The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Along much of the southern New England coast, the situation was considerably different. The great epidemics of 1616 to 1619 had emptied much of the land, and English colonists felt free to settle where they liked. Even where there were surviving Indian communities, the Puritans invoked biblical law, under which land that was not actively used—that is, tilled and farmed—was available for the taking.

  “What warrant have we to take the land, which is and hath been of long tyme possessed of others the sons of Adam?” John Winthrop asked in 1629, then answered his own question. “That which is common to all is proper to none . . . Why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving such places as they have manured for their corne) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites?”

  The Wapánahki in Maine, though hit hard by disease, generally remained in control of their coast, and many of the English immigrants they encountered were not sin-obsessed Puritans, but entrepreneurs looking for commercial opportunities in furs and fishing. Here the English and the Wapánahki encountered the same initial misunderstandings about land ownership, but as surviving deeds from the 1620s on show, the Natives quickly developed a working knowledge of what “buying land” really entailed.

  There’s an assumption today that all such land deals were swindles, designed to separate Indians from the land for a pittance, but the Maine deeds suggest that a more nuanced dynamic was at work, with both sides bridging the cultural divide to reach what each saw as an equitable agreement. Yes, the prices paid—in wampum, bolts of fabrics, clothing, tools, food, and household items—seem ridiculously low by modern standards, but such assumptions about worthless beads and trinkets (as they seem to us) overlook the very real appeal of unusual goods from distant lands, to say nothing of their utilitarian value. (If you doubt the virtue of a steel hatchet, try using a stone ax to chop down a tree.) And some deeds spelled out what is implied in many others—annual payments that make the transaction appear more in the nature of a lease than an outright purchase.

  With time, Indian deeds also tended to spell out explicitly what rights the Native owners were retaining for themselves—the right to hunt moose or deer, to fish for salmon or sturgeon, to gather certain roots or shellfish, to camp there seasonally. “Nothing in this Deed be Construed to deprive us ye Saggamores [our] Successessors or People from Improving our Ancient Planting grounds nor from Hunting In any of said Lands, nor from fishing or fowling for our own Provission Soe Long as noe Damage Shall be to ye English fisherys,” reads one deed for land along the Kennebec River being sold by Warumbee and five of his fellow sagamores. In many respects, the rights carved out by Indian deeds may have been the same uses to which they had always put the land. Having been burned by the all-inclusive concept of English ownership, they were simply spelling it out.

  In less than a generation, up and down the eastern seaboard, the bonds between Europeans and Indians had grown remarkably strong, bolstered by trade, marriage, and military alliances. That was not always the case between the colonists themselves, however, even those from the same country.

  Jamestown was an Anglican settlement, nominally so in its earliest years, more rigorously after Lord De La Warr’s arrival, when he ordered all colonists to attend the twice-daily worship services. The appearance in 1634 of settlers sponsored by the overtly Catholic Cecilius Calvert, Baron Baltimore, just up the Chesapeake on the Potomac River, was seen as a threat to Protestant control of the tidewater, as well as the growing profits that Jamestown’s backers were beginning to enjoy. Worse, the land included in the new colony of Maryland had been carved out of Virginia two years earlier by Charles I.

  Perhaps because the Virginians started a rumor that the newcomers were the hated Spanish, the Piscataway, who controlled the lower Potomac, met Calvert’s brother Leonard and the Maryland colonists with hordes of armed men, who “made a generall alarm, as if they intended to summon all the Indians of America against us.” Somewhat reassured, the Piscataway tayac (grand chief) granted them permission to live at an abandoned town site at the mouth of the river, which Calvert named St. Mary’s City.

  In a sense, both the Marylanders and the Piscataway needed friends. The Piscataway were being squeezed between Powhatan’s confederacy to the south and the Susquehannock to the north. The Virginians, too, had launched reprisals after the 1622 massacre, even though the Piscataway weren’t involved. The Piscataway were also being cut out as middlemen in the fur trade between the English and the powerful Massawomeck, an interior tribe from the headwaters of the Potomac with rich stores of beavers.

  Developing a good fur trade was also important to Calvert, and his colonists needed Indian corn to tide them over. As St. Mary’s grew, the connections between the Piscataway and the colonists deepened. English Jesuits converted many of the Indians, including the new tayac, strengthening the ties between the two communities. Treaties obligated the Piscataway to aid the English in war, and vice versa. Indians and Marylanders built forts together, hunted together, and drank together.

  They continued bartering corn and deerskins for English goods. One of the traders, a man named Mathias de Sousa, came to St. Mary’s with the original settlers as an indentured servant of a Jesuit priest. Almost certainly of mixed Portuguese and African descent, de Sousa eventually became a free man under Maryland law, and in 1641 his name appeared on the rolls of the general assembly—the first man with African roots to have a voice in American government.

  For several decades, the Piscataway and Maryland colonists existed in a kind of equilibrium. Smallpox and other diseases reduced the Indians’ ranks, the encroachments of hostile tribes increased, and more and more land and control were ceded to the English, ultimately including the right to chose a new tayac. Yet the Piscataway, if no longer a dominant political force in the upper Chesapeake, still held on to their identity. Despite early successes, the Jesuits made little headway with them and eventually abandoned their mission. The English colonial proprietors maintained a largely hands-off policy toward their allies, who by the late seventeenth century still lived in their palisaded village, ruled by a tayac of their own choosing (if then rubber-stamped by Maryland authorities). They could still field almost a hundred warriors, roughly the same strength that John Smith had reported almost a century earlier, although some of them were certainly refugees from other, fractured tribes.

  This delicate balance ended in the 1690s, when pressure from encroaching farmers reached the tipping point, at the same time that the English Crown assumed direct control of the colony. Francis Nicholson, former governor of New York, took the reins, implementing policies explicitly designed to drive the Piscataway from land deemed too valuable to waste on Indians when it could be used for growing tobacco. Nicholson’s policies worked. The last tayac gathered his thinning flock and left, eventually settling with their one-time enemies the Susquehannock.

  The early tensions between fellow Englishmen in Maryland and Virginia was entirely typical of the times. While France’s colonial template was based on fur posts and wilderness Jesuits, the Dutch focused on trade and trade alone, and Spain created a unified network of mission towns supported by the repartimiento system, England took a far more ad hoc, idiosyncratic approach to colonization. The settlements it was sprinkling from Jamestown to Newfoundland reflected almost the entire spectrum of English spiritual views, from the rawly secular to Calvert’s Catholicism to the astringent Puritanism of the Pilgrims, grafted onto competing commercial interests that made furs, cod, or tobacco at least as important as anything else, including eternal salvation. The mixture was often unstable and could be combustible.

  Most modern Americans assume that the colonists came seeking religious freedom, but even the most pious of colonists depended on commercial backers. When the Pilgrims landed at the deserted Wampanoag village of Patuxet in 1620 and renamed it New Plimmoth, their leaders were motivated by a desire to flee the Church of England, but the underwriters who paid for the colon
y—the Merchant Adventurers of London—were inspired by profits, and they were displeased by the lack of gain in the colony’s first year. Their testy letter of complaint arrived in 1621 with a second load of colonists, many of them young, non-Pilgrim men who came to make their fortune and who immediately chafed under the community’s literally puritanical religious rule. (The Pilgrim leaders grudgingly permitted the newcomers to observe Christmas—a holiday the Pilgrims considered essentially pagan—but when the celebrants organized a ball game, a disgusted Governor William Bradford snatched away their balls and bats.)

  Especially in New England, competing commercial backers led to competing colonies, and internal disputes about religion and the rights of man led to splintering, schism, and still more settlements. In 1629, land between the Charles and Merrimack rivers, including existing fishing encampments at Cape Ann and Salem, was granted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which brought almost a thousand new immigrants to Boston in 1630.

  The Massachusetts colonists were mostly Puritans, like the Pilgrims, dedicated to shedding what they saw as secular trappings in the Anglican Church, but they were not separatists, instead believing that the church could be reformed from within—anathema to Pilgrims. And they were shrewd businessmen, although you’d never know it by Governor John Winthrop, who claimed that other English settlements had failed because “there mayne end and purpose was carnall and not religious . . . aymed chiefly at profit.”

  In fact, Winthrop and others had raised a grubstake of almost £200,000—about $40 million in today’s currency—an investment on which the colony’s backers expected to turn a profit, from furs and cod fishing, in this new and holy experiment. Business and righteousness would go hand in hand, unlike in previous colonial enterprises, Winthrop said, which “used too unfitt instruments, a multitude of rude and ungoverned persons, the very scums of the land.”

  But even within the Puritan community, there were opposing factions. In 1636, the Reverend Thomas Hooker, angered by Massachusetts’s refusal to grant full suffrage to all men regardless of church membership, took a hundred followers and trekked west for weeks—driving a large herd of cattle, goats, and hogs along the way—to the Connecticut River valley, where they founded Hartford on land ostensibly under Dutch control. By contrast, a boatload of Puritans under the Reverend John Davenport declined to settle in what they saw as the lax spiritual environment of the Bay Colony and sailed down the coast to alight at what they called New Haven, a colony founded on an Old Testament reading of scriptural law —perhaps the most purely theocratic colony in the New World.

  Massachusetts just kept rubbing people the wrong way. Roger Williams was perhaps Davenport’s opposite—a separatist Puritan who came to believe in religious tolerance, the rights of Indians, and what he called a “wall of separation” between the church and secular life. Williams bounced back and forth between the Bay Colony and Plymouth before being expelled entirely. In 1636, he founded Providence Plantations, the start of what would eventually become the colony of Rhode Island, a welcoming home for Quakers, Jews, and those scorned in most other colonies.

  The Dutch, meanwhile, had spread out along the Noort Rivier (Hudson River), establishing a fort near what is now Albany and a settlement at New Amsterdam on manahatta, the Lenape’s “island of many hills.” They also erected handelshuisen (trading posts) east to the Versche Rivier (Connecticut River) and south to the Zuyd (Delaware River). Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan for sixty guilders has become shorthand for Europeans swindling Natives out of their land, but it actually reflects an earnest policy by the Dutch to deal fairly with the Indians. They sought to negotiate in (mostly) good faith, stipulate punishment for colonists who abused Natives, and even set wages—though at half the pay given Europeans—when Indians were hired to work.

  Although France, Spain, and England are usually thought of as the three-way imperial rivalry in North America, in the early to mid-seventeenth century, the United Provinces of the Netherlands represented a global power to match or exceed any of the others, standing as the world’s dominant trading nation, with colonies and outposts from North America to Brazil, Indonesia, India, China, and Japan, all connected by a potent navy. Only Spain—Holland’s one-time imperial master, whose yoke the Dutch had only recently thrown off—came close to this immense reach. By comparison, England and France were bush leaguers.

  And unlike those nations, the Dutch were interested in one thing and one thing only in North America: business. In fact, they did not speak of their footholds in the New World as colonies, at least not at first. Unlike the English, they had no desire to create growing agricultural communities for large numbers of immigrants; initially, they brought just enough farmers to feed their operations. Nor did they have any great desire to bring Indians to the church, as did the French. The Spanish model, with its casual brutality and enslavement, was an active abomination to Hollanders, having just escaped Spanish rule.

  Instead, the Dutch negotiated for the right to build forts and handelshuisen along the coast and major rivers, treating their Native counterparts as fellow entrepreneurs. Recognizing Native priority was a decision that also paid shrewd commercial dividends, since the Dutch could shrug as they sidestepped claims from other European powers, even as they considered their own right to do business in the New World—founded on the exploration and mapping of Henry Hudson and other explorers in Dutch employ—as ironclad.

  The Dutch holdings were peopled by a multiplicity of ethnicities and religions drawn to the Netherlands’ history of tolerance—which went only so far, since the communities included a significant number of African slaves. Backed by the powerful West India Company, the Dutch had a distinct advantage over the foundering, squabbling English colonists: stable supplies of quality trade goods with which to bind the Mohawk, Lenape, Susquehannock, Mohegan, Pequot, and other nations to them in commerce, all based on the barter of beaver pelts.

  The European fashion for broad-brimmed felt hats drove this insatiable demand for beavers, whose plush undercoat made superb felt once the long brown guard hairs were removed. Beavers could be easily trapped in the winter near their lodges and bank dens, lured by bait sticks smeared with a vile-smelling secretion called castoreum, with which they mark the boundaries of a colony. Otter, muskrat, lynx, fox, and other furs also were traded, but beaver pelts were the great prize.

  No matter where it arose, the fur trade caused profound changes in Indian life. The demand for European goods caused communities to alter their traditional seasonal movements, created middlemen, and intensified rivalries among tribes for access to goods and control of the flow of furs. It transformed a Native lifestyle that had been focused on subsistence and created a new economy based on an international trade triangle: beaver pelts from the hinterlands, manufactured goods from Europe, and what may have been North America’s first mass-produced commodity, wampum.

  Traders purchased beaver pelts with muskets, kettles, steel knives, dried peas, and liquor, among other goods, but wampum was “the source and the mother of the beaver trade,” New Netherland governor Peter Stuyvesant told his backers, who were aghast at its price. “Without wampum, we cannot obtain beaver from the savages.”

  Wampum—the word comes from the Algonquian wampompeag —served as both a form of currency and a medium of diplomacy among many Indian nations, with spiritual aspects that transcended both uses. The small beads came in two colors—white, made from whelk shells, and black (actually dark purple) made from the hard shells of quahog clams. Both kinds were produced by tribes along the Atlantic coast and traded as far west as the Great Plains.

  Although crude forms of wampum were important among Northeast Indians long before contact, the introduction of hand-held metal drills in the late 1500s standardized the manufacturing process, allowing craftsmen to turn out remarkably uniform, neatly cylindrical beads about half an inch long. It was still a laborious process. A skilled wampum maker could produce about forty white beads a day from whelk shells but b
arely half that number of black beads from the much harder clamshells. A large, especially ornate wampum belt might contain seven or eight thousand beads—months’ worth of work.

  But wampum’s importance went far beyond its monetary value. Strings or belts of wampum were used to punctuate important speeches, reinforce calls to war, emphasize overtures for peace, and ratify alliances. They might fulfill tributary demands by conquerors, memorialize treaties, serve as a badge of recognition for a messenger, or compensate the family of a victim of violence.

  Although the English colonies sat on a rich trove of wampum raw material, it wasn’t until 1627 that they learned about its value from the secretary of New Netherland, Isaak de Rasieres, during his visit to Plymouth. De Rasieres had hoped the English would use their shell wealth to buy furs from the north, leaving Dutch areas to the west alone, and at first his plan worked. Indians in Maine who had scorned English offers of corn for furs snatched up all the wampum they could get. But that simply increased English demand for the beads, in pursuit of which they pushed west along the southern New England coast into Dutch territory and sailed across Long Island Sound to Peconic Bay, where the Indians made some of the best wampum in the region.

  Soon the trade triangle fell into place. English merchants imported cheap goods from abroad, including the heavy woolen cloth known as duffel, popular among the Indians. With these goods, they purchased wampum from the Wampanoag, Pequot, Narragansett, and other coastal groups, then resold it to the Dutch at a considerable markup. They also traded it directly for furs with interior tribes along the middle Connecticut River, who needed it for tributary payments to the Mohawk. The furs, drawn from increasingly distant parts of the interior, were shipped back to Europe and sold there at a tremendous profit.