Editor's Note: This series of blog posts recounts the dramatic story of the Esopus Indian Nation’s Revolutionary War exodus. The original inhabitants of Ulster County, the Esopus Indians successfully maintained their sovereignty and traditional way of life in the face of overwhelming odds for over a century. These blog posts are summaries of a much fuller story that will be published in 2027.

Part 2: A Peaceable Disposition (1776-1777)
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Spring, 1776. Over the New England border to the east, revolution was brewing. Within a few months, it had reached the isolated settlers living near to the Esopus Indians on the far side of the Catskill Mountains. In that year, Kingston resident Charles DeWitt, a member of the New York Provincial Congress, became colonel of the 2nd Ulster County Militia regiment. Like other colonial officials, he knew that the outcome of previous colonial wars greatly depended on the support of Native allies, especially the powerful Six Nations. In Ulster County, the Esopus Indians no longer resided in appreciable numbers around Kingston and the river towns. Over the preceding decades, nearly the entirety of the Esopus Indian Nation had moved over the Catskill Mountains to the headwaters of the Delaware and Suquehanna Rivers, where they were in regular communication with both the government of the Six Nations and with that of Ulster County. Individuals and families continued to visit their old Hudson Valley homeland, where many still counted friends among their Dutch colonial former neighbors. For DeWitt, maintaining friendly relations with the county’s former Native residents might ensure some measure of protection in case the war were to spread into the Colony of New York. And so, Col. Charles DeWitt and other Ulster County officials strove to strengthen the traditional bonds of friendship between Ulster County and its Esopus Indians.

Over the course of 1776, Kingston authorities sent letters and gifts to the Esopus Indians’ tribal government and elected chief, Philip Houghtaling. Notably, they sent quantities of gunflints, powder, and lead for ammunition over the mountains. These gifts of ammunition seem to indicate that DeWitt hoped for more than simply peaceful relations. Perhaps he hoped that, like the Stockbridge Mohicans in New England to the east, the Esopus Indians also sympathized with the Rebel cause. Indeed, quantities of ammunition were also sent over the mountains to those settlers who were known to be “hearty friends of the American cause.”[1] The Esopus Nation’s leadership, like that of their Nanticoke, Munsee, Mohican, and Tuscarora neighbors on the nearby upper Susquehanna, emphasized to colonial officials in both Pennsylvania and New York of their desire to stay out of conflict. They offered, instead, to shield Ulster County from the war while not otherwise offering support.[2]

That autumn, the thinly-scattered European settlers on the far side of the Catskills expressed alarm at a possible war afoot in adjacent Indian Country. The paranoia of Indian raids that spread among them was much like that which overtook Ulster County two decades earlier during the French and Indian War. What these settlers did not mention in their panicked letters was the fact that some of them had formed a gang and were actively persecuting Loyalist neighbors on the upper Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers. Many of the so-called Loyalists were simply peaceful farmers who had little interest in joining a rebellion. The persecutions – which included violent evictions and theft of property – got so out of hand that armed local Indian warriors felt the need to protect these settlers.[3] The harassment by the roving Rebel gangs pushed many on the frontier – Indian and white – towards Loyalism. In that September, leaders from the tribal governments on the western side of the Catskills pledged loyalty to the British at a large treaty held at Fort Niagara.[4] Upon returning from Fort Niagara, Esopus Indian chief sachem Philip Houghtaling sent a representative, the war captain John Runnupe, with a message to local Rebel settlers: they had one week to leave the Western Catskills, with no guarantee of safety for those who refused.[5]

In response, Ulster County resolved that a company of rangers be formed to patrol the western frontier of Ulster County to protect non-Loyalist settlers.[6] A few days later, more alarming news arrived from over the Catskills: an elderly Esopus Indian woman “…weeping much… desired the [settlers] to move this week to get out danger, and that she would not see them [again for] a long time… she expected that in case they did not move off they would be murdered by the Indians in a short time…”[7] Many settlers now abandoned their frontier farms and fled eastward to the safety of the river towns. And yet, even if they had warned off rebellious frontier settlers, the Esopus Indians still showed no inclination towards conflict with Ulster County as a whole. A number of their leaders arrived in Kingston in November of 1776 to renew the treaty of peace, just as they had done nearly annually since the Second Esopus War ended in 1664. This would be the last time in history that the Nicolls Treaty was renewed.
           
The winter of early 1777 passed by relatively uneventfully. When travel became easier with the melting of winter snow, messengers were once again sent from Kingston to the Esopus Indians on the other side of the Catskills to enquire as to their intentions.[8] By early April of 1777, the Esopus Indians’ response was received: they still wished to maintain peace with Ulster County. The Esopus Indian leadership even offered to send one of their most respected citizens, Nicholas, to Kingston with his family to remain for the duration of the war as a sign of their good will (and as a potential hostage). Chief Sachem Philip Houghtaling ended his message stating that “We assure you of a truth, that it is our determination that we will lay still in this distressing time, and that you shall not receive damage by us… The remote tribes of Indians are mostly joined at Niagara, and we expect they will be on your [i.e., the rebels’] backs some time this moon, at the northward [towards the Mohawk River]…”[9]
           
Pragmatically, the Esopus Indians wished to avoid conflict with their friends and former neighbors in the river towns of Ulster County, regardless of political orientation. They promised to protect Ulster County from raids by Loyalists and loyal Indian allies, so long as Ulster County protected Esopus Indian families and settlements on the upper Susquehanna and along the upper branches of the Delaware River. But by all indications, in following the lead of the Six Nations, the Esopus Indian Nation had allied itself with Great Britain the previous autumn two months before renewing the Nicholls Treaty in Kingston for the last time. And they had good reason to do so: should the Rebels win the war, they would prove to be an existential threat to all of those Native Nations dwelling near to the Fort Stanwix Treaty Line.[10] Moreover, it is likely that many young Esopus Indian warriors were inspired by charismatic Mohawk war chief and British officer Joseph Brant, who spent lengths of time in these years living amongst them. By early August of 1777, the Esopus Indians had participated as victors in one of the bloodiest ambushes of the American Revolution: the Battle of Oriskany in the western Mohawk Valley.

Several weeks later, on August 23rd, a rumor spread among the Esopus Indian communities that a large Rebel force from Kingston was on its way to destroy them. Although the rumor was unfounded, Esopus Indian families and non-combattants were sent eastward for safety up the West Branch to an isolated one of their settlements, as well as to Joseph Brant’s base of operations at the town of Onaquaga. It is possible that they imagined that this attack would be retribution for their involvement at Oriskany. They then sent a friendly overture to the authorities in Kingston; just as in previous overtures, they noted that they would continue to shield the river towns in Ulster County from any Loyalist raids, while hoping that Ulster County would cast a blind eye towards their warriors’ support of British military endeavors in the Mohawk Valley to the north.[11] New York Governor Clinton’s response to the Esopus Indians was indignant: that since “…the young Indians & warriors who had joined [the Loyalist officer] Butler went there designedly to fight and kill our People and to assist the English, that we cannot, therefore, consider the Fathers & Mothers of those young Indians as our Friends…”[12]
 
                                                               To Be Continued…
 
Citations:
[1] Journals of the Provincial Congress of the State of New-York: 1775-1776-1777, Vol. I. Albany: Thurlow Weed. 1842. 539-540.
[2] Harvey, Oscar Jewell & Ernest Gray Smith. A History of Wilkes-Barré, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Vol. II. Wilkes-Barré: 1909. 888-889.
[3] McGinnis, Richard. "A Loyalist Journal, Part 1" in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, Vol. 105(4). New York: 1974. 193-202.
[4] Journals of the Provincial Congress of the State of New-York: 1775-1776-1777, Vol. II. Albany: Thurlow Weed. 1842. 216.
[5] John Runnupe was likely the son or grandson of his namesake, whose full name was recorded under variations of Noondawiharind and who was involved in land sales in Shawangunk and for the Hardenbergh Patent earlier in the century.
[6] Journals of the Provincial Congress of the State of New-York: 1775-1776-1777, Vol. I. Albany: Thurlow Weed. 1842. 656-657.
[7] Ibid, Vol. II: 340.
[8] Calendar of Historic Manuscripts Relating to the American Revolution in NYS, Vol II. Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Company. 1863. 93-94.
[9] Journals of the Provincial Congress of the State of New-York: 1775-1776-1777, Vol. II. Albany: Thurlow Weed. 1842. 423-424.
[10] The 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty line was a boundary that more-or-less followed the Appalachian Mountains and which was meant to keep the peace by dividing the British colonies from the Indian Nations to the west.
[11] Calendar of Historic Manuscripts Relating to the American Revolution in NYS, Vol II. Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Company. 1863. 276-277.
[12] Public Papers of George Clinton, Vol. II. Albany: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co. 1900. 272-274.

Editor's Note: This series of monthly blog posts by Justin Wexler recounts the dramatic story of the Esopus Indian Nation’s Revolutionary War exodus. The original inhabitants of Ulster County, the Esopus Indians successfully maintained their sovereignty and traditional way of life in the face of overwhelming odds for over a century.. These blog posts are summaries of a much fuller story that will be published in 2027.

Post 1: Setting the Scene (1770)
Five centuries ago, the hazy-blue peaks of the Catskill Mountains towered over a vast expanse of fertile, grassy flats and cornfields that stretched in swathes from Saugerties to Kingston and far to the westward. On these flats lay a mosaic of cornfields, lush bottoms of tall bluestem grass, and dense thickets of hazelnuts, blackberries and wild plums. Clusters of dome-shaped, bark-shingled houses were found here and there on the edges of the floodplains. The shimmering rivers that wound through these flats – the Esopus, the Rondout and others – were periodically crisscrossed with fence-like weirs and fish traps. The surrounding rocky uplands were cloaked in a forests of oaks and pitch pines and, in many cases, were barren at their tops due to frequent fires. This idyllic, park-like landscape was the result of centuries of careful management by the region’s human inhabitants: the Esopus Indians.

The Esopus Indians appear in the earliest colonial records under variations of the name Waranawankong, perhaps meaning ‘The Cove People.’ They spoke a dialect of what linguists today call the Munsee language.[1] The Esopus dialect survives today in the dozens of place names that still grace their ancestral homeland, including Ponckhockie, Ashokan, Shandaken, Wawarsing and, of course, Esopus. The Esopus Nation’s territory was divided among four matrilineal clans, and included the valleys of the Esopus, the Rondout, the Shawangunk, and the lower Wallkill Rivers as well as the headwaters of the Delaware River and lands across the Hudson River in the current towns of Red Hook and Rhinebeck. A chief sachem was elected to represent the four clans.

In the decades before and after the arrival of Dutch colonists in the early 17th century, the Esopus Indians lived in dispersed settlements that stretched along the terraces of land that border the fertile floodplain bottomlands. There, they grew their crops of maize, pole beans, squash, sunflowers and tobacco. They built stockaded strongholds in select elevated locations to retreat to during times of war. Theirs was a life built around the seasons: in the springtime, when the women were busy preparing their maize fields, most of the men could be found downstream in fishing camps where they took advantage of successive visits of spawning fish including alewives, shad, striped bass, sea lampreys, sturgeon, and eels. Summers were spent close to their cornfields. After the autumn crop harvest, younger and more mobile families visited hunting cabins in the uplands of the Shawangunk Ridge and in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. There, they hunted numbers of white-tailed deer, Eastern elk, black bears and beavers in massive collective hunts. By early springtime, everyone returned to their villages in the bottomlands.

The 1660s were a time of major upheaval in the region. The Esopus Indians controlled the largest stretch of contiguous cleared arable farmland in the entire Hudson Valley. This was extremely attractive to settlers, creating friction that eventually led to the devastating First and Second Esopus Wars with the Dutch settlers. Concurrently, the Esopus Indians were involved in a massive intertribal war with the Five Nations or Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Between 1664 and 1669, the Esopus Indians had little other recourse than to make peace with the Haudenosaunee, with the Dutch and with the British. They would renew these treaties of peace regularly over the entire following century.

Over the 17th and 18th centuries, the Esopus Indians and other regional Native Peoples faced catastrophic population declines, largely due to Old World viruses to which they had little immunity. They soon found themselves to be a minority in their own land. And yet, the New York colonial government continued to treat with them as the sovereign indigenous nation that they were. As a strategy of survival, between the mid-17th century and the mid-18th century the Esopus Indians sold the vast majority of their territory in dozens of land sales, many preserved in deeds to this day. The deeds occasionally reserved their right to reside in or to use select areas. They soon held legal title to very little of their traditional territory.

Land sales, the growing colonial population, and environmental degradation made a traditional life difficult. By the 1750s, the majority of the Esopus Indian People had moved to the other side of the Catskill Mountains. There, they dwelled in communities along Delaware River’s East Branch, where they preserved the traditional spring fish camps for American shad and striped bass and the tradition of winter hunting camps. Over the preceding century, many had gained some level of fluency in the Dutch language. They had also adopted many customs from their colonial neighbors, including keeping of dairy cows, horses, hogs and chickens and growing of new crops including apples, peaches, cucumbers and turnips. Records from this period reveal Esopus Indian individuals who had adopted colonial skills including cider production, violin making, and blacksmithing. And yet, they tenaciously maintained their traditional religion: the Esopus Indians are the only Native group in the Hudson Valley who refused to join the Christian mission at Stockbridge, and only a handful of members joined the Moravian Missions.

By the early 1770s, it became clear that an influx of settlers was coming to the isolated valleys of the western Catskills and upper Susquehanna River, where they had a village called Ahlapeeng. Between the sales of the Hardenbergh Patent and the 1768 Fort Stanwix Treaty, land speculators and settlers were ready to pour over the mountains. Early in 1770, the Esopus Indians even met with British Indian Superintendent Sir William Johnson to try to find a solution. Ultimately, their destiny lay with that of the Haudenosaunee, now the Six Nations, whose lead they had followed since 1669. With the coming of the American Revolution, the consequences would be disastrous.
 
[1] The Munsee language, which belongs to the Eastern Algonquian language subfamily, is still spoken by a handful of descendants on the Moraviantown Reserve in Ontario, Canada.

The Hudson River Valley is part of Lenapehoking - or the Lenape homeland. As residents of the southern Hudson Valley and the New Jersey coastline, they were some of the first Indigenous people in the Northeast to make contact with Europeans, and therefore among the first to bear the brunt of disease, violence, and forced removal. In the Hudson Valley, Manhattan, Tappan, Ramapo, Neversink, Wappingers, and Esopus are all place names derived from Lenape tribal names or words. ​

Editor's Note: This introduction to the Delaware Tribe of Indians Lenape and more information can be found here: https://delawaretribe.org/
​The name DELAWARE was given to the people who lived along the Delaware River, and the river in turn was named after Lord de la Warr, the governor of the Jamestown colony. The name Delaware later came to be applied to almost all Lenape people. In our language, which belongs to the Algonquian language family, we call ourselves LENAPE (len-NAH-pay) which means something like “The People.” Our ancestors were among the first Indians to come in contact with the Europeans (Dutch, English, & Swedish) in the early 1600s. The Delaware were called the “Grandfather” tribe because we were respected by other tribes as peacemakers since we often served to settle disputes among rival tribes. We were also known for our fierceness and tenacity as warriors when we had to fight, however, we preferred to choose a path of peace with the Europeans and other tribes.

Many of the early treaties and land sales we signed with the Europeans were in our people’s minds more like leases. The early Delaware had no idea that land was something that could be sold. The land belonged to the Creator, and the Lenape people were only using it to shelter and feed their people. When the poor, bedraggled people got off their ships after the long voyage and needed a place to live we shared the land with them. They gave us a few token gifts for our people’s kindness, but in the mind of the Europeans these gifts were actually the purchase price for the land.
​
Our Delaware people signed the first Indian treaty with the newly formed United States Government on September 17, 1778. Nevertheless, through war and peace, our ancestors had to continue to give up their lands and move westward (first to Ohio, then to Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and finally, Indian Territory, now Oklahoma). One small band of Delawares left our group in the late 1700s and through different migrations are today located at Anadarko, Oklahoma. Small contingents of Delawares fled to Canada during a time of extreme persecution and today occupy two reserves in Ontario (The Delaware Nation at Moraviantown and The Munsee-Delaware Nation). https://delawaretribe.org/home-page/about-the-tribe/

The Hudson River Valley is part of Lenapehoking - or the Lenape homeland. As residents of the southern Hudson Valley and the New Jersey coastline, they were some of the first Indigenous people in the Northeast to make contact with Europeans, and therefore among the first to bear the brunt of disease, violence, and forced removal. In the Hudson Valley, Manhattan, Tappan, Ramapo, Neversink, Wappingers, and Esopus are all place names derived from Lenape tribal names or words. ​

Editor's Note: This video reflects the terminology used when it was produced in 2009. ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWFeMGmJne4&t=10s

Not able to attend the in person event? Here's a video link to Shawn Stevens' storytelling and song.

November is Native American Heritage Month, and although we've been interpreting Indigenous history through guest speakers Harv Hilowitz and Justin Wexler aboard Solaris this summer, we thought we would take this Media Monday to highlight some of the Lenape history in New York City and the Hudson Valley. 

The Bowery Boys have been interpreting New York City history for the general public via podcast since 2007. In this episode, "Land of the Lenape: A Violent Tale of Conquest and Betrayal," they examine the history of the Lenape in New York City and environs.

The Hudson River Valley is part of Lenapehoking - or the Lenape homeland. As residents of the southern Hudson Valley and the New Jersey coastline, they were some of the first Indigenous people in the Northeast to make contact with Europeans, and therefore among the first to bear the brunt of disease, violence, and forced removal. In the Hudson Valley, Manhattan, Tappan, Ramapo, Neversink, Wappingers, and Esopus are all place names derived from Lenape tribal names or words. 

Although some Lenape people still live in the Northeast, most were forcibly removed multiple times to several different locations, including Wisconsin, Ontario, and Oklahoma. You can learn more about the Lenape through the work of the Lenape Center, located in Manhattan. 

Learn More:

• ​If you missed this summer's video with historian Harv Hilowitz on Lenapehoking, you can check it out here. 
• "The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland" Smithsonian Magazine
• A Tour of Native New York from Barnard College
• "How New York Was Named" the New Yorker​
• Visit the "Native New York" exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to support more history blog content, please make a donation to the Hudson River Maritime Museum or become a member today!​

On Saturday we looked at a birchbark canoe in the Hudson River Maritime Museum's collection. So today we thought we'd share a couple of documentary films about traditional birchbark canoe building. 

The first is called "How Indians Build Canoes" and was published in 1946 by the International Film Bureau. It was produced by Crawley Films in collaboration with the Canadian Geographic Society. Filmed in eastern Canada (possibly Ontario) this short film, together with another called "Trappers and Traders," was originally shown as a longer film known as "Portage" (1946), which described the Canadian fur trade. The film was digitized by the American Indian Film Gallery, a project of the University of Arizona. 

The second film is an hour-long documentary about reconstructing a historic 1860s Ojibwe birchbark canoe and was produced by Lakeland PBS, a public television station in central Minnesota. 

Today's Featured Artifact is this beautiful birchbark canoe. The museum was recently notified of a project to catalog birchbark canoes in museum collections across North America into one comprehensive online resource. Of course, knowing about this one, we had to add our canoe to the digital collection!

Like many objects that get donated to museums, we don't know much about its history, except that it was built by Indigenous Algonquian people in Canada, sometime in the 1930s. It was donated to the Hudson River Maritime Museum in 1998 and is currently on display in the museum's East Gallery - you just have to look up to see it! 

Because it is currently being displayed on top of an exhibit case, we took these photos so you could see some of the beautiful interior details. Click on the images below to make them larger and click through the gallery.

This canoe is listed in the digital collection created by The Museum of Underwater Archaeology and Georgia Southern University’s spring 2021 American Indian History class, which includes over 30 museums, parks, and historical societies across North America that have traditionally built birch-bark canoes in their collections.

This digital storymap currently includes 54 bark canoes from Canada’s Northwest Territory to Savannah, Georgia.  Each organization provided photos of their canoes and information about their origins, cultural affiliations, age, and physical characteristics.  In addition, researchers visiting the storymap can download a spreadsheet containing the canoe data for analysis. The website also hosts videos on canoe construction and an interview with a traditional bark canoe builder. ​

Today's Media Monday video is one of our own! In this short documentary film, independent researcher Harv Hilowitz outlines the history of the Lenape people in the Hudson Valley, from pre-contact to the present. This video was recorded as part of the RiverWise Project.

If you want to learn more, Harv is leading a series of programs on Lenape history aboard our 100% solar-powered tour boat Solaris! Get tickets here.

To learn more about the Lenape in New York today, visit the Lenape Center.

This video featuring the Stockbridge-Munsee Community History is part of the PBS Wisconsin Tribal Histories project. By the rapids of the Red River, Kimberly Vele tells of Mohican life in the Hudson Valley of New York before their move to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, followed by their forced removal to Indiana where they joined with the Munsee tribe before their final relocation to Wisconsin. James Fenimore Cooper was incorrect in predicting the demise of the Mohican people. The PBS Wisconsin Tribal Histories series are half-hour programs that presents the histories of all eleven federally recognized American Indian tribes and bands located in Wisconsin, plus one tribe that is seeking to regain its federal status. 

To learn more about the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians visit their website.