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xi Preface On August 2, 1762, a local official of Dutchess County, NewYork,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 NewYork 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 xii PREFACE 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...

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