Starting in the late sixteenth century, the buying of furs from North America became big business, especially beaver given its water proof qualities. French, English, and Dutch traders regularly visited the North Atlantic coast of North America to trade with the local natives. This was generally seen as a positive by everyone involved. The local tribes got access to metal tools, wool blankets, and a bunch of other shit from Europe they thought was pretty damn awesome, and the traders made a bunch of money selling the furs in Europe. As the number of beaver along the coast began to decline, the coastal tribes began trading with tribes further into the interior for furs. However, this made the furs more expensive which in turn led to the Europeans to search for direct water routes into the interior to effectively cut out the middleman. The largest of these was the St. Lawrence River.
Between 1605 and 1610, the French built several small trading outposts along the St. Lawrence, not only allowing them to build strong trading relationships with the tribes in the area, but also effectively blocking the English and Dutch traders from the most accessible route into the interior. As one can probably imagine, this did not sit well with either the Dutch or the English, who were not about to give up on making a shit ton of cash. The English responded by attacking and burning down the various French outposts for the next twenty years, which was not super effective, because not only were the outposts easily rebuilt, but also because such behavior made the tribes in the area rather leery of dealing with them. After all, you wouldn’t buy groceries from the same guy who just burned down the grocery store next door. The Dutch traders were a little more strategic in their response, instead focusing their efforts on the Hudson River, the second best route into the interior, building Fort Nassau far up the river near present day Albany in 1614. This was a fortuitous location given it was right on top of the primary trade routes bringing furs from the interior to the coast, and because it put the Dutch in direct contact with the Iroquois Confederacy, an alliance of five powerful Iroquois tribes in what would become upper New York. Over the next decade the Dutch built several trading outposts up and down the Hudson, as well as outposts further afield near the mouths of the Delaware and Connecticut rivers.
At first, the Dutch presence in North America was limited to a few trading outposts. However, when the Puritans successfully established Plymouth colony in the early 1620’s, it began to raise concerns. After all, the English colony of Virginia to the south already had some thousand people, so the writing was kind of on the wall. In order to guard the Hudson River from excursion, the Dutch purchased land on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the river for a bunch of trade goods, worth little in Europe but worth a lot in North America, from a tribe who didn’t even technically control the land. Either way, the Dutch founded the colony of New Amsterdam there in 1624.
Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch were a dominant force in the North American fur trade. This was largely accomplished by their close relationship with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy and their willingness to sell guns to them, something neither the French or English were willing to do with their respective trading partners. This in turn allowed the Iroquois Confederacy to utterly beat the shit out of their rivals, which in turn shifted a greater portion of the fur trade down the Hudson River to New Amsterdam. As a result, New Amsterdam became a bustling port home to some 1,500 people by 1650. As the English colonies in New England grew larger, the Dutch government did what it could to incentivize settlement along the Hudson River to ensure its control of the area wasn’t threatened, giving traders the right to claim vast tracts of land along the river, which they in turn leased to people willing to settle and farm said lands. By 1650, several small settlements had been built, with New Netherlands having a population of some 5,000 people.
The Dutch domination of the American fur trade was not without its challenges. In the north, the Iroquois, armed with Dutch guns, were in constant conflict with the French allied tribes along the St. Lawrence and eastern Great Lakes. However, they were also increasingly in conflict with the powerful Lenape and Susquehannock tribes to the south, which did little to improve these tribes views regarding the Dutch. Already weakened by epidemics that swept across the region during the 1630s, they were more than happy to look for new trading partners, the most prominent being the Swedes. First arriving on the scene in the 1630s, Swedish fur traders built Fort Christina at mouth of the Delaware River in 1638. By 1650, some 600 Swedish settlers were spread up and down the river. With a new trading partner on the scene, the Lenape decided that they really didn’t need to put up with Dutch bullshit anymore. The arming of the Iroquois was creating a refugee problem as tribes they were attacking fled south, creating conflict with the tribes and Dutch settlers already in the area. When the Dutch responded to this issue by attacking the refugee camps, the Lenape and refugees rose up in 1643, killing any Dutch settlers they could get their hands on. The Dutch responded in kind, massacring whole villages, in a back and forth which continued for the next two years before peace was restored.
The threat of New Sweden ended in 1655 when one of the seemingly never ending wars in Europe gave the Dutch the excuse to forcefully seize control of it. The seizure of New Sweden angered the Susquehannock, their closest trading partner, who that same year launched a major attack on the Dutch settlements along the Hudson, which did little to rectify the situation, but did deepen the level of distrust between the Dutch and the more closely neighboring Lenape. By 1660, the population of New Netherland was some 6,000 people, nearly half of which lived in New Amsterdam. Growing tensions between the weakening Lenape and the growing Dutch population resulted in conflict in 1659 and again in 1663. In both cases, though the Lenape did damage and disrupt Dutch settlements, they ultimately suffered defeat with the Dutch and their Iroquois allies burning their fields and villages. The violence only ended with the end of New Netherlands soon after. In 1665, the English went to war with the Dutch, one of a series of wars in which the English were attempting to end Dutch hegemony over global trade. Early in the war, English forces seized control of New Amsterdam, and when the war ended in 1667, the Dutch gave all of New Netherland to the English in return for retaining control of Suriname, with its valuable sugar plantations, and some key islands in southeast Asia. The English made peace with the Lenape by beginning a new policy of buying land from the tribe prior to settling it and creating a system to find peaceful resolutions in cases of conflict. Over the next two decades, most of the Lenape in the area of Hudson River sold their lands, taking refuge with the Iroquois.
