Ramapough Mountain Indians - History

History

A number of local historians, genealogists and archeologists have written about the Ramapough people. Accounts have changed related to research that has revealed more archeological, historical, linguistic and other evidence, as well as because of social attitudes. As with other multiracial peoples seeking recognition as Native American tribes, the Ramapough Mountain Indians have encountered differences of opinion over the significance of ancestry in contrast to identity in being recognized as a distinct culture.

The Ramapo were a Munsee-speaking band of the Lenape, an Algonquian language-speaking people who occupied a large territory throughout coastal areas of the mid-Atlantic states and along the Delaware River valley. Bands were typically named after their geographic region, and early European colonists thought they were different peoples, but all were Lenape. Ramapo villages were recorded in the late seventeenth century in western Connecticut, near present-day Bethel and Ridgefield. In 1911 an intact dugout canoe was found underwater near Bethel and identified as possibly Ramapo; it is now held at the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History at the University of Connecticut. In 1923 Foster H. Seville, an ethnologist, authenticated two dugout canoes found in Witteck Lake, near Butler, New Jersey, as of Ramapo origin and possibly 1,000 years old. They were exhibited in the American Museum of Natural History and in Hackensack, New Jersey.

In the early 1700s, the Ramapo in present-day western Connecticut were led by a sachem or chief named Katonah. Under pressure from English colonists, they sold their land in the Ridgefield area, a territory estimated at 20,000 acres (81 km2), and moved away. The Ramapo migrated west and some eventually settled in the mountains in northeastern New Jersey and southwestern New York; this part of the Appalachian Mountains was named for them by colonists as the Ramapo Mountains.

The colonial Dutch referred to the Lenape Indian peoples whom they encountered in this mid-Atlantic region, along the lower Hudson and northern New Jersey areas, as the Hackensack, Tappan, Nyack, and Minsi; these were the Dutch-derived names from the Lenape words for the bands, who took the names associated with geographic places. The archeologist Herbert C. Kraft says that some of the Ramapough retreated to the mountains by the mid to late seventeenth century, and theorizes they were joined by remnants of the Esopus and possibly Wappinger bands after wars with the Dutch. The Dutch allocated land from the Tappan Patent in the Hackensack Valley; it crossed what became the border between New York and New Jersey.

Wynant Van Gelder, the first European landowner in what became Sloatsburg in Rockland County, New York, was noted as having bought land from the Ramapough in 1738. Ramapough Mountain Indians still live in the county, especially in Hillburn, New York

When colonists entered the areas along Ramapo Creek to develop iron mines and works in the eighteenth century, they noted that the Ramapough people occupied the hills. The founder of the iron mines brought in German and English workers, some of whose descendants settled in the area.

The historian David Cohen found that early settlers in the Hackensack Valley included "free black landowners in New York City and mulattoes with some Dutch ancestry who were among the first pioneers to settle in the Hackensack River Valley of New Jersey." Among these were Augustine Van Donck, who bought land in the Tappan Patent in 1687. As the border between New York and New Jersey split the area of the patent in 1798, Cohen theorized that some of these early free people of color moved west into the mountains. (The surname Van Dunk is common among the Ramapough, as are DeGroat, DeFreese, and Mann.)Cohen thought that, while some free blacks may have married Lenape remnant peoples in the area, the residents of the mountains developed not primarily of Indian culture but as multiracial people of European-American culture, with rural traditions. The origin of these surnames could also be from earlier contact times with the Colonials. From superstition, many Indians chose to use the names given by the Colonials instead of their real names.

Archeologist and Historian Edward J. Lenik disagrees with Cohen's findings by stating "While the Ramapough's origins are controversial, most historians and anthropolgists agree that they (Ramapough) are the descendants from local Munsee speaking Lenape (Delaware) Indians who fled to the mountains in the late seventeenth century to escape Dutch and English settlers. It is a well known fact that displacement of Indian tribes followed European Incursions in the region which resulted in the forced movement and resettlement of Indian peoples."