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Jersey Indians Characteristics - The Lenni Lenape Religion
They were gentle, and received strangers with the most gracious hospitality. Samuel Smith, New Jersey's first historian, wrote of them in 1765: "None could excel them in liberty with the little they had, for nothing was too good for a friend."
But they kept strict watch over their tribal boundaries, as a rule. A Hackensack, for instance, could fish and hunt in Newark territory and none other. Other tribes of Lenni Lenape and those of other peaceful nations had full right to traverse the Indian highways and to enjoy temporarily the privileges of the region, but they could not tarry long nor take the fish nor the game nor the fruits of the fields and the wildwood. It is pretty certain also, that no one family remained for any great length of time at any one spot, so Newark cannot be said to have belonged to any one man or small group of red men, since it was "possessed" only by the tribe; and as we shall see later, was disposed of to the settlers by the tribe, a few acting as the tribal representatives and who probably were the last natives to have residence here. (17)
There was no Indian village of any considerable size on Newark soil at least not for several generations before the settlement. It was part of the domain of the Awkinges awky, Ackinken hackys or Hackensacks a sub tribe of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. The Hackensacks headquarters were near the site of the present city of Hackensack and the tribal boundaries were roughly Wee quahic creek the original boundary line afterwards fixed by the settlers between Newark and Elizabethtown on the south the Ramapo mountains on the north and west with the Hudson and a part of Staten Island completing the confines Below the Hackensacks were the Raritans and above them the Tappans The whole State was dotted with tribal centres like that near Hackensack from which small groups composed of a few families moved hither and thither over the region set aside to their tribe hunting fishing raising occasional crops of maize corn etc.
OLD INDIAN HIGHWAYS
When the Dutch trappers and traders, the first white men to really explore the region fared out from New Amsterdam and from the little settlement at Bergen a decade or so after Hudson discovered the great river that bears his name, they found the country we now call New Jersey peopled with perhaps fifteen hundred Indians, living peacefully each division and sub division in its own section under a loose government which served well for all purposes of the aborigines. They welcomed the Dutchmen, piloted them up and down the streams, bartered their furs, showed them the way through the wilderness along the myriad paths, which the feet of many generations of their people had worn deep, along the waterways through clefts in the hills around all natural barriers, over meadows and beside marshes and in and out of forests that to the stranger seemed at first quite impenetrable. They taught them many things in woodcraft and they showed them the mysteries of their crude methods of farming.
The greatest Indian pathway in all New Jersey was undoubtedly the Minisink path leading from the sea to the headquarters of the Minsis on Minisink Island high up in the Delaware. This path ran from the Shrewsbury river northwest crossing the Raritan a little west of Perth Amboy, proceeding north to and through the Short Hills and then to the Passaic, which it crossed where the oldest portion of Chatham Morris county now is, at a ford where Day's Bridge was built in 1747. From this ford the old path ran a distance of about twelve miles to Little Falls, being seldom more than six or eight miles west of the Watchung First Mountain from the Short Hills to Little Falls. There was another crossing there from whence the path ran along the eastern side of the valley to Pompton thence following the Pequannock towards the Delaware river.
"The Newark mountain region", writes Wickes in his history of the Oranges, was constantly crossed and recrossed by the Indians going to and from the Hudson by paths all of which inter sected the great Minisink highway. Their nearest or most direct route from the Hudson to Minisink Island was through the Great Notch of the First Mountain, four miles above Montclair meeting the main path near Little Falls. The other intersecting paths were: At Montclair where the highway Bloomfield avenue crossed the mountain; the notch at Eagle Rock; the notches of the Mt Pleasant and the Northfield highways and the mountain crossing at South Orange (South Orange avenue, where it enters the South Mountain reservation). All these routes led to the Minisink path They all crossed this great thoroughfare and were the highways of Indian travel from the Hudson through the Musconetcong Valley to the Delaware.
The Dutch traders found to their surprise that the Hackensacks as well as all other savages had a name for every path, stream, creek and mountain range, as well as for every other object in nature which could serve as a guide or landmark to the traveler. If he took these names in the regular sequence as the red man gave them to him, remembering the meaning of each as the savage had imparted it, the trader could make his way for long distances, recognizing each point as he came to it by the Indian place names. It was thus for many generations that the natives taught each other how to thread their way up and down and across New Jersey. These place names answered every purpose of the time quite as perfectly as guide books auto tour books road maps etc do the present day denizens of the country. The Dutch officials employed the Indian runners to carry dispatches between their settlements on the Hudson and the Delaware The trip one way was made in something less than five days (11)
INDIAN TRADITIONS AND TRIBAL DIVISIONS
The Lenni Lenape were a branch of the great Algonkin nation. Long before the coming of the white man they had been beaten in battle by the fierce Iroquois to the north, and from that time bore the name of women among the Iroquois and other warlike peoples. In compensation for that epithet, given in derision, they came to be known as wise and safe in counsel and were often appealed to by other nations to settle disputes. They showed their wisdom in keeping out of wars and although they had been conquered by the Iroquois, they considered themselves superior to their conquerors because they felt they possessed higher intelligence.
Lenape held sway at one time or another over a large part of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and a portion of New York. They were divided into three branches, the Minsis or Mountaineers or wolves, the Unarms or tortoises, the Unalachtigoes or turkeys. The Hackensacks seem to have been a sub tribe of the Unamis with the Minsis above and the Unlachtigoes below them. the Minsis above and the Unlachtigoes below them. To the traders and trappers the Lenni Lenape gave various interpretations of their family name: "our men" "Indian men" "the original or pure Indian". To be a Lenni Lenape was to have sprung from a very ancient race of red men, whose blood was unpolluted by that of other nations. To be of the tribe of Unamis was to have been borne of the most ancient of all the Lenni Lenape; for, as the old Hackensack chieftains explained, it was the tortoise who bore the earth on his back and who created all things upon the earth that were good for man; and the totem of the Unamis was the tortoise. Thus the child of the forest babbled of his history, a tale in which myth and fact are inextricably intermingled. If we are to believe him, the Indians who once called the soil of Newark their own were sprung from the oldest of the three great divisions of the Lenni Lenape, and the Lenni Lenape were descended from the very earliest of Indians.
The Lenni Lenape were powerfully built usually of about the average height of the white men, with dark eyes, glistening white teeth, coarse black hair. They preserved their skins, wrote Charles Wolley in 1701, by anointing them with the oil of fishes the fat of eagles and the grease of raccoons, which they hold in the summer to be the best antidote to keep their skins from blistering by the scorching sun and their best armour against the musketto's and stopper of the pores of their bodies against the winter's cold. (16) (continue...)
Ref.: A history of the city of Newark (published in 1913)
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