Belle Starr Was Outlaw Queen on a Side Saddle

Belle Starr was locally notorious in Texas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas but captured public imagination with lurid tales in the Police Gazette which were gathered and expanded into this Dime Novel that carried a heafty 25 cent cover price due to the many illustrations. Ever after the supposed Outlaw Queen became fodder for novels, plays, songs, and movies.

You have to admit Belle Starr was the perfect name for an outlaw queen.  It emblazoned perfectly the covers of dime novels, titillated the readers of the original scandal sheet The Police Gazette, and set off fantasies of a bewitching bandit beauty celebrated in generations of movies, TV shows, and songs.  The allure was so strong that in the back yard westerns we enacted every Summer day in Cheyenne my cousin Linda was always Belle to my brother’s Roy Rogers and my Hopalong Cassidy.   The stories we played out were just about as real as any associated with Starr.

Myra Maybelle Shirley doesn’t quite cut the same ice.  But that was her name at birth on a farm near Carthage, Missouri on February 5, 1848.  Her father John Shirley was a prosperous farmer.  Her mother was a member of the Virginia (later West Virginia) Hatfield clan. But it would be a mistake to read too much into that—Hatfield-McCoy feud did not break out until after the Civil War and the family was not particularly then identified with violence.

Myra got a quite proper upbringing for a young lady of her class.  She was a graduate of the Carthage Female Academy, a finishing school where she learned a little Latin, how to play the piano, and all of the social graces.

About the time Myra graduated, all hell was breaking loose along the Kansas-Missouri Border.  The well-to-do Shirleys were slave owners.  Her father and uncles may have ridden with the Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers who attacked Free Soil settlers in Bloody Kansas.  The family was close to other pro-slavery clans in the area of south eastern Missouri including the James and Younger families.  Myra was said to be particularly close to the Younger boys.

After the war broke out Confederate Missouri Guard forces under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and General Sterling Price whipped a Union force under the command of Colonel Franz Sigel, in the First Battle of Carthage, the first important engagement in the West which gave control of most of the state south and west of St. Louis to the Rebels.  The Shirley family decided to sell the farm and move to Carthage which was becoming a major regional hub for the Confederacy.  John Shirley opened an inn and livery stable on the town square.

It was probably during this period when young Myra mastered the difficult use of the side saddle which was becoming the “proper” way for a young gentlewoman to ride.  The saddle accommodated the voluminous skirts and petticoats of the day by allowing a lady to wrap one leg around a pommel draping both to the same side of the horse.  The seat was not as secure as a conventional saddle ridden with legs astride the horse.  It took a skilled horsewoman to do much more than amble along at a walk in such a contraption.  Myra could reportedly keep in the saddle at a full gallop.  She continued to use the side saddle almost exclusively the rest of her life.

In 1863 the tide of war turned in the region at the Second Battle of Carthage, a smaller but significant skirmish in which Union forces repulsed an advancing force sending them scurrying back to Arkansas.  Yankee troops occupied the town.  Myra’s brother John A. M. “Bud” Shirley joined the partisan irregulars harassing Union troops.  He became a Captain of his own band of Bushwhackers.  He may have ridden when partisans attacked the occupied town in September 1864 and burned the Courthouse and much of the Square.  With a Yankee price on his head, Captain Shirley was ambushed and killed as he ate at a sympathizer’s house in near-by Sarcoxie soon after. 

The Shirley family became refugees.  They fled the area and made their way to Scyene, Texas near Dallas where other Missouri guerillas, including the Younger Brothers and Frank and Jesse James also settled.

As May Reed the future Belle Starr took to wearing broad hats and carrying pistols like the outlaws she associated herself with in Texas.  This photo shows that as a young woman she was much more attractive than the gaunt, haggard woman of better known later pictures.

In 1866 Myra, now generally called May, married James Reed, a young man from back home in Carthage on whom she once had a teen age crush.    No contemporary accounts remark on her beauty, although once or twice she was called handsome.  What May might have lacked in conventional attractiveness, she made up with a sense of style, even when they young family struggled on a farm near town.  She cut a swath in riding habits and plumed hats when she rode into town.

James did not take much to sod busting and his wife’s taste in finery compelled him to find extra income.  He fell in with her old chums the Younger Brothers and began to ride with their gang.  He may also occasionally have ridden with the James Gang—the two groups were friendly and often shared personnel.  All were former Confederate guerillas and at least at first considered their robberies as an extension of the war.

May took to the life style.  She soon added a pair of Colt revolvers to here riding gear and was known to display her marksmanship to admiring locals.

Scyene served as a safe haven and base for the outlaw gangs’ far flung raids, bank, and train robberies.  Reed would be gone for weeks at a time, return, and resume what looked like an ordinary life on the farm.  May gave birth to the couple’s first child, Rosie Lee, who they called Pearl in 1868.

Outlawry was dangerous work and was apt to disrupt family life sooner or later.  In 1871 Reed was charged with robbery and murder in Arkansas and wanted posters with a price on his head began to circulate in Texas—a sure invitation to some greedy or ambitious neighbor to turn him in.  The couple fled to California where a son, James Edwin—Eddie—was born.

When things cooled off, they returned to Texas.  Reed soon fell in with a new gang, the Starrs, a Cherokee clan based in Indian Territory who specialized in running whiskey to the tribes, cattle rustling, and horse thievery.  Strong arm robbery, Reed’s specialty was a side line.  

It is unclear if Mrs. Reed actively took part in the commission of her husband’s crimes during these years or was merely an accomplice.  But her continued show of being an armed and her swagger did nothing to discourage a notion that she was an active participant.  In April 1874 that supposition was enough despite a lack of any evidence placing her on the scene, to get a warrant issued along with her husband and members of the Starr gang for a Stagecoach robbery. 

The Reeds shifted their base of operations to Paris, Texas where James was shot and killed that August.
A widow with two children and no means of support, May continued her association with her old outlaw pals, many of whom evidently helped support the family.  She may have become more directly involved in some of their operations, particularly the sale of rustled cattle and horses.  She was evidently spared the fallback occupation of many a widow in her position—prostitution.

In the late 1870’s she may have entered a brief relationship—some say a marriage—with Charles Younger, uncle of Cole.  But this is unsubstantiated by any known records and may simply be rooted in gossip which took root in lore.

In 1880 31 year old May married Sam Starr and settled with him on a ranch, renamed Younger’s Bend, on the Canadian River near present-day Eufaula.  It was there that she finally became something like the bandit queen of legend.  She adopted the name of Belle, probably to obscure her identity, but perhaps as a pet name given to her by her new husband.  In Texas she was still known as Mrs. Reed or May.

Belle turned out to be a woman of great organizational skill and was soon assuming a leadership position among the Starrs.  She organized and directed cattle raids and planned robberies.  She regularized the clan’s business dealings, cultivating markets and keeping lawmen on the payroll for protection.  She was seen in her full regalia in company of the boys, her brace of pistols now upgraded to a nickel-plated pearl handle horse pistol and a lighter .38.  She kept a shotgun in a saddle boot. But whether she actually led any of the gang’s crimes is doubtful.  No reliable witness ever put her on the scene.

But in 1883 Belle and Sam were found in possession of stolen horses by a Federal Marshall operating in Indian Territory.  The pair was dragged before the notorious Hanging Judge Isaac Parker’s Federal Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Both were convicted.  Belle was sent to the Detroit House of Corrections in Michigan because the Feds had no facilities for women.  There she was regarded as a model prisoner, was made a trustee, and won the admiration and affection of the supervising Matron.  The rebellious Sam served time at hard labor, much of it on a chain gang and in the hole for various infractions.

Belle was released after nine months.  Sam rejoined her in Indian Territory when his sentence was up.  Then they were back in business.

Belle and her husband Sam Starr in Fort Smith,Arkansas in 1886 months before Sam was killed in a shoot out with an Indian Police Officer.  She is shown riding side saddle and heavily armed. 

In 1886 Belle was again hauled before Judge Parker on a theft charge but escaped conviction.  While in Ft. Smith she posed on horseback fully armed for her most famous photograph.  It was a triumphant moment, but Belle’s happiness was cut short when Sam and Indian Police Officer Frank West shot each other to death in a gunfight on December 17 of that year.

Widowed once again, Belle was rumored to have had several short relationships with members of her outlaw circle—Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, and Jim French.  In order to be able to remain on her land in the Indian Nation, Belle married the much younger Jim Starr a/k/a Jim July.

Belle with Blue Duck, a Cherokee outlaw who rode in the Starr gang.  After Sam's death he was one of a series of lovers she took and was rumored by some to have briefly been her husband.  Blue Duck is most famous as the relentless and remorseless killer in Larry McMurtry's  novels Commanche Moon and Lonesome Dove, both of which were made into successful TV mini series.

Despite these relationships, her active leadership in the Starr gang had ended with Sam Starr’s death.

On February 3, 1889 just two days before her 41 birthday Belle was riding home from a visit to neighbors in Eufaula when she was ambushed.  She was hit in the back and neck with a blast of buckshot from a shotgun.  She was knocked off of her horse.  He assailant turned her over on her back and finished her off with a second blast directly in the face, and act of such rage and savagery that suspicion was immediately drawn on those closest to her. 

Those suspects included her husband, and her son.  A tenant sharecropper named Edgar J. Watson, a Creek, was charged with her murder supposedly because Belle had threatened to turn him into the law on an outstanding murder charge in Florida.  But Belle, who had harbored many outlaws at her ranch including Jesse James himself once for several months, would be unlikely to betray anyone.  Evidence was slim to non-existence and the jury did not believe the prosecutor’s case.  Watson lived until 1910 when he was shot and killed.

Jim Starr may not have been entirely happy in his marriage to a dominating older woman, but he had little motive to murder her since he had no claim on the land on which he was living comfortably.  Most historians discount him as a suspect.

Belle with her children.  James "Eddy" Starr, upper right, was her eldest and has been suspected of her murder.  Pearl, standing in back of her seated mother became a prostitute and successful madame after her mothers death. 

Eddy, however, had recently been beaten by his mother for abusing a horse and was known to be furious with her.  The fact that the shotgun used in the murder probably belonged to Belle also linked him to the crime.  But there was never enough evidence to charge him.  Belle’s murder remains officially unsolved.  

Eddie Reed was convicted of horse theft and receiving stolen property in July 1889 and the family nemesis Judge Parker sentenced him to prison in Columbus, Ohio.  Like many former outlaws Eddie switched sides, becoming a lawman in Fort Smith.  He was involved in a famous gun battle with two outlaw brothers named Crittenden in 1895 who he killed.  He died in another shoot out in a Claremont, Oklahoma saloon on December 14, 1898.

Belle's daughter Pearl turned to prostitution after her mother's murder and went on to be a successful madame. 

Pearl Starr turned to prostitution to raise money to try and secure her brother’s release from the 1889 prison sentence.  Her efforts did earn him a pardon which opened the door to his law enforcement career.  Pearl continued to ply her trade and operated brothels in Van Buren and Fort Smith, Arkansas, up to and through World War I.  

At the time of her death Belle was locally notorious in Indian Territory, Texas, and Arkansas, but unknown in the rest of the country.  Richard K. Fox, editor and publisher of the Police Gazette, always on the look-out for exciting yarns, picked up the story of Belle’s murder from the Western press. Intrigued he did a modicum of investigation into her life and launched a series of lurid articles in his magazine.  These were consolidated and expanded into a dime novel, Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James published late in the year of her death.  Some Western historians continue to cite the book as a source on her life although it is riddled with errors and exaggerations.

But it did prove popular.  More dime novels followed along with the inevitable stage melodrama.  Woody Guthrie was just one of those who immortalized her in song. 

The luminous Gene Tierney actually got second billing to Randolph Scott in the highly fictionalized 1941 20th Century Fox bio-pick Belle Starr the Bandit Queen. 

Belle has been portrayed, rarely very realistically, in dozens of films.  Actresses portraying her included Betty Compton in 1928, Gene Tierney opposite Randolph Scott in 1941, Jane Russell in 1953, Elsa Martinelli in a spaghetti western with a feminist touch directed by Lina Wertmüller in 1968,  Elizabeth Montgomery in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, and Pamela Reed in the same year’s The Long Riders.

In her statue at the Woolaroc Museum in in the Osage Hills of Northeastern Oklahoma Belle is toting a rifle, not the usual shotgun she had in the boot of her side saddle. 

Belle is commemorated in the former Indian Territory where she spent much of her life with a gun-toting life size statue at Woolaroc, Oklahoma.

 

Why the Greatest Real Estate Deal of All Time Wasn’t and How it Cursed All it Touched

Almost everything is wrong with this 19th Century depiction of the sale of Manhattan Island to the Dutch under Peter Minuit including the squatting Canarsie tribe being depicted in Plains Indian attire and the trade goods offered by the Europeans.

On this day in 1626 the greatest real estate deal in history went down.  But the real winner in the deal is not the one you have been told about.

Due to a simplistic account in a 19th Century popular reader, almost any American will tell you that Manhattan Island was bought by the Dutch from local Indians for “$24 in beads and trinkets.”  Those with especially acute memories might recall the alleged sharpie who hoodwinked the natives with his paltry offering was Peter Minuit, Governor of the North American colony owned by the Dutch West Indies Company. 

There are several things wrong with this version.  First and foremost is that the trade goods Minuit offered were not the trade trifles mentioned, but a selection of metal tools and implements including axe heads, knives, awls, needles, cast iron kettles, as well as cloth.  They were valued by Minuit at 60 silver guilders, a significant sum.  Depending on who is doing the reckoning and how inflation over nearly four centuries is figured, that would be worth well more than $1000 in today’s cash. 

But as one historian points out, the value of the items to the natives was probably much more than the actual monetary value.  Most of these items had been virtually unobtainable, although a few had found their way ashore from other European ships or have been traded down from New England or far away New France.  A historian described it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.”

                        Peter Minuit--a colonial governor for both Dutch and Swedish mercantile firms.

But it was the natives who Minuit dealt with that may have been the real sharpies.  He assumed he was doing business with the Lenape; a powerful and extensive tribe that held sway over what is now the Delaware Valley including much of modern New Jersey and over the area around the mouth of the Hudson River including Manhattan and much of Long Island.  They were a sedentary people engaged in extensive agriculture and both coastal and inland fishery, including the harvesting of oysters.  Relatively large villages relocated within the range every year or so, returning to previous sites when the land rejuvenated itself.

Evidently the local Lenape, however, were not using Manhattan at the time the Dutch arrived.  Instead, they made sort of a sub-lease agreement with the much smaller Canarsie tribe who shared some of Long Island with them and a dozen other small bands.  The Canarsie, who were harvesting oysters and gardening on the island, could hardly believe their good fortune.  They gladly sold the Dutch what didn’t belong to them and retreated to Long Island with what they must have considered a fortune.

A previous governor had established Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of the island the year before.  Minuit now felt secure enough in his sale to begin settlement of a new colonial capital Nieuw-Amsterdam.  Eventually the Lanape, who became the chief partners of the new colony in the fur trade, complained about the Dutch squatting on their land and a second purchase had to be arranged.  The exact price paid in this second deal is lost to history, but the Lenape likely did pretty well in trade goods themselves.

The fates of all parties to the deal were unhappy.

In 1631 Minuit was fired by the Dutch West India company for failing to meet expectations for the fur trade and was accused of skimming accounts for his own benefit.  Enraged, he returned to Europe and offered himself to the Swedes, an ascending power eager to get into North American colonization.  In 1638 he returned as Governor General of New Sweden and established Fort Christiana new modern day Wilmington, Delaware.  He was killed later the same year on a return voyage to recruit more settlers.  He sailed via the Caribean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the journey profitable for the company and perished in a hurricane near the island of St. Christopher.  His colony lasted a dozen more years until a later Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, conquered it in 1655.

The Canarsie, one of thirteen small tribes on Long Island, allied themselves with the much more powerful Mohawks from the mainland for protection.  They lived in relative harmony with the Dutch until a later governor, William Kieft, launched a war on local tribes.  A massacre of the village of Pavonia united all the tribes in a general uprising in 1643.  The ensuing war was devastating to both settlers and the tribes.  Peter Stuyvesant eventually negotiated a peace.  Many Canarsie converted to Christianity during the period of peace and continued to farm and fish in the area.

The Dutch persuaded the 13 tribes of Long Island not to pay tribute to their traditional protectors, the Mohawks.  In 1655 a large Mohawk war party invaded Long Island and massacred most of the local tribal residents.

Descendants of the Canarsie sill living in Brooklyn participated in this 1937 re-enactment of their real estate scam at a public school.

A remnant of the Canarsie later sold most of their remaining land to the British, after they seized New Amsterdam.  Small numbers continued to live and farm in rural Brooklyn into the 19th Century.  A unit of Canarsie volunteers served in the Civil War.  Eventually descendants of the tribe became absorbed by the white community and the tribe disappeared into the mist of history.

The much larger Lenape at least persist as a people.  Their culture was much disrupted by the arrival of the Dutch, Swedes, and the English.  In order to obtain much desired trade goods, they abandoned much of their traditional agricultural and fishery based economy to pursue the fur trade.  This took them deep into hostile territory dominated by the Mohawk and other Iroquoian people.  By the late 18th Century pressure from the Iroquois and expanding European settlement forced most major bands to re-settle west of the Allegany Mountains in what is now western Pennsylvania and along the Ohio River.  Remnant bands in the east were mostly absorbed by other tribes or by neighboring white settlements.  

A traditional eastern Lanape Village before their culture was disrupted and they were forced out of their original range.

After the signing of the Treaty of Easton in 1758, most of the remaining Lenape were forced to move west out of their lands in Delaware, New Jersey, eastern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania into what is today known as Ohio.  Some of Lenape were converted by the Moravians, a German pietistic sect that practiced pacifism.  These “Praying Indians” settled west of Ft. Pitt along the Ohio River with their missionaries. 

In the French and Indian Wars more warlike bands allied themselves with the French and were present at the Siege of Ft. Pitt.

During the American Revolution bands of the tribe, by then generally known as the Delaware, split allegiances between the British and the colonists.  Several large bands relocated to the Sandusky to be closer to the British stronghold of Ft. Detroit.  Others scouted for the Americans, or in the case of the Praying Indians tried to remain neutral.  Coshocton was the main town of the Delaware friendly to the colonists.  They hoped to form an all-Indian state within the infant republic.  But after their chief, White Eyes was killed, probably by American militiamen, many of the warriors from Coshocton joined their kinsmen with the British.

Massacre of the Praying Indians by the Pennsylvania Militia and their native scouts.

American Colonel Daniel Brodhead led an expedition out of Fort Pitt and in 1781 destroyed Coshocton. Surviving residents fled to the north to the British.  The next year the peaceful Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhutten was attacked by Pennsylvania militia.  At least 96 men, women and children were massacred.

Various Delaware bands were caught up in the continuing fierce warfare along the Ohio frontier after the Revolution.  Some took up arms again with the British in the War of 1812.  After the capture of Ft. Detroit in that war, northern Delaware bands, including some of the Moravians relocated to what is now western Ontario.

Most of the remaining American Delaware ceded their lands in Ohio in the Treaty of St. Mary’s in 1814.  Bands took up lands in Indiana and Missouri.  In 1829 yet another treaty, the Treaty of James Fork pushed the tribe yet further west.  In exchange for the Indiana and Missouri lands they received grants in Kansas.

The Delaware became active as guides and trappers in the trans-Mississippi West and frequently served as scouts for the Army.  They were prominent in the Seminole Wars and were among those with John Charles Frèmont when he entered California during the Mexican War.  Later they would be guides for emigrant trains to the West.

A Delaware couple in the late 19th Century, probably in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).  Their dress was reflective of cultural contact with other tribes and adaptations in their generations of being pushed ever west.

Despite loyal service the Delaware were again pushed from their lands.  Most relocated to Indian Territory by 1860.  They were forced to buy lands from the Cherokee.  In 1979 The Bureau of Indian Affairs ceased to recognize the Oklahoma Delaware as a separate tribe and began to count them as Cherokee.  That decision was overturned in 1996.  A challenge by the Cherokee to the re-instatement caused a see-sawing legal battle with the tribe stripped of recognition again and then having it restored.  As of 2009 they have had tribal status and the same year reorganized under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act with a tribal government of its own.

Other small bands of Lenape or Delaware are scattered from New Jersey to Wisconsin but have no formal recognition.  In Ontario, decedents of the Lenape of Ohio still live on four reservations.

 

The Greatest Real Estate Deal of All Time Wasn’t and Cursed All it Touched

Almost everything is wrong with this 19th Century depiction of the sale of Manhattan Island to the Dutch under Peter Minuit including the squatting Canarsie tribe being depicted in Plains Indian attire and the trade goods offered by the Europeans.

On this day in 1626 the greatest real estate deal in history went down.  But the real winner in the deal is not the one you have been told about.

Due to a simplistic account in a 19th Century popular reader, almost any American will tell you that Manhattan Island was bought by the Dutch from local Indians for “$24 in beads and trinkets.”  Those with especially acute memories might recall the alleged sharpie who hoodwinked the natives with his paltry offering was Peter Minuit, Governor of the North American colony owned by the Dutch West Indies Company. 

There are several things wrong with this version.  First and foremost is that the trade goods Minuit offered were not the trade trifles mentioned, but a selection of metal tools and implements including axe heads, knives, awls, needles, cast iron kettles, as well as cloth.  They were valued by Minuit at 60 silver guilders, a significant sum.  Depending on who is doing the reckoning and how inflation over nearly four centuries is figured, that would be worth well more than $1000 in today’s cash. 

But as one historian points out, the value of the items to the natives was probably much more than the actual monetary value.  Most of these items had been virtually unobtainable, although a few had found their way ashore from other European ships or have been traded down from New England or far away New France.  A historian described it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.”

Peter Minuit--a colonial governor for both Dutch and Swedish mercantile firms.

But it was the natives who Minuit dealt with that may have been the real sharpies.  He assumed he was doing business with the Lenape; a powerful and extensive tribe that held sway over what is now the Delaware Valley including much of modern New Jersey and over the area around the mouth of the Hudson River including Manhattan and much of Long Island.  They were a sedentary people engaged in extensive agriculture and both coastal and inland fishery, including the harvesting of oysters.  Relatively large villages relocated within the range every year or so, returning to previous sites when the land rejuvenated itself.

Evidently the local Lenape, however, were not using Manhattan at the time the Dutch arrived.  Instead, they made sort of a sub-lease agreement with the much smaller Canarsie tribe who shared some of Long Island with them and a dozen other small bands.  The Canarsie, who were harvesting oysters and gardening on the island, could hardly believe their good fortune.  They gladly sold the Dutch what didn’t belong to them and retreated to Long Island with what they must have considered a fortune.

A previous governor had established Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of the island the year before.  Minuit now felt secure enough in his sale to begin settlement of a new colonial capital Nieuw-Amsterdam.  Eventually the Lanape, who became the chief partners of the new colony in the fur trade, complained about the Dutch squatting on their land and another purchase had to be arranged.  The exact price paid in this second deal is lost to history, but the Lenape likely did pretty well in trade goods themselves.

The fates of all parties to the deal were unhappy.

In 1631 Minuit was fired by the Dutch West India company for failing to meet expectations for the fur trade and was accused of skimming accounts for his own benefit.  Enraged, he returned to Europe and offered himself to the Swedes, an ascending power eager to get into North American colonization.  In 1638 he returned as Governor General of New Sweden and established Fort Christiana new modern day Wilmington, Delaware.  He was killed later the same year on a return voyage to recruit more settlers.  He sailed via the Caribean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the journey profitable for the company and perished in a hurricane near the island of St. Christopher.  His colony lasted a dozen more years until a later Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant conquered it in 1655.

The Canarsie, one of thirteen small tribes on Long Island, allied themselves with the much more powerful Mohawks from the mainland for protection.  They lived in relative harmony with the Dutch until a later governor, William Kieft, launched a war on local tribes.  A massacre of the village of Pavonia united all of the tribes in a general uprising in 1643.  The ensuing war was devastating to both settlers and the tribes.  Peter Stuyvesant eventually negotiated a peace.  Many Canarsie converted to Christianity during the period of peace and continued to farm and fish in the area.

The Dutch persuaded the 13 tribes of Long Island not to pay tribute to their traditional protectors, the Mohawks.  In 1655 a large Mohawk war party invaded Long Island and massacred most of the local tribal residents.

Descendants of the Canarsie sill living in Brooklyn participated in this 1937 re-enactment of their real estate scam at a public school.

A remnant of the Canarsie later sold most of their remaining land to the British, after they seized New Amsterdam.  Small numbers continued to live and farm in rural Brooklyn into the 19th Century.  A unit of Canarsie volunteers served the Civil War.  Eventually descendants of the tribe became absorbed by the white community and the tribe disappeared into the mist of history.

The much larger Lenape at least persist as a people.  Their culture was much disrupted by the arrival of the Dutch, Swedes, and the English.  In order to obtain much desired trade goods, they abandoned much of their traditional agricultural and fishery based economy to pursue the fur trade.  This took them deep into hostile territory dominated by the Mohawk and other Iroquoian people.  By the late 18th Century pressure from the Iroquois and expanding European settlement forced most major bands to re-settle west of the Allegany Mountains in what is now western Pennsylvania and along the Ohio River.  Remnant bands in the east were mostly absorbed by other tribes or by neighboring white settlements.  

A traditional eastern Lanape Village before their culture was disrupted and they were forced out of their original range.

After the signing of the Treaty of Easton in 1758, most the remaining Lenape were forced to move west out of their lands in Delaware, New Jersey, eastern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania into what is today known as Ohio.  A large number of Lenape were converted by the Moravians, a German pietistic sect that practiced pacifism.  These “Praying Indians” settled west of Ft. Pitt along the Ohio River with their missionaries. 

In the French and Indian Wars more warlike bands allied themselves with the French and were present at the Siege of Ft. Pitt.

During the American Revolution bands of the tribe, by then generally known as the Delaware, split allegiances between the British and the colonists.  Several large bands relocated to the Sandusky to be closer to the British stronghold of Ft. Detroit.  Others scouted for the Americans, or in the case of the Praying Indians tried to remain neutral.  Coshocton was the main town of the Delaware friendly to the colonists.  They hoped to form an all Indian state within the infant republic.  But after their chief, White Eyes was killed, probably by American militiamen, many of the warriors from Coshocton joined their kinsmen with the British.

Massacre of the Praying Indians by the Pennsylvania Militia and their native scouts.

American Colonel Daniel Brodhead led an expedition out of Fort Pitt and in 1781 destroyed Coshocton. Surviving residents fled to the north to the British.  The next year the peaceful Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhutten was attacked by Pennsylvania militia.  At least 96 men, women and children were massacred.

Various Delaware bands were caught up in the continuing fierce warfare along the Ohio frontier after the Revolution.  Some took up arms again with the British in the War of 1812.  After the capture of Ft. Detroit in that war, northern Delaware bands, including some of the Moravians relocated to what is now western Ontario.

Most of the remaining American Delaware ceded their lands in Ohio in the Treaty of St. Mary’s in 1814.  Bands took up lands in Indiana and Missouri.  In 1829 yet another treaty, the Treaty of James Fork pushed the tribe yet further west.  In exchange for the Indiana and Missouri lands they received grants in Kansas.

The Delaware became active as guides and trappers in the trans-Mississippi West and frequently served as scouts for the Army.  They were prominent in the Seminole Wars and were among those with John Charles Frèmont when he entered California during the Mexican War.  Later they would be guides for emigrant trains to the west.

A Delaware couple in the late 19th Century, probably in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).  Their dress was reflective of cultural contact with other tribes and adaptations in their generations of being pushed ever west.

Despite loyal service the Delaware were again pushed from their lands.  Most relocated to Indian Territory by 1860.  They were forced to buy lands from the Cherokee.  In 1979 The Bureau of Indian Affairs ceased to recognize the Oklahoma Delaware as a separate tribe and began to count them as Cherokee.  That decision was overturned in 1996.  A challenge by the Cherokee to the reinstatement caused a see-sawing legal battle with the tribe stripped of recognition again and then having it restored.  As of 2009 they have had tribal status and the same year reorganized under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act with a tribal government of its own.

Other small bands of Lenape or Delaware are scattered from New Jersey to Wisconsin but have no formal recognition.  In Ontario decedents of the Lenape of Ohio still live on four reservations.