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A Devastated People

By 1700, disease kills thousands of Long Island Indians, and survivors hold on to little land.

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

The Montaukett Indians had lived on the windswept plain for thousands of years. But by the mid-18th Century they had reached a critical milestone in their history. They were, one of them wrote, in danger of becoming "Vagabonds on the Face of the Earth."

Every aspect of the Montauketts' lives had changed irrevocably in the more than 120 years since the English had arrived on the South Fork. Their language, their customs, how they viewed their world, how they worshiped their gods -- all of it was gone. And their reservation on Montauk Point had been shrinking for decades as more of their land was bought up by their East Hampton neighbors in questionable land deals.

Hoping to regain some of the land, a Montaukett named Silas Charles dictated a letter to Cadwallader Colden, the lieutenant governor of New York, in 1764 and scratched his mark -- an X -- at the bottom. He began:

That your Petitioner and those Indians concerned with him, constitute a Tribe commonly distinguished by the name of the Montawk Indians, and . . . at present constitute about thirty families . . . That this tribe continued to live in the Neighborhood; living principally by Planting, Fishing and Fowling, gradually wasting away, and those who remain, now occupy a Tract upon Montawk Point . . .

That they are exposed to, and suffer great Inconveniences from the Contempt shewn to the Indian Tribes by their English Neighbors at East-Hampton, who deny them necessary Fuel, and continually incroach upon their occupations, by fencing more and more of the Indian's Lands, under Pretence of Sales made by their Ancestors.

That your petitioner and his Associates are in Danger of being crowded out of all their ancient Inheritance, and of being rendered Vagabonds upon the Face of the Earth . . .

Charles wanted a secure place for his people to live:

. . . that your honor would be pleased to grant and confirm to said Indians all the Lands on Montawk Point that may appear to be unsold by their Ancestors.

New York history does not record Colden's response, nor what, if any, efforts were made by the colony to help the Montauketts, who would continue to live at Montauk until they were permanently displaced in the 1880s by a real estate promoter.

But the letter reflects how poorly one of the communities of Long Island's first inhabitants was living 12 years before the beginning of the American Revolution. The fate of the Algonquians of Long Island had been sealed by the end of the 1600s -- their communities decimated by disease, loss of land and poverty. By 1764, Long Island had changed dramatically since the first years of English and Dutch settlement. At the west end, prosperous farms straddled the girth of Brooklyn, and at the East End, the village of Sag Harbor was a busy port, home to a U.S. Customs House and wealthy inhabitants.

The eastern half of Long Island, which the British had first called the East Riding of Yorkshire, was now Suffolk County, named for a county in England. There, approximately 13,000 people lived. In the western half, home to Queens and Kings Counties, approximately 14,000 people lived. Across the region, towns were small, insular and set apart; there were no newspapers or colleges.

Indians were part of the landscape, either as individuals or in small groups, but often were not counted in town censuses. If counted at all, many were counted as slaves, along with blacks; others were indentured servants, working on sailing vessels, on farms, and living in small communities at the wooded fringes of towns and villages. When Thomas Jefferson came to Suffolk County in 1791, he found the remnants of the Unkechaugs living in a swampy tract near present-day Mastic. There were Shinnecocks in the western part of Southampton Town; and at Montauk, according to Charles, 30 families lived in small huts and cottages on land set aside by the town as a Montaukett reservation.

The Indians of Long Island were in trouble long before Charles wrote his letter.

In the mid-1630s, an English official in Connecticut said smallpox had killed great numbers of Indians -- entire villages almost at once -- and that the Indians living along the Connecticut River Valley were dying like "rotten sheep." Smallpox had long since ravaged Europe and many settlers to the new world were immune. Later that decade, the Dutch began buying land on western Long Island and the English began buying on the East End. Soon, there were accounts of mass Indian deaths on Long Island.

A Dutch account published in the 1650s indicates that a smallpox epidemic in the 1630s killed 90 percent of the Indian population in the New Netherlands region. In a brief account of his life, written in 1660, Lion Gardiner said a great plague roared through Long Island that year, killing two-thirds of the Algonquian population. There are no accounts that year of mass burials of Indians, but the number of dead surely ran into the thousands.

On April 2, 1661, an Indian leader in Flatlands, now part of Brooklyn, told an official of the Dutch government that, before Europeans arrived, his people were "a great and mighty people," who were now reduced to "a mere handful." In one Long Island town, this "mere handful" was subjected to punishment if they traveled into white areas.

According to scholar John Strong's "The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700," officials in East Hampton at this same time ordered Indians not to come into white areas for fear they would bring diseases with them. Indians who violated the ban were fined or whipped.

Farther west on Long Island, Indian life was equally bleak. Daniel Denton, the son of the first minister in Hempstead, wrote an account, published in 1670, entitled "A Brief Description of New York: Formerly Called New-Netherlands." He wrote of the Indians, whose number had fallen only 30 years after the arrival of Europeans. Their deaths, he wrote, were the work of God:

To say something of the Indians, there is now but few upon the Island, and those few no ways hurtful but rather serviceable to the English, and it is to be admired, how strangely they have decreast by the Hand of God, since the English first settling of those parts; for since my time, where there were six towns, they are reduced to two small Villages, and it hath been generally observed, that where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand makes way for them, by removing or cutting off the Indians either by Wars one with the other, or by some raging mortal Disease.

"The Algonquian people on Long Island were overwhelmed in the first years after Europeans arrived," Strong said in an interview. "Their communities were devastated."