a provision was shrewdly included to limit the population. This was
intended to prevent an influx of farmers who would spoil the fur trade.
Actually, the founder brought out only twelve families. As a result of
his plan the main business of Springfield for many years was the beaver
trade.
There was a provision in the resolutions, too, for obtaining a
minister, Pynchon himself acting in this capacity until the Reverend
George Moxon was finally installed. It is recorded of this good
parson that when he did arrive he preached a sermon that lasted for
twenty-eight days. It is also a matter of record that an early purchase
for the church was an hourglass. But whether its purpose was to impose
a time limit or to insure good measure is not stated.
Travelling extensively by canoe and on horseback, William Pynchon
bartered with many tribes for beaver, otter, marten, mink, muskrat,
raccoon, lynx, and fox. And, tactfully using Algonquin tribes as
middlemen, it wasn’t too long before he tapped the Iroquois trade. By
1640 he had established one of his agents, Thomas Cooper, at Woronoco,
later the site of Westfield, “where the Indians brought not only their
own furs, but also furs which they obtained from the Mohawks.” When
this happened, the Dutch no longer had a monopoly of the furs of the
Iroquois.
Of course Pynchon’s tremendous gains meant some real losses to the new
towns below Springfield, which in 1639 had created a government of
their own when they drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. In
an effort to checkmate Pynchon, and bring the trade of the valley to
Hartford instead, Connecticut now granted to Governor Edward Hopkins
and William Whiting “liberty of free trade at Woronoco and at any place
thereabouts ... all others to be restrained for the terme of seven
years....” But Massachusetts came to Pynchon’s rescue, resisted the
Connecticut grab, and eventually established through the Commissioners
of the United Colonies that Woronoco was within its bounds.
Later, the Connecticut people tried another tack. They declared an
impost on all pelts and other goods that Pynchon shipped down the
river, a tax that could have ruined him. However, they voted to remove
this excise when the Massachusetts authorities, in retaliation, levied
a large duty on Connecticut goods coming into Boston harbor. And
William Pynchon went on to expand the fur frontier of Massachusetts to
the north and the west, and through his beaver trade to become one of
the richest men in New England.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, the Puritan migration was taking other avenues of expansion
in the direction of New Netherland, along the shores of Long Island
Sound. These routes, too, followed the paths of fur traders who as
usual broke through the wilderness to make pacts with the natives or to
fuse the wars that cleared the way for settlement.
The Narragansett country and Long Island Sound were of course
traditional Dutch trading preserves. But as early as 1632, New Plymouth
established a truckhouse at Sowamset, now Barrington, Rhode Island, and
in the following year daring John Oldham, filled with “vast conceits
of extraordinary gaine,” was driving a trade on his own account much
farther to the west in Long Island Sound. Oldham did business with
both the Pequots and the Narragansetts, the latter taking so kindly
to him and his trucking goods that they offered him free land for the
establishment of a permanent trading post among them.
Three years later however, on a trading voyage in the Sound, Oldham was
murdered at Block Island by Indians under Pequot control. His boat was
plundered and two English boys with him at the time were carried off
into captivity. This episode fused the Pequot War, the chief results of
which was a bloody purge by the New Englanders that cleared the shores
of the Sound for settlement.
The campaign commenced against the Pequots in 1637 quickly became a
hundredfold more terrible than the murderous episode the white men set
out originally to avenge. Under the leadership of Captain John Endicott
of Massachusetts, a devastating blow was first delivered at Block
Island. A hundred men went there with him in three ships. They burned
the native wigwams, spoiled the corn, and slew all the Indians they
could catch. Then they repaired to the mainland, where they invaded the
heart of the Pequot country and repeated their brutal chastisement of
the red men.
This grim Puritan punishment came close to uniting all the Indians in
those parts against the English. Only the diplomacy of Roger Williams,
who traded for furs with the Narragansetts while preaching the gospel,
prevented the great Narragansett tribe from joining the Pequots in the
fierce revenge they now took against any isolated Englishmen they could
find. Meanwhile the Pequots scourged the countryside--until, by a final
campaign, the New Englanders set out to remove this powerful tribe from
the face of the earth!
An army composed mostly of mercenary savages was assembled by the
Englishmen for this gory task. It originated with a party of ninety
white men from the Connecticut River towns under the command of John
Mason. Together with an equal number of Mohegans, they went down to
Fort Saybrook to meet Captain John Underhill who had been sent from
Massachusetts with twenty soldiers. This nucleous force then proceeded
to the Bay of the Narragansetts where it was joined by some 500 of
those savages, all bent on scalps and loot. From the bay the army
marched overland to the Mystic River to attack one of the chief Pequot
towns, occupied at the time by some six or seven hundred men, women and
children.
The English and their Indian allies took the inhabitants of the town
by surprise. They put the torch to the wigwams before the sleeping
natives could offer any resistance. All who were not burned to death
were slaughtered as they tried to escape--all except seven who managed
to escape and seven others who were taken captive. It was a terrible
affair--for the Pequots. Only two Englishmen died in the encounter.
Another main body of the Pequots was routed soon afterward. But that
did not end the bloody harassment. A month later, a large force from
Massachusetts under Captain Stoughton, together with Captain Mason’s
Connecticut men, surrounded all that remained of the once powerful
tribe. This occurred in a swamp at Fairfield where the remnant of the
tribe had taken refuge. The warriors put up a brave fight, but the odds
were too great against them. Those few who escaped this final butchery
were divided among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, never more to be
called Pequots.
The shores of the Sound west of Fort Saybrook were open now to
settlers. A wave of migration from Boston resulted in the founding of
New Haven, Stratford, Norwalk, Stamford, and other towns. The New Haven
people, forming their own government, even spread across the Sound
to Long Island which, of course, had long been occupied only by the
Hollanders, whose traders exploited the natives there for the wampum so
essential in the beaver trade.
To halt this encroachment on the very nerve center of their trading
territory, the Dutch hurriedly purchased from the Indians all the
country that remained open between Manhattan and the oncoming English,
acquiring legal title to additional lands on Long Island as far west
as Oyster Bay as well as to all that triangle of territory between the
Hudson and the Sound south of Norwalk. The latter comprised much of
present Westchester County. However the English encroachment along the
north shore of the Sound, as a practical matter, was halted no farther
east than Greenwich.
Only in the Narragansett country, after 1640, did the Dutch hang on to
any substantial beaver trade east of Greenwich. Rhode Island, by then
well populated with Englishmen, tried to keep them out. However, the
Dutch simply supplied the Indians there more generously with rum and
guns--in return for beaver. So did some interloping but enterprising
Frenchmen. And so did some of the New Englanders themselves, for that
matter. Nowhere was the competition for beaver more keen or more
dangerous than in Rhode Island.
English laws at the time sincerely prohibited the sale of liquor or
firearms to the savages. But such laws were difficult to enforce on a
wild frontier where uncontrolled profits could be scooped up so easily.
Roger Williams was later to write that he had “refused the gain of
thousands by such a murderous trade.” Some of his neighbors in the
wilderness and even some of his own trading associates had no such
scruples however.
Richard Smith who became wealthy on the Indian trade was a man of
this stripe. He and Roger Williams, along with John Wilcox, “a
sturring, driving, somewhat unscrupulous fellow,” began trading in the
Narragansett country as early as 1637. Each of them built trucking
houses on the much-traveled Pequot and Narragansett Trail at the site
of present-day Wickford. As trading practices sharpened over the years,
neither Smith nor Wilcox hesitated to meet the increasing demands of
the natives for liquor and powder. Williams was revolted. In 1651,
when he was about to go to England, he sold his house and trading
interests to Smith for 50 pounds sterling. That left Smith without any
competition for this lucrative fur trade, as he had bought out Wilcox
some years earlier.
Men like Smith and Wilcox furnished tinder for many flaming atrocities
in Rhode Island. But their murderous trade was “the most profitable
employment in these parts of America ... by which many persons of mean
degree advanced to considerable estates.” Rhode Island was truly one of
the most fertile of all beaver grounds--while it lasted. That was until
1660. By then the beaver was all but exhausted, while, with the help
of the white man’s goods, the Indian trapper was well on the way to
destroying himself too.
It had been the same of course on every fur frontier in America. In
Rhode Island the fateful process of the aborigine’s extinction was
just exaggerated in dreadful degree. As native drinking increased,
atrocities mounted and bloody retaliation followed. Yet, in spite of
this terrible situation, the English themselves came to recognize wine
and spirits as the chief staple of the Indian trade, while futilely
putting new laws on their books intended to limit the natives’
consumption!
For their part the Hollanders never had any compunction about
distributing hot waters or firearms among the savage neighbors of the
New Englanders, who after all seemed bent on taking over all of New
Netherland. Protected by ships, of which the Rhode Islanders had none,
the Hollanders drove a continuing trade at their long-established posts
in Narragansett Bay, especially at Dutchmen’s Island which they had
fortified. As late as 1647 the natives were transporting their pelts
in canoes to Dutchmen’s Island, where it was said they could lay in
a supply of strong waters sufficient to keep an Indian village in an
uproar for a week and acquire all the guns and powder they wanted.
And the Dutch continued to trade in the bay for some years after that,
until the beaver of Rhode Island was almost exhausted.
In fact at no time, until 1650, did the New Netherlanders give up any
part of their claims south of Cape Cod, even though they hadn’t been
able to stem the overland flood of English traders and settlers. In
1647 they did seize an Amsterdam ship, trading at New Haven without a
license from the Dutch West India Company, and brought her into New
Amsterdam where she was confiscated in spite of excited protests from
New Haven. On land, however, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Furthermore, troubles at home, especially with the savages, kept them
close to the valley of the Hudson after 1640.
* * * * *
Curiously enough, the New Netherlanders’ troubles at home beginning in
1640 sprang largely from their sale of firearms to the distant Iroquois.
These lake country Indians, with practically inexhaustible supplies of
the finest beaver, thought nothing of offering as many as twenty heavy
skins in exchange for a musket. The great profit in this traffic had
proved irresistible to the Dutchmen. So the authorities at Manhattan
often winked at the illegal purveyance of arms and powder by their
traders to such faraway savages. If their consciences bothered them at
all, they were comforted by the knowledge that their Iroquois allies
maintained a bulwark against competitive traders from French Canada, as
well as against the enveloping English.
At the same time however, prompted strictly by self-preservation, the
New Netherlanders clamped down hard on any “bosch-lopers” who sold
arms among their Algonquin neighbors. This was good policy for the
Hollanders of course, but it left the river tribes at the complete
mercy of their ancient and terrible Iroquois enemies, especially the
Mohawks, who descended upon them periodically to collect taxes.
Added to this touchy situation was the asininity of a reckless Dutch
governor, one William Kieft, who himself attempted to collect taxes
from these same river Indians for the support of his fortifications on
Manhattan. When he adopted wholesale butchery and the surprise tactics
of the Iroquois to enforce his demands for tribute, things became
explosive. The Dutch found themselves waging a sanguinary five-year war
against local tribes who in turn managed to terrorize Manhattan and the
surrounding plantations.
This war, though sporadic and spotty, was fought with a thirst for
blood on both sides. Massacres and other atrocities were committed by
reds and whites alike, as the Indian league against the Hollanders
spread up the Hudson above the Highlands. In 1643 a shallop coming down
from Fort Orange with four hundred beaver skins taken in trade with
the Mohawks was plundered, to signal a general massacre that resulted
in the virtual evacuation of all the outlying plantations in the lower
valley as surviving colonists fled to Fort Amsterdam.
It took a final annihilating blow, no less terrible than the recent
English offensive against the Pequots, to end the war. And it was
Captain John Underhill who delivered it with the same dreadful
efficiency he had demonstrated during the Pequot campaign. Underhill,
now a Boston “heretic” living under the jurisdiction of the West India
Company, led 150 Dutch soldiers into the mountainous region north
of Stamford where the remnant of the Indian league against the New
Netherlanders had a strongly palisaded town. When it was all over 700
Indian corpses darkened the snow. The Dutch lost 15 men.
Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s patroonship far up the Hudson was spared
the tomahawk during these Indian troubles. There, where the shrewd
Amsterdam jeweler had purchased lands about Fort Orange embracing most
of two present-day New York counties, the neighboring Mohawk allies of
the Dutch provided complete protection from Algonquin depredations.
While all was pandemonium on the lower river, both agriculture and
trade flourished at Rensselaerwyck.
Nowhere in New Netherland, in fact, was there a livelier trade in
pelts then or at any other time than at Van Rensselaer’s manor. And
nowhere was this trade more unlicensed. In 1644 it was estimated that
between three and four thousand furs had been carried off the manor
illegally during a twelve month period. That is, illegally carried off
in the eyes of the patroon, although he himself was shipping out pelts
illegally as far as the authorities at Manhattan were concerned.
Van Rensselaer, however, recognized no jurisdiction from that quarter.
He asserted that he held his patroonship directly from the States
General and that he would buy and ship furs as he pleased without
regard to any laws or taxes proclaimed by the West India Company’s
representatives at New Amsterdam. And so he did.
He even built a fort of his own on a Hudson River island where he
emphasized the independence of his feudal domain by enforcing the
medieval principle of “staple right.” Every passing vessel, except
those of the Dutch West India Company, must pay duty or deposit its
cargo of pelts ashore where the patroon might buy these “staples” on
his own terms. The skippers must strike their colors too, in homage to
the lord of Rensselaerwyck.
Van Rensselaer also made it clear that company as well as private fur
traders were to keep off his property. This caused much bitterness.
Fort Orange, about which the patroon had established his domain, was
the official post of the Dutch West India Company, the emporium where
their traders traditionally bartered for beaver with the Iroquois.
After Rensselaerwyck was established Fort Orange continued to be
the commercial center of this profitable trade, so much so that the
flourishing little trading village which sprang up there under the
very cannon of the fort, and which was to grow into the strategically
important city of Albany, was originally christened Beverwyck. Kiliaen
van Rensselaer of course had no jurisdiction over Fort Orange, the
company’s private precinct, but he considered Beverwyck within his
domain. The resulting rivalry between his traders and the company’s
representatives, with guns for the savages as bait for beaver, was
anything but neighborly.
The company’s management at Manhattan only quickened the tension when
on occasion the authorities there confiscated firearms en route to the
patroon of Rensselaerwyck. In one case, in 1644, a ship out of Holland
for Rensselaerwyck was discovered to be carrying 4,000 pounds of powder
and 700 guns intended for the Indian trade, and these munitions were
seized with considerable show of propriety. But what then happened to
them is not stated, although one well-informed old chronicler suggests
that they got along probably in due course to the Iroquois as usual
in return for their precious beaver. In any event, the confiscation
represented only one slight interruption in the continuous flow of
these murderous trade goods to the lake-country Indians.
The feud between the company and the patroonship on the upper Hudson
really settled down to cases in 1648 after Kiliaen van Rensselaer
died and his young son’s contumacious new commissary, Brandt van
Slechtenhorst, took over the management of Rensselaerwyck. For, in the
meantime, that little snappish captain, Peter Stuyvesant, had arrived
in New Netherland as the West India Company’s Director General.
Stuyvesant was by way of being a reformer, so long as the reforms were
in the company’s trade interests. One of his first acts to attract more
settlers was to permit the popular election of “Nine Men” who, when
called upon, were to assist the governor and the council in matters
concerning the general welfare. But when the “Nine Men” proposed to
serve the general welfare without being called upon by the governor,
Peter Stuyvesant proceeded to knock them down. And when the right of
appeal to the home government was suggested, the governor stamped about
arrogantly on his pegleg and dared anyone to try it. He said he would
make the appealer “a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland, and
let him appeal in that way!”
Brutally dictatorial though he may have been, the new governor was
earnest nevertheless in all things, reforms included. He took very
effective steps, for instance, to check the smuggling of beaver into
New England where it could be traded tax-free for European goods. And,
while setting up tighter export controls, he also increased the tax
on furs. Furthermore, he not only forbade the sale of liquor to the
natives but he tried his best to enforce the contraband on firearms for
use as trade goods.
Naturally, such policies were obnoxious at Rensselaerwyck, where
gun-running was popular and company taxes were not. There too the
commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, headstrong in pretensions
to complete independence of the company, was itching to prove his
insubordination.
So, when Stuyvesant, with his penchant for issuing autocratic
proclamations, decreed a certain fast day not to van Slechtenhorst’s
liking, the Commissary of Rensselaerwyck pounced upon it, rejecting it
as an invasion of “the right and authority of the Lord Patroon.” When
the governor went up the river to challenge his adversary he was met
with open defiance.
It was Stuyvesant’s edict then that “no new ordinances affecting trade
or commerce within the colony were to be made, unless with the assent
of the provincial authorities.” Also, with regard to the company’s
jealously guarded “precincts” about Fort Orange, no more buildings
were to be erected at Beverwyck within range of the guns of the
fortifications. Such encroachments on the company’s precincts rendered
the fort insecure, the governor claimed. And further, he ordered, the
wooden palisades of the fort were to be replaced with a stone wall, the
stone to be quarried on an adjoining tract of land.
Van Slechtenhorst’s reply to all this was that he would build wherever
he pleased because all the land around belonged to the patroon. He
noted sarcastically that the patroon’s own trading house had once
stood on the very border of the fort’s moat. No sooner had Stuyvesant
departed than the wilful commissary went right ahead erecting houses,
“even within pistol shot” of the palisades. Furthermore, he forbade the
quarrying of stone for new walls to replace the palisades.
The feud, continuing unabated, was eventually referred to Holland where
the States General sustained the Governor of New Netherland on every
point. Although by this action the aspirations of the patroonship
for independence were dashed beyond hope, van Slechtenhorst resisted
stubbornly until 1652, when he was arrested and transported down to
Manhattan. In the end also, the village of Beverwyck was officially
declared free, to become a part of the “precincts” of Fort Orange.
Meanwhile, for Governor Stuyvesant, there was the more vital problem of
the New Englanders who were hungrily gnawing away at Dutch fur trading
territory.
XVI
_The English Close Their Coastal Ranks_
All during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper
Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action
against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no
easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad.
After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy
of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the
two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United
Colonies of New England,” even without Cromwell’s soldiers, could
overrun New Netherland with ease if they took concerted action. That
possibility had been implicit in the founding purpose of their alliance
in 1643.
It was a fact that defense against the Indians had motivated the New
Englanders not much more than the animosity they nurtured against their
Dutch neighbors, an animosity born of rivalry for the fur trade. After
the alliance, English fur factors became even more aggressive. The men
of New Haven, who were especially bitter about being cut off from the
Indian trade, boldly encroached on Dutch preserves when they ascended
the Housatonic valley and set up a trucking station on the Naugatuck
River within sixty miles of Fort Orange. And traders from the upper
Connecticut valley probed deeply into traditional Dutch territory in
their efforts to tap the beaver stores of the Iroquois.