Historical Inquiry & Indigenous Nations — Print · U.S. & New York History: Indigenous Nations to Reconstruction, Grade 7

Part 1 · One letter, eleven words of substance

The Schagen letter sits in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague and runs to a single page. The part everyone quotes is eleven words long in the original Dutch. The rest of the letter is about cargo: 7,246 beaver skins, 853 otter skins, and assorted mink and wildcat, which tells you plainly what the Dutch West India Company actually cared about. Manhattan is mentioned almost in passing, as one line of news among the shipping returns.

Notice what the document is. It is not a deed, a contract or a treaty; no such paper has ever been found. It is not an eyewitness account, because Schagen was more than three thousand miles away. It is a secondhand summary, written by an administrator, of what a ship's crew said when they docked. A historian would call it a secondary source for the purchase itself, even though it is a primary source for 1626 Dutch administration.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A document can be genuine, old and completely reliable about one thing while being weak evidence for another. The Schagen letter is excellent evidence that the Dutch believed, in November 1626, that a transaction had happened and that 60 guilders was the figure in circulation. It is poor evidence for what was handed over or what the Lenape agreed to.

Part 2 · Where the twenty-four dollars came from

The letter says 60 guilders. It does not say dollars, and it does not say beads. The famous figure was produced in 1846, when the New York historian John Romeyn Brodhead converted 60 Dutch guilders of 1626 into contemporary American money and arrived at about twenty-four dollars. That number was then repeated for the next century and a half until it stopped sounding like a conversion and started sounding like a fact.

It is a bad conversion, for a reason that has nothing to do with arithmetic. Comparing money across 220 years using a simple exchange rate ignores what the money could buy. Sixty guilders in 1626 was roughly several months of a labourer's wages — estimates vary, and historians disagree, which is itself worth noticing. It was not a fortune, but the picture of a continent traded for pocket change is an artefact of the 1846 calculation, not of 1626.

The beads are not in the letter at all. Dutch trade goods of the period typically included duffel cloth, iron axes, hoes, kettles, knives and wampum — the shell beads made along Long Island Sound that carried real value in regional exchange. Later deeds from the Hudson Valley list such goods item by item. The beads entered the Manhattan story through retelling, because they made the bargain sound more lopsided and the story better. A detail that improves a story is exactly the detail to check.

Part 3 · What the other side thought it was doing

The hardest problem with this story is that one side left no document. The Lenape, who lived across what is now New York City, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, kept records in speech, wampum and memory rather than in writing, and no Lenape account of 1626 survives. Everything written at the time was written by the people on the other side of the exchange.

What historians can reconstruct from later Lenape and Haudenosaunee dealings is that land in this region was generally understood as something a group held and used, not something an individual could sell outright and permanently. Agreements of this kind were often understood as granting rights to share, use or pass through, renewed through continuing gifts and relationship. The Dutch, working from European property law, recorded a sale.

So the two sides may have come away from the same afternoon believing two different things had happened, and the only surviving record is in the language of one of them. This is not a detail about 1626. It is the central difficulty of the next three hundred years of this course, and it starts here.

It also explains something that will otherwise look like bad faith later. When colonists and Native nations fell out over land they had both signed for — as happened repeatedly through the 1600s and 1700s — the quarrel was often not that someone had lied, but that two legal traditions had been written down as one agreement, in one language, by one side. Recognising that is different from excusing it: the Dutch and later the English acted on their reading and took the ground.

Part 4 · Four questions to ask any source

From here on you will meet hundreds of documents, and the same four questions open all of them. Who made this, and were they present? When was it made — at the time, or long afterwards? Why was it made, and for whom? And what would this person have no way of knowing, even in good faith?

Run the Schagen letter through them and the answers come fast. A company administrator; not present; three weeks or so after the ship sailed, which is prompt for the news but still secondhand; written to report cargo to superiors; and he could not know what was said on the island or what the Lenape understood. None of that makes the letter worthless. It makes it precise — you now know exactly what weight it bears.

The same four questions will do real work on a 1776 pamphlet, an 1857 court ruling and an 1863 army return. They are also why historians change their minds, which is a feature of the subject rather than a failure of it: new documents turn up, old ones are reread, and a claim everyone repeated for 150 years turns out to rest on an eleven-word aside about beaver skins. When you meet a confident sentence about the past in this course, the useful reflex is not to doubt it but to ask which document it came from.

Part 1 · One founding, three answers

Haudenosaunee oral tradition records the founding in detail: the Peacemaker travelled among five warring nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca — and persuaded them to bury their weapons under a white pine. The tradition includes a sign in the sky, a darkening of the sun, at the moment the last holdout agreed.

In 1997 two researchers, Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields, argued that the darkening was a total solar eclipse and worked backwards through the astronomy. An eclipse crossed Haudenosaunee territory on 31 August 1142, and they proposed that as the founding date. The reasoning is checkable: eclipse paths can be computed precisely for thousands of years.

Most archaeologists put the founding far later, somewhere between about 1450 and 1600. Their evidence is in the ground. Iroquoian villages of the earlier period are heavily fortified with timber palisades, which is what communities build when they fear their neighbours; the fortifications thin out in the later 1400s and 1500s, which is what you would expect once the neighbours stop being enemies. A third group reads the first European accounts and argues for the 1570s.

Part 2 · What a date is actually resting on

Every date you meet rests on one of a few kinds of evidence, and they are not equally precise. A dated document is the strongest: a treaty signed on 3 September 1783 was signed that day. Astronomy is precise but needs an assumption to connect it to the event. Archaeology gives ranges — radiocarbon dating returns a span, not a year. Oral tradition preserves order and meaning reliably over long periods but is not built to carry calendar dates, because it was never meant to.

So the honest way to write the Confederacy's founding is not to pick a number and move on. It is to say: founded before European contact, by a process the Haudenosaunee themselves record in detail, at a date disputed between about 1142 and about 1600, with the evidence pulling in different directions. That sentence is longer and less satisfying than “1142”. It is also true.

Watch for this when a textbook gives you a suspiciously round or suspiciously confident number for anything before written records. The confidence usually belongs to the printing, not to the evidence.

Part 3 · A map is an argument

John Mitchell published his map of North America in 1755, before the French and Indian War. It was the best available, and in 1782 and 1783 the American and British negotiators in Paris spread it on the table and drew the new country's boundaries on it. A copy with their markings survives.

The map was wrong in places, and the errors became the border. It misplaced the source of the Mississippi, which left the northwestern boundary describing a line that could not exist on the ground. Disputes over what the 1783 text meant — traced on a map drawn twenty-eight years earlier by a man who had never seen most of the country — were still being settled in the 1842 Webster–Ashburton Treaty, nearly sixty years later.

Mitchell's map also did what most European maps of the period did: it showed Native nations where it was convenient and left vast inhabited regions looking blank or merely labelled. Empty space on a map is not evidence of empty land. It is evidence of what the mapmaker knew, or wished to assert, about who had a claim.

That omission had a purpose. Mitchell drew his map for the Board of Trade in London, and it was designed to support British claims against French ones — which is why British territory runs generously westward across country no British official had surveyed. When the negotiators of 1783 divided North America between Britain and the new United States using that sheet, the Haudenosaunee and every other nation living on the land were not in the room and are barely on the paper. Within eleven years the Confederacy was negotiating the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794 over ground that two European-descended powers had already assigned to each other.

Part 4 · Reading both without being fooled

Three habits will carry you through the rest of the course. First, ask what a date rests on, and accept a range when the evidence only supports a range. Second, ask what a map leaves out, and who benefits from the omission. Third, notice that spacing on a timeline is a design choice: a timeline with 1763, 1776 and 1783 evenly spaced hides that the first gap is thirteen years and the second is seven.

These are not reasons to distrust maps and timelines. They are the reasons to use them properly. A timeline is excellent at showing order, which is what you need when deciding whether one thing could have caused another — an event cannot be caused by something that happened after it. A map is excellent at showing distance and terrain, which is why the Erie Canal's route makes sense the moment you see where the Appalachians stop.

Use each for what it is good at, and ask what it is quietly asserting. You will do both in every chapter from here.

Neither the dating problem nor the map error is a reason to give up on dates and maps. Both are tools you will use constantly, and both work better once you know what they can and cannot carry. The point is to ask, every time, what a number or a line is actually resting on.

One last habit, which costs nothing: check the date of the map itself, not just the date of the thing it shows. A map printed in 1850 showing the colonies in 1750 is a nineteenth-century argument about the eighteenth century, and it will quietly carry what people in 1850 believed. The Mitchell Map is the sharpest example in this course of why that matters — a 1755 sheet still setting borders in 1783 and still being argued over in 1842.

Part 1 · A city on the Mississippi

Cahokia grew fast. Around 1050 the settlement reorganised on a planned grid around a central plaza, in what archaeologists call the “big bang” — a deliberate act of city-building, not slow drift. At its height it held more people than any city in what is now the United States would hold again until Philadelphia passed it around 1780, nearly seven centuries later.

Building Monks Mound took an estimated fifteen million baskets of earth carried by hand. That is not a weekend's work by a few families; it implies organised labour, a food surplus to feed the workers, and authority able to direct both. The surplus came from maize, which had spread north from Mexico over centuries and reached the Mississippi valley in quantity by about 900.

The city drew people in. Analysis of teeth from Cahokia burials shows that a substantial share of those buried there grew up somewhere else, which is what you expect of a place people move to rather than a place that merely grows. Goods arrived from far off: marine shell from the Gulf coast, copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians.

Cahokia also declined, and the reasons are still argued. Deforestation of the surrounding uplands, flooding, drought after about 1150, and political strain have all been proposed. By around 1350 the site was largely empty. Societies in the Americas rose and fell on their own terms long before anyone arrived from across the Atlantic.

Part 2 · Different places, different answers

In the Southwest, the Ancestral Puebloans built in stone. Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon had more than 650 rooms rising to five storeys, and roads ran out from the canyon in dead-straight lines for tens of miles across broken country. Building and maintaining those roads in a dry landscape implies co-ordination between communities far apart.

In the Eastern Woodlands, including what is now New York, farming meant the Three Sisters: maize, beans and squash grown together in one mound. The maize gives the beans a pole to climb, the beans return nitrogen to the soil, and the broad squash leaves shade out weeds and hold moisture. It is a genuinely sophisticated system that European farmers, planting single crops in rows, did not match for centuries.

On the Northwest Coast, cedar and salmon did the work that farming did elsewhere. Communities built plank houses and ocean-going canoes and accumulated enough wealth to hold potlatches, ceremonies at which a host gave away or destroyed goods to establish standing. None of this fits a simple ladder from hunting to farming to civilisation, which is why that ladder is a poor way to think about the continent.

Part 3 · How many people, and why the number is fought over

Estimates of the population of North America north of Mexico in 1492 range from about two million to about eighteen million. For the Americas as a whole, serious estimates run from roughly forty million to over a hundred million. These are not small disagreements; the high figure is nine times the low one.

The spread exists because the evidence is indirect. There was no census. Historians work from the carrying capacity of farmland, from the number of village sites found and their size, from early European accounts that were often written decades after the first epidemics had already passed through, and from later counts worked backwards through estimated death rates. Each method carries its own assumptions, and small changes in those assumptions multiply.

The argument matters because the number changes the story. If the continent held two million people, European settlement looks like expansion into thin country. If it held eighteen million, and disease removed most of them before most colonists arrived, then what the settlers found was not empty land but emptied land — and the difference between those two words is the difference between two versions of American history.

Part 4 · Nations, not tribes in general

It is worth being careful with words from the start. “Native Americans” covers hundreds of peoples who were as different from one another as the Portuguese are from the Finns, and who often did not regard themselves as having anything in common. Mohawk and Lenape lived a few days apart and spoke unrelated languages.

The nations of what is now New York State make the point locally. The five Haudenosaunee nations spoke related Iroquoian languages and farmed in palisaded villages of longhouses; their neighbours down the Hudson and along the coast — the Lenape, the Mahican, the Munsee — spoke Algonquian languages, unrelated to Iroquoian, and lived in smaller, more mobile settlements. Two very different ways of organising life, within a few days' travel of each other.

They were also in constant contact. Copper from Lake Superior, obsidian from the Rockies, shells from the Gulf and the Atlantic coast all turn up hundreds of miles from where they originated, which means long-distance exchange routes were running for centuries before 1492. Goods moved, and so did ideas, crops and people.

Nor were these nations frozen in place. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the subject of the next unit, was itself formed at some point in this period by nations that had been fighting one another; Cahokia rose around 1050 and was gone by about 1350; Chaco was abandoned after roughly 1150 and its people moved to the Rio Grande and to Hopi and Zuni country. Three centuries of change happened here before any of it was written down.

So when a European ship appeared off the coast, it did not arrive at an isolated place. It arrived at the edge of a continent that was crowded, connected and politically complicated, and the newcomers were drawn into alliances and rivalries that had been running long before they came. That is the subject of the next three chapters.

Part 1 · Fifty chiefs and one fire

The Grand Council met at Onondaga, near modern Syracuse, and seated fifty royaner — usually translated as chiefs or sachems, though the word means something closer to “good men” or counsellors. The seats were not shared out by population. The Onondaga held fourteen, the Cayuga ten, the Mohawk and Oneida nine each, and the Seneca eight, which meant the largest nation did not have the most votes.

That was deliberate, because the Council did not decide by majority. It worked by consensus: a question passed back and forth between groups of nations in a set order until a position emerged that nobody would block. The Mohawk and Seneca, the elder brothers, considered a matter first; it passed to the Oneida and Cayuga, the younger brothers; the Onondaga, as firekeepers, could send it back for more discussion and confirmed the result.

The Great Law also fixed how business was conducted. A council opened with the Words Before All Else, a long thanksgiving addressed to the natural world, and proceedings were recorded in wampum — belts of white and purple shell beads whose patterns held the terms of an agreement. A wampum belt was not decoration or money; it was the record, read aloud by someone trained to carry it, and a treaty was not complete until the belt was exchanged.

Consensus is slow, and that was understood as a feature. A decision nobody would block is a decision that does not need enforcing afterwards, which matters when the Confederacy had no police, no standing army and no power to tax. Nations followed the Council because they had agreed, not because they could be made to.

Part 2 · The women who chose the chiefs

Haudenosaunee society was matrilineal: a person belonged to their mother's clan, children belonged to their mother's family, and longhouses and fields belonged to the women of the clan. A man who married moved into his wife's longhouse, where he remained a member of his own mother's clan.

This had direct political consequences. The head woman of each clan, the clan mother, nominated the man who would fill her clan's seat on the Grand Council. She instructed him. If he failed in his duties — if he ignored the people, or acted for himself — she warned him three times, and could then remove him and name another. The procedure for this is set out in the Great Law, not left to custom.

Women also decided questions that look military. A clan mother could withhold the food supplies a war party needed, which in practice was a veto on the expedition, and captives taken in raids were brought to the clan mothers, who chose whether a captive was adopted into the family of someone lost or put to death. Adoption was common enough that the nations absorbed substantial numbers of outsiders.

Set that against the colonies arriving in the next chapter, where a married woman generally could not own property in her own name, could not vote, and had no formal political voice at all. Visitors noticed. When Haudenosaunee delegates met colonial officials, they sometimes asked where the women were, and the question was not rhetorical: they could not understand how a decision could be made without them.

Part 3 · Longhouses, fields and the Three Sisters

A longhouse was a frame of bent saplings sheathed in elm bark, commonly sixty to a hundred feet long, housing several related families along a central corridor of shared hearths. Villages of a few dozen longhouses stood behind timber palisades and held several hundred to a couple of thousand people, moving every ten to twenty years as soil and firewood were used up.

The fields around them grew the Three Sisters together, and the women owned both the fields and what came out of them. Maize, beans and squash in one mound fed a population large enough to support the political structure above it; a confederacy needs a food surplus as much as a city does.

Men hunted, traded and fought, often far from home for long stretches. That division — women holding the village, the fields, the clans and the nomination of chiefs; men away at war and diplomacy — is why the two halves of Haudenosaunee authority sat where they did. It was not an accident of custom but a structure that followed from how the work was organised.

Part 4 · Why the Confederacy mattered to everyone else

From the 1600s the Haudenosaunee sat between the Dutch and later English on the Hudson and the French on the St Lawrence, in control of the routes west. Both European powers needed them more than they needed either, and both spent a century trying to secure the alliance. That position is the single most important political fact of this region before 1776.

Colonial officials studied the Confederacy closely. At Lancaster in 1744 the Onondaga speaker Canassatego told commissioners from three colonies that his people had grown strong by uniting and advised them to do the same. Benjamin Franklin printed the speech, and in 1754 he proposed the Albany Plan of Union, citing the Six Nations as proof that colonies could combine. Historians disagree about how much the Great Law shaped the later United States Constitution, and the honest answer is that the Albany connection is documented while a direct line to 1787 is argued rather than proven.

The Confederacy's power ended with the Revolution, when the Six Nations split between the sides and the war came to their own country. That is a story for chapter three. What matters now is that the nations the Dutch meet in the next chapter were not scattered bands but an organised power with a constitution, a capital and a foreign policy.

Part 1 · Why the diseases went one way

The imbalance was not about strength or cleanliness; it was about history and livestock. Smallpox, measles, influenza and tuberculosis all descend from diseases that crossed into humans from domesticated herd animals — cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens — kept in close quarters in Europe and Asia for thousands of years. Those populations had been dying from these diseases for centuries and carried hard-won resistance.

The Americas had almost no domesticated herd animals. There were llamas and alpacas in the Andes, dogs and turkeys elsewhere, and that is nearly the whole list. The crowd diseases never arose, so nobody had met them, and when they came, they came all at once to people of every age, including the adults who grew the food and led the community.

Nor was it a single event. A community that survived smallpox might meet measles a decade later, then influenza, then smallpox again in a generation with no immunity. The Haudenosaunee were struck repeatedly through the 1630s and 1640s, losing by some estimates half their people, and the wars they fought with neighbouring nations in those decades are partly a response to that loss — captives were adopted to rebuild populations that disease had cut down.

That last point is easy to miss. A disease that kills across all ages at the same time does not just reduce a population; it removes the people who plant, hunt, teach and govern in a single season. A village could survive an epidemic and still lose the knowledge and the harvest it needed for the following year.

Part 2 · Dying before the settlers arrived

Smallpox reached Hispaniola by 1518 and the mainland soon after, and from there it moved along the same Indigenous trade routes that had carried copper and shell for centuries. People fleeing an outbreak carried it with them. The result is that epidemics repeatedly reached regions years or decades before any European did.

The New England coast is the clearest case. Between 1616 and 1619 an epidemic swept the shoreline, and by the most-cited estimates it killed between 75 and 90 per cent of the people in some communities. When the Mayflower passengers landed in 1620 they found cleared fields, stored seed corn and abandoned village sites, and took this as providence. They were walking into the aftermath of a catastrophe that had finished the year before they sailed.

In New York the same pattern ran up the Hudson and the Mohawk. Dutch traders at Fort Orange, the post that became Albany, recorded epidemics among the nations they dealt with within a few years of establishing themselves in the 1620s. The fur trade that drew the Dutch inland was also a channel along which infection travelled, so the commercial relationship and the dying are not separable.

Estimates of total mortality across the Americas over the first century and a half range from about 50 to about 90 per cent, depending on the region and on which starting population a historian accepts — the disagreement you met in the previous unit. Whichever end of the range is right, this is among the largest losses of human life in recorded history, and most of it was not deliberate killing. It was biology moving faster than anyone understood.

Part 3 · What the exchange did to Europe and Africa

Going east, the crops changed what populations could be fed. The potato yields more food per acre than wheat or rye and tolerates cold, wet, poor ground, so it turned marginal land productive across northern Europe. Maize did similar work in southern Europe, Africa and China. Historians connect these crops to the sustained population growth of the 1700s, though they argue about how much of it to credit to them.

The dependence could also be lethal. Ireland came to rely on the potato so heavily that when a water mould destroyed the crop from 1845, about a million people died and a million more emigrated, many to New York. A crop that had crossed the Atlantic three centuries earlier produced one of the largest migrations into the city, which you will meet again in chapter five.

The third direction is the one most often left out. Sugar grew well in the Caribbean and Brazil, demanded enormous labour, and the Indigenous workforce had collapsed. European planters turned to the Atlantic slave trade, which carried roughly 12.5 million captive Africans onto ships between 1501 and 1866, of whom about 10.7 million survived the crossing. The exchange of crops and the trade in people are the same history, not two adjacent ones.

Part 4 · Horses, and a world remade twice

Horses had evolved in the Americas and died out there thousands of years earlier. The Spanish brought them back, and after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove the Spanish temporarily out of New Mexico, large numbers spread north through Indigenous trade and raiding onto the Great Plains.

What followed was a transformation Europeans had nothing to do with directing. Nations including the Comanche, the Lakota and the Cheyenne rebuilt their lives around the horse, hunting bison at a scale impossible on foot and dominating a vast territory. The Comanche in particular built a power that checked Spanish, Mexican and later American expansion for well over a century.

The same is true of other borrowings. Haudenosaunee and Algonquian nations took up iron axes, brass kettles and woollen duffel cloth quickly, not because they were dazzled but because the goods did a job better; brass kettles were often cut up and reworked into arrowheads and ornaments rather than used as pots. Choosing what to adopt, and what to make of it, is not the behaviour of people to whom things simply happen.

This matters for how you read the whole period. The exchange was not something done to passive people; nations took what arrived, judged it and used it for their own ends. The horse culture of the Plains, which Americans later treated as timeless and ancient, was in fact younger than the colony at Jamestown — built after 1680, out of an animal that arrived by accident of empire.