The First Long Islanders

They arrived thousands of years ago when the ice was finally gone, a trickle of big-game hunters who sought out shelter near freshwater streams and lakes. They had been walking for centuries, generation after generation, traveling imponderable distances, continent to continent. When they arrived in the land that divided into two forks at its easternmost end like the tail of a great fish, they were as far east as they could go.

Surrounded by salt water, these new arrivals discovered that the bays were filled with food -- shellfish of all varieties in unlimited quantities, and fish so numerous that when they migrated into shallow creeks they seemed to push out all the water.

In thick forests of pine and oak, they built shelters from tree branches and grasses, cultivated crops with stone tools, carved out canoes from tree trunks and used them to hunt whales and to journey great distances across open ocean. And for as long as 12, 500 years -- more than 550 generations of people, one following the other in an unbroken chain -- they lived all to themselves on the long island by the ocean.

If Long Island's first residents had a name for themselves, it is lost in the mists of history. When Europeans arrived along the northeast coastline in the early 16th Century, floating ashore in their own great boats, they called the people they met Indians. What that first momentous encounter was like for the Indians can, for the most part, only be guessed at. But wispy clues are buried like precious gems in historical documents.

``Many years ago, when men with a white skin had never yet been seen in this land, some Indians were out fishing in the mouth of the Cohotatea [Hudson] River . . . spied at a great distance something remarkably large floating on the water,'' an Indian told a Moravian missionary in 1801. ``Some believed it to be an uncommonly large fish or animal, while others thought it was a very big house floating on the sea.''

If history is a chronology of events, there is little hard evidence of the earliest inhabitants of Long Island -- a people called the Paleo-Indians. There is more about the Indians who were here when Europeans arrived -- they are called the Woodland Period Indians -- but nearly all of it was written by Dutch and English settlers. What constitutes the Indians' own writings can be seen in the mysterious symbols and squiggly lines they made on the deeds the Europeans used to claim land as their own. History you can hold in your hand has been found in the ground Long Islanders live, play and walk on -- stone utensils the Indians used in virtually every aspect of their lives.

So much seems lost to the centuries. Their language, part of the Algonquian language group, is extinct, with only a few words saved for posterity. In one celebrated case, words were recorded by a man soon to be president -- Thomas Jefferson -- who traveled to Long Island on horseback to conduct research. But most of his notes were stolen. The Indians' social mores, how they raised their children, how they farmed, how groups living near each other on Long Island were related, how far they traveled, who their allies and their enemies were -- all these remain shrouded in mystery.

Today, artists can only guess what they looked like. A drawing by Shinnecock artist David Bunn Martine shows a tall, lean, leather-clad man, decorated in a colorful belt made from shells, with bird feathers and porcupine quills adorning his hair. The earliest photographs, made in the 19th Century, show an entirely different people -- formally dressed, stern, sometimes sad-eyed men and women staring into the camera like strangers in their own land.

One famous photo taken in 1867, shows Stephen (Talkhouse) Pharaoh -- a Montaukett who was born and died on Montauk Point -- sitting in a chair, his legs crossed, the long, graceful fingers of his left hand draped across his thighs, his right hand clutching a stout walking stick the way he once held a whaler's harpoon, his long black hair draped across his broad shoulders. If a people's history can be seen in a single photograph, it is perhaps found in this one.

``He is my great-great-uncle,'' said Robert Cooper, who sits in a home in a section of East Hampton called Freetown, where Indians and freed black slaves once lived. Old black-and-white photographs decorate his walls, monuments to his ancestors. ``He is a stern-faced gentleman, isn't he? You know, he would walk from East Hampton to New York City in a single day. He was a Civil War veteran, and proud of it. He was born at a place on Montauk Point that used to be called Indian Fields. I believe he was of the last generation to live there before they were removed.

``He is buried there, too. Most days, even now, there is a flag on his grave. People sometimes leave little coins on his grave, little keepsake items. I believe that, before he died in 1879, he could say he had been true to his heritage as much as he could. In a way, I guess, he was the last great Montaukett.''

Stephen Pharaoh's story connects like the beads of a necklace, all the way back to an enigmatic Indian named Wyandanch, who also lived on Montauk Point. Wyandanch sold off thousands of acres of Long Island to the English after their arrival on the East End in the 1640s -- actions that would reduce his people to guests on their former land.

For the most part, an examination of the record of Indian history on Long Island shows that Wyandanch's story, along with the stories of so many other Indians, remains untold.

``I think their history has been ignored,'' said John Strong, a professor at the Southampton Campus of Long Island University and the region's leading expert on Indians. ``I don't think there's any question of that. There is a new way of looking at the Algonquian people that is essentially from the wigwam out, rather than from the outside in, as it always had been done. It is looking at what they saw, what they experienced. In a real sense, it's an effort to right a wrong in the telling of our history.''

As taught for years in Long Island schools, the region's Indians lived in tribal groups that had names like Corchaug and Canarsie, Unkechaug and Setauket. They greeted the Europeans when they came and sold their land to the new arrivals. After that, they ``disappeared'' or ``died off,'' vanishing from the landscape as if they had never really been here.

The ``new'' Indian history of which Strong is a leading proponent tells a far different story.

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Experts divide the periods before Europeans arrived in the New World into four groups: Paleo-Indian Period, 12,500 to 8,000 BP (before present); Archaic Period, 8,000 to 3,000 BP; Woodland Period, 3,000 to 1,000 BP, and Late Woodland, 1,000 BP to the calendar year 1600. It has been long accepted that the Paleo-Indians, whose origins are believed to be in Asia, walked across a land bridge between modern-day Siberia and Alaska when huge glaciers had absorbed enough ocean water to drop sea levels by up to 500 feet. This epic crossing took place more than 13,000 years ago. Once on the North American continent, the Paleo-Indians followed their prey -- large, hairy, elephant-like beasts -- wherever it took them, across vast and frozen distances.

Over the generations, small bands of hunters moved from Alaska down a north-south corridor between enormous walls of ice. The southern end of the corridor was in modern-day Montana. The Paleo-Indians carried spears tipped with what archeologists call Clovis points -- intricately carved pieces of stone with characteristic fluting down the center. Named after a town in New Mexico where a similar point was found, they date to hunters who used them to kill big game. Fourteen such points have been found on Long Island.

``The Clovis points on Long Island are certainly suggestive of Paleo-Indians being there eleven thousand years ago,'' said James Adovisio, an archeologist who helped excavate a site in southwest Pennsylvania that suggests humans were there approximately 16,000 years ago. To arrive then, Adovisio said in an interview, would mean humans walked across the Bering Strait more than 30,000 years ago.