History is full of enterprising sales and screaming bargains. One of the most notorious, legend has it, took place in Manhattan, when the island’s Native residents sold it to the Dutch for a handful of beads and the equivalent of $24 in cash.
Or did they? Here’s how Manhattan really ended up in European settlers’ hands—and why the transaction itself remains a historic mystery.
Manhattan’s Native residents
By the time European colonists made their way to the Hudson River region, the area had long been settled by the Lenape people, who named the verdant island along the Hudson Manahatta, or “hilly island.” The Lenape, who spoke an Algonquian language and traded with a variety of other Indigenous Americans, lived a seasonal existence on the island with rich natural resources and abundant animals.
Those animals—particularly beavers—attracted the attention of the first Europeans to encounter the Lenape and Manhatta beginning in the 1500s. In fact, much of North America’s appeal to early Europeans had to do with animal pelts, which were used to produce fashionable hats and luxury items for European consumers—particularly as Europeans had hunted fur-bearing animals on the their own continent almost out of existence.
Lured by the region’s plentiful beaver furs, Dutch merchants began trading with the Lenape and soon claimed land running from what is now Delaware to Rhode Island on behalf of the Dutch West India Company, which developed a monopoly on Atlantic trade. The company established New Netherland in 1621, extending Dutch rule across the Hudson River region. By 1624, Dutch people were living on Manhatta—eventually renamed Manhattan—in a settlement called New Amsterdam.
The Dutch West India Company’s charter enabled its members to make contracts with “princes and natives” of the region, trading goods and currency for the “peopling of these fruitful and unsettled parts”—places that already served as ancestral lands. And so the corporation set about not just colonizing the land in question, but purchasing as much as possible from its Native inhabitants.
The murky details of Manhattan’s sale
In 1626, the Dutch seem to have done just that. In a report back to the Dutch West India Company, colonist Peter Schagen wrote a letter claiming that the Dutch “have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders.” Though records also claim the Dutch did purchase the island from the Lenape, no deed or other correspondence relating to the sale was ever found. And the amount paid—and the very nature of the transaction—has been disputed for nearly 400 years.
Nineteenth-century legend seems responsible for some of the confusion. In the 1840s, historian Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan began uncovering documents from New York’s Dutch past, writing the first scholarly history of the state and eventually becoming state archivist. Among O’Callaghan’s discoveries was the 1626 letter from Schagen, and O’Callaghan wrote that the Native Americans “received for that splendid tract the trifling sum of sixty guilders, or twenty-four dollars.”
Readers latched on to the figure of $24, along with other tales of O’Callaghan’s about the exchange of beads for valuable commodities throughout the region, and a legend was born. But it remains unclear whether the exchange involved money, commodities, or both. Modern historians point out that 60 guilders were worth much more than a modern $24 at the time—they were the equivalent of about 1,000 contemporary dollars. And if money did change hands, it likely was accompanied valuable furs, beads, and other trade goods.
Similar transactions support that interpretation. The final 1670 deed for the Dutch acquisition of Staten Island from the Munsee people shows evidence of fierce bargaining. Ultimately, the Dutch exchanged over 100,000 wampum beads, along with large amounts of clothing, tools, and weapons and ammunition, for the future borough—and promised to acknowledge the deed annually as an act of mutual friendship.
But no such deed exists for Manhattan. And regardless of whether money, goods, or both changed hands in the transaction, writes historian Paul Otto, the exchange was likely seen as a “significant affair” by the Lenape.
Was Manhattan really sold?
That “significant affair” wasn’t necessarily a sale, however: Otto notes that the Lenape and other Native Americans were likely not aware of European forms of property ownership and did not recognize individual rights over land at all; rather, the area’s Indigenous inhabitants probably thought they were agreeing to share the land with the Dutch or rent it to them. Historian Jean Soderlund writes that though the Lenape had a reputation as a peaceful nation, “they were neither fainthearted nor weak”—and that their actions always reflected both their commitment to their own sovereignty and their desire to protect their trade rights.
The Dutch, on the other hand, believed they’d purchased the land, and proceeded to settle it with the help of their colonists, enslaved Africans, merchants of various nations, and people fleeing religious persecution. The beaver trade flourished to the point that beaver pelts became an accepted currency throughout New Netherland. By 1664, New Amsterdam was home to 1,500 people, and a reported 18 languages were spoken throughout the settlement. The town was known for the wall that surrounded it: Built by enslaved people, its vestiges eventually became New York’s famed Wall Street.
The 1626 letter from Dutch colonist Peter Schagen describing the purchase of Manhatta for 60 guilders.
Photograph by Peter Newark American Pictures, Bridgeman Images
Another historic trade
But the wall wasn’t enough to protect the Dutch from their own forced takeover: In August 1664, British soldiers stormed New Amsterdam; after its Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant, surrendered the multicultural colony a month later, it was renamed New York.
In the meantime, the Dutch and English were grappling for power elsewhere in the world as part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and in 1667 the Dutch invaded the English colony of Surinam in South America. That same year, the warring countries signed a treaty that officially exchanged New Netherland/New York for a variety of colonial holdings, including the colony now known as Suriname and the minuscule nutmeg-producing island of Pulau Rhun in Indonesia.
Meanwhile, the people who considered Manhattan their ancestral land were pushed out. Wars, treaties, and forced removal followed, and by the 1860s most of the Lenape people had been pushed into what is now Oklahoma. Today, three Lenape tribes are federally recognized by the U.S., and other Lenape people are still fighting for recognition.
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