The Mohicans or Mahicans ( or ) are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands who spoke an Eastern Algonquian language. Historically, they were based in Upstate New York. Today, they are enrolled in the federally recognized Stockbridge Munsee Community in Wisconsin.
The Mohicans lived in the upper tidal Hudson River Valley, including the confluence of the Mohawk River (where present-day Albany, New York, developed) and into western New England centered on the upper Housatonic River watershed. After 1680, due to conflicts with the powerful Mohawk to the west during the Beaver Wars, many were driven southeastward across the present-day Massachusetts western border and the Taconic Mountains to Berkshire County around Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
They combined with Lenape Native Americans (a branch known as the Munsee) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and later the people moved west away from pressure of European invasion. They settled in what became Shawano County, Wisconsin. Most Eastern Native American populations were forced to reservation in Indian Territory during the 1830s, and other reservations in the American West later. Decades later the United States government organized the Stockbridge-Munsee Community with enrolled citizens of the Munsee people and a reservation, which was originally the land of the Menominee people.
Following the disruption of the American Revolutionary War, most of the Mohican descendants first migrated westward to join the Oneida, a Haudenosaunee people, on their reservation in central New York. The Oneida gave them about 22,000 acres for their use. After more than two decades, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Oneida and the Stockbridge moved again, pressured to sell their lands and relocate to northeastern Wisconsin under the federal Indian Removal Act.EB-Mohicans "Mohican" (history), Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007 A group of Mohican also migrated to Ontario, Canada to live with the predominantly Haudenosaunee Six Nations of the Grand River reserve.
Territory In their own language, the Mohican identified collectively as the , "people of the waters that are never still".
At the time of their first contact with Europeans traders along the river in the 1590s, the Mohican were living in and around the Hudson River (or ). After 1609, at the time of the Dutch settlement of New Netherland, they also ranged along the eastern Mohawk River and the Hoosic River, and south along the Hudson to the Roeliff Jansen Kill, where they bordered on the Wappinger people. This nation inhabited the river area and its interior southward to today's New York City.
Most of the Mohican communities lay along the upper tidal reaches of the Hudson River and along the watersheds of Kinderhook-Claverack-Taghkanic Creek, the Roeliff Jansen Kill, Catskil Creek, and adjacent areas of the Housatonic watershed. Mohican territory reached along Hudson River watersheds northeastward to Wood Creek just south of Lake Champlain.
Culture The Mohican villages were governed by hereditary sachems advised by a council of clan elders. They had a matrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance (including such hereditary offices) passed through the maternal line. Moravian missionary John Heckewelder and early anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan both learned from Mohican informants that their matrilineal society was divided into three phratries (Turkey, Turtle, and Wolf). These were divided into clans or subclans, including a potentially prominent Bear Clan. This finding is supported by the evidence of Mohican signatures on treaties and land deeds (see the works of Shirley Dunn).
A general council of sachems met regularly at Scodac (east of present-day Albany) to decide important matters affecting the entire confederacy. In his history of the Indians of the Hudson River, Edward Manning Ruttenber described the clans of the Mohican as the Bear, the Turkey, the Turtle, and the Wolf. Each had a role in the lives of the people, and the Wolf served as warriors in the north to defend against the Mohawk, the easternmost of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee.
Like the Munsee-speaking communities to their south, Mohican villages followed a dispersed settlement pattern, with each community likely dominated by a single lineage or clan. The villages usually consisted of a small cluster of small and mid-sized longhouses, and were located along floodplains. During times of war, they built fortifications in defensive locations (such as along ridges) as places of retreat. Their cornfields were located near their communities; the women also cultivated varieties of squash, beans, sunflowers, and other crops from the Eastern Agricultural Complex. Horticulture and the gathering and processing of nuts (hickory, butternuts, black walnuts and acorns), fruits (blueberries, raspberries, juneberries among many others), and roots (groundnuts, wood lilies, arrowroot among others) provided much of their diet. This was supplemented by the men hunting game (turkeys, deer, elk, bears, and moose in the Taconics) and fishing (sturgeon, alewives, shad, eels, lamprey and striped bass).
Language The formally extinct Mohican language belonged to the Eastern Algonquian branch of the Algonquian language family.
Name The tribe identified by the place where they lived: (or "people of the continually flowing waters").Stockbridge, Past and Present; Electa Jones According to Daniel G. Brinton and James Hammond Trumbull, "two well-known authorities on Mohican history", the word refers to a body of water that flows in both directions, being tidal to most of its Mohican range, so they named the Hudson River , or the river with waters that are never still.Electa F. Jones, "Mohican Oral Tribal History as recorded by Hendrick Aupaumut", in Stockbridge, Past and Present: Or, Records of an Old Mission Station, Springfield, Massachusetts: Samuel Bowles & Company, 1854 Therefore, they, along with other tribes living along the Hudson River, such as the Munsee to their west, known by the dialect of Lenape that they spoke, and Wappinger to the south, were called "the River Indians" by the Dutch and English.
The Dutch heard and transliterated the term for the people of the area in their own language, variously as: Mahigan, Mahinganak, Maikan, among other variants, which the English later expressed as Mohican, in a transliteration to their own spelling system. The French, adopting names used by their Indian allies in Canada, knew the Mohican as the (or wolves). They referred to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as the "Snake People" (as they were called by some competitors, or "Five Nations", representing their original tribes). Like the Munsee and Wappinger peoples, the Mohican were Algonquian-speaking, part of a large language family related also to the Lenape people, who occupied coastal areas from western Long Island to the Delaware River valley to the south.
History Mohican Confederacy The Mohican were a confederacy of five tribes and as many as forty villages. Mohican proper, lived in the vicinity of today's Albany (, "the fireplace of the Mahican Nation") west towards the Mohawk River and to the northwest to Lake Champlain and Lake George , lived along the west shore of the Hudson River above the Catskill Creek Wawyachtonoc (or , "eddy people" or "people of the curving channel"), lived in Dutchess County and Columbia County eastward to the Housatonic River in Litchfield County, Connecticut, main village was Weantinock, additional villages: Shecomeco, Wechquadnach, Pamperaug, Bantam, Weataug, Scaticook Westenhuck (from , "on the other side of the mountains"), the name of a village near Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Often called the "Housatonic people", they lived in the Housatonic Valley in Connecticut and Massachusetts and in the vicinity of Great Barrington, which they called , meaning "the place downstream"Donald B. Ricky: Indians of Maryland Past and Present, Verlag: Somerset Pubs, 1999; Wiekagjoc (from , "upper reaches of a river"), lived east of the Hudson Rivers near the city of Hudson, Columbia County, New YorkAllen W. Trelease, William A. Starna: Indian Affairs in Colonial New York Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century the Seventeenth Century, Seite 8, University of Nebraska Press; 1997,
Conflict with the Mohawk
The Algonquians, including the Mohican, and Haudenosaunee were traditional competitors and enemies. Haudenosaunee oral tradition, as recorded in the Jesuit Relations, speaks of a war between the Mohawks and an alliance of the Susquehannock and Algonquin sometime between 1580 and 1600. This was perhaps in response to the formation of the League of the Haudenosaunee.Brandon, William. American Heritage Book of Indians, (Alvin M. Josephy, ed.), American Heritage Pub. Co. 1961, p. 187
In September 1609 Henry Hudson encountered Mohican villages just below present day Albany, with whom he traded goods for furs. Hudson returned to Holland with a cargo of valuable furs which immediately attracted Dutch merchants to the area. The first Dutch fur traders arrived on the Hudson River the following year to trade with the Mohicans. Besides exposing them to European epidemics, the fur trade destabilized the region.
In 1614, the Dutch decided to establish a permanent trading post on Castle Island, but first they had to arrange a truce to end fighting which had broken out between the Mohicans and Mohawks. Fighting broke out again between the Mohicans and Mohawks in 1617, and with Fort Nassau badly damaged by a freshet, the Dutch abandoned the fort. In 1618, having once again negotiated a truce, the Dutch rebuilt Fort Nassau on higher ground. Late that year, Fort Nassau was destroyed by flooding and abandoned for good. In 1624, Captain Cornelius Jacobsen May sailed the upriver and landed eighteen families of Walloons on a plain opposite Castle Island. They commenced to construct Fort Orange.
The Mohicans invited the Algonquin and Innu (Montagnais) to bring their furs to Fort Orange as an alternative to French traders in Quebec. Seeing the Mohicans extend their control over the fur trade, the Mohawk attacked, with initial success. In 1625 or 1626 the Mohicans destroyed the easternmost Haudenosaunee "castle". The Mohawks then re-located south of the Mohawk River, closer to Fort Orange. In July 1626 many of the settlers moved to New Amsterdam because of the conflict. The Mohicans requested help from the Dutch and Commander Daniel Van Krieckebeek set out from the fort with six soldiers. Van Krieckebeek, three soldiers, and twenty-four Mohicans were killed when their party was ambushed by the Mohawk about a mile from the fort. The Mohawks withdrew with some body parts of those slain for later consumption as a demonstration of supremacy.Parmenter, Jon W., "Separate Vessels", The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley , (Jaap Jacobs, L. H. Roper, eds.) SUNY Press, 2014, p. 113
War continued to rage between the Mohicans and Mohawks throughout the area from Skahnéhtati (Schenectady) to Kinderhoek (Kinderhook).Reynolds, Cuyler. Albany Chronicles: A History of the City Arranged Chronologically, J.B. Lyon Company, 1906 By 1629, the Mohawks had taken over territories on the west bank of the Hudson River that were formerly held by the Mohicans.Burke Jr, T. E., & Starna, W. A. (1991). Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, New York, 1661–1710 , SUNY Press. p. 26 The conflict caused most of the Mohicans to migrate eastward across the Hudson River into western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The Mohawks gained a near-monopoly in the fur trade with the Dutch by prohibiting the nearby Algonquian-speaking tribes to the north or east from trading.
Stockbridge