From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600-1830

7. The Mahican Homeland

99 Seven The Mahican Homeland The Mahican Homeland Establishing the extent—the boundaries—of the Mahican homeland at contact, and for the period of these Indians’ occupancy of the upper Hudson and upper Housatonic Valleys and environs , is a task fraught with difficulties. The basis for the earliest published description of Mahican territory is obscure and lacks an explicit statement on sources. Those that followed are commonly little more than unattributed restatements of this work. The most frequently cited history of these Native people offers no evidence for the boundaries it describes. More recent attempts uncritically maintain that the limits of Mahican territory can be extrapolated from the large number of land sales that took place over the course of a century and a half, that is, between 1630 and the final decades of the eighteenth century. This argument, however, discussed later, is absent a theoretical framework; is shot through with anachronisms; does not take into full consideration the motives and agendas of not only the Dutch purchasers but, equally important, the Native sellers; and finally, fails to reconcile or make accommodations for the movements —the shifts in location—of Mahican people through time. Adding to the complexity of the problem is the relative weakness and thus ineffectualness of the archaeological record as a mechanism with which to fix boundaries. The earliest known account to situate what may have been the main body or core area of the Mahicans is found in a passage 100 The Mahican Homeland from the 1624 section of Van Wassenaer’s “Historisch Verhael.” The “Maikans,” it reads, were “a nation lying 25 leagues on both sides of the [Hudson] river.”1 Assuming that Van Wassenaer’s estimate followed the line of the river, it remains that the starting and ending points of this distance are not specified. At this early date, however, the Dutch knew next to nothing about the Hudson above Albany, which was where navigation ended. Thus, it might be reasoned that this was the northern point of Mahican occupancy insofar as the Dutch understood things. Applying the standard conversion factor of about three statute miles to a Dutch league (mijl), the downriver boundary of the Mahicans would have been near Newburgh, deep in Munsee country .2 Modern scholars would agree, then, on the inutility of Van Wassenaer’s acknowledged secondhand views and look elsewhere for depictions of the lands the Mahicans might have controlled , even nominally. What in all likelihood is the first general description of the Mahican homeland, absent supporting documentation, has it that, at contact, these Indians possessed “the east bank of the [Hudson] river from an undefined point north of Albany to the sea, including Long Island; that their dominion extended east to the Connecticut [River], where they joined kindred tribes; that on the west bank of the Hudson they ran down as far as Catskill, and west to Schenectady; that they were met on the west by the territory of the Mohawks, and on the south by chieftaincies acknowledging the supremacy of the Minsis [Munsees], a totemic tribe of the Lenni Lenapes.”3 A century later a second historian, setting aside certain of the exaggerated boundaries claimed by the first, especially as they concerned the Connecticut Valley and the line drawn from Albany south to the sea, confined Mahican lands to “eastern New York and adjacent portions of Massachusetts and Connecticut in historic times.”4 In the 1970s, however, this expanse was again broadened amid claims that Mahican occupancy had extended “from Lake Champlain southward into the western part of The Mahican Homeland 101 Dutchess County, New York, and from the valley of the Schoharie Creek in the west to south central Vermont in the east.”5 Although it is these boundaries that have been repeated by other historians, it remains unclear how they had been determined. In his short history, written about 1790, Hendrick Aupaumut explained that the people at Stockbridge, whose lands were “partly in the State of New York, partly in Massachusetts and Vermont,” had hunted moose in Vermont’s Green Mountains. However, he said nothing about boundaries or to what extent any of this area had been occupied by his people.6 Other assessments of the late precontact limit of Mahican territory are based on the distribution of archaeological sites, but they too have their limitations, rendering the setting of boundaries essentially unattainable.7 To approach anew, then...