07/01/2025
Well researched. Another example of native peoples eliminating each other before Europeans. We are all the same. Good and bad
The Beaver Wars shaped the history of the Berkshires- true story. Its now been exactly 400 years since the Mohican power base began to decline in the northeast, beginning with a series of wars with the Mohawk.
As late as 1624 the Mohican (an Algonquin group) were a confederacy of 5 tribes and 40 villages, 90% of them in New York, with their capital at Albany. They totally dominated the Hudson River fur trade, at a time when beaver pelts were like oil and bitcoin rolled into one.
But the Mohawk (an Iroquois group) had done exceedingly well in their first decades of European contact. Their entire population had doubled in 30 years of trading with the Dutch, and they'd invested most of their wealth into fi****ms. Over the course of mid 1620s they drove the Mohican off all the land they had controlled west of the Hudson. The fighting continued for generations, with the tribes taking turns as aggressors. The Mohican consistently lost and their surviving remnants were gradually pushed out of New York over the 17th century. There were less than 1,000 of them left by the time the first Englishman set foot in the Berkshires, and smallpox caught from Dutch traders in 1690 brought that number under 800.
Having lost 90% of their population to Mohawk conflicts and disease by 1734, they voted out of sheer desperation to become Christian and invite an English missionary, and at that point became known as the "Stockbridge Indians."
