The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth
Published: New York, Farrar & Rhinehart, 1939

CHAPTER 2

Old Moon Into Stars

Wanderers from the Eastern Hemisphere crossed the Bering Straits into the north land and became the first Americans. Increasing with the generations, they spread southward along the west Coast, then eastward. No one knows how long it took them to cross the mountains, deserts, plains, rivers, of the continent, but the story of the journey was remembered and often told among a people called the Algonkins. For a reason long forgotten they had set out from their homes beside the blue Pacific to travel toward the sunrise until they would come to the water-that-flows-two-ways.

Long years of wandering and of wars followed, but at last the Algonkins came to the banks of a wide river and saw with excitement the down current stopped, then overcome, by the rush of upstreaming tides. They had found the water-that-flows-two-ways. Eagerly they spread out along the shores, organizing small tribes, painting and engraving rocks and trees with tribal insignia as a manner of staking out exclusive hunting rights in certain areas. On the western banks settled the large association of tribes called the Lenape.

Across from the big island at the river’s mouth was the land of the Raritans, and north of them lay the wooded shores that belonged to the Hackensacks, the Tappans, the Haverstraws. All these were joined in the Lenape alliance of the Unami, the Turtle. Above them was another such Lenape union, the Minsi, or Wolf, brotherhood among whose river tribes were the Waranawankongs, the Catskills, the Wawarsings.

Across the Hudson from the Lenape were the homes of other Algonkin peoples--the Manhattans, the Wappingers. And to the north of these, from the site of Albany to the two big lakes now called Lake George. and Lake Champlain, lived the strongest of all the Algonkin tribes, the Mohicans, who had taken their very name from the old prophecy—people-of-the-water-that-flows-two-ways.

Hudson River Algonkins
The Hudson River Algonkins were a simple people and they were good to look at. Possibly their journey from the west coast had killed off the weak, leaving the strong to mate and produce a fine race. Their dusky bodies were muscular and tall and symmetrical.

White settlers found them more pleasing to the eye than to the nose, however, for they rubbed themselves with the odorous greases of slain wild animals and went about naked to the waist in warm weather. During the summer months the clothing of a man was a breech clout, hip-length leggings of tanned hide, and soft-soled moccasins. He never wore a long feather war bonnet like the headdresses that decorated his western cousins. The River Indian often burned off with hot stones most of the hair on his head, leaving a strip of stiff short hair running from the forehead to the back of the neck and, hanging from the crown, one long lock-the scalp lock coveted by his enemies.

The women’s leggings were knee-high and their square leather aprons, tied about the,waist, did not reach to the knees. Aside from moccasins, their only other articles of apparel were square beaded caps which covered the long black braids caught up on their heads. In cold weather both men and women wore, carelessly slung to windward, handsome robes of wildcat, wolf, bear, deerskin or mantles of gorgeous turkey feathers.

The River Indians pleased themselves aesthetically with much colorful decoration. They painted their faces and the exposed parts of their bodies with dyes made from the colored clay of the riverbank or from the juices of berries. The men wore necklaces of opalescent shells and sometimes hung pendants of colored stones on their chests. The women covered their clothes with shell beads, not only to be more beautiful but to show how rich and socially important they were.

Living along the River
The Indians lived well beside the big river which some called the Mannahatta, others the Shatemuc. The woods were so full of birds that the noise of their twittering overwhelmed the sound of the hunter’s approach. There was red meat among the valley trees, too, to be brought down with arrows from hickory bows--deer, bear, and, raccoon. In the water swam countless fish-- the heavy leaping sturgeon, the striped bass, the slim herring, the lavender-scaled shad running in millions upriver every spring. And all a lazy man who was also hungry need do to satisfy his appetite was walk into the river shallows and pick up a meal of oysters.

Well fed by the water, the Indians sported in it and upon it. They swam as well as the river otters and they built boats from single big trees, making the trunks hollow by burning and scraping. Few, if any, took the pains to build a birchbark canoe such as the Indians of the north woods used. A craft of lightness and delicacy fashioned for the swift attacks and swifter flights of human conflict seemed unnecessary to them. Most of the causes of aggressive war, economic causes at least, had been removed by the generous stream. Now that they lived by the water-that-flows-two-ways portages to other waters were not to be contemplated.

The Indian villages along the Hudson looked like clusters of very large wooden bowls turned upside down, little replicas of the rounded hills behind them. Hickory poles set into the ground and bent over, to be tied together at their meeting, formed the framework on which the bark walls rested. A hole in the center of the roof allowed the smoke from the fireplace, built deep in the ground just below it, to escape. Long poles, hung horizontally from the roof on strong withes, held drying corn, food baskets, household utensils, clothes. Around the inside wall ran a curving bench on which the Indians sat and also slept.

In their clearings beside the broad, sun-flecked river the women of the tribes hoed the maize fields, tended the yellow pumpkins that lay between the tall green plants, hoed the beans, watched over the playing children while their husbands fished and hunted. When night had come and the roasted meats and the loaves of maize bread had been eaten, the Indians sat outside their houses and watched the stars as their fathers before them had done-until those pinpoints of light in the deep blue arc above them could make no movement they did not anticipate. They measured the time of their plantings by the alternation of the constellations, their harvestings by the autumn moons.

Peace and War
The Hudson River Indians wished they could fight better whenever the Mohawks left the rich valley that bears their name and came down the river in well organized war parties to demand tribute. Only the Mohicans sometimes dared to resist them. The southern Algonkin tribes usually submitted meekly. Though their warriors were big and strong, the sight of a single Mohawk in war dress would scare the wits out of a half dozen of them-so well had the Iroquois spread the reputation of their fiercest tribes.

The strongly governed Iroquois federation, made up of Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Senecas, was usually content to rest upon its fertile lands along the Mohawk and the Genesee, but its rulers knew that in an emergency they could always rob the Hudson valley tribes. The River tribes were too loosely organized, too fond of the ways of peace to be victorious in their wars. It would seem from their history that the ebbing and flowing water which the Algonkins so long sought had in the end betrayed them for, by making them happy and contented, it had caused them to think too much on peace.

The Sachem and Spirits
The highest officer in the government of the Mohicans, the sachem, devoted himself only to the problems of peaceful living. An ancient account says that the sachem was looked upon as a great tree under whose shade all the tribe might rest. "His business is to contemplate the welfare of his people day and night--how to promote their peace and happiness . . . whatever he does for his nation must be done out of friendship and good will." Only in time of actual war was the authority of this counselor superseded by that of "the Hero," the battle leader. It is not surprising that the first white man known to have visited a tribe of the River Indians, Henry Hudson, spoke of his hosts as "loving people."

The wide tidal stream beside them inspired the Indians’ belief in supernatural beings. They cowered beside the fires in the bowl-like houses wondering how they bad offended as Minewawa, goddess of the valley, hurled lightnings down upon them and growled at them in thunder. But they were soon dancing to thank her as the soft rains followed, making the gardens fertile, and the burning of their votive tobacco sent clouds of pungent smoke toward her dwelling beyond the Catskill peaks where in Onteora, "land of the sky," lived many gods. It was Minewawa, the River Indians said, who hung the new moon above those peaks and it was she who took it down when it had grown old and cut it up into little stars which she cast about her in the western sky.

Like children in ecstatic fear of the dark, the Indians listened to the ghost spirit Jeebi speaking through the wailing monotony of the whippoorwill; they looked for dark monsters among the river rushes which the Wabwahtaysee-the fireflies-tried to reveal with their flashing lanterns; they told tales of the pukwidjinnies-the little men who seemed to materialize in the valley dusk as soon as the sun was behind the hills but who often disappeared before one’s very eyes.

The squaws putting their papooses to sleep ("squaw" and "papoose" were Algonkin words which the Iroquois claimed to despise) told the little Indians of the naked bear who lived in a valley shut off by circling high hills, great Mishemokwa, who was very hard to kill and who sometimes ate bad children. The old men spoke of the Wendegoes, big men of the woods who tore down oak trees and clubbed the storm spirits with them. The elders said, too, that in the thunderstorms that sweep across the Hudson valley on many summer days they could hear the groans and shrieks of rebel spirits captured by the powerful spirit, Manitou, who imprisoned them behind the river hills he had built up to hide himself and his victims from mortal eyes. And when the old men had related these tales, the young Indian girls sitting together told each other of sunny hours in the afternoon when they had heard the sound of splashing in the shallow river bays and had tried to catch the Neebanawbaigs, water spirits, at their play.

One hot, hazy day these simple, fanciful savages living beside their broad river saw a strange giant moving smoothly over the water. Some of them thought it a fish sent by a distant devil to bring them evil; others, seeing the sun’s rays on its big white wings, thought it a bird sent by the god of light and prepared to worship it.