Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [21]
Even as the first colonists arrived on the scene, Lenape men were devoting more and more of their time to gathering furs for exchange with Europeans rather than for the use of their families and clans. They were away from home longer and returned with less food, which every spring left a few more communities a little closer to real famine when their stores from the previous harvest finally gave out (and in time virtually exterminated fur-bearing animals throughout the lower Hudson region). Then, too, as the work of men shifted from stalking to setting and checking traps, territorial boundaries became a matter of escalating controversy. The reciprocity that sustained complex kin networks weakened. Bands dissolved, re-formed, and dissolved again in a search for stability. Old intergroup alliances broke up. War became increasingly likely and, with the spread of firearms, increasingly deadly.
As European commodities supplanted their Lenape equivalents, a widening array of traditional skills, duties, and knowledge became less and less important. Lenape women assumed ever greater responsibility for supplying the camp with food and managing its internal affairs. Lenape sachems gained new prestige as the managers of trade with Europeans, though every year it would be more and more difficult to manage their often conflicted communities, let alone mobilize them for resistance. Alcohol hastened the disruption of earlier ways. As early as 1624 Nicolaes van Wassenaer could report that excessive drinking had destroyed the authority of at least one sachem, who “comes forward to beg a draught of brandy with the rest.”
Another danger for the Lenapes had meanwhile appeared to the north in the form of the Iroquois League. According to legend, the idea of the league originated around the middle of the sixteenth century with a Huron prophet and philosopher named Deganawidah, who wandered among the Iroquois-speaking peoples of upper New York State preaching a gospel of unity, brotherhood, and equality. Around 1570, assisted by a certain Ha-yo-went’-ha (Longfellow’s Hiawatha), Deganawidah brought the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca “nations” together in a single federation known as the League of the Great Peace. The league stretched from the Hudson to Niagara, encompassing perhaps a dozen semipermanent, stockaded villages whose combined population approached fifteen thousand.
Once Deganawidah and Ha-yo-went’-ha had gone—not died, it was said, merely moved on to spread their message among less fortunate peoples elsewhere—the league entered a new, aggressively expansionist phase. Its armies, sometimes numbering more than a thousand warriors, ranged west to the banks of the Mississippi, south to Virginia and the Carolinas, east into New England, and north, across the St. Lawrence, deep into Canada. Not unlike the crusading chivalry of medieval Christendom, they ventured out among the infidel with news of the Great Peace of Deganawidah and Ha-yo-went’-ha, a scourge to all who opposed them. Like the crusading chivalry, too, they had practical motives as well.
Their initial encounters with European commodities and weapons, which must have occurred around the same time that Deganawidah and Ha-yo-went’-ha were finishing their work, impressed upon the Iroquois the importance not only of direct access to the traders but also of controlling the supply of furs. In the 1580s, a decade or so after the league had been formed, the Iroquois attempted to establish a foothold on the St. Lawrence but were turned back by a combined force of Hurons and Algonkians, armed with French weapons.