THE TRADING-HOUSE ON THE PAUGASSET. BY REV. WILLIAM G. ANDREWS, D.D. [Read October 18th, 1886.] THE great historian, Diedrick Knickerbocker, in the twelfth chapter of his fourth book, describes certain soldiers as "worn out with constant campaigning," at about the year 1646. Nevertheless, some of those same soldiers are at this moment drawn up in line of battle, and vigorous enough to be not only reviewed but interviewed, a far more trying experience. For the "standing army" which our historian celebrates, being the one commanded at this period by William Kieft, Governor (or Director) of New Netherland, consisted of "the four and twenty letters of the alphabet." These warriors were arrayed, as we learn, in "bad Latin, worse English, and hideous Dutch." The particular battalion which we are about to inspect and interrogate (along with that led out against it), originally wore the dress in which the troops of Julius Cæsar still threaten the peace of studious youth at the Hopkins Grammar School. But it now wears an English uniform, and as that must have been manufactured at New Haven, it is no fault of Director Kieft if it is worse than the Latin, and it probably is not. On the third of August, 1646 (new style), Kieft wrote as follows, in words quoted before you seven years ago, by our present presiding officer:* "To thee, Theophilus Eaton, Gou'nor of the place by us called the Red Hills in New Netherland, (but by the English called New Haven)." These words indi *New Haven Hist. Soc. Papers, iii. 272. cate the general ground of controversy between the English and the Dutch colonists. For Kieft's New Netherland stretched far beyond the Red Hills, and even the Red Island (called Rhode Island by Yankees speaking bad Dutch), to New Holland, or Cape Cod.* But the Director had lighted on a new grievance. "Because you & yours," he proceeds, "have of late determined to fasten your foote neere Mauritius Ryver in this Province, & there not onely to disturbe our trade of noe man hitherto questioned, & to drawe it to y'selves but utterly to destroy it, we are compelled again to ptest & by these p'sents we doe ptest against y" etc. Governor Eaton replied, under date of August 12, (old style): "We know no such Ryv," (as the Mauritius), "neither can we conceave what Ryu' y" intend by that name, unlesse it be that wh the English have long & still doe call Hudson's Ryu"." Denying all intrusion, past or present, he adds: "It is true we have lately upon Paugaset Ryu', wh falls into the sea in the midst of these English plantacons, built a small house within or owne lymitts, many miles, nay leagues from the Monhattoes, from yo' trading house and from any part of Hudson's Ryu', * nor did we build there till we had first purchased a due tytle from the true proprietors.”+ Governor Eaton undoubtedly believed, and was right in believing, that Kieft's complaint related to this establishment on the Paugasset. But the river Paugasset is hardly more familiar to us than the Mauritius was to Eaton. Accordingly the site of the trading-house has been placed at a variety of points by careful historical students. Mr. Savage, the editor of Winthrop's Journal, puts it at Derby; the historian Hildreth, "high up the Housatonic, near a hundred miles in the interior," or about the present site of Stockbridge; Dr. O'Callaghan, the early editor of the colonial documents of New York, at Springfield. * * *New York Hist. Coll., New Series, i. 274, 292, etc. New Haven Hist. Soc. Papers, iii. 443. Hazard's Hist. Coll. of State Papers, ii. 55–6. New Haven Col. Rec., i. 265-6, and note. + Winthrop's History of New England, Savage's ed., ii. 328, (modern paging). History of the U. S. (N. Y. 1880), i. 434. | Docs. rel. to Col. Hist. of N. Y., i. 284, note. As recently 1881 the opinion has been expressed that Kieft's letter probably refers to Springfield and Eaton's to Derby.* I do not hope to deal exhaustively with the question as to the true locality, and my apology for offering the society a probably incomplete recital of the facts must be that for years an account has been looked for at the hands of a gentleman who is of all men best fitted to prepare it, but who has thus far been occupied with more important tasks, and that I am assured that such an account as I can give will now be accepted, for lack of a better. And although what I believe to be the correct answer was not long ago made public, there is ample room for an orderly statement of the evidence, and the archives of the society ought to contain something like a summary of what is known with regard to the matter. Our first business is to get as much information as we can out of what the governor of New Netherland and the governor of New Haven said to each other, in order to avoid reaching conclusions in conflict with what they must have known. Beginning with Kieft's letter, we find him complaining of some recent enterprise of the New Haven people which seriously threatened the Dutch trade with Indians living in the region bordering on the Mauritius, or Hudson, river. This river was often called Mauritius by the Dutch, in honor of their great captain and stadtholder, Prince Maurice of Orange, son of William the Silent,+ as was the island, still known by his name, in the Indian ocean. Now, as far as a mere approach to the Hudson was concerned, the English had advanced westward along the coast to Rippowams, or Stamford, in 1641, five years earlier. And Kieft's complaint of a fresh aggression, upon a trade before unmolested, suggests a subsequent movement towards the Hudson at some point farther north. The principal trade of New Amsterdam was with the tribes on the upper Hudson, and had it been possible to divert that permanently to New Haven the Dutch would have been almost ruined. In fact New Amsterdam was almost ruined already by wars with the *N. Y. Col. Hist. (as last ref.), xiii. 21, note. + Doc. Hist. of N. Y., iii. 27; Hildreth's U. S., i. 137. natives, for which Kieft himself was largely responsible. The Indians for a hundred miles above the mouth of the river had never been very friendly, and the trade" of noe man questioned" had been very vigorously questioned a year or two before by those just north of the Highlands. Peace had been made in August, 1645, but the Dutch hold on much of the trade was precarious, and Kieft must at this time have been particularly jealous of English competition.* His protest, then, makes it probable that the new line of communication opened by New Haven led northwest, in the direction of some point as far north as the Highlands. Turning to Eaton's letter, his admission that "a small house" had been built "lately upon Paugaset River," reminds us that in 1642 two residents of New Haven were "excused fro watching for the present because of their imploymt att Pawgasett.”+ Paugasset was the Indian name of Derby, and one of the historians of that town tells us that these men were employed "on what is now Birmingham Point." As no permanent settlement, apparently, was made here for a number of years,§ it is probable that the place was first occupied for purposes of trade, and the theory of Mr. Savage and others that the trading-house mentioned by Governor Eaton was at the junction of the Housatonic and the Naugatuck looks plausible. But the establishment at Paugasset was in 1646 at least four years old, or half as old as New Haven itself, and would scarcely have been referred to either by Kieft or Eaton as recent, while it is unlikely that Irving's "William the Testy" would have borne even an imaginary wrong in silence for four years. Derby, moreover, is much farther from the Hudson than Stamford, and is not far enough inland to have had much more effect on the Dutch trade than the coast towns of Milford and Stratford, ten miles below. And as Eaton merely says that the trading-house was on the river Paugasset, he leaves us free to look beyond Derby. *Ruttenber's Ind. Tribes of Hudson's River, 63-4, 94, 111, 118, 120; Hildreth's U. S., i. 423-4, 431. + New Haven Col. Rec., i. 74. Orcutt's Ind. of West. Conn., 16, 107. N. H. Col. Rec., i. 77, 148, etc. The river in question might, as far as the name defines it, be either the Housatonic or the Naugatuck. The latter was apparently sometimes called Paugasset,* and Mr. Brodhead, the historian of New York, supposes that such is the case here.† But the Housatonic was generally meant when this appellation was used, and Eaton's statement that the river "falls into the sea" applies in strictness only to the Housatonic. It was known by half a dozen different names during the colonial period. And a glance at the map will show that a movement up this stream from Derby would have had a north-westerly direction to a point in the lower part of Kent, where it almost touches the New York line. Governor Eaton's description of the post as "within of owne lymitts" open a wide field for conjecture. He could hardly mean the limits of the New Haven jurisdiction, for since the colony had neither charter nor patent, its boundaries were defined only by the successive purchases made from the natives, and the site of the trading-house was not within the jurisdiction until after it had been bought. The limits spoken of must be those of what the writer calls "these English plantacons," including the New Haven towns east of the mouth of the Housatonic, and the Connecticut towns west of it. He may have had in mind either the boundaries named in the New England patent of 1620, to which he appealed a year later, or those of the so-called "Warwick patent" of 1632, which embraced the territories of both New Haven and Connecticut. To the north the settlers might, in their commercial ventures, have paused at the Massachusetts line, if they knew where it was. But to the west, as far as this phrase of Eaton's guides us, we are free to look for them at Chicago, or on the northern shores of the Great Salt Lake, or on the coast of California. But we are already confined to the Housatonic, which we observe, finally, does its best to uphold Governor Eaton in placing the trading-house "many miles, nay leagues," *Derby Records, i. 39 (MSS). Brodhead's Hist. of the State of New York, i. 428. SN. H. Col. Rec., i. 508. |