The Ice and the People
Whencery, Season 1: New York City, Episode 1 (before 1609)
https://whencery.com/new-york-city/the-ice-and-the-people/

[0:00] THE SPRING NET

In spring, people stretched a large net across the mouth of a stream, with stones weighting its lower edge. Spawning fish swam into it: alewives, shad and sturgeon. The catch was large, and it came every spring.

Women carried seed out to the field. The stream, the stones in the net and the field all had a history. The oldest part of that history was ice.

[0:35] THE ICE MAKES THE LAND

About 20,000 years ago, the sea stood about 410 feet lower than it does today. A great sheet of ice came south and stopped on this coast. The ice was at least 500 feet thick, and at its edge it may have stood 1,000 feet high. It was heavy and slow. In places it slid over older ground without disturbing it.

Where the ice stopped, it dropped the rock and earth it had carried. The load piled up in two long ridges, one inside the other. Those ridges became Long Island, which runs east from New York Harbor. The inner ridge rises to 384 feet at its highest point.

Much of the stone under Brooklyn, now part of New York City, came from New Jersey. The ice had carried it across the river from the northwest, with many boulders. Melting water ran off the ridges at three points and spread sand over the land to the south. So the ground on the ridges was hilly and stony, and the ground south of them was flat and sandy.

The island of Manhattan is made of three kinds of rock, in a fixed order. The lowest forms the bluff along the east shore. Marble, a rock that water can dissolve, lies above it, standing almost exactly on edge. A river now called the Harlem River runs where it does because it follows that marble.

Schist, a coarse rock that is tough but not very hard, lies on top. A steep wall of schist runs down the west side for the whole length of the island. The island’s highest point stands about 265 feet above sea level.

A deep gorge in the rock crossed the upper part of the island. It started at the river on the island’s west side, now called the Hudson River, and ran east. Its floor lay almost 200 feet below sea level. The ice filled it with the loose earth and stone it carried. Much later, a drill at 125th Street, above the gorge, went down 204 feet and never reached rock.

Without that fill, the Hudson would meet Long Island Sound, the salt water to the east, across the island. Manhattan would be two islands. It is one island because the ice filled a hole.

As the ice melted, the sea rose again. Salt water spread into marshes where trees had grown not long before, and their stumps stood up out of the marsh. From then on, the Hudson ran in the flooded top of a much deeper valley. At New York City, the river’s rock floor lies about 300 feet down in places.

[3:28] A LIVING FROM THE HARBOR

The people who lived along the lower Hudson were the Lenape. They had lived in their homeland for at least 1,000 years, and probably much longer.

Some of them spoke Munsee, one form of the Lenape language. They tended to call themselves by the names of their villages. Today their descendants are citizens of three nations, two in Oklahoma and one in Wisconsin. The people holding the net in that spring stream were Lenape.

Women grew most of the food. They grew mainly corn, beans and squash, and the corn was planted in open fields with few or no trees. Beside the corn stalks, they pushed beans into the ground. In the Netherlands, farmers grew beans up poles. Here the corn stalks were the poles. The women grew squash as well, and gathered nuts and berries in the woods.

The Lenape said that corn and beans had come to them from peoples to the south. Those peoples had got their seed from people farther south still. Before corn, they said, their own people had eaten roots and the bark of trees. Family descent ran through the women, and women were treated with considerable respect.

In summer, the men went to the river and caught a great quantity of fish in a short time. Every day, people dug mussels, clams and oysters from the beaches. They camped where fresh water met salt water. The best places had a spring for drinking and open water for fishing. Such places generally hold a heap of shells, mixed with ash, charcoal and stones cracked by fire.

Inland, Manhattan had a pond, the Fresh Water pond, with a large shell heap on its west shore. The Dutch would later name the spot after that heap. In time, the name was shortened to the Collect, and it passed to the whole pond. So a pond of fresh water ended up named after a trash heap.

Near the water, people lived in lodges built on a frame of poles, arched over and set in the ground. Bark and mats of rushes covered the frame. From outside, the lodges looked “very much like wooden bowls turned upside down.” A fire burned in a pit in the floor, under a hole in the roof. Some lodges were as long as 60 feet and held several families.

Not every shell went on the heap. The harbor had large shellfish called cockles. People made beads from their shells, some white and some black. The beads were strung into belts called wampum. Wampum was highly valued, and it served as money. The Munsee name for Long Island meant land of shell money.

At Castle Hill, a point of land in the Bronx, one heap was different. It was made of the waste from making wampum.

Between these places, a main path ran north from rocks at the island’s southern tip, where canoes landed. Partway up the island, a second path crossed it, running west toward the Hudson and east toward the other shore. The city later built its hall where the two paths met. Many of the city’s later roads followed these old paths.

On the island’s west side, a cove called Sapohanikan sat on the Hudson shore. Canoes landed there with goods from the New Jersey side of the river. It was a trading place for the Hackensack, a people whose land lay across the river.

[7:11] FIRE, THE DEER DRIVE AND WINTER

As each year turned to autumn, the woods were burned over. The fires kept open the meadows that herds of game animals depended on. In that season, wild geese, turkeys and deer were at their best and easiest to take. The ground was still bare the next spring.

To take the deer, the hunters built two fences of stakes. At the open end, the fences stood one or two thousand paces apart. They ran closer together until the gap was only five feet wide, “like a large door.” The hunters drove the deer toward the gap, making a noise like wolves. They held deer hunting to be “the noblest hunting.”

A place called Shorakapkok lay far up the island, in the hollow now called Cold Spring, under Inwood Hill. Cold Spring had three rock shelters, out of the wind, with fresh water and both rivers close by. People left turkey and deer bones in them. A nearby path ran around the rocks. Feet had worn it more than an inch into the stone.

Close by, at a village site, people buried dogs, and sturgeon as well. The dogs’ bones were unbroken, so they had not been eaten. No one has given a satisfactory explanation.

Winter came. Where people spent it is an open question, with three possible answers. Families may have spent the summers in shore camps and the winters at the northern end of the island. The island may have been only a place to work, used from villages on the mainland. Or it may have had a main village of its own.

[8:55] LAND HELD BY USE

Wherever they wintered, land belonged to the whole village. The village gave a piece of it to a family to use. When needed, it could give that piece to another clan. Three peoples lived together on Staten Island, another island in the harbor, and two more had rights there too.

In the same way, a village leader had to persuade people to follow him, because he could not force them. The villagers could reject his decisions, or reverse them later. A war leader gave orders in war. When the fight ended, so did his power.

Even a field, when it was left alone, grew back into woods. The Lenape said of one stand of young woods that they had planted corn there only twenty years before. To the Lenape, goods given for land may have looked like no more than a customary exchange of friendly gifts. Land seems to have been held through use, and no leader could bind a village to give it away forever.

Sources: https://whencery.com/new-york-city/the-ice-and-the-people/#how-we-know