It Happened Here--The Esopus Wars

For several hundred years the Esopus people lived along the banks of the stream that bore their name and flowed into the great North River. Flooding regularly in the springtime, the Esopus Creek renewed the soils within its flood plain and nourished the Native Americans fields of maize and beans. When the Dutch began exploring the North River  (Hudson) Valley they landed at a small natural harbor where the Rondout Creek enters the Hudson. As they explored some three miles inland they came upon the rich bottom lands of the Esopus Creek. By 1652 they had begun settling there and started farming, buying choice plots of land from the Esopus Indians. In the six years that followed, however, tensions between the Dutch and the Indians rose as the Dutch appropriated more land, misunderstandings blossomed between the two radically different cultures, and Dutch cattle and hogs ran wild and destroyed Indian corn. Dutch brandy, an important trade good, and a  commodity highly desired by the Indians, exacerbated strained relationships.

Fair Street, Kingston

By early1658 the Dutch settlers of Esopus, as the settlement came to be known, began petitioning the New Netherlands Director-governor, Peter Stuyvesant, to station soldiers at Esopus to protect its Dutch inhabitants. Stuyvesant could not ignore their requests because Esopus was becoming the bread basket of the colony. He arrived there in May 1658, not with a large number of garrison troops but with a carpenter, Frederick Phillipse,  and plan to require the inhabitants to build a stockade and a fort to defend themselves. Surveying the high ground on a bluff overlooking the Esopus Creek flood plain, Stuyvesant directed the building of a stockade with 14 foot high walls. Incorporated in the southern wall was a fort. In typical fashion for the Director-governor, he then issued a set of rules requiring that all residents who went out during the day to cut wood or work their fields must return to their new homes within the stockade, at night.

Wall St., cor. of Main St., Kingston

But tensions remained high until in September 1659 when a prominent member of the community employed a small number of local Indians to harvest and husk his corn, paying them in brandy. The Indians celebrated their windfall by consuming the brandy at once and becoming roaring drunk outside the walls of the stockade. A couple of soldiers were sent from the fort to determine if the drunken Indians were a threat to the community, but returned, deciding they were not. Meanwhile another armed group of farmers and a few soldiers sallied forth to disperse the Indians. One Indian was shot dead, another semi-conscious Indian was struck in the head with a cutlass and the Dutch mob fired a volley into the mostly-insensate Indians, killing another and wounding several. The Indians ran for their lives. The next day over 500 irate Esopus Indians laid siege to the town and began destroying the inhabitants crops, livestock. barns and other structures, beyond the village palisades.  For three weeks Esopus was besieged as Stuyvesant attempted to raise a relief force of volunteers, first among the inhabitants of Fort Orange and Rensselaerwyck, then among residents of New Amsterdam.  Incentives of plunder and Indian captives that might be sold into slavery in other Dutch West Indian colonies went largely unheeded.  Finally, Stuyvesant issued an order of conscription for  Company servants, clerks, brewers and bakers of New Amsterdam and he was able field a army of 160 villagers and soldiers to relieve Esopus. The Director-Governor pursued the war vigorously, capturing an Indian castle, taking plunder and captives. The Esopus Indians sued for peace, but Stuyvesant refused and continued the war until the fall of 1660, then demanding the Indians sell to the Dutch the remaining land along the Esopus creek plus large tracts along the Rondout and Wallkill creeks, as the price for peace. When the Indians inquired as to the fate of their brethren in captivity,  Stuyvesant declared they should consider them as dead, for they had been sold into slavery in the Dutch colony of Curacao.

 In 1661 Esopus was given a proper Dutch name, Wiltwijk. The following year, Dutch farmers settled lands further up the Esopus creek, calling their settlement Niew Dorp.

 Indian resentments remained high until June 1, 1663 when a number of Indians entered the stockade  to trade with villagers. Small groups of Indians filtered through the town offering small amounts of corn and beans for sale. Suddenly a messenger rode to the fort crying that Niew Dorp was under attack. The traders turned on the villagers and a slaughter began. Houses on the southern end of the village, the windward side, were set ablaze. The attackers positioned themselves in corner houses to fire on the defenders and to cut down villagers rushing in from their fields to grab weapons from their homes. Women and children were carried off.  Total destruction of the town was avoided only because the wind abruptly shifted direction.  Niew Dorp was destroyed, and not resettled for three years when it was renamed Hurley. One account listed twelve men, four women and two children killed in Wiltwijk with ten women and children taken hostage and twelve homes burned; another claimed twenty dead, and forty five captured.  Niew Dorp suffered three men killed, and eight women and twenty six children abducted.

In the first weeks of July New Netherlands mobilized for a war with the Esopus Indians.  Allies were sought among the Mohawks and the Long Island tribes. Provisions and troops were ferried up the North River to the landing on the Rondout, and carted, under guard, to Wiltwijk. Throughout most of the month, scouting parties were sent out to locate the Esopus camps and castles and determine the intent of the Esopus.  Mohawk scouts, emissaries and Dutch women escapees aided in these efforts.

On July 26th an expedition led by Captain-Lieutenant  Martin Kregier with 91 men, Lt. Stilwel with 30 men and Lt. Couwenhoven with 41 Long Island Indians left Wiltwijk along with  41 volunteers from Manhattan and Wiltwijk.  Dragging wagons and two cannon it was slow going, but they reached the palisaded Esopus village near the present day village of Kerkhonkson the next day. They found the Indians had fled, escaping into the Shawangunk Mountains. They searched for them to no avail, then turned their attention, the next several days, to destroying the Indians' food supplies and village. For several days they cut the Esopus' standing corn and burned their buried cashes of dried beans and maize.  About 213 acres of corn were destroyed and 100 pits of dried beans and corn were burned.  On the 31st* they burned the fort and all the houses and returned to Wiltwijk.

Rte 209, Kerkhonkson

After nearly two months of trying to negotiate for hostages, (and attempting to capture prisoners, themselves, for exchange), the Dutch set out on another expedition  from Wiltwijk.  Traveling  south-south-west a force of about fifty five soldiers and volunteers passed the recently destroyed Indian castle and came upon another in the vicinity of what is now Bloomingburg, Sullivan County. This time they surprised the Esopus, engaging them in a running battle through the Indian village.  Fourteen warriors and a prominent sachem, Papequanaehen were killed, as well as four women and three children. Many others were wounded, and fourteen Esopus were taken prisoners.  Dutch losses were three killed and six wounded but twenty three Dutch prisoners of the Indians were freed. The Indian's standing corn was cut down; and a great deal of plunder was taken, including 20 pounds of gunpowder and twenty four or twenty five muskets, half of which were destroyed. The castle was burned. 

• SITE OF NEW FORT
  23 INDIANS KILLED, 13
  CAPTURED. 23 CAPTIVE
  WOMEN AND CHILDREN
  RELEASED. 3 SOLDIERS
  KILLED, SEPT. 5, 1663 Location:  OFF CO. RD., 1 MI. S. OLD SHAWANGUNK CHURCH
  

The rest of the year Dutch forces had little contact with the defeated Esopus and occupied themselves with guarding work parties, and supply wagons to and from Wiltwijk.  Patrols succeeded mainly in discovering and destroying isolated fields of the Indian's corn.

The following year the Dutch settlers lives would again be turned upside down--not by the Esopus Indians, but by the English.  In August, four English warships sailed into New Amsterdam harbor and announced their take over of New Netherlands. In 1666 the English signed a treaty with the Esopus forbidding the wanton destruction of property and guaranteeing the personal security of both Native Americans and "Christians".


If anything is remarkable about the Esopus Wars it is their stunning similarity to most of the other Native-American/European conflicts of the 17th and 18th centuries. They began with a lengthy period of building tensions between Indians and Europeans, including violent incidents, with the Native-Americans coming to feel their survival as a people was threatened. Several violent incidents occurred. Then, a meticulously planned attack by the native people to annihilate the European threat in their midst once and for all occurred. There was  a concerted effort to take women and children prisoners, as a way restore their declining populations, and counter decades of exposure to European diseases.  Then came the European reaction, a retaliatory campaign that mostly failed tactically but succeeded strategically.  The European forces usually failed to close with any significant number of Native people and destroy them, but the raiders were left to ravage the native people's towns, destroy their crops and stores of food.  The Native people sued for peace to recover what remained of their lives,  but exposure, hunger and disease accomplished what European guns and swords could not.  Indian survivors managed to continue on as individuals and small family groups on the margins of whites society, or in small tribal enclaves, or they were absorbed into other tribes beyond the frontier.
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Rte 209, Accord

Marker of the Week-- Persistence!

*The "Long House" marker appears to be in error.  Thomas Kregier's journal reports the Indian fort and buildings were burned on July, 31st, 1663, not August.
*Spelled variously in old documents--also Wildwyck, Wiltwyck.