.

Native Americans Were Swindled
Out of Manhattan in 1634

Knowing Eyes—an aging elder, born in Black Bear County
Famed for being fearless and the wisest of his tribe—
Met with “Diamond-Jim” Van Dyne in 1634,
When Jim—a well-rehearsed negotiator—conjured up a bribe!

Figuring he could all-but-steal 11,000 acres
For what was then a fraction of that parcel’s actual worth—
While Knowing Eyes and every last Canarsee brave believed that
What they owned was holy—blessed by Gods—and sacred earth!

The Tribal Council gathered to discuss the proposition,
Wary of the fairness of the anxious buyer’s plan—
Well aware how settlers’ agents focused on expansion,
Offering “relocation” had invariably sent a man

Whose sole intent was purchasing all they could acquire
Nudging natives farther west, to make them start anew,
And often times reneging on the payment for their land!
A cold, deceptive tactic… of which every elder knew!

But Knowing Eyes suggested they should trade their land instead
For hefty groups of useful things like kettles, cloth, and knives—
Things he knew his tribe could use (despite their meager worth),
That would, in his opinion, over time enhance their lives!

The chief and all the elders felt that what they would be trading,
Something in the neighborhood of seventeen square miles,
Was to them worth 40 kettles, 60 bolts of cloth,
Plus three good knives for every acre making up the isle!

The Canarsee would come to wish they’d kept what’s now Manhattan—
Given, after all this time, what it’s worth today;
But those, of course, who own it now are not the least ashamed,
And love to share the story of the price they had to pay!

.

.

Mark Stellinga is a poet and antiques dealer residing in Iowa. He has often won the annual adult-division poetry contests sponsored by the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has had many pieces posted in several magazines and sites over the past 60 years, including Poem-Hunter.com, PoetrySoup.com, and Able Muse.com—where he won the 1st place prize for both ‘best poem’ of the year and ‘best book of verse.’

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29 Responses

    • Mark Stellinga

      Michael, one of a zillion, particularly when it comes to what we improperly refer to as – ‘Native Americans’. Thanks for your comment –

      Reply
  3. Roy E. Peterson

    I tried to track down Diamond Jim, but could not find him. Several things are clear from my research. 1.) Peter Minuit is accredited with the negotiation. 2.) The Canarsee had no concept of a deed and furthermore did not think of it as a sale, but a normal transaction. 3.) The Canarsee did not even control the land they “sold.” Here are some things I found in my research:

    WHO GOT TAKEN?
    Canarsee
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canarsee

    Sale of Manhattan
    It is the “Canarsee”, who only utilized the very southern end of Manhattan island, the Manhattoes, as a hunting ground, who are credited with selling Peter Minuit the entirety of the island for $24 in 1639. A confusion of possession on the part of the Canarsees who failed to tell the Dutch that the balance of island was the hunting ground of the Wecquaesgeek, a Wappinger band of southwest Westchester County.”
    Note: the Canarsee were a small subgroup of the Lenape.

    Peter Minuit
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Minuit

    “Peter Minuit …is generally credited with orchestrating the purchase of Manhattan Island for the Dutch East India Company from representatives of the Lenape, the area’s indigenous people. Manhattan later became the site of the Dutch city of New Amsterdam, and the borough of Manhattan of modern-day New York City. A letter written by Dutch merchant Peter Schaghen to directors of the Dutch East India Company stated that Manhattan was purchased for “60 guilders worth of trade”, an amount worth ~$1,143 U.S. dollars as of 2020.”

    Mental Floss: Was Manhattan Really Bought for $24?
    By Matt Soniak | Oct 2, 2012
    https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12657/was-manhattan-really-bought-24

    “In the Dutch National Archives is the only known primary reference to the Manhattan sale: a letter written by Dutch merchant Pieter Schage on November 5, 1626, to directors of the West India Company, which was instrumental in the exploration and settlement of “New Netherland.” In the letter, he writes, “They have purchased the Island of Manhatten from the savages for the value of 60 guilders.” (There is a surviving deed for Manhattan and Long Island, but this was made well after this initial Manhattan purchase, when the Dutch had already been inhabiting the island for several decades.)”

    Was Manhattan really sold for $24 worth of beads and trinkets?
    LiveScience
    https://www.livescience.com/was-manhattan-sold-for-24-dollars.html

    “…Also abundant in 17th-century New York were beavers — a fact that Hudson would have conveyed to his Dutch colleagues. That precipitated the arrival of thousands of people from Holland, who called their new home “New Amsterdam” and set in motion a fur trade of epic proportions. At the time, beavers’ velvety pelts were valued in Holland for the production of hats: the lucrative trade became the basis of an ongoing relationship between the Dutch and the region’s Indigenous inhabitants — among them the Lenape and Mahican peoples — wherein hundreds of thousands of pelts were provided by hunters in exchange for metal, cloth and other valuable items from the Dutch.

    But in the following decades, accounts emerged of a different trade that went far beyond beaver skins, and ultimately shaped the history of New York. In 1626, the story goes, Indigenous inhabitants sold off the entire island of Manhattan to the Dutch for a tiny sum: just $24 worth of beads and “trinkets.” This nugget of history took on such huge significance in the following centuries that it served as “the birth certificate for New York City,” Paul Otto, a professor of history at George Fox University in Oregon, wrote in a 2015 essay on the subject.

    Yet the details remain slim on exactly how this momentous exchange occurred and why the people who had inhabited the land for centuries gave it up so easily. Today, the question remains: Is this all-important piece of history even true?

    The first known mention of the historic sale comes from a 1626 letter penned by a Dutch merchant named Pieter Schagen, who wrote that a man named Peter Minuit had purchased Manhattan for 60 guilders, the Dutch currency at the time. This information fits within a crucial period of New York’s history.

    During this time, the Dutch — growing rich off the beaver trade and dependent on the Native Americans to propel their industry — were trying to secure their dominance in the New World against other European competitors. This motivated them to secure territory far and wide, across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Governors Island and Staten Island.

    Some accounts of the sale suggest that the individuals who sold Manhattan were Munsees, a subtribe of the Lenape people — though that’s not confirmed. This marks just the first of several uncertainties about the information in Schagen’s letter. Most notably, it isn’t primary evidence; Schagen’s text discusses the sale of Manhattan, but there’s no known paper record of the exchange. Schagen himself had never even been to New York, said Johanna Gorelick, manager of the education department at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. “[Schagen’s letter] is the only piece of evidence we have — the only document. Whether you call it a piece of evidence is questionable.”

    The letter contains no details of the individuals involved in the sale, nor the precise date of the exchange. “We don’t really know what happened,” Gorelick said. Even the one detailed piece of information — the 60-guilder value of the trade — has been warped through time and misinterpretation into $24. That figure was taken from a history book published in 1846 and has somehow remained unchanged since then. Adjusted to present-day value, 60 guilders would be the equivalent of more than $1,000 today. Furthermore, there’s no indication of what that money represented in terms of traded goods, though many accounts have perpetuated the questionable idea that native people sold their homelands for little more than a few “trinkets.”

    The absence of evidence doesn’t mean the exchange didn’t occur, however. Trading land was actually common during this period; there are many cases in which there is much more convincing evidence that land was exchanged in some way between Native Americans and the Dutch. For instance, there are several formal land deeds, signed by Native American sellers and Dutch buyers, for the purchase of Staten Island in 1630, for parts of Long Island in 1639, and also for Manhattan, again, in 1649.
    But considering that it’s become the defining symbol of New York City’s “origins,” that first purported 1626 sale ironically seems to be the least reliable account we have. Even assuming the historic transaction did go ahead, there are other factors that make it unlikely that Manhattan was traded so straightforwardly, as the story suggests.

    What counts as a “sale”?
    Historians have dissected the various accounts of land sales across 17th-century New Amsterdam and have concluded that broad cultural differences in the understanding of property rights and ownership would have muddied what it really meant to “sell” land.

    Some historians have noted that land trading and ideas of private landownership were not uncommon features in the economies of native people. But as well as that, land was more commonly understood as a space to be shared among different groups or, in some cases, leased between them. Less common was the idea that land might be sold and permanently relinquished to another group — which was the driving principle behind European ideas of property and ownership.

    “The Dutch came with a certain idea about property that was not the idea of the Indigenous people,” Sanderson said. “And yet those agreements that were struck in those early years in the 17th century are still the agreements that underlie all the titles in New York City today.”

    To the Native Americans who signed title deeds, it’s likely that the documents represented an agreement that the Dutch could share the land or lease it for a limited period — which might also explain why the modest payment doesn’t match the magnitude of what was seemingly being acquired by the Dutch. The trade may also have represented a guarantee of safe passage for the Dutch through the area. What’s less likely is that Indigenous Manhattanites knowingly engaged in the irrevocable sale of their ancestral home.

    In this light, the real question becomes not so much whether the 1626 sale happened but rather what it signified — and for that matter, the significance of any sale that took place in 17th-century New York. “I don’t think the exchange itself is in question. I think the meaning of that exchange is in question,” Gorelick said. This raises the question of whether the purported “sale” of New York would even be legal, in today’s terms.
    Historic accounts also suggest that the effects of land sales in New Amsterdam rarely resulted in the direct, short-term removal of Native Americans from the land, who, in many instances, occupied the land alongside the Dutch for a while. But these sales likely did create an ideological shift in colonists’ minds over who was really in control. That served the Dutch for 40 years until 1664, when they were finally edged out of New Amsterdam by the English, who moved in and named it New York. Battles over landownership grew more complex and intensified across the landscape, and over the following decades, many Native Americans were gradually displaced.

    The magnitude of the myth
    The account of Manhattan’s founding sale is, it would seem, more falsehood than truth. Why, then, has the story persisted for so long? Like any good legend, its colorful details — the $24 worth of trinkets and beads — have kept people captivated over the centuries. These details have also had a troubling effect on how the story has been interpreted.

    The misleading $24 figure makes the payment seem pitiably small. Over numerous recountings, and as shown in dozens of paintings, there’s been an emphasis on the idea that “trinkets” were all that native people received in return for their ancestral home. That has created an impression of Manhattan’s Indigenous inhabitants as guileless, unsophisticated people who were oblivious to the value of what they had, Gorelick said — an offensive interpretation that couldn’t be further from the truth.

    “Native people were extremely, extremely scrupulous traders,” she said. “They didn’t just take what was offered to them. There are great accounts from Europeans at the time which said, ‘This color cloth is not desired by native people. They would prefer this other color cloth.’ [Native people] were very much orchestrating how and what was traded in those early years.”

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Wow, what a ton of research! Two things that I recall from earlier reading on the subject were this: 1) the island was essentially an open hunting ground, without extensive permanent settlement by the various native tribes that used it, and 2) the quoted price of “24 dollars” refers to Dutch “thalers” (modern dollars did not exist at that time). In any case, it was a rotten deal for the Indians, who generally did not think of land as a fungible commodity, but rather as a loosely defined place where one tribal group tended to inhabit.

      Reply
    • Mark Stellinga

      Hi Roy, looks like I gave you a serious kick in the hiney to research this rough ‘high-schooler’ account of one of the most one-sided land-grabs of all time. A super thorough & greatly appreciated job of sharing the true facts of the matter. Thanks much. For the record, I took the poetic license of using “Diamond-Jim” Van Dyne as the culprit in my historical piece merely as a metaphor – just as ‘Grinch’ and ‘Scrooge’ are often recruited to disparage those who fit that bill, but I will add that most every ‘Diamond-Jim’ I’ve ever known has turned out a not-to-be-trusted scoundrel.

      Reply
  4. Paul A. Freeman

    Maybe this poem could be used as a document in the teaching of American history, a subject which has become so controversial of late.

    Very informative and well-written, Mark.

    Reply
    • Mark Stellinga

      Thanks for your kind words, Paul – it’s far from 100% factual, but it could make for a good conversation-starter.

      Reply
  5. Mike Bryant

    Mark, you have outdone yourself with this one!
    It seems that those Dutch guys really got up to a lot of mischief. First, I find out they killed off the dodo… and now this!
    The Dutch and the British have much to answer for. I’m glad that the Republic of Texas had nothing to do with the sins of our fathers.

    Reply
      • Mike Bryant

        Yes Paul, I know how devastating that one and a half degrees over the last hundred and fifty years has been. Of course, here in Texas, it ain’t happening. Also, as the earth has zoomed that tiny increment (less than you might notice in your back yard) here in the USA we have cleaned up our water and air, while saving the whooping crane. Amazing how actual work is so much more effective than fear mongering and money-laundering. I feel your pain… maybe you should stop flying in those disgusting commercial jets and buy you a corporate jet like all the climate saints use. Best wishes…

        https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/11/24/the-u-s-national-temperature-index-is-it-based-on-data-or-corrections/

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Paul, your obsession with this “global climate change” hysteria is getting out of control. Most of us at the SCP consider it a propagandistic distortion, so why do you keep on pushing here? It has nothing to do with poetry.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Paul can’t help himself, his programming from his leftist overlords wont let him shut up. I’ve dealt with many like him, and that’s par for the course.

        What absolutely galls me about environmentalists is how they piss and moan about the increase in use of energy when it’s caused by population growth, but are silent about when it’s caused by technological advances (for example, the switch to ebooks uses more energy and resources than printing paper books). Or how they plead for future generations while they push for killing the next generation. This shows their hatred of humanity like little else. Perhaps those who want humans to die should practice what they preach.

      • Mike Bryant

        Paul, I read your link. The mice were introduced to Marion Island, South Africa some 200 years ago! I wonder if any Dutch sailors were involved.

        According to the warming narrative, 200 years ago was when we had perfect weather. So these mice did just fine until experts introduced feral cats in 1949 to kill the mice!

        But then the cats started eating the seabirds and breeding, so the experts decided to eradicate the cats using poisons, viruses, traps and hunters with dogs! I wonder how much they scammed off of taxpayers with that sweet scheme? Anyway whatever they thought it would cost was wrong because Marion Island wasn’t cat-free until 1979. (Correction 1993)

        Now these guys want 25 Million Bucks for helicopter dropped poisons (because the cats didn’t work) – they obviously know what they are doing.

        I mourn the cats that had to die at the hands of the government-paid butchers. Now they’re coming after the house mouse in 2027 when they get funding.

        The main bright spot is that Marion Island is not a honeymoon destination. I would hate to think about South African honeymooners in the same place all those mice, birds and ill-fated felines were burnt on the pyre of human idiocy.

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Joshua — your remark that technological changes often do not save time or labor, but instead increase both of them, is an important insight. This was brought up back in 1948 by the German writer Friedrich Junger, in his absolutely pivotal (but ignored) book “The Failure of Technology.” This book, written in the backwash of the technological explosion of the Second World War, pointed out that while new technology could provide some convenience and speed, the larger drive for technology demanded a HUGE amount of new labor, expenditure of money and energy, increased complexity, and a bewildering array of vast support and supply systems that would make the world deeply uncomfortable, tyrannical, and eventually unlivable.

        This is precisely what we are living with today.

        It is significant that the most voluble and fanatical supporters of new technology are left-liberals, who are the small elite that benefits from both the incidental conveniences of technical developments, and the opportunities for deeper social control that technology makes possible.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Wow, I have to read The Failure of Technology!

        What you describe reminds me of a quote from Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski. While obviously I don’t agree with his resorting to violence, he makes a really good point:

        “The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.” (“Industrial Society and Its Future”)

  6. Stephen Dickey

    When I read back about things like this I always remember Chief Dan George in “The Outlaw Josie Wales”:
    “We thought about it for a long time—‘Endeavor to persevere’. And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union.”

    Reply
    • Mark Stellinga

      Stephen, rightly so – a small shot at ‘reparations’ has been attempted here and there now and then, but, sadly, there’s no truly adequate way to appease for the immeasurable theft perpetrated by our forefathers. My wife and I absolutely love that movie, and thank God that feisty little squaw escaped her demise when Josie rushed to save her from “Dan the Brute” – 🙂

      Reply
  7. C.B Anderson

    Forget about Manhatten. I would have paid them twice as much for all the clams on Long Island. Nowadays, a good, clam goes for a couple bucks or more, same as oysters.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      In colonial times, both Manhattan and Long Island were awash in huge oysters and clams. You could have lived off them free for the rest of your life if you had a mind to.

      As late as the 1950s, when my family went to the beaches out on Long Island, my father and grandfather would go out into the surf, dig with their hands into the sand, and come up with clams of all sizes, some quite large. The next day these were made into a big chowder.

      Reply
    • Mark Stellinga

      C. B., in 1634, a person wouldn’t have had to ‘own’ that particular property, of course, just to snatch up its countless clams and oysters, which, as you opine, have since been so greedily exploited as a great culinary delicacy. A friendly tip – it normally helps to purchase item of this sort in bulk!

      Reply
  8. Mark Stellinga

    Hi Mike, thank you for your kind and encouraging comment. 🙂 It has been brought to my attention that the most accepted spelling of this small tribe (of the 3 available) is actually ‘Canarsee’. And its spelling for ‘plural’ is the same! Can I get you to correct my 2 oversights in stanza 2 & in the last? I’m perfectly OK with leaving “Diamond-Jim” Van Dyne as is…I’m sure he was mixed up in this at some point! Thanks much, Mark — “Hi” to the boss.

    Reply
  9. Cheryl Corey

    I think that a reference to “beads” tends to trivialize the transaction. We should recall, however, that “wampum” beads were considered a valuable form of currency. From what I’ve read, the Dutch had used it as currency since 1622, and it was used as a form of currency in NY until about 1673. The $24 worth of beads, etc. probably felt like a small fortune back then.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Wampum belts were extremely valuable. The making of the small cylindrical beads of white and purple clamshell was very labor intensive, and the careful stringing and pattern arrangement took much time. Both the Dutch in New York and the English in New England quickly appreciated the value of wampum, and used it as a medium of exchange. Although it did not have the intrinsic value of gold or silver, it was highly prized both for its beauty, its comparative rarity, and because would be accepted by both whites and Indians in trade. In this sense it functioned just as paper money does today — not for being materially valuable, but because it is recognized as a marker of economic purchasing power.

      I can’t help saying this: a wampum belt was the epitome of a fictive artifact, the value of which lay in its beauty, and in the esteem in which it was held.

      Reply
      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        Thank you for elaborating on the value of wampum.

  10. Lannie David Brockstein

    Mark, a modern day historical rhyme for the sale of Manhattan, is the sale of the Moon by The Lunar Embassy company. According to its website, it is selling extraterrestrial plots of land for the fantastically low price of $35 per acre!

    https://lunarembassy.com/product/buy-land-on-the-moon/

    But anybody who looks at the Moon can clearly see it is made of snow, and thus that it is like the Arctic, whereby underneath all of that snow there is only water and not any land.

    Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem. But as every woke maven knows, due to climate change it won’t be long before the temperature of the Earth has become hot enough to melt the Moon! So what would be the point of buying land on the Moon?

    That would be as ridiculous as buying land on the Sun!

    Reply

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