The Mohican Board! [Bumppo's Redux!] - Fort Orange, Dutch West Indian Co., Beverwyck, New Netherland

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Fort Orange, Dutch West Indian Co., Beverwyck, New Netherland

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MoneminsCastle
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November 27 2008

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Posted - May 21 2009 : 1:21:26 PM

Fort Orange

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From the NYS Museum http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/loc/fortorange.html

Fort Orange is the name given to the fur trading post erected in 1624 on the west bank of the Hudson just south of the future site of Albany. The Dutch West India Company built similar structures to serve as their headquarters in many parts of their worldwide trading empire. The small, wooden structure with four bastions shown below was to be the West India Company's official outpost in the upper Hudson Region.

The Company staffed the "fort" with employees to conduct business, kept a small detachment of soldiers to protect the outpost and maintain order, and sponsored a number of farmers to provide food and other necessities. Some of each of those groups of settlers lived in small huts within the fort. The others lived in separate structures located outside the walls.

However, before long, employees, soldiers, and farmers alike realized the great potential of bartering for furs and many of those living in the area committed their best energies to securing beaver and other skins from Native American hunters. By 1639, the Company realized the folly of trying to maintain its fur trading monopoly and instead sought to tax the furs exported from Fort Orange. By the 1640s, these new traders had come together in a community of interest surrounding but mostly north of the fort. In 1652, a court was created to help structure activities in the fledgling, multi-purpose settlement called Beverwyck.

By that time, the almost annual spring overflow of the Hudson had taken its toll on flood plain-sited Fort Orange. As the fur trade became less and less profitable to the West India Company, the company committed fewer resources to maintaining Fort Orange. During the late 1640s, New Netherland Governor Petrus Stuyvesant sought to rehabilitate the fort as a military outpost and also granted permits to individual traders to build within the fort's walls. However, despite considerable refurbishing, his efforts were shortlived. With the emergence of Beverwyck and another devestating flood in 1654, this initial center of settlement was all but abandoned by the end of the decade.

In 1664, New Netherland fell to the English and Beverwyck was renamed "Albany." Fort Orange fell into further decay as the English looked instead to a more elevated location for their headquarters. By 1676, the English had built a new fort overlooking the community on upper State Street.

As time passed, the image of Fort Orange faded from view. In 1687, the new city of Albany sold the land around the old fort to the Dutch Reformed Church for use as pastureland. The ruins remained. During the eighteenth century it was shown on contemporary maps and labeled "ruins of an Old Fort." By 1769, traveller Richard Smith observed that there was "nothing to be seen of Fort Orange . . . but the Ditch which surrounded it."

During the 1790s, a large home (called a "mansion") and a number of outbuildings were built on the site for Simeon De Witt - afterwards surveyor-general of New York State.

Following De Witt's death, the property then became the "Fort Orange Hotel" and was a well-known establishment opposite the steamboat landing. It burned in the fire of 1848 and a new Fort Orange Hotel was built on the site afterwards.

In 1886, a bronze commemorative tablet was erected on the site to commemorate the bicentenniel of Albany's chartering. It was moved to its present location perhaps during railroad railroad construction or the building of the Dunn Memorial Bridge in 1930..

In 1971, archeological excavations preceding highway construction unearthed a large portion of the original fort.

In 1993, the location was declared a National Historical Landmark.

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Fort Orange Archeological Site - National Historic Landmark Nomination - Paul R. Huey and Robert S. Grumet - Archeologists
http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/93001620.pdf

Excerpts:

Archeological evidence recovered during salvage excavations, undertaken from 1970 to 1971, shows that site attributes had been drawing Indian people to the locale for at least 1,000 years when Henry Hudson, an English navigator employed by the Duth, made the first recorded visit to the area in 1609. . .

Fort Nassau was located in the heart of the Mahican Indian homeland. Regarding the post as a rich resource, bothy they and their Iroquois-speaking Mohawk neighters to the west soon found themselves competing to control acess to the post. . .

Establishment of Fort Orange intensified Mahican-Mohawk trade rivalry. Anxious to forge good relations with his closest Indian neighbors, For command Daniel van Krieckenbeeck openly sided with the Mahicans in open difiance of Company policy in the early spring of 1626. Some months later, Mohawk warriors killed Krieckenbeeck and three of the six Company employees accompanying a Mahican war party in an ambush just three miles from the fort.

Van Krieckenbeeck's successor immediately met with the Mohawks. Having sustained no losses in the encounter, the Mohawks quickly agrreed to restore friendly relations with the Dutch. Turning their full attention to the Mahicans, the Mohawks managed to defeat and drive them away from lands around Fort Orange by 1628. . .

Fort Orange's inhabitants increasingly relied upon the wall of flesh of their Mohawk allies for protection against possible French, English, or Indian attack. In return, Stuyvesant authorized fort personnel to establish "a moderate trade in munitions" with the Mohawks to be carried out as "secretely as possible." Armed with Dutch guns and supplied with Dutch lead and powder, Mohawk and other Iroquois warriors renewed their warefare against Indian and European rivals along their borders. Within a few years, Iroquois war parties defeated the Eries and their allies to the west, launched attackes against Susquehannocks to the south and New England Algonquians to the east, and virtually cut New France off from its western Indian allies.

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POSTER'S NOTES:

The beavers along the Hudson River were wiped out within a few years of trapping. Dutch fur traders had to go father north and farther west to find pelts to export back to Europe. West meant down the Mohawk river and trade with the Mohawk and other Five Nation's tribes. The Dutch were unscrupulous and had no qualms about trading the Mohawks arms and ammunition for beaver pelts. A trade could be made for a musket in exchange for a pile of beaver pelts as tall as the musket.

A beaver hat was a sign of class distinction in Europe and was selling London for 40 schillings or $560-$600, in 1583! There were enormous amounts of profit to be made. Guns - no problem. The Dutch would have sold them cannon if they weren't so heavy and could have dragged them into the forest. http://people.ucsc.edu/~kfeinste/history.html

Now the Mahicans living in very close proximity to the Dutch had endured wave and wave of epidemic of european disease: smallpox, spotted fever, yelloe fever, measles, influenza, scarlet fever, diptheria.

An excerpt from a 19th century publication called The Sanitarian:
CONTAGIONS AND EPIDEMICS IN AMERICA By WILLIAM M.BEACH, M.D., London
...the first pestilence on this continent, of which we have undisputed proof, occurred among the aborigines of the eastern coast, in 1617. How general this epidemic was, remains an uncertainty; but in 1618-19 Captain Dermer, an English adventurer, wintered among the Indians ; and as he coasted southward in the spring toward Virginia, he stopped in several towns that he had visited the season before. He says that he found many Indian towns " totally depopulated." In other towns a few remained alive, but not " free of sickness." The disease, he says, was the "plague, for we might perceive the sores of some
that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die.
~~~~

An exerpt from Muh-he-ka-ne-ok, a History of the Stockbridge Nation By John Nelson Davidson

Where are the twenty- five thousand in number, and the four
thousand warriors, who constituted the power and population of
the great Muh-he-con-new Nation in 1604? They have been victims
to vice and disease, which the white man imported. The
small-pox, measles, and "strong waters" have done the work of annihilation. Wannuaucon, the Muhheconnew
~~~~

I read that the mortality rate from the first few years with the Dutch was 90%. Many that lived fell into the alcoholism and their family structure disintegrated. The Dutch were swindling the Mahicans out of their land.

The armed Mohawks were sending war parties west of the Schoharie Creek (http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=42.918092,-74.260712&spn=0.079199,0.216122&t=p&z=13) and into Mahican territory. By 1628 the Mohawks drove the surviving and severely weakened Mahicans off their land - something the Mohawks could never had dreamt of doing before and after their league of Nations, for hundreds if not a thousand years. All it took was 19 years of the Dutch.

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