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Park it passed by an encampment near a sixty-foot-deep pond, fed by an underground spring, which together with adjacent meadow and marsh lands almost bisected the island. Farther north, where the trail passed Greenwich Village, a secondary path led west to Sapokanikan, a site of fishing and planting on the Hudson River near the foot of Gansevoort Street. At about 98th Street and Park Avenue the trail ran by a campsite known as Konaande Kongh and, on the broad flats of Harlem just to the north, still more fishing camps and planting fields. (From an East River landing at about 119th Street, fishermen paddled out in tree-trunk

The largest Lenape habitation sites were occupied by several hundred or more people and probably resembled these villages depicted in western New Netherland, but without the enclosing palisade. Detail from a map by Nicolaes Visscher, 1656. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

canoes to net or spear striped bass.) Its northern terminus was a cluster of three camps along the Harlem River, two of which now actually lie on the mainland, severed from Manhattan by the Harlem Ship Canal.

Across the East River, in Brooklyn and Queens, another major artery ran just below the terminal moraine, following the present course of Jamaica Avenue west from the Nassau County line. At Evergreen Cemetery, on the Brooklyn-Queens border, it dropped down along the route of Kings Highway, looped across the outwash plains of south Brooklyn, then swung west along Bay Ridge Parkway toward the Narrows. Where Kings Highway now crosses Flatbush Avenue, it went through the main campsite of the Canarsees. At the western end of Bay Parkway, in the Fort Hamilton section of Brooklyn, it passed a camp whose residents maintained planting fields at nearby Gravesend. A half-dozen branches reached down to sites that ringed Jamaica Bay from the main Rockaway camp on the east to what is now Bergen Beach on the west, and to Coney Island, a favorite summering place. Other branches ran to Maspeth on Newtown Creek, to the shores of Wallabout Bay, to downtown Brooklyn (near Borough Hall), and, from there, over to maize lands lying along Gowanus Creek.

Similar trail grids can be traced on Staten Island and in the Bronx. Running up the Atlantic shore of Staten Island, marking the present course of Amboy Road and Richmond Road, was a path that connected campsites at Tottenville, Great Kills Park, and Silver Lake Park. At Silver Lake Park, it intersected shorter paths that circled the island’s central hills to reach additional sites along the Kill Van Kull and Arthur Kill. In the Bronx, most major trails ran north-south along the Harlem, Bronx, and Hutchinson rivers and sundry smaller streams and creeks that together empty south into the East River or Eastchester Bay. These trails linked campsites and planting fields along the shore—among them one on Hunts Point and another on Clasons Point, which may have sheltered three hundred or more people—to similar places in the hilly interior.

Their seasonal movement along these trail systems afforded the Lenapes easy access to fish, shellfish, game birds, and deer—sources of animal protein that compensated for the lack of domesticated livestock—but this transient way of life meant that tools, weapons, and cooking utensils had to be simple and light, or easily reproduced. Their longhouses, some big enough for a dozen families, could be quickly constructed of bent saplings covered with sheets of bark, the crevices plugged with clay and cornstalks. Moving from one place to the next every few months likewise discouraged the accumulation of property. (Dutch fur traders soon discovered that native peoples did not want iron pots in trade because they were too heavy.) It also minimized accumulations of garbage and waste—though Pearl Street in lower Manhattan would get its name from the mounds of oyster shells left by Lenape bands along the East River shore. Constant relocation also