Peoples of the River Valleys

The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians

Amy C. Schutt

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812220247
• eBook ISBN: 9780812203790
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Seventeenth-century Indians from the Delaware and lower Hudson valleys organized their lives around small-scale groupings of kin and communities. Living through epidemics, warfare, economic change, and physical dispossession, survivors from these peoples came together in new locations, especially the eighteenth-century Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys. In the process, they did not abandon kin and community orientations, but they increasingly defined a role for themselves as Delaware Indians in early American society. Peoples of the River Valleys offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley. It focuses on a broad and significant period: 1609-1783, including the years of Dutch, Swedish, and English colonization and the American Revolution. An epilogue takes the Delawares' story into the mid-nineteenth century.Amy C. Schutt examines important themes in Native American history—mediation and alliance formation—and shows their crucial role in the development of the Delawares as a people. She goes beyond familiar questions about Indian-European relations and examines how Indian-Indian associations were a major factor in the history of the Delawares. Drawing extensively upon primary sources, including treaty minutes, deeds, and Moravian mission records, Schutt reveals that Delawares approached alliances as a tool for survival at a time when Euro-Americans were encroaching on Native lands. As relations with colonists were frequently troubled, Delawares often turned instead to form alliances with other Delawares and non-Delaware Indians with whom they shared territories and resources. In vivid detail, Peoples of the River Valleys shows the link between the Delawares' approaches to land and the relationships they constructed on the land.

Chapter 1

Communities and Kin

During the seventeenth century Algonquians of the Hudson and Delaware valleys oriented their lives around small communities and kin groups, which gained reinforcement from two other sources: leaders known as “sachems” whose authority was tied to their role within a group of kin traced through the female line, and rituals aimed at promoting the health and welfare of a people. The intersection of these two cultural elements—leaders and rituals—strengthened relationships within communities and kin groups as sachems maintained integrative ceremonies for the people they represented. Although deeply rooted among Indian peoples of the Hudson and Delaware valleys, kin and community groups were not unchanging entities. Their makeup fluctuated as Algonquians adapted to various conditions. Algonquians re-created their lives out of a merging of the old and the new as communities broke apart and reconnected and kin groups combined, separated, and overlapped.

Peoples of River Valleys

One fall day in 1679 Tantaqué, an elderly man of the Hackensack region on the lower Hudson, related his beliefs about the origin of the world in a conversation with Dutch traveler Jasper Danckaerts. After Tantaqué had settled by the fire, Danckaerts asked the old Indian “where he believed he came from.” Pulling a chunk of coal out of the hearth, Tantaqué “began to write upon the floor.” He drew “a little oval, to which he made four paws or feet, a head and a tail.” “ ‘This,’ said he, ‘is a tortoise, lying in the water around it,’ and he moved his hand round the figure, continuing, ‘This was or is all water, and so at first was the world or the earth, when the tortoise gradually raised its round back up high, and the water ran off of it, and thus the earth became dry.’ ” Placing a straw in the center of the oval, he said, “ ‘The earth was now dry, and there grew a tree in the middle of the earth, and the root of this tree sent forth a sprout beside it and there grew upon it a man, who was the first male. This man was left alone, and would have remained alone; but the tree bent over until its top touched the earth, and there shot therein another root, from which came forth another sprout, and there grew upon it the woman, and from these two are all men produced.’ ”¹

This and other origin stories told by peoples from the Hudson as well as the Delaware Valley included water as a central motif. In another account reported in the eighteenth century, Algonquians depicted their ancestors as living “under a lake.” “One of their men made of a hole, through which he ascended to the surface.” There “he found a deer,” which he took to his friends below the lake. “He and his companions found the meat so good,” the story went, “that they unanimously determined to leave their dark abode, and remove to a place where they could enjoy the light of heaven and have such excellent game in abundance.” Seemingly a variation on Tantaqué’s account, an origin story repeated in the early twentieth century depicted a great flood and the actions of Gicelamu’kaong, or the Great Spirit, to carry dirt from the bottom of the submerged earth to create a new world on the back of a turtle.²

The peoples who told these stories oriented their lives around water, specifically around the Hudson and Delaware rivers and the many small streams and creeks nearby. In some cases, they lived along the rivers’ banks and at other times they built communities on islands. Their islands, both large and small, rose out of the river like the turtle’s back from the depths of the water. Given their settlement patterns, it is not surprising that water emerged as a vital part of each origin story that these Indians handed down. By virtue of the explorations of Henry Hudson in 1609, the Dutch staked a claim in Algonquian homelands and established New Netherland. Early colonizers reported on the riverine settlements of Indian peoples in the Hudson and Delaware valleys. “Some of our navigators are well acquainted with these rivers, which they discovered and have visited for several years,” one Dutch report stated. These navigators concluded, “several nations” of Indians “inhabit the banks of these rivers.” Europeans who first encountered these peoples recognized their riverine orientation when they referred to them as “River Indians.” This general term sometimes appeared in early seventeenth-century documents as shorthand for Hudson or Delaware Valley peoples, though by late in the century, Europeans increasingly applied it to New England Indians migrating into New York. Although Algonquians from the Hudson and Delaware valleys did not spend all their days along rivers and tributaries, sometimes moving inland to hunting territories, the areas around rivers were central to their lives. Rivers created floodplains where the soil was rich for planting. They provided fish of many varieties. They led to ocean bays and sounds where people could gather the sea’s bounty. And they provided a pathway for travel and trade that helped people build relationships throughout the region.³

Hudson and Delaware Valley Algonquians included a wide diversity of groups and communities. According to an early historian of New Sweden, a Delaware Valley colony in competition with New Netherland between 1638 and 1655, “there were ten or eleven separate tribes, each having its own Sackheman [sachem], or king” in the region. In the present Philadelphia area, between Pennypack Creek and the Falls of the Schuylkill, a Swedish observer in the 1650s found “six different places … settled, under six sachems or chiefs, each one commanding his tribe or people under him.” New Netherlanders also catalogued a multiplicity of communities and groups along both the Delaware—or “South River” as they called it—and the Hudson—the “North River” or “Great River.”⁴

At the time of early contacts with Europeans, most of these river-based peoples do not seem to have oriented their lives around large-scale warfare. A likely factor affecting the need for war and defense was the nature of Algonquians’ relationships with the Iroquois or the People of the Longhouse (Haudenosaunee, meaning “the whole house”). Iroquois peoples consisted of the Mohawks, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas, and their homelands included the Mohawk Valley, the area south of Oneida Lake, the Finger Lakes region, and the area east of the Genesee River—all within the bounds of present upstate New York. These peoples appear in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century records as the “Five Nations”; later they became the “Six Nations” with the addition of the Tuscaroras to the Iroquois Confederacy. About the time of their first encounters with Europeans, many Hudson Valley Algonquians, whose lands bordered on Iroquoia, may have had relatively peaceful relations with their Iroquois neighbors. While the Iroquois engaged in sixteenth-century wars with the Wendats to the northwest, Susquehannocks to the south, and Indian groups along the St. Lawrence, they seemingly had fewer conflicts with Hudson Valley Indians. Competition related to the rise of the fur trade sparked conflict between Delaware Valley Algonquians and Susquehannocks in the seventeenth century; however, this hostility does not appear to have been of long duration.⁵

When it occurred, warfare involving Hudson and Delaware Valley Algonquians appears to have been decentralized and small scale. With some exceptions, they were less likely than neighboring Iroquoian peoples—the Five Nations and the Susquehannocks—to utilize military stockades. The seventeenth-century Swedish commentator Peter Lindeström, a student of mathematics and of “the art of fortification,” noted this difference between Lenapes of the Delaware Valley and Iroquoians, whom he considered “somewhat cleverer in building” compared to “river Indians who live closer to us,” because the former used “palisades around their dwellings.” By implication, Lindeström let his readers know that Lenape settlements lacked what he considered to be superior defensive construction. When Hudson and Delaware Valley groups engaged in war, it may often have been limited to raids by small numbers of warriors who were responding in kind to the killing of relatives in an earlier attack. “The next of kin is the avenger,” a New Netherland chronicler reported. Lindeström hinted that warfare for Lenapes meant limited retaliation. As he explained, when an Indian “of one nation kills one of another, immediately he sends one of his subjects to the same nation and stealthily has one of them killed,” When Indian peoples along Delaware Bay in the early 1630s destroyed a small Dutch colony, Swanendael, they acted as an aggrieved group of “friends,” perhaps kin, who blamed the Dutch for the death of one of their sachems. Discovering the ruins of the Dutch settlement soon before his visit to Fort Nassau, David de Vries was told, “the friends of the murdered chief [had] incited their friends … to set about the work of vengeance.”⁶

Trade was a powerful factor influencing relations among Algonquians and their neighbors, both Indian and European. In addition to furs, which Europeans found especially desirable, wampum (or sewan), a type of shell bead, was a major trading item. After obtaining iron tools from Europeans, coastal Indians used them to drill holes in certain types of shells to produce wampum. Hudson-area Indians manufactured these beads in winter, using white and even more valuable black (or dark purple) shells. The Dutch lawyer and commentator Adriaen van der Donck explained bead production: “They strike off the thin parts of those shells and preserve the pillars or standards, which they grind smooth and even and reduce the same according to their thickness, and drill a hole through every piece and string the same on strings.” Wampum became a form of currency in colonial America at a time when coins were scarce.⁷

Native North Americans, however, attached additional meaning to wampum. Believing that sacred power resided in wampum, they often kept this power close at hand by adorning themselves with it. Van der Donck described Indian women’s dress as beautifully made with wampum: “The women … wear a cloth around their bodies, fastened by a girdle which extends down below their knees, and is as much an under-coat; but next to the body, under this coat, they wear a dressed deer-skin coat, girt around the waist. The lower border of this skirt they ornament with great art, and nestle the same with strips, which are tastefully decorated with wampum.” A European correspondent from the 1620s explained that the Indians considered wampum “as valuable as we do money … they string it, and wear it around the neck and hands; they also make bands of it, which the women wear on the forehead under the hair, and the men around the body; and they are as particular about the stringing and the sorting as we can be here about pearls.” Lindeström noted that Delaware Valley Indians of the 1650s greased their hair with bear fat so that “it shines so that one can see one’s reflection in it.” Then “the locks they bind up with braids and ribbons and their threaded money [wampum]. On the ends of their hair they string money and tie a knot to [it].” Wampum surrounded the wearer with spiritual power. No wonder that, according to a description from New Netherland, “They twine both white and black wampum around their heads … they wear Wampum in the ears, around the neck and around the waist.”⁸

Wampum represented the spoken word, a sacred force for Indian peoples steeped in oral traditions. It added power to messages and speeches that constructed relationships. To give words legitimacy in negotiations, statements required the backing of wampum strings or belts. A 1645 treaty between the French, the Iroquois, and other Indian groups indicated the importance of wampum in representing the words that forged ties among these people. At the courtyard of the Three Rivers Fort on the St. Lawrence, “large sails” were “spread to keep off the heat of the Sun.” A Jesuit priest described this event: “In the center was a large space, somewhat longer than wide, in which the Iroquois caused two poles to be planted, and a cord to be stretched from one to the other on which to hang and tie the words that they were to bring us.” The “words” were wampum collars or belts, “a portion of which were on their bodies.” Wampum was a signifier and authorizer of language, as a multitude of treaties demonstrated.⁹

Delaware Valley Algonquians had less access to wampum than did those in the Hudson Valley. New Sweden’s governor, Johan Printz, complained in 1644 that the lower-Delaware groups “are poor, so that one can secure from them only little or hardly any sevant, hence we must buy sevant from Manathans and of the North English [New Englanders], where sevant is made, and it can be bought cheaply there.” Unlike the Hudson, the Delaware River did not provide a direct route to Long Island Sound, a major source of wampum. The difficulty in obtaining wampum may have minimized Delaware Valley Indians’ trade in this sought-after commodity.¹⁰

It is possible that Hudson Valley peoples engaged in trade networks involved with the distribution of copper, which, like wampum, had ceremonial value. An officer on Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage saw copper items among Hudson Valley Indians. The people he encountered had “red Copper Tobacco pipes, and other things of Copper they did weare about their neckes.” This officer also mentioned that the Indians “have yellow Copper.” Hudson himself noted similarly that on the lower Hudson River “the people had copper tobacco pipes.” The sources for this copper are uncertain, and it is also possible that the Dutch were misinformed, confusing red shale and clay items for copper. If the Hudson Valley Indians had copper, it may have been from the Great Lakes, reaching them via the Iroquois, who in turn obtained it from the Wenros and Neutrals living along the western end of Lake Ontario and the eastern end of Lake Erie. However, there were also copper deposits much closer to home—in areas of present-day Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Later Euro-American discoveries of copper indicate that Indians could have had sources in the region. In the eighteenth century a significant amount of copper was unearthed in the New Brunswick area, and copper was also mined in the Watchung Mountains of northern New Jersey.¹¹

Communities and Kin Groups

When it came to obtaining the basic necessities of life, Hudson and Delaware Valley Algonquians of the seventeenth century depended greatly on their own considerable skills in planting and harvesting crops, hunting, fishing, and gathering wild foods. In the process of providing for their needs, Indians of the river valleys established numerous localized community-based associations. We should avoid narrow definitions of community for these Indians. Within a delimited territory, they constituted and reconstituted different types of communities, serving different functions and different sizes of population. Thus Hudson and Delaware Valley Indians took an adaptive and flexible approach to community building.

At least two major variables influenced the diversity in community formation. The first variable was seasonal change, to which Algonquians adjusted by occupying and reoccupying different places according to subsistence cycles. Arriving in 1682 to establish the colony of Pennsylvania, William Penn observed the round of seasons in the Delaware Valley. Fall was like a “mild Spring” in England; winter was “sharp” and “Frosty” with a “Skie as clear as in Summer, and the Air dry, cold, piercing and hungry”; spring was “sweet” with “no Gusts, but gentle Showers, and a fine Skie”; and summer “had extraordinary Heats, yet mitigated sometimes by Cool Breezese. … And whatever Mists, Fogs or Vapours foul the Heavens by Easterly or Southerly Winds, in two Hours time are blown away.” Algonquians adapted to this seasonal round. They formed hamlets around cultivation of the soil, making good use of the growing season approximately between May and October, and they established hunting communities and fishing stations that corresponded with the seasonal migrations of animals. The second variable was the absence or presence of war. Algonquians appear to have frequently continued their dispersed settlement patterns during wartime; however, Hudson Valley Indians occasionally constructed stockades. Thus at least four types of community—planting settlements, hunting communities, fishing stations, and occasionally stockaded towns—emerged from these variables. It is important to note, however, that a location could serve more than one function, allowing for overlaps among these types.¹²

There was probably variation in the degree to which seventeenth-century Hudson and Delaware Valley Algonquians relied on crops. Coastal peoples may have devoted less attention to growing crops in comparison to groups farther inland because of less fertile soils. Nevertheless, the documentary record provides important examples of Algonquians’ field production by the seventeenth century. The Jesuit father Isaac Jogues commented that when the first Dutch colonists arrived, they “found lands fit for use,” left by the Indians “who formerly had fields here.”¹³

Indians in the Hudson and Delaware valleys cultivated three principal crops—corn (or maize), beans, and squash. Van der Donck found squash (or quaasiens) a fascinating new type of food. “It is a delightful fruit,” he rhapsodized, “as well to the eye on account of its fine variety of colours, as to the mouth for its agreeable taste. The ease with which it is cooked renders it a favourite too with the young women.… [I]t is incredible, when one watches the vines, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: “Sachems from nine different places”
• 1 Communities and Kin
• 2 Reorganizations and Relationships in the Hudson and Delaware Valleys, 1609–82
• 3 Sharing Lands and Asserting Rights in the Face of Pennsylvania’s Expansion, 1682–1742
• 4 Networks, Alliances, and Power, 1742–65
• 5 Defining Delawares, 1765–74
• 6 Striving for Unity with Diversity, 1768–83
• Epilogue: “Sit down by us as a nation”
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments