The Esopus Indian Nation’s Revolutionary War Experience

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.

Map: Sauthier, Claude Joseph (1776) "A map of the Province of New-York" Library of Congress Geography and Map Division G3800 1776 .S3 Medal: 1766 Peace Medal, American Numismatic Society Raymond.1925.929; Fuld,Tayman.HWU12; Stahl.Scully.28

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.

Author

Author Justin Wexler is an ethnoecologist who has spent the last 25 years conducting archival and ethnographic research to better understand the history, culture, and land management practices of the Native Peoples of the Hudson and Delaware Valleys. He has a BA in History and Anthropology from Marlboro College and an MA in Teaching History from Bard College. He and his wife Anna Plattner run Wild Hudson Valley, a forest farm and educational organization focused on Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountain history, ecology, wild foods, and land stewardship practices.

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