me: don’t sit around a campfire eating baked beans with that guy. Or, ya know, do whatever you want. That’s the point of New York. You can sit around eating baked beans with Naked Cowboys.
I have roots in New York City too. One of them even made it into Ripley’s Believe it Or Not– the Dutch-American Quaker matriarch Penelope Van Princis Kent who in 1643 was attacked by local Lenape Indians, severely wounded, was left for dead, but played possum, survived inside a hollow tree, made her way to New Amsterdam, re-married a man named Stout, raised a family in what is now Coney Island, and then moved to New Jersey, where she lived to be…110 years old. Dubious? Well, that’s why they call it Believe It or Not.
The Lenape had reason not to be hospitable by 1643 and this brings us to our third American foundation myth. Plymouth has the first Thanksgiving, Virginia has Pocahantas and Captain Smith, and this one is New York’s. In 1626, when New York was still a Dutch colony, Peter Minuit is said to have purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for a lot of goods valued at 60 guilders, which amounts to a bit over $1000 in today’s money.
The island of Manhattan for $1000. If true, and various aspects of the story are arguable, it’s a swindle and one that New Yorkers used to have a great affection for. Groucho Marx played Peter Minuit in a comical reenactment of this event in a 1959 movie called The Story of Mankind. There’s something about the story that seems to reflect people’s ideas about New York, and America in general. Now that we’ve had a New York con artist for a President it doesn’t seem remotely cute or funny or harmless anymore, but people used to think it was quite the knee slapper.
Have you ever heard the expression “Don’t take any wooden nickels”? Wooden nickels were a real form of counterfeit once, and if you took one you were a real sucker. What could be more obvious than the fact that one of the most common materials in the world was not as valuable as precious metal? A wooden nickel was literally not worth the lumber it was printed on. And so it became synonymous with a swindle. And significantly, wooden nickels, like real 19th century nickels, have a picture of an Indian head on the front face, almost like a reminder of broken promises.
If the Puritans of New England were bent on reforming humankind and the planters of the Old South sought to preserve a perceived natural hierarchy, New York, the middle place, has always been about making the best bargain with whoever comes out on top. The pile hadn’t even cooled on 9-11 and there were guys out there going “Fridge Magnets! Get your Twin Tower Fridge Magnets! Buy one, get one free!” (Which, come to think of it, was probably the very thing the real estate dealer said when he was selling the Twin Towers in the first place. “A two for one sale on towers! Act now, and I’ll throw in the Brooklyn Bridge!”) When I first moved to New York I would get mad at those guys who come out of the ground like earthworms to sell overpriced disposable umbrellas every time it rains. In time, I came to see the light, a parting of the clouds, if you will. Those guys ARE New York. That is what you bought, man! And it’s not like they didn’t mention this in the brochures.
Why is New York America’s financial capitol? One could argue that it is because it was originally a Dutch Colony, and so they established the culture. At one time, half of Europe’s shipping was Dutch. The Dutch gave the world its first publicly traded company, its first stock exchange, its first multinational corporation, its first central bank. So New Netherland, which became New York following a hostile takeover, is founded on the art and science and culture of trade. Yet let us not forget that Wall Street was named after a literal wall, which had been erected to keep certain people out.
There were several other quote-unquote “sales” after Peter Minuit’s original one and as a consequence the Lenape (also known as the Delaware) were increasingly marginalized in their own land over time. In 1664 the English seized control of the colony from the Dutch and it was renamed for its new proprietor, the Duke of York. Who was a Stuart, by the way, James II, the younger brother of Charles I, and so, yes, I am literally related to the York in New York, though I try not to let it go to my head. (A little decapitation humor there).
At any rate, as Bob Dylan sang, some men rob you with a fountain pen. The Natives of New York were finally subdued around the same time as those of New England and the Chesapeake region, but not by the same amount of bloody warfare. New York did not participate in King Philip’s war. Instead, when it flared up, the government here took pre-emptive steps, disarming all the local Lenape, keeping them under guard, and then making an alliance with the Five Iroquois Nations, rivals of the Lenape, who were situated on the other side of them, boxing them in. In other words, New York made a characteristically tricky deal. Then in the 1750s in the French and Indian War, the Lenape and other Algonquian tribes had the bad judgment to side with the French; whereas the Iroquois stuck with the English. The French lost; thus the Lenape lost. Over time, the Lenape dwindled in number, they merged with other tribes, and moved to other regions.
Legend has it that the last true New York area Lenape, a guy nicknamed Bill the Wild Man, died in Canarsie in 1803. Bill was a Munsee, which is what the local Lenape were called. The Lenape, a.k.a. the Delaware, originally occupied a huge area, including also parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and, naturally, Delaware. They were part of a larger group called the Algonquians, not be confused with the Algonquins, who sat around drinking martinis and making ribald witticisms that were reprinted in the New Yorker. The Algonquian tribe who lived just North of the Lenape, in the Lower Hudson Valley, were the Mahicans, better known, though erroneously so, as the Mohicans, and I hope you’ve heard of the last of those. In James Fenimore Cooper’s famous novel, set in the French and Indian war, the Mahicans had been nearly wiped out by the Iroquois tribe the Mohawks and fought against an Iroquois speaking tribe called the Huron.
But it’s not like Iroquois won anything in the long term either. For they had the bad judgment to side with the British in the Revolutionary War. When the British lost, the Iroquois were up a creek without a paddle. The various Iroquois tribes also dispersed and moved and wound up on reservations. Some Lenape and Iroquois wound up as far away as Oklahoma and Canada.
One important member of the Lenape continued to have a lingering presence in New York City however, well after his death. His name was Tamenend and he was a Chief who had signed a major peace treaty with the Quaker founder Willian Penn in 1683. In time Tamanend was considered by many to be a kind of patron saint of America, St Tammany. There were Tammany festivals. A Tammany society was formed in Philadelphia in 1772, and soon they sprang up over the country. The New York chapter was founded in 1786, largely with the backing and machinations of John Pintard. Tammany Hall became the heart and soul of New York’s Democratic Party machine. It was also a lot like those themed fraternal lodges. Local chapters were known as wigwams. The administrators were known as sachems and sagamores. Through their mother, my two sons are descended from one of those Tammany Hall sachems. (Tony Pastor’s last and best vaudeville house was located in Tammany Hall’s last headquarters!)
At any rate, I find towering irony in the fact that a major New York politican Martin Van Buren worked that Democratic machine, largely through an organization named after Native Americans, to get Andrew Jackson to get elected — who then proceeded to exterminate Native Americans. There really is no portion of America with clean hands with respect to this history.
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