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

Introduction: Politics and Society

1 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 2 IntroductIon 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 PolItIcs and socIety 3 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...