The Record · Fort Orange · 1621 to 1701

The Beaver and the Gun

A trading post on the Hudson River sold guns for beaver and never sent a man west. Seventy-seven years later a deed signed in that same town had Chicago written on it.

Chicago · 1 October 2026

A company before a colony

In 1621 the Dutch government handed a group of Amsterdam investors a charter. It gave their new outfit, the West India Company, a monopoly on Dutch trade across the Atlantic, from West Africa to the Americas. The paper came first and the ships came after.

Dutch traders already knew the Hudson River. They had been buying furs on it since soon after Henry Hudson sailed up in 1609, and in 1614 they put up a post called Fort Nassau on an island that kept flooding. In 1624 the company replaced it with a fort on the west bank, where Albany sits today, and named it Fort Orange.

The company wanted beaver. Europe was wearing felt hats, and the best felt came from beaver fur. The first lever in this chapter was pulled in a boardroom. A charter decides who is allowed to make the money before anybody has made any.

The fort nobody asked for

Fort Orange went up on Mahican land. The Dutch did not ask the Mahican first. They built, and then they handed presents to Mahican leaders to keep things friendly. Gifts and payments to leaders, run on the first day. A present costs less than rent.

The spot was picked with care. It sat a few miles below the place where the Mohawk River meets the Hudson, at the end of a footpath that let people carrying furs from the west walk around a big waterfall. Furs came in from the west, went down the river to Manhattan and sailed for Europe.

It was a poor excuse for a fort. A French priest who saw it in the 1640s called it “a wretched little fort” built of stakes, with four or five cannon. A Dutch count in 1628 found no families living there, only about 25 traders. It was a store with a fence around it.

The door

The Mahican lived next to the store. The Mohawk, the easternmost of the five Haudenosaunee nations, lived west of it and had to come through Mahican country to trade. Whoever stood between the fort and everybody else could set the terms, so the two nations went to war over the door.

In 1626 the fort’s commander, Daniel van Crieckenbeek, picked a side. He marched out with a few soldiers to help the Mahican. A Mohawk party killed him and three of his men in the woods.

By 1628 the Mohawk had driven the Mahican east and north of the fort and had the door to themselves. The company took the lesson. From then on the business at Fort Orange was selling to whoever came in with furs.

The first time the gatekeeper runs in this Record, a Native nation runs it, and runs it well.

Twenty beavers a gun

The business grew fast. Fort Orange took in more than 8,000 furs in 1626. By 1633 the count was about 30,000 a year.

In 1634 the trade dipped, and the commander sent a man named Harmen van den Bogaert west into Mohawk country to find out why.

Then came the guns. A Dutch report written in the 1640s lays the trade out plain. The Mohawk wanted firearms badly and were paying as many as twenty beavers for one gun, and ten to twelve guilders for a pound of powder. The settlers around the fort saw the profit. Merchants back in Holland caught wind of it and shipped guns over in quantity. Before long, the report says, four hundred Mohawk men carried firearms and knew how to use them.

Father Isaac Jogues, a French priest held in the Mohawk towns in those years, counted three hundred guns among seven or eight hundred fighting men. Dutch traders were charging five to ten times the going rate for what they sold.

Goods and guns. The seller gets beaver today. The buyer needs powder, lead and repairs tomorrow, and the store on the Hudson carries all three.

The landlord who never came

One of the company’s own directors found a second way to get paid. Kiliaen van Rensselaer was an Amsterdam diamond and pearl merchant and one of the men who founded the West India Company. In 1629 the company wrote a rule letting its insiders set up private estates in the colony. Van Rensselaer was among the first to use it.

He bought a huge tract from the Mahican, on both banks of the river, wrapped around the company’s fort. He named it Rensselaerswijck. He never crossed the ocean to see it. His agents ran it, and by the company’s own telling the people living on his land were traders to a man.

By 1648, five years after he died, the company and his estate were fighting over who owned the ground under the fort. The estate’s manager barred the company from quarrying stone on the family’s land. The company’s man in the colony, Peter Stuyvesant, drew a line 600 paces around the fort and declared everything inside it the company’s.

A director sits on the board that writes the rule, uses the rule, and his heirs end up in a property fight with the company he helped found. The family held that land until the 1840s.

The seller who could not stop

By 1648 the directors in Amsterdam had a problem they had built themselves. They wrote that the nations wanted firearms so badly they would go to war if the trade were cut off. Their answer was to ban private gun sales and let the company sell a small number itself. In 1650 the colony tried licensing gun traders. Neither rule shut the trade down.

The company had armed its best customer to the point where the customer set the terms.

The scattering

The Haudenosaunee were nobody’s hired hands. They had their own long practice of making war to take captives and replace their dead. They also wanted to be the ones standing between the western beaver and the eastern stores. The guns let them do it all at once.

Raids on the Wendat, whom the French called the Huron, began in 1642. In 1649 more than a thousand Seneca and Mohawk hit two of the main Wendat towns, and the Wendat were finished as a nation in their own country. The Petun and the Nipissing were attacked that winter. The Neutral were crushed, and the Erie after them.

The French had guns to sell too. Their priests talked officials into selling only to Christian converts. One side of the war bought freely at a store. The other had to be baptized first.

People who lived through it went west. They crowded into the country around Lake Michigan and the Illinois River, among nations already living there, and the ground this paper covers filled with refugees from a war over hats.

New flag, same counter

On 24 September 1664 the Dutch handed Fort Orange to the English without a shot fired. The town was renamed Albany.

The store stayed open. The trade went on with the same customers, and the alliance between the town and the Five Nations carried over to a new king. The two sides called it the covenant chain and renewed it year after year.

The far end of the line

In 1673 Jolliet and Marquette were shown the carry at Chicago. By then the war had been moving west for thirty years.

The Illinois had a great town on the Illinois River across from the bluff we call Starved Rock, three miles of lodges along the north bank. By the spring of 1680 it held more than 8,000 people. That January the French built Fort Crèvecoeur downriver. By April its own men had wrecked it and deserted.

The Haudenosaunee came in September. About six hundred men, carrying guns, reached the town while most of the Illinois were away at their winter hunting camps. The town was burned. The Illinois still there were driven down the river and across the Mississippi. Ten years later about a thousand people lived where eight thousand had.

Starved Rock is under a hundred miles from the carry. That was force as the collection department, on Illinois ground, thirty-two years before the siege at Detroit in the next chapter.

The deed

By 1701 the Five Nations were worn down. The French had burned Mohawk towns, and the war in the west had turned against them. That summer they made two deals in two towns.

In Montreal they made peace with the French and with the nations of the Great Lakes.

In Albany, on 19 July, leaders of the Five Nations put their marks on a paper for John Nanfan, the acting English governor of New York. The paper is titled a deed. It gives the King of England their beaver hunting ground, a country it measures at about eight hundred miles long and four hundred wide, running west to a place the deed spells Quadoge. A note on the old copy says what Quadoge is. Chicago.

The Haudenosaunee have always read that paper their own way. To them it put the hunting ground under the king’s protection, and they kept the right to hunt it forever. The words about hunting forever are in the deed. So is an English lawyer’s language about surrender.

The French never accepted it. The nations living on that ground were not parties to it.

The Five Nations were doing to two kings what kings had been doing to them, taking a deal from each and letting them argue over it. And London walked away with something worth keeping, a signed paper saying the country out to Lake Michigan was English by gift of the people who had conquered it.

Where The Carry picks up

It took a charter in Amsterdam, a store on a river and guns at twenty beavers apiece. No Dutchman in this chapter ever saw Lake Michigan.

By the time the French built their forts in the Illinois country, the nations they found there had already been moved, crowded, outgunned and emptied out of their biggest town. The French walked into a country that somebody else’s customers had rearranged, and they set up shop as protectors. The forts and the gatekeepers in The Carry start from there.

And when two kings traded this ground on paper in 1763, theirs was the second paper. The first had been signed sixty-two years earlier, in the town that grew up around the store.

The people at our end of the line paid for a hat they never saw.

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Sources

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