Uncovering Hudson Valley Indian History

Abstract

Tom Arne Midtrod. The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Di- plomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. xxxii + 297 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $35.00. The Hudson Valley may not have the same rich historiographical tradition of New England and the Chesapeake, but it is the setting for a disproportionate number of influential monographs in early American history. Over the past several decades these have included Sung Bok Kim's Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (1978); Daniel J. Walkowitz's Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 (1978); Donna Merwick's Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (1999); Judith Richardson's Possessions: The His- tory and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2005); and, most recently, John L. Brooke's celebrated Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010). Crucially, all of these books advance broad arguments relevant beyond their geographical confines, which accounts for their appearance on oral exam lists and syllabi created by and for those with no particular interest in the Hudson Valley. Every subfield, it seems, from political to labor to literary history, has its own classic work that takes the Hudson Valley as its subject. Until very recently, one glaring exception to that rule was American Indian history. Whereas most early Americanists have read enough about, say, the Powhatans and the Iro- quois to lecture intelligently about them, far fewer can do so for the Mahican, Munsee, Esopus, and Wappinger Indians of the Hudson Valley. Three valu- able books may be changing that: Paul Otto's The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (2006); Robert Steven Grumet's The Munsee Indians: A History (2009); and the book under review here. Like the books by Otto and Grumet, Tom Arne Midtrod's monograph is deeply researched and clearly written. It poses important questions and offers persuasive, non-polemical answers. It does not, however, provide quite enough interpretive payoff to win it a place on many exam lists. Midtrod bravely tackles a subject for which written sources are scattered and frequently unrevealing: inter-Indian diplomacy. He wants to know how