2. Myth: The Dutch Bought Manhattan for Only $24 Worth of Beads and Trinkets from the Manahatta people
Fact: The land the Manahatta people “sold” to the Dutch was not a part of their territory. They made out like bandits and watched the Dutch enter conflict with another tribe who DID own the land.
The Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island had been a fur trading post for several years previously before becoming a formal colony in 1624. At that time, the leader of the Dutch settlers, Peter Minuit, negotiated a treaty with a Manahatta tribe of the Lenape natives. The natives had been actively trading beaver pelts with the Dutch – highly valued in Europe for their use in making hats – for several years. The Manahatta accepted 60 guilders, around $1,100 in current value, for approximately half of the island of Manhattan. Dutch leader Peter Minuit referred to the transaction in his diary, but the deed prepared to record the exchange formally has been long lost to history. The transaction was negotiated to protect sawmills and gristmills already erected by the enterprising Dutch.
In fact, it was the natives rather than the Dutch who got the best of the other party in the deal. Manhattan Island was not the recognized territory of the Manahatta in Lenape tradition. The island was the territory of another band of natives known as the Wappinger, who also controlled large portions of Long Island and Connecticut. The Wappinger opposed the Dutch settlements in New Amsterdam and in Connecticut, and it took an alliance between the Dutch and the Mohawks, strong trading partners, to defeat the Wappinger in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Manhattan purchase may have been the equivalent of a modern-day swindle, but it was the natives who sold what they did not own to unwary newcomers.