MAY 6:

 May 6, 1626:  The Purchase of Manhattan takes place. The Shinnecock or Canarsee Indians, according to which source you believe, sell it to Peter Minuit.
 

BACKGROUND:
 

From http://www.jersey.net/~standingbear/newsap.htm
 
 

06:19 AM ET 09/22/99 Manhattan `Purchase' in 1626 Letter NEW YORK (AP) _ A 1626 letter containing what is believed to be the only known mention of the Dutch purchase of Manhattan for $24 has been put on display at the New York Historical Society No deed or official document of Manhattan's sale to the Dutch from the Lenape Indians exists. The creased yellowed letter, written by a ship captain to the governors of the Dutch West India Company, briefly mentions the transaction. ``They (the Dutch settlers) have bought the island of Manhattes from the wildmen for the value of sixty guilders,'' it reads. The letter, put on display Monday, continues with a laundry list of items being sent to Amsterdam including beaver, rat, and mink skins. Herbert Kraft, anthropologist and director of the Seton Hall University Museum, said the land transfer might not have been that big a deal, particularly because many of the Lenape lived in what is now New Jersey. ``At the time it was not a great piece of property,'' Kraft said of Manhattan. ``There were loads of mosquitoes and it was very rocky.'' Jim Rementer, a Lenape descendant and head of the Lenape Language Project in Bartlesville, Okla., said the Indians who ``sold'' Manhattan to the Dutch did not share European notions of land ownership.
 

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>From http://www.thebeadsite.com/FRO-MANH.html
 

New York was until a few years ago, the most populous state in the Union. Its universities and colleges and produce a lot of historians. Many are interested in the history of New York. New York also has a lot of schoolchildren who are required to study state history. Many textbooks have been written for them.

All the histories and all the textbooks since the mid 1840s have discussed the acquisition of Manhattan Island, the heart of New York City, by the Dutch from the Canarsee Delawares. And all of them for the last century or more (except two) say that beads were used as part of the trade goods given for the island.

And why not? The early Dutch settlers knew the value of beads. Beads were common trade items. The Dutch had a glass bead industry at this time, making beads very like contemporary Venice, because the beadmakers in Holland were themselves Venetians. However, there is no proof.

In January 1625 the ship Orange Tree left Amsterdam for New Netherlands with William Verhulst, who was to become the second governor of the colony and Peter Minuit, who was to succeed him. Verhulst had instructions from the merchant group known as the West India Company, who were financing the building of the colony. The instructions read in part:

In case any Indian should be living on the aforesaid land or make any claim upon it or any other places that are of use to us, they must not be driven away by force or threat, but by good words be persuaded to leave, or be given something therefor to their satisfaction, or else be allowed to live among us, a contract being made thereof and signed by them in their manner, since such contracts upon other occasions maybe very useful to the Company. [A.J.F. van Laer, trans. 1924 Documents Relating to New Netherlands 1624-1626 In the Huntington Hartford Library. San Marino CA, pp. 51-2.]

Further instructions were sent out to Verhulst on 22 April 1625 telling him much the same thing and specifically mentioning trade goods. So, the governor was explicitly instructed to pay something for the land they were to settle on if need be. Verhulst didn't last very long and was sent home in disgrace on the Arms of Amsterdam on 23 September 1626. In the meantime, Minuit had become governor and on 11 May 1626 wrote a letter to one of the other colonists instructing him to buy Manhattan Island, which had not been the colony's first choice.

When the Arms of Amsterdam arrived in Amsterdam on 4 November with the embarrassed Verhulst, Peter Schagen, a member of the governing board of the West India Company, met it. He interviewed the crew and passengers and gathered information from them about the state of the colony. On the next day he wrote a letter to the "Nineteen," the governing board of the WIC, which said in part:

They report that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the women have also borne some children there. They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; 'tis 11,000 morgens (about 22,00 acres) in size. [E.B. O'Callaghan, ed. 1856 Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York. Albany. Vol. 1, [p. 37.]

Nicolaes Wassenaer also talked to the people returning on the Arms of Amsterdam and reported what they told him in Historisch Verhael. He said New Amsterdam (later New York) was a bustling community with a sawmill and a windmill and plans for the fort laid out. He said nothing of the purchase of the island.

And there you have it. That is the documentation. That is all that is historically known about the purchase of Manhattan. The deed is lost, and there is no copy of it. Shortly after Manhattan was bought on 10 August 1626 Minuit and five other men went to Staten Island and bought it. That deed is also lost, but was at least partially copied down by Cornelius Melyen before it disappeared. No glass beads are mentioned. Shell beads (wampum) were exchanged, not in payment but as a second sort of deed. The Staten Island inhabitants made their own wampum, as the "Drilling Awls" included in the goods given attest.

So where did the beads come in? American scholars didn't know that Manhattan was purchased until 1846. Harmanus Bleeker, a man from Albany of Dutch descent was sent as ambassador to the Netherlands by President Martin Van Buren, another New York Dutchman. Bleeker discovered a trove of documents on New Netherlands in the Dutch national archives. In 1839 he persuaded the New York State legislature to send his secretary, John. R. Brodhead, to go to Amsterdam and copy the documents. Brodhead returned in 1842 and the documents were translated and edited by O'Callaghan and published in the work cited above in 1846. The passage by Peter Schagen was made public. For the next few decades historians alluded to the purchase of New York, but it was Martha J. Lamb in History of the City of New York [1877: New York, Vol. I, p. 104] who first wrote: "He [Minuit] then called together some of the principal Indian chiefs, and offered beads, buttons, and other trinkets in exchange for their real estate. They accepted the terms with unfeigned delight, and the bargain was closed at once."

I have the feeling that it was actually J.G. Wilson's Memorial History of the City of New-York in 1892 that was even more influential on later historians, as the four volume set was considered the basic work for a long time. He echoed Lamb. In any case, it was all a product of Lamb's imagination, as was the "unfeigned delight" of the natives and the information that the "bargain was closed at once."

So, you can't believe everything you read.
 

*****
 

>From http://www.molsk.com/dar/minuit.html
 

Peter Minuit is best known as the man who bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians for the legendary sum of 60 Dutch guilders, or $24.00.

Born in Wesel, Germany, in 1580, Minuit was a Walloon (a Belgian, French-speaking Protestant) whose family fled persecution at the hands of the Spanish army and settled in the Netherlands. He was an employee of the Dutch West India Company, which held a monopoly over all Dutch trade with West Africa and the Americas and plundered over 120 million guilders from Spanish ships.

On May 4, 1626, Minuit arrived at the mouth of the Hudson River to take up his assignment as the third director of the New Netherland Colony, the Dutch settlement centered at the southern tip of Manhattan that was established in 1624. The colonists traded furs with the local native peoples - Mahicans and Lenapes - and set to work farming the area bounded by the Delaware and Connecticut rivers and the west bank of the Hudson, including outposts on what are known today as Staten Island and Governors Island.

At the same time that the West India Company was settling its New Netherland Colony, war broke out between the Mohawks and Mahicans over control of the fur trade with the colonists. Realizing that settlers in the more far-flung reaches of the colony were caught in the middle of this war, the West India Colony moved them to lower Manhattan, an area mostly deserted by the natives. To solidify control over the island, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from the Lenapes for 60 guilders' worth of trade goods. No deed or bill of sale has survived, which has caused some confusion over whether the purchase was made by Peter Minuit or his predecessor, Willem Verhulst, but the similar purchase of Staten Island was paid by him and five other colonists in duffel cloth, kettles, axes, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, "Jew's Harps," and "diverse other wares."

The newly-purchased land was called New Amsterdam, and its 270 residents continued to trade European goods for furs to be sold back in the Netherlands. Peter Minuit served as director of New Netherland until 1633, when he carried on the business of colonizing America and settled New Sweden on the lower Delaware River. He died in 1638, reportedly drowned at sea during a hurricane.

Peter Minuit is commemorated today by Peter Minuit Plaza, a small park at the foot of Manhattan; by a granite flagstaff base in Battery Park, which depicts the historical purchase; by P.S 108 Peter Minuit School; and by the Peter Minuit Chapter, NSDAR.
 

Sources:

Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace: Gotham. New York, 1999. Jackson, Kenneth T., ed.: The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven, 1995. Time Out Group Ltd., ed.: Time Out New York Guide. London, 1997. Kamen, Michael: Colonial New York. London, 1975. Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration: The WPA Guide to New York City. New York, 1939 and 1982.