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Refugees Went West and North

By Steve Wick | Staff Writer

When the Kieft War erupted in 1643 across the lower Hudson River Valley, Manhattan island and western Long Island, hundreds of Indians fled west into New Jersey to escape the bloodshed.

These Indians escaped the rampages of Dutch soldiers and English mercenaries such as John Underhill, but they also escaped smallpox and other epidemics that ravaged Indian communities on the East Coast.

Most of the refugees -- who spoke an Algonquian language called Munsee Delaware -- settled in Pennsylvania, then Ohio, where a massacre occurred in the 1790s that pushed them into modern-day Canada. In Ontario, on a reservation called Moraviantown, modern-day descendants of the very Indians who greeted Henry Hudson in 1607, and who helped Adrian Block build a ship during the winter of 1613-14 on Manhattan island, live today.

And a tiny handful of them, perhaps no more than 10, still speak Munsee Delaware. They are the only fluent speakers in the world of any Algonquian language once spoken on Long Island.

But, in interviews, these Indians say they don't regard themselves as museum pieces -- just survivors.

"We feel fortunate that we've been able to live the way we have," said Philip Snake, the chief of the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown. "Leaving New York was the best thing we did."