stones, on dead cattle lying among the trampled grain, where the night before smiled peace, and plenty, and content. For three days bands of exultant savages harried the villages and farms about the Bay and along the river. At Gravesend lived a Lady Moody, - an English lady whom religious intolerance had driven out of Massachusetts more than a dozen years before, and to whom Kieft had made a grant of lands for the bravery of her followers in defending themselves against the Indians in the war of that period. Her house was now again attacked, though discrimination usually was made in favor of the English, for it was the Swannekins the Dutch - who in the other English towns were threatened with massacre; a new settlement at Esopus, on the North River, was so sore beset that its people abandoned all their possessions and fled to New Amsterdam to escape from death; on all Manhattan Island no farm was safe, and their owners sought refuge in the town; consternation and ruin spread with this savage outbreak over all New Netherland; many plantations with their buildings, crops, and cattle were destroyed; three hundred of the people were reduced to want; one hundred were killed; one hundred and fifty were taken prisoners. A summons was sent to Stuyvesant to hasten back from the South River to the defence of New Netherland. Prompt and energetic in action, though often unwise and rash in judgment, he was always ready to meet an emergency. His very presence inspired confidence in the panic-stricken people. All who had not already sought refuge in the town he ordered to leave their farms till peace could be restored. The citizens were enrolled in a military organization; new defences were added to the fortifications of New Amsterdam; military detachments were sent out to meet and drive off the Indians wherever they appeared most formidable, and effectual measures were taken to meet the additional expense incurred by all these measures. But when some of the more rash and hot-headed of the colonists urged that war be declared against the tribes who had brought such calamities upon the colony, the Director counselled moderation. He advised that friendly relations be cultivated with the savages, while the settlers should keep nearer together in villages, with a block-house, capable of defence, to fly to in the event of an attack. It was better, he thought, to subdue the Indians if possible, by kindly treatment, rather than exasperate them by declaring a war of extermination, which the Dutch were not strong enough to bring to a successful issue. So judicious was the course he pursued that in a few months the unfriendly tribes again made promises of lasting peace, and the prisoners taken in the recent raids were all released, though heavy ransoms were paid for them in gunpowder and lead. The savages pacified. 1655.] THE FRENCH AND DUTCH AND THE INDIANS. 233 At Rensselaerswyck they did not wait for the suggestion of this policy from Stuyvesant, and escaped, therefore, the calamity which fell upon other parts of New Netherland. When the tidings of the atrocities committed by the Indians in the neighborhood of New Amsterdam reached the Patroon, his people looked at once to their own safety. By timely gifts and promises they induced the Mohawks to renew the old treaty of amity and peace which for many years had been advantageous to the whole province of New Netherland and profitable especially to themselves. It may have been because theirs was the frontier settlement that the people of Van Rensselaer's manor had always aimed to maintain friendly relations with the powerful tribes who occupied that vast region on the west as yet almost unknown to the white men. But whether the policy was one of choice or of necessity, they determined to keep on good terms with the savages for the sake of trade, and the result justified at least their worldly wisdom. The French Indians. Where the Dutch had succeeded in gaining and in keeping the good-will of the Indians, the French, with a far higher purpose to the same end, had signally failed. For years the and the missionaries of the French, sometimes singly, sometimes in companionship, had sought the Iroquois in their remotest villages in friendly contest for their friendship with the Dutch. The desire to bring these benighted heathen within the pale of the church took precedence of any political or commercial aim with the government of Canada. It was not that trade and territorial acquisitions were esteemed by them as of little value; that treaties were not made to secure both; that well-appointed expeditions were not sent out to gain a foot-hold within the territory of the present State of New York; but that it was above all and before all made almost a reason of state that the cross should mark every advancing step of the white man, and that the subjugation of the savages should be the triumph of the Church. But the trader was received as the missionary of peace and good will where the servant of religion provoked only strife. The Five Nations, whose domain was south of the St. Lawrence, extending from the Hudson to Lake Erie, and whose most powerful tribe was the Mohawk,1 were in almost perpetual hostility with the French of Canada through all the years that New Netherland was a Dutch province. More than one of the gentle and devoted Jesuits died deaths of torture or privation in return for their zeal for the salvation of the souls of their unrelenting enemies. In the little box in which Father Jogues carried the simple furniture for an altar in the wilderness 1 Gallatin's Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, Coll. Am. Ant. Soc., vol. ii. Fate of the savages believed the "black gown" concealed an Evil Spirit. To save themselves from the dire disasters that would come with its release, they tore the flesh from his arms in strips before they could be merciful enough to end his torments with death. But they were slow to detect the devil in the brandy, the Jogues. gunpowder, and the lead which the Dutch trader brought, and they welcomed him as a friend. The trader and his wares the Indians understood; the crucifix and the missal appealed only to their superstitions and their fears. At times the enthusiastic missionaries were persuaded that the light of the gospel had penetrated into the dark recesses of those savage souls. No such pious aspiration disturbed the minds of the dealers in peltries. The Dutch were careful to cultivate the friendship of the Mohawks, to be kind to them in the way of strong waters and fire-arms, and the colony on their borders on the upper Hudson increased in wealth and strength. But the handful of Frenchmen who at length, in 1655, clustered about the bark chapel of the Fathers Chaumonot and Dablon, near the Salt Springs of Onondaga, were glad in less than three years to escape with their lives, leaving all their possessions behind them, while the Indians, who had come to massacre them, lay in a drunken sleep.2 Voshe brenhumble sales Наас Родин Portrait and Signature of Father Jogues. 1 Father Jogues was treacherously murdered, in 1646, by the Mohawks in the Mohawk Valley, called thenceforth in the annals of the Jesuits "The Mission of the Martyrs." An interesting sketch of the singularly devoted and romantic life of this Father is given by J. G. Shea in his edition of the Novum Belgium, written by Jogues, in 1644. He was the first European, probably, to explore Lake George, which he named Saint Sacrament in commemoration of the festival of Corpus Christi, the day on which he reached it. The Indian name was Andiatarocte. 2 Le Moyne, a Jesuit Father, discovered the Salt Springs of Onondaga in 1654, and on a visit to New Amsterdam four years later told the Dominie Megapolensis of a spring at the source of a little lake which the Indians did not dare to drink, because, they said, there was a devil at the bottom of it. The Father tasted it and found it as salt as the water of 1658.] THE ESOPUS WAR. 235 The conflict between Stuyvesant and the authorities at Rensselaerwyck had little intermission till in the latter years of his administration the supremacy of the company was acknowledged in the payment of a fixed subsidy in wheat by the Patroons. But the Director always had reason to be grateful to them for their steady adherence to that policy which preserved friendly relations with the Five Nations. In 1658 trouble again broke out with the river Indians, which might have been far more disas trous had not the Mohawks remained Totem or Tribe-mark of the Five Nations neutral. (from La Hontan). The Esopus The Director had persuaded the people of Esopus, when they returned to their farms, after the massacre of three years before, to find mutual protection in a compact village sur- war. rounded with defences. The confidence that very precaution gave may, perhaps, have made them careless of provoking the hostility of the savages. A band of these, who had been engaged to assist in the harvest, were fired upon by the villagers, for no greater offence than being noisy and offensive in a drunken revel for which the Dutch themselves had supplied the means. Retaliation followed, and the whites, as usual, suffered in the devastation of their farms and in loss. of life. This Esopus war, as it was called, continued intermittently till 1664, and might have been ruinous to the settlements along the banks of the Hudson had not the Mohawks been persuaded to continue faithful to the peaceful and friendly relations which had been so long maintained. Even without the aid of that tribe the Esopus Indians were a formidable enemy. In the course of the war some of those who had been taken prisoners by the Dutch were sent to the plantations of Curaçoa as slaves. The wrong was one not to be forgotten nor forgiven. In June, 1663, the village of Wiltwyck or Wildwyck — as Esopus was then named-was almost totally destroyed. Although the ostensible cause of this particular attack was the building of a new Ronduit, a little fort, at the neighboring village, thence known ever since as Rondout, -in every blow that fell from the tomahawks of the savages was the memory of the slaves, their brothers, across the sea. It was at high noon, while Stuyvesant was conferring, in the open the sea. The Dominie repeated this in a letter to the Classis in Amsterdam, but adding "whether this be true or whether it be a Jesuit lie, I do not determine." - O'Callaghan. fields outside the town, with the chiefs who had agreed to meet him on pretence of making a treaty, that the warriors, scattering themselves through the village apparently in friendly mood, suddenly fell upon the unsuspecting people. The houses were plundered and set on fire; some were killed, and some were seized and carried off as prisoners; men at work in the fields, hurrying in at the sight of the burning houses, to protect their wives and children, were shot down from within their own doorways. When, after a fierce and desperate fight, the savages were driven off, they left behind them a heap of ruins in which were the charred bodies of twenty-one of the murdered villagers, but they carried away more than twice that number of women and children as prisoners. It was, however, the last event of the war; the Indians were vigorously pursued and punished; and in the course of the next few months a treaty was concluded, the last ever made between the Dutch and the Indians. Progress of land. But notwithstanding these Indian wars and massacres, from which no colony was altogether free, New Netherland New Nether slowly grew and prospered. At New Amsterdam Stuyvesant yielded, when longer resistance was useless, to fresh innovations upon the prerogatives of the Director-general, though none of them. took much from his power, or added much to the power of the people. Whatever gain there was to popular government came not through any such well-defined purpose as existed in New England, of deriving the right of governing from the will of the governed; but only that the privileges belonging to citizenship in the fatherland should be preserved in the new home. So far as popular freedom existed in Holland it was to be maintained in the New Netherland; but wherever a limit or a barrier had been set New Amsterdam in the middle of the Seventeenth Century (from Vischer's Map in Asher's New Netherland). |