Overview: Geography of the “Esopus”

On Block's map of 1611 the mouths of the Rondout and the Esopus are clearly indicated, as are the islands of the Tivoli Bay that lie on the opposite shore. This area, beginning at the point of the Esopus Meadows and extending past Saugerties to Catskill, was named after the many fresh water outlets that line this stretch. Its name, given first on this map - “Esopus”- is probably a corruption of an Algonquin word for river, "sop", and small, "us". Their word for "small outlet" is "saugus". Saugus is a name given to and still used by an early settlement location north of Boston and very similar to the base of the name “Saugerties”.

Block's map and those that are based on it clearly indicate the importance of these outlets. Much shallower waters were in the Hudson River and at its mouth in the early 1600's than today. The effects of the “little ice age” made tidal water levels much lower. Even the Verrazano Narrows was generally too silted for traffic at the time. Access to New York Bay was to the west of Staten Island where the drainage of three rivers kept a deep channel.

Up river, the channel of the Hudson abruptly became narrow and shallow beginning below the outlet of the Rondout Creek at Esopus Meadows and continued to shoal north of this at the Esopus and Catskill outlets. Awareness of and attention to these navigation hazards was the main reason for the early naming of this section of the river. Eventually it was this familiarity with the river that solidified naming of the region “Esopus” and the native inhabitants “Esopus Indians”.

The territories of the native peoples are thought to relate to water rights from a stream’s source to its outlet. The earliest “sales” to Europeans reference stream names. By tradition the Hudson River, because it's tidal waters flow neither north nor south, but both, was not territorially held by any one people.

Surveying, or “Metes and Bounds” descriptions of land rather than merely naming physical landforms or neighbors' bounds, was a new science in the late 17th Century. By 1693 the demands of surveying the bounds of the many patents granted since New York became a Crown Colony required legislation setting exact points of reference for a “True North” standard. At this time the point of the most northern extent of Ulster County on the Hudson River at the mouth of the Sawyer Creek was made the origin of the line of this border running due west. This line was made possible by establishing true north as a line through this point south to the high point of what is now Cruger Island and north passing through the “Great Fountain” a pressure outlet of a body of water called the Great Vly.

The Sawyer Creek was likely chosen as the reference point for the division of the counties because of its visual accessibility. The mouth of the Esopus Creek is a wide delta with no exact point of intersection with the Hudson River like that of the Sawyer Creek right below its falls. Also, directly above the Sawyer outlet is the highest hill on the Hudson shoreline in this area (the heights of Seamon Park in the village of Saugerties). From this high perspective inland survey references could be easily related to those of the Hudson below. Plainly visible west from this point loomed the corner of Overlook Mountain where the north-south line of the Great Wall of the Manitou escarpment turns southwest to follow the peaks of the Catskills down the Esopus Valley.

The entire “Sawyerkill”, as it was earlier referenced, was in the territory of the Katskill Indians. Its mouth was the division point between their lands and those of the Warranawonkong to the south.

Overview: Early Dutch Colonization

The first record of an attempt to settle a colony on the Hudson was by England. In 1619 a patent to John Wyncop (Johannas Wyncoop) was given for land to place a colony of Puritan refugees residing in Leyden, Holland in the northern claim of the Virginia Company that overlaid the Dutch claim. These settlers were instead redirected by a competitive group of investors to the claim of the Plymouth Company and settled Plymouth in 1621. They were the Pilgrims.

The Dutch responded in 1624 to this attempt to create an English colony overlaying its New Netherlands claim by transferring the monopoly rights of the New Netherlands Company to the newly formed Dutch West India Company with the express purpose of establishing a colony. Thirty families were sent to establish settlements, most to the Fort Nassau area. A new fort named Fort Orange was erected there. Smaller numbers, about three or four families each, were left to found settlements on the Connecticut and the Delaware Rivers.

In 1626 all of these colonists were moved for safety by Peter Minuit to people the newly founded village on the southern tip of Manhattan Island; New Amsterdam. Fort Orange was again reduced to a trading post of transient habitation and New Amsterdam became the center of all New Netherlands trade. In their colonization plan the Dutch placed their focus on the Hudson Valley and the Dutch West India Company for supporting all their possessions in the New World. All goods imported or exported from Brazil, the Caribbean and the Hudson Valley would be processed through the port of New Amsterdam.

However, by 1628 most of the colonists, because of the hardships, had returned to the homeland and this left the Dutch West India Company in default on its colonization mandate. To remove itself from the financial burden of re-settlement the Dutch West India Company created partnerships for its investors called Patroonships that exchanged grants for large tracts of land with manorial rights for taking on the responsibility of colonization. Rights to four mile stretches of river front at a depth as far as they wished to claim was granted to Patroons in exchange for settling 50 or more persons within a four year period. The first Patroonship granted was to Kiliaen van Rensselaer for all the tract of land in the rich fur trading region at Fort Orange. This was the colony of Rensselaerwyck.

In 1630 the total population of New Netherlands was 300 with the majority farming the company plantations around New Amsterdam not Dutch but French-speaking Walloon (Belgian). The only Dutch inhabitants were temporary employees of the Company. The principal activity of the Dutch West India Company was to profit from its privateering license along the trade routes between the Caribbean and New Amsterdam. There was little concern for the governance of New Netherlands.

Over the next decade the Patroonship scheme and the growing population it represented completely destabilize the relations between the native peoples and the Dutch.

The small size of the earlier settlements was of little concern to the much larger native population. However, the competitive growth of the English colony of the Plymouth Company and its desire to show a territorial presence against the Dutch claim brought them into neighboring Long Island and Connecticut and this began to alarm the coastal Mahican chieftaincies already pressed from the north and west by the Maquas.

After the establishing of Patroonships, the Dutch West India Company totally abandoned its monopoly rights in 1638 with its "Articles and Conditions" and it officially abdicated its colonization responsibilities in 1640 through its Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions. With these events businessmen in the Netherlands that were associated with the Company were permitted permanent ownership of smaller tracts than those of Patroonships.

The first to take advantage of these oportunities were the resident officers and military personnel of the downsized Company. Without many restrictions and little oversight they were able to use their knowledge of the colony to, independently and as agents of large trading families in Holland, establish land holdings and produce agricultural products with their own tenants, servants and slaves. This further encroached on the remaining territory of the native peoples but also on the Patroonships.

The Manorial rights of the Patroonships gave them the freedom to make their own laws and govern themselves. Rensselaerwyck was able to ignore the Director General of the Dutch West India Company and supply firearms to both the Maquas and the Mahicans in exchange for beaver and uncontested recognition of its ownership of the expanded lands it claimed. This served to arm the native population against themselves but it also threatened the newer European settlers who were economically competing with the Patroonships.

In Rensselaerwyck the displaced native population migrated by forcing itself upon its weaker Indian neighbors, pressing them against the English colony of Massachusetts. With firearms they soon began to expand and conquer other tribes, demanding tribute goods which they used to trade with the Dutch. In time warfare became their sole means of providing sustenance and they became known as Fort Orange Indians because their hostilities and conquests would permanently establish Fort Orange and later Albany as the center for negotiating Indian treaties.

The demands of the rapidly increasing, often disorderly European population of both Dutch and English and their clashes with the native cultures led to massacres on all sides between 1640 and 1645. The decade of the 1640's was punctuated by ineptitude in governance and callousness in treatment of the natives with some of the gravest atrocities committed against a native people by any colonial power in history happening at this time. The coastal native population retreated wholly from their lands in the face of these repulsive events.

It is to the great shame of the Dutch culture of the time and the character of the system under which it settled the Hudson Valley that so little is known of the native peoples that were here then. Those responsible for promoting settlement seem to have gone out of their way to shuttle the fringes of society, with little interest in learning, to the colony. From its beginnings New Netherlands was governed by mean-spirited and abusive men with no concern for the culture and history of the tens of thousands whose race had called this land home for millennia. The Dutch left little or no record of the culture and peoples they destroyed.