Wappinger (people)

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Traditional residential areas of the Wappinger around 1600.

The Wappinger or Wappani were a group of Indian tribes that formed a confederation in the Wappinger War . Their traditional residential area stretched east of the Hudson River in southern New York State to the Connecticut border .

Demographics

At the beginning of the 17th century there were around 8,000 Wappingers, spread over about 18 tribes and 30 villages. Diseases introduced by Europeans, especially smallpox epidemics in 1633-1635 and 1692, caused the tribes to shrink to 10 percent of their population by the end of the century. Wars also contributed to the population loss , especially the devastating Wappinger War (1643–1645) against the Dutch , in which they lost at least 1,600 tribesmen. At the beginning of the 18th century there were only a few hundred Wappingers left in the lower Hudson Valley, but by 1760 almost all of them had disappeared. They'd moved to the Mahican in Stockbridge , the Iroquois in New York, or the Lenni Lenape in Pennsylvania . Possible descendants of the Wappinger are the Ramapough Mountain Indians in northern New Jersey , who consist of a mixture of remnants of the Munsee , Mattabesic , Wappinger and other groups and have around 2500 tribal members.

Name and language

Wappinger means Easterners in the Algonquian language and refers to all members of the related and loosely allied groups of the Wappinger Confederation; originally it was the name of a single small tribe east of the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie . There are a large number of synonyms for the Wappinger, for example Wappinck, Wapping, Wappingo, Wawping, but also Highland Indians, Opine and Pompton. Their now-extinct language was an Algonquin dialect called Quiripi , which was understood by the Mattabesic in western Connecticut and the Metoac in western and central Long Island .

Groups of Wappingers

The Wappingers were once divided into the following groups or sachemships :

Villages: Kitchawank, Sackhoe and Senasqua

  • Massaco (along the Farmington River in Connecticut)
  • Mattabesic (also Mattabesset , Mattabeseck in what is now New Haven County , Connecticut)
  • Menunkatuck (also Menunkatuc , along the coast in what is now New Haven County, Connecticut)
  • Nochpeem (northern Putnam and southern Dutchess County, New York)

Villages: Canopus (Canpopus), Keskistkonk, Nochpeem and Pasquasheck

  • Paugussett (along the Housatonic River in what is now eastern Fairfield County , Connecticut and western New Haven County, Connecticut)
  • Podunk (east of the Connecticut River in what is now eastern Hartford County , Connecticut)
  • Poquonock (western Hartford County, Connecticut)
  • Quinnipiac (also Quiripi , in the center of what is now New Haven County, Connecticut)
  • Rechgawawanc (also Recgawawanc , Reckgawawank , lived along the Spuyten Duyvil Creek in today's Manhattan and the Hudson River in New York, at the confluence of the two rivers was an island that they used as a trading center called Papparimamim)
  • Sicaog (in what is now Hartford County, Connecticut)
  • Sintsink (also Sinsink , east of the Hudson River between Tarrytown and Croton in what is now Westchester County, New York)

Villages: Kestaubuinck and Ossingsing (Sin-Sing)

  • Siwanoy (also Sinanoy , along the coast in what is now Westchester County, New York and east of Norwalk in southwest Fairfield County , Connecticut)

Villages: Cassacuhque, Noroaton (Roatan), Norwauke (Norwalk), Poningo and Sioascauk

Villages: Aspetuck, Mount Misery, Pahquioke, Saugatuck, and Shippan

  • Tunxis, southwest Hartford County, Connecticut
  • Wappinger (also Waping or Wappani , east of the Hudson River between Wappinger Falls and Poughkeepsie in what is now Dutchess County, New York)

Villages: Poughkeepsie and Waping

  • Wechquaesgeek (also Wecquaesgeek , Wiechquaeskeck , Wickquaskeek , east of the Hudson River between the Bronx and Tarrytown in what is now southwestern Westchester County, New York)

Villages: Alipkconk, Nappeckamak, Nipinichsen, Rechouwakie, Rechtauck (Rechgawank, Reckawawana), Wecquaesgeek and Wysquaqua

However, it must be noted that the tribes of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware), Wappinger, Mahican , Mattabesic and the Western Metoac all belonged to the Eastern Algonquin and could therefore hardly be distinguished from outsiders culturally and linguistically.

Some historians count the Manhattan , Nochpeem , Kichtawank , Rechgawawanc , Sintsink , Wechquaesgeek and Wappinger to the Munsee (the so-called Northern Delaware , a dialect group of the Lenni Lenape), the Hammonasset , Massaco , Menunkatuck , Paugussett , Podunk , Poquonock , Quinnipiac (also Quiripi) , Sicaog and Tunxis are often counted among the Mattabesic .

The Manhattan are also sometimes counted among the Wappingern, while the Paugussett and Mattabesic are often viewed as separate tribes or tribal groups. The Canar Sea , Massapequa , Matinecock and Rockaway, on the other hand, are sometimes included in the Munsee or Western Metoac .

Wappinger Confederation

Together with tribes of the Munsee (the northern dialect group of the Lenni Lenape ), western and eastern Metoac (especially the Canarsee ) and tribes of the Mattabesic , these united in the 17th century to form the so-called Wappinger Confederation . In the following Wappinger War (1643–1645) (also Gouverneur Kiefts War ) and in the Peach War (also Peach Tree War ) of 1655, the allied tribes fought against the Dutch and their powerful trading partners, the Mohawk belonging to the Iroquois League . More than 1,500 Wappingers were killed during the Wappinger War. In the Peach War that followed, an estimated 100 white settlers and 60 Wappingers perished and relations between the Dutch and the Indians remained strained. After the defeat in the Peach War, the Wappinger Confederation broke up, and many of the surviving Wappingers left their homes and joined neighboring tribes such as the Munsee and Mahican. Groups of the former confederation fought again on the side of the Esopus , a powerful Munsee tribe in the so-called Esopus Wars from 1659 to 1664.

Way of life and culture

Like their neighbors, the Wappingers were divided into small units and led by a sachem whose power, however, was very limited. His influence was mostly limited to a few villages, each of which was subordinate to a clan chief and from which the tribal council was formed. The exception was wartime, when a war chief with special powers was elected for the duration of the conflict. A preferred trade item of the Wappingers was a special form of wampum , which was very popular with other tribes and was later even accepted as a means of payment by the whites. Wars between tribes were fought over Wampum and the Wappingers were particularly hard hit. In addition to their villages, they had at least two fortresses, under whose protection they could escape in case of threat.

Like their neighbors, the people of Wapping were farming. In the vicinity of the villages, the forest was burned down and the residents laid gardens between the charred tree stumps. The gardens were usually on the small side, but intermediate harvests appear to have produced sufficient amounts of food by the Wappingers, mostly corn , beans , squash (a type of pumpkin) and probably sunflower and tobacco . Horticulture was certainly of great importance and was primarily in the hands of women.

In the spring, enormous schools of herrings and shads (Alosa sapidissima) came up the Hudson and its tributaries. The men spent most of the summer fishing and gathering large quantities of freshwater clams, using their dugout canoes and bark canoes , or working on fish traps in the smaller rivers. Much of the catch was dried and smoked on the spot for winter supply.

After the harvest had been stored in pits covered with grass or bark, called "Indian barns" by the colonists, small groups of men went hunting. In the autumn, the tribes organized joint driven hunts , followed by a deer sacrifice ritual . In November, the Wappinger families dispersed in their traditional hunting ground and stayed there until mid-winter. They then returned to their villages to take part in a bear sacrifice ritual. In March the men went hunting for moose . Bows and arrows, spears and a variety of traps were used in hunting, which the Indians supplied with both meat and skins for clothing. The hunting grounds were in the foothills of the mountain ranges along the upper reaches of the rivers and streams. The mountains themselves were rarely visited because there was little game in these areas and the Indians believed that they were possibly inhabited by evil spirits. The Dutch reported of the Wappinger custom of often cooking the animals with their entrails so that they were inedible for Dutch guests - nevertheless, many of them married Wappinger women.

In the warmer months, the Wappingers lived in the summer houses of their villages and moved to the fortresses in winter. The Hudson River served as a route of transport and was called Mahicantuk by them and the Mahican . That means always flowing river , because the lower reaches of the Hudson are exposed to the tides . Old folks who stayed home during the winter usually spent their time doing a variety of different handicrafts. For example, older men carved wooden bowls, mortars and spoons, while older women specialized in pottery, weaving bags, baskets and mats, and decorating leather clothing with paint and red-dyed porcupine bristles .

history

Verrazzano's voyage of 1524.

Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first to explore the narrow approach to New York Harbor in 1524 , which today bears his name . His encounter with the natives was friendly, but he tried to kidnap some of them on his return trip . Over the next 80 years the Indians had repeated at the lower Hudson River with English and Spanish contact, on their ships to the Gulf Stream along the East Coast from the Caribbean drove coming back to Europe. The Wappinger and other coastal tribes learned to fear the Europeans, for they dragged them off as slaves on their ships or stole their food supplies.

Dutch

Peter Minuit, founder of New York

In 1609, in search of the Northwest Passage , Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name with his ship Half Moon and a crew of 18, and traded furs from some of the Indians living there. When the news of Hudson's trip reached the Netherlands , the Amsterdam merchants promised high profits from the lucrative fur trade. Several competing groups of merchants, shipowners and boatmen sent ships to North America in the years after 1610 and outbid one another in the price of the fur the Indians traded in.

The Wappingers on the lower Hudson River were hostile to the Dutch. They therefore drove further upstream and obtained their furs from the tribes living there, especially the Mahican and Mohawk. In 1613 the Dutch opened their first trading post at Fort Nassau on Castle Island, south of what is now Albany .

After 1610, the Dutch tried to improve their relationship with the Wappingern, Munsee and Metoac. In 1626 the new general manager of Nieuw Nederland , Peter Minuit , made an offer to buy the Canarsee stored there for the island of Manhattan . The Canar Sea was not the owner of this land, but accepted the offer of 60 guilders anyway, with the Indians probably receiving the equivalent in the form of trade goods. However, there is no sufficiently reliable evidence for the legendary purchase of Manhattan by Peter Minuit. Fort Amsterdam was built at the southern end of the island and next door Nieuw Amsterdam was built for farmers to supply the soldiers of the garrison with food. Further Dutch settlements emerged on the lower reaches of the Hudson, also on the tribal area of ​​the Wappinger. In contrast to the Mahicans, relations between the Dutch and Wappers and their neighbors have always remained tense.

The colony of Nieuw Nederland was essentially a private trading company and was founded and administered by the Dutch West India Company ( WIC ) in 1621. Nieuw Nederland suffered from a chronic shortage of settlers until the middle of the century, which hampered the colony's development. The trading company tried to increase the number of immigrants through special incentives for donors. It enabled some of its financially strong directors to establish a hereditary manor overseas. The WIC left small units of private land to the landlords, the so-called patroons , on which they received extensive rights, from tax collection to jurisdiction. In return, the patroon undertook to settle at least fifty people over the age of fifteen on his property within four years. But the patronage system failed, despite generous offers, not enough immigrants could be recruited. Only when the company gave up the fur trade monopoly in 1639 did Dutch migrants arrive in large numbers. Yet in 1643 there were fewer than 750 colonists in Nieuw Nederland.

Wappinger War

In 1639 Willem Kieft was appointed the new general manager of Nieuw Nederland. He should restore law, order and morality in the young colony and generate more profit. Kieft showed little intuition in dealing with the indigenous people and due to his merciless harshness he had made enemies of almost all the Indians in the colony in a short time.

Tensions intensified and Kieft finally believed that a general Indian revolt against the Dutch and English colonists was being organized. He therefore ordered a surprise attack on several Wecquaesgeek villages that belonged to the Wappinger Alliance . This action later became known as the Pavonia massacre . On February 25, 1643, Dutch soldiers raided a peaceful Wecquaesgeek village near the settlement of Pavonia near what is now Jersey City , killing 110 Indians. This massacre led to the outbreak of the Wappinger War (1643–1645), also known as Kieft's War . The Wappingers and surviving Wecquaesgeek retaliated and raided remote Dutch farms and settlements. Most of the colonists fled to Fort Amsterdam, where Willem Kieft was preparing for a lengthy siege. The war now also reached the tribes on western Long Island. Eventually twenty smaller tribes united in the Wappinger Confederation to fight the Dutch.

Although little is known about it today, the Wappinger War was one of the bloodiest and cruelest wars of extermination against the Indians. The sometimes tiny tribes of the region were not able to hold their own against the combined combat strength of Dutch and British soldiers, as well as Mohegan warriors. Although the Dutch were almost defeated at the beginning of the conflict, the situation changed decisively when in 1644 two companies under the command of Captain John Underhill , consisting of Mohegan scouts and Connecticut colonists, rushed to their aid. In the same year there was a Dutch-English attack on a Siwanoy village near Greenwich , in which almost 700 Indians were killed. By the end of that war in 1645, nearly 1,600 Wappers and Native American allies had lost their lives.

In April 1644 the sachems of the Wappinger and some other tribes asked for peace in Fort Amsterdam. Only the Metoac on Long Island wanted to keep fighting. Through the mediation of the Mohawk and Mahican, a peace treaty was finally signed in Fort Orange in August 1644, which obliged the Wappinger and Metoac tribes to pay an annual tribute in the form of wampum to the Mahican. The Mahican had no losses of their own and the Treaty of Fort Orange enabled them to control the wampum trade in western Long Islands. The Metoac, for their part, had been nearly decimated in this conflict. To heighten the humiliation, the Mahican did not collect the due tribute themselves, but instead sent the Wappinger to the Metoac as their collectors. The lack of payments resulted in raids by the Wappingers on Metoac villages without the Dutch intervening.

Peach War

In the following period, the Wappinger avoided further conflicts with the Dutch and in 1649 the Wechquaesgeek sold their land at the northern end of Manhattan. Nevertheless, there was one last confrontation between the Wappers and the Dutch in 1655, the so-called Peach War . A Dutch farmer named Van Dyke in Manhattan shot and killed a wapping woman while she was stealing peaches in his garden. Over 200 Wappinger warriors then came down the Hudson in canoes to kill Van Dyke, but were embroiled in a skirmish with the Dutch military. The Wappingers fled across the Hudson River, united with the Hackensack, and burned Dutch farms on the west bank of the river at Pavonia, on Staten Island and Hoboken . At the end of the war, 50 Dutch people had died and ransom had to be paid for 50 other colonists captured.

British

When the government in the Netherlands learned of Kieft's devastating policies and the massacres, he was replaced in 1647 and Petrus Stuyvesant was appointed as his successor. The Dutch colony was taken over by the British in 1664 without a fight and renamed New York in honor of the Duke of York , their future king .

Between 1683 and 1685 the Wappingers sold more than 25 miles of their land east of the Hudson River. Most of the Wappingers moved north to the Mahican villages on the Housatonic River in western Connecticut, or to the Algonquians in Schaghticoke , who had fled there after the King Philip's War . The disappearance of the Wappinger is typical of almost all eastern tribes when they encounter white civilization. Alcohol abuse played a crucial role in the social decline of many Indians and in dubious land sales to whites. Regularly recurring smallpox epidemics in 1636, 1656 and 1692, as well as the colonial wars between the British and the French decimated the tribes. Almost two thirds of the Indian warriors who voluntarily fought on the British side lost their lives.

Small groups of the Wappingers left their traditional residential area at the beginning of the 18th century. Some moved north and settled in Schaghticoke on the upper Hudson River or east to the Mahican in Stockbridge, Massachusetts , Massachusetts . Others went to Lenni Lenape in northern New Jersey . Around 1730 there were only a few hundred Wappingers in the lower Hudson Valley who no longer posed a threat to their white neighbors. Increasingly, Christian missionaries tended to the remains of the tribes in southern New England and tried to curb the illegal sale of alcohol to Indians. The Moravian Church (English: Moravian Church ) built in 1740 on a mission in Shekomeko, today's Pine Plains , New York, for Wappinger and Mahican.

Colonial wars

In King George's War (1744–1748), the Abenaki from Canada, allied with the French, raided white settlements in Vermont , New Hampshire and the Hudson Valley. In response, the colonists attacked several peaceful Munsee villages near Walden in New York in the fall of 1745 . The surviving Wappinger and Munsee then fled to Pennsylvania . In the French and Indian War (1755–1763) Abenaki from Odanak again raided settlements of the British colonists in New England and took many of the Wappinger, Mahican and Munsee families with them on the way back to Canada. This also made the remaining Indians suspicious of supporting the French. In December 1755 there was a decree calling on the natives to move closer to the white settlements for "their own safety". On March 2, 1756, a group of white vigilantes led by William Slaughter killed nine peaceful Munsee. Thereupon 196 Wappinger and Munsee moved north to the Iroquois, while another group fled to the Moravian mission settlements Peace Huts and Gnadenhütten in Pennsylvania. A final group went to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and converted to Christianity under John Sergeant .

Migration to the west

In the course of the Pontiac uprising (1763–1766), the Moravians completed their missions in Pennsylvania, the Wappinger living there joined the general migration to the west and were later absorbed by the Lenni Lenape. The Wappinger living with the Iroquois mixed with the Nanticoke , who were refugees from Maryland . In the American War of Independence (1774–1783) they fought on the side of the British, had to leave New York in 1783 and move to southern Ontario. Some of their descendants can be found there today with the Delaware of the Thames and Munsee-Delaware First Nation .

The remaining Wappinger and Mahican land in Duchess and Putnam Counties in New York was confiscated by the state in 1758. Daniel Nimham , the last great sachem of the Wappingers, therefore went to London to reverse this action. He was heard and went to court in New York in 1762 to reclaim the land that had been expropriated without compensation. The trial was interrupted by the start of the War of Independence.

During the War of Independence, the Wappinger, Mahican and Iroquois initially remained neutral. In 1774 they joined Hendrick Aupaumut from Stockbridge and supported the Americans. They fought in most of the great battles of the war. Daniel Nimham and 40 of his warriors were killed in the Battle of Kingsbridge in August 1778. Half of the Wappinger and Mahican of military age fell on the US side in that war . As a thank you, the surviving tribal members had to leave Stockbridge and settled with the Oneida in New Stockbridge , New York State. In the following years the Brothertown Indians from Connecticut and Long Island also moved to the Oneida. By 1820 they lost their land to white speculators and New York State and were relocated to Wisconsin near Green Bay .

Todays situation

In 1856 the United States bought land from the Menominee and established a joint reservation for the Stockbridge, Brothertown, and Munsee. Native American clothing, restricted to a conservative minority anyway, completely disappeared in the 1870s. The last speakers of the Wappinger language died in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some knowledge and the use of medicinal herbs are still there among older people.

Today the tribe is federally recognized as the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians of Wisconsin , the reservation they inhabit is called the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and counted 2,012 tribesmen in the 2000 census.

A forest management plan ensures limited employment in the timber industry. Handicrafts, produced part-time by some craftsmen in the tribal workshops, provide additional income. Some men do farm work on the reservation and some jobs are in the Shawano County trade . However, most of the tribe members have to look elsewhere for their work. Many young people have become skilled workers in Milwaukee and other cities and only spend their weekends on the reservation. The women work in the potato harvest in Antigo County and then go to Door County as cherry pickers.

Since the Indian reservation school closed in 1952, children have been attending school in Bowler and Gresham . The high degree of adaptation to the American lifestyle has had a positive effect on relations with the white population and leads to an increasing number of marriages between the two groups. Children from these mixed marriages who have at least a quarter of Stockbridge-Munsee blood can be granted tribal membership.

The city of Wappinger and the village of Wappingers Falls , both in New York State, were named after this people.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Lee Sultzman: Wappinger History. In: dickshovel.com. June 28, 1997, accessed March 5, 2019 .
  2. ↑ James Renner: Spuyten Duyvil Creek and the Harlem River Ship Canal. In: Washington Heights NYC. August 2005, accessed March 5, 2019 .
  3. ^ New York Indian Tribes. In: Access Genealogy. Archived from the original on February 11, 2012 ; accessed on March 5, 2019 .
  4. ^ Carl Waldmann: Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes , ISBN 978-0-8160-6274-4
  5. ↑ a b c Handbook of North American Indians - Chapter: Mahican, page 198ff
  6. ↑ Lee Sultzman: Mattabesic History. In: dickshovel.com. November 15, 1997, accessed March 5, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Lee Sultzman: Metoac History. In: dickshovel.com. January 23, 1999, accessed March 5, 2019 .
  8. ^ Stockbridge-Munsee History. In: Milwaukee Public Museum. December 14, 2017, accessed March 5, 2019 .