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Updated: June 15, 2025
The Governor regretted having called together the twelve men. But he soon got rid of them, and to show that he was still absolute ruler, he decided to make war upon the Indians. Then the war-cloud broke. Those Indians who lived nearest New Amsterdam were fighting with another tribe called the Mohawks. The nearby Indians thought that since Kieft had been paid to protect them, he should do so now.
Kieft, in his overwhelming embarrassments, had found it necessary to convene eight select men to advise him and to aid in supporting his authority. These select men decided to demand of the home government the recall of Kieft, whose incapacity had thus plunged the once-flourishing colony into utter ruin.
Such was the ruin which the mal-administration of Kieft had brought upon the colony. The male adult population around Amsterdam was reduced to one hundred. At the same time the population of the flourishing New England colonies had increased to about sixty thousand. On the 11th of May, 1647, Governor Stuyvesant arrived at Manhattan. He was appointed as "Redresser General," of all colonial abuses.
Close upon this time Kieft decided that he needed money for other work, and he told the Indians of the province that he expected something from them. Of course the Indians had no such money as we have in these days. They used instead beads, very handsome and made from clam-shells. These beads were arranged on strings.
On the other hand, some of the more fiery spirits in the colony thought that the occasion furnished them with an opportunity so to cripple the Indians as to render them forever after powerless. They sent in a petition to Kieft, saying, "We entreat that immediate hostile measures may be directed against the savages.
Kieft would not concede the point, and the situation was strained. At this juncture, the unexpected happened. The Mohawks, a kingly tribe of red men, who claimed all Northeast America from the St. Lawrence to the Delaware, and who had already driven the Algonquins before them like chaff, sent down a war party from northern New York, and demanded tribute from them.
This was several years before John Eliot commenced preaching the gospel to the Indians near Boston. Kieft very earnestly applied to the English colony at New Haven for assistance against the Indians. The proposal was submitted to the General Court.
He was present, he says, in 1645, at a treaty between Governor Kieft and the Mohawk Indians, in which one of the latter, in painting himself for the ceremony, used a pigment, the weight and shining appearance of which excited the curiosity of the governor and Mynheer Van der Donck.
In the meantime the sovereign people, having got into the saddle, showed themselves, as usual, unmerciful riders; spurring on the little governor with harangues and petitions, and thwarting him with memorials and reproaches, in much the same way as holiday apprentices manage an unlucky devil of a hack-horse; so that Wilhelmus Kieft was kept at a worry or a gallop throughout the whole of his administration.
Hence they have facetiously received the nickname of "The Pilgrims," that is to say, a people who are always seeking a better country than their own. The tidings of this great Yankee league struck William Kieft with dismay, and for once in his life he forgot to bounce on receiving a disagreeable piece of intelligence.
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