HV Chronic Vol I No 2

Suspended school official Baker gets public hearing 4

ChroniC News For THe TIMe BeING voluMe 1, No. 2 • DeCeMBer 2008 oN THe weB aT HvCHroNIC.CoM

INSIDE:Tax Revolt! SUDOKU! Dangerous Women! Jump Pages! Humor, Pathos and Insight!

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The Hudson Valley

Tax Nightmare on Elm StreetHow one brave woman dared to battle the reval ... and lost

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Nora Post is keeping her chin up and her eyes focused on the big picture now that her battle with Kingston’s city assessor appears lost.

Nora Post is a pleasant, in-telligent, soft-but-firm-spoken woman who

lives alone with a dog and two cats in a lovely picture-postcard home in one of Kingston’s tidy middle-class neighborhoods. Her tiny plot is surrounded by larger houses and properties, and her relatively modest two-story home makes up for its lack of size by evincing some Old-World charm by means of a bit of Victorian trimwork over the front porch.

Post is about to lose that home, not as a result of a balloon mortgage or anything related to the economic meltdown, but because of skyrocketing prop-erty taxes based on what looks to be an almost criminally high assessment following last year’s City of Kingston revaluation. Her story describing the three Byzantine levels of municipal purgatory one must negotiate during an ultimately futile tax grievance effort is positively Kafka-esque.

Ms. Post has a PhD, and was an oboist with the New York Philharmonic in her youth un-til a bad spinal operation short-circuited her career. I prob-ably heard her play in the city or at Saratoga Performing Arts Center during one or more of the orchestra’s summer runs in the 1970s. Neither her disability nor her present dire circumstances have hampered her outlook or her ability

to turn a phrase. In fact, she has penned one of the more adroit treatises on the property tax nightmare we’re all find-ing ourselves suffering from to one degree or another. Up-state New York is a region the Wall Street Journal recently described as “property tax hell,” and a candidate for an up-rising like those in California and Massachusetts that trans-

formed the once moribund tax hells of San Francisco and Boston into the freewheeling economic powerhouses they are today. Post’s missive was widely circulated the week of December 7 by someone from the New York State Property Tax Reform Coali-tion, and it has struck a chord with more than one media outlet, including this one.

I couldn’t resist giving Nora Post a front-page teaser with a photo op, something most papers probably wouldn’t be able to do, given size limita-tions and an unwritten rule about relegating opinion pieces inside. But Nora gives the growing property tax reform movement a hu-man face, and is willing to offer herself up as a poster child for the cause. Kings-ton Mayor James Sottile, no doubt worried that she’s going to galvanize the na-scent opposition movement

in the city, reportedly wants a sit-down with her.So go get ’em, Nora, and here’s hoping you keep your

beautiful little home while helping bring down this anti-quated, punitive system that is gutting our cities, towns and neighborhoods and the middle class that once gave them life and purpose. Her story starts on page 2.

—Steve Hopkins

It’s a beautiful slice of heaven on Earth, Dutchess County is; a place that seems as if it sprang whole from an artist’s imagination. Unfortunately, it did

not.In fact, the beautiful English-style countryside we

take for granted today had its beginnings in the greed, trickery, and disdain for human life of a conquering peo-ple as they performed North America’s first bit of ethnic cleansing. To know the truth about what happened to the Mahicans and Wappingers of Dutchess County is to look upon the beauty of these hills in a new and poi-gnant light, with a heightened appreciation for the tran-sitory nature of all things. In this article we will attempt to explore the truth, from a number of perspectives, and bring some of its light into the present.

The last of the MahicansJames Fenimore Cooper’s epic “The Last of the Mo-

hicans” is a work of fiction that purports to distill the story of the people who once called the Hudson River Valley home into a single, highly allegorical account. He felt his story was necessary because of the pronounced lack of a historical record regarding their fate, and he wanted to ensure that, at least, an emotional gap would be filled.

Cooper’s fictional legacy, although engrossing, has created a number of misconceptions. He chose the name “Mohicans,” he explains in his introduction, as a catch-all for a people who, through various misunderstand-ings, have gone by many names (Lucy Johnson, a pro-

Indian WinterThe story of Native Americans in Dutchess CountyBy Steve HopkinsEditor’s note: Since WAMC has been bringing up the subject of American Indians in the aptly named Empire State of late, it seemed timely to weigh in with this old chestnut from the vault, if only to educate Joe Donahue, Sarah LaDuke and company that things were more complicated than they’ve led listeners to believe, and that the mighty Iroquois weren’t the only game in town.

fessor of archeology at Vassar College, says that “many of the early tribal names that were recorded were given by their enemies, usually something like ‘those bastards on the other side of the hill’”).

Cooper picked his name from among the following: “Lenni-Lenape, Lenope, Delawares, Wapanachki, … Mahicanni, Mohicans, and Mohegans.” His choice has led some today to believe that the Connecticut tribe of Mohegans, proprietors of the famed Mohegan Sun Ca-sino, are made up of these Hudson Valley descendants of the Lenni-Lenape. They are not. For the purpose of this article, these original Dutchess County inhabitants will be called “Mahicans” and “Wappingers” – the closest

thing to what they still call themselves. The other misconception is that the “Mohicans” are

gone from the face of the earth. They are not. Most of these tribes’ few descendants, scattered and hounded out of the fertile Hudson Valley by the English during the 18th century, ended up joining with remnants of other tribes and relocating numerous times. The federally-rec-ognized Stockbridge-Munsee tribe (made up mostly of people of Mahican and Wappinger ancestry) maintains a website containing a sketchy history from contact with the Dutch through the long diaspora from their ances-tral hunting grounds to central Wisconsin, where they still reside today.

The unrecognized Schaghticoke tribe, a small reser-vation of five or so families hugging the western bor-der of Connecticut near Webutuck, consists of people descended from the Pequot of Connecticut, with some Mahican and Wappinger ancestry. Another group of Mahicans and Fishkill Wappingers gave up the fight and were enfolded into the Mohawk and Seneca tribes in 1756, eventually losing their identity. Many more inter-married with their conquerors and simply blended over time into the new American landscape.

Searching for cluesIn actuality the long, proud, eventful history of the

Mahicans and their close cousins the Wappingers, both of whom populated what is now the Hudson Valley (including Dutchess County) for thousands of years, is mostly lost – particularly that which occurred before the coming of the white man. What little is left of their his-tory is exceedingly difficult to re-construct, as the car-riers of orally transmitted tribal lore were all but wiped out by the end of the barbaric 17th century, by the dis-eases, swords and musket balls of the Dutch.

From a fledgling researcher’s point of view, the story of Native Americans vanishing from the area is seriously under-reported, if you go by the slim number of volumes on the subject in local public libraries. Histories of the re-gion commonly begin with the arrival of Henry Hudson in 1609, casually mentioning the existence of the “Indi-ans” he encountered along the river, some friendly – even worshipful of him and his giant “floating castle” – and some not so friendly, owing to their memories of encoun-ters with Verrazzano more than 50 years earlier.

Documentation of their fate is limited, and usually involves a number of famously violent incidents, land

PagE 2 • DECEMBER 2008 CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

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CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

Nora Post tries to relax on the front porch of her property-tax-plagued, unsellable house.

The goddesses must have an ex-quisite sense of irony. The tax assessor’s office in Kingston,

N.Y., just happens to be adjacent to the emergency room entrance of our local hospital. The biggest differ-ence between these two institutions is that when I am a patient at the emergency room at Kingston Hospi-tal, I can see a Patient’s Bill of Rights plastered up on the wall. No such luck with the tax assessor’s office. Perhaps Dante’s Abandon Hope All Ye That Enter Here should be framed over the assessor’s door. Allow me to explain.

This spring, the City of Kings-ton properties were reassessed. My house, which I bought for $146,900 in 2002, was reassessed at $333,000. My property taxes went up 40 per-cent in one day. It doesn’t matter that according to the Ulster County Board of Realtors, all the percent-age increases in Kingston prop-erty values since the date of my purchase would leave the house at a value of $253,000. It doesn’t matter that my insurer, Allstate, has valued my home at $236,000. It doesn’t matter that according to the city’s own “uni-form percentage level of assessment” formula (that’s a real mouthful), the house should be taxed at $216,000. It doesn’t matter that the house next to mine — assessed at $328,000 — just sold for $204,000. It doesn’t matter that the most reputable appraiser in the Hudson Valley appraised my house at $63,000 less than the tax assess-ment, and it doesn’t matter that the houses the tax asses-sor used to determine my assessment were, on average, assessed about $50,000 less than my house, even though my house has about 233 square feet less area on average than those houses. But wait, those houses have on aver-age 138 percent more land than my postage stamp piece of property. So, what gives? How can this possibly be?

After three rounds of grievance appearances, I think I get it. What I get is that we need a Property Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. The tax assessor uses an opaque formula known only by her to determine assessments. She does not have to inform the taxpayer how the amount of an assessment is determined. If I had committed a felony, for example, everyone would have access to the same laws and information. But with the tax assessor, it’s not a level playing field because the taxpayer doesn’t have the information used by the assessor to determine their assessment. For example, when your grievance is turned down, it is on the basis of information provided by the asses-sor. Fine. But we do not have access to the information provided by the assessor! Yet when I appealed my taxes for the third time, I had to file six copies of all my pa-perwork and research, and I also provided a formal ap-praisal. Why doesn’t the tax assessor have to provide her research? The Office of Real Property Services tells us that to prepare for our hearings, we must assume that we are guilty until proven innocent. Why isn’t it the other way around? The notice I received for my hearing stated that I was the plaintiff and the tax assessor was the defen-

Toward a Property Taxpayers’ Bill of RightsBy Nora Post, PhD

dant. Either this was simply an error, or the tax assessor should actually defend herself and provide the informa-tion my appraiser and I requested concerning the basis for her assessment. Why isn’t she held accountable? Why shouldn’t she prove that she is correct, instead of leaving the taxpayer to second-guess what she might have been thinking? In order to even consider a concept like fair-ness — which is the stated aim of these hearings — the taxpayer needs to have the same information the asses-sor has. We all need to play by the same set of rules, and fairness should be the goal. Right now, the rules are stacked against the taxpayer, yet, according to our con-stitutional rights, we are assumed innocent until proven guilty. What happened?

Having been one of a small group of people in my city who went through the six-month ordeal of three levels of grievances, perhaps a few observations are in order. First, I would suggest that this entire process could oc-cur in a lot less than six months. Six months is way too long to go to sleep every night worrying that you are go-ing to lose your home. Second, the forms we have to fill out should be straightforward, clear, and in terms that the layman can understand. When a form starts out by asking for the case and docket number of an appearance that hasn’t been scheduled yet, something is very wrong. When I arrived to submit three copies of the paperwork for the third appeal to the Ulster County Clerk’s office, I asked about this. The woman who was there looked me straight in the face and told me that she would provide me with no information at all, that her job was to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to grieve his or her taxes. I was stunned, but didn’t say anything, assuming this was what she was told to say to people. Yet all I could think was that it’s taxpayers like me who fund her paycheck. If she isn’t responsible to the taxpayers who have hired her, who is she responsible to?

Most people are intimidated by filling out all the pa-perwork for a grievance, doing the research, and defend-ing themselves. Instead, they just give up, roll over, and write the check. Many people are afraid to ask ques-tions because they don’t want to appear stupid; they are simply too intimidated to go up against the system. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that the asses-sor is counting on this!

In Kingston, we were entitled to a whopping five-min-ute appearance at the second level of grievance. It’s sim-ply not possible to summarize the appeal and have an intelligent discussion within five minutes. But I guess it doesn’t really even matter, because what happened was that 1,200 homeowners grieved their taxes (we made

National Public Radio), but the as-sessor didn’t want to see that many people. So, once the available five-minute slots were filled up, no one else could get a hearing! No kid-ding. I got my appeal in early and got my five minutes.

At the third and final tax ap-peal, there is a hearing officer who makes the final determination after the taxpayer and the tax assessor do battle. I would hope the hearing officer is independent of City Hall, but he is paid to perform this ser-vice, and there was no information provided to the taxpayers about the credentials of the different hearing officers. As residents of New York State, we deserve some basic infor-mation about the qualifications of the hearing officers, and what it is that makes the State of New York believe they might possibly be the qualified, impartial, independent folks who could offer the taxpayer what they are hoping for: fairness. One other observation on this third

level of appeal has to do with my own case: my hear-ing officer wrote that his judgment was based upon the information provided in both the assessor’s and my ap-praisals. I couldn’t believe my eyes, because the tax as-sessor had no appraisal.

I believe the tax assessor should be elected, not ap-pointed. She should not serve at the pleasure of City Hall, with all the financial and political pressures this places on someone. Rather than being in bed with the local politicians, she should be shielded from City Hall.

So, what’s an honest taxpayer to do? I used to live in New Paltz, N.Y., and sold my house there when the tax-es doubled within a few short years. I moved to Kings-ton, to a modest home (I think a 2002 purchase priced

at $146,900 would be considered modest to most people) on an absolutely tiny parcel with a backyard that is 12 feet deep (some-one would have to get a variance to build on something this small nowadays). I assumed I would be able to handle the property taxes. But in six years, my proper-ty taxes have almost doubled again.

In cases like mine, where reassessments result in dramatic property tax increas-es, I think the increas-es should be phased in gradually, so that the homeowner has some wiggle room to figure out where the additional funds are going to come from.

The City of Poughkeepsie was also reassessed this year, but they are phasing in the increased tax assessments at a rate of 5 percent per year until the amount of the new assessment is reached. No such luck in Kingston, where it’s all due immediately. There should be a statewide per-centage cap on increases due to reassessments for exist-ing homeowners.

On a personal note, I became disabled in 1980. Thank-fully, I have been fortunate enough to be among the working disabled. I run my own business on a part-time basis so that I can work around my spinal cord disabil-ity (because of the nature of my disability, I would not be physically capable of holding a traditional job). After almost 30 years of disabling pain, after three spinal sur-geries, after being paralyzed on my right side, the funny thing is that it’s not my disability that is driving me from my home — it’s the property taxes. My projected property taxes are now over half my income. But wait, the City of Kingston now plans to increase our taxes another 15 percent for the new city budget. All of this is since the spring of 2008.

My house is now on the market, but there simply is no market in this economy. I am willing to leave the house I love, but I am trapped in a market with virtually no buyers. Being as disabled as I am, living alone, being unable to lift more than about five pounds, the thought of moving is daunting. But I have no choice. That still, small voice inside me keeps asking: What will I do when my property taxes double yet again? I guess I would be the world’s biggest homeless fool by then …

In the end, property taxes are a judgment call. Let’s give everyone the same information, let’s make this as fair as possible for New Yorkers throughout the state, and let’s give the people who come after me a fair chance to stay in their homes.

This Kingston home, bought for $146,900 in 2002, has been valued by its insurer, Allstate, at $236,000. During its revaluation process last year, the city assessor’s office decided it was worth $333,000

DECEMBER 2008 • PagE 3CHRONICThe Hudson Valley

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Nobody’s Business By Steve Hopkins

So there I was, hanging out at The Men’s Room barber-shop in Poughkeepsie, waiting for a trim and sweat-ing the ebullient, highly opinionated and always per-

sonable owner, Manny Drivas, for the ad you see below. While not exactly a soft touch, Manny has as finely-tuned a

bullshit meter as I do, and the first time I met him in his now-shuttered Wappinger store we hit it off. He could sense that I wasn’t trying to snow him with a spiel, and that I believed in the paper I was working for at the time.

Manny’s political sentiments, as do those of many of the people I tend to befriend these days, swing a tad to the right. While he knows I may not agree with virtually everything he says, he also seems to sense, correctly, that I think he’s smart and value his opinion.

This mutual respect not only leads to half-page ads. It also can lead to the galvanization of a half-realized opinion into a full-blown idea. During my haircut, jabbing at the air with his scissors for effect as he spoke, Manny responded to my relat-ing of the tax nightmare story on the facing page with a tax debacle of his own, from his hometown of Marlborough.

Property owners in the Marlboro School District in May of 2008 were dealt a crippling blow when Dynegy, the Houston-based energy company that owns the Roseton and Danskam-mer power plants in the Town of Newburgh, settled a long-run-

ning tax certiorari suit with the town. In effect, the settlement, which saw the plants’ assessment nosedive from $1.46 billion to $895 million, a loss of 39 percent, shorted the Marlboro School District out of an annual windfall of about $3.6 million.

No problem, though. Long past living within its means, just like other bloated, top-heavy school districts in the state, the district merely piled the deficit onto the property owners of the Town of Marlborough, which, as luck would have it, had just completed an assessment-hiking revaluation. Home-owners were right in fearing that their tax bills might jump by 30 or 40 percent. They banded together and voted down the budget, but even the so-called “contingency” budget carried with it a whopping 7.76 percent increase over the year before.

And it’s going up another 7.23 percent for 2008-2009, with the net effect that — you guessed it — many home-owners’ taxes are indeed jumping 34 percent or more when the new assessment rates are factored in.

Which would make one think that school officials might be careful not to offend the hands that feed them.

Not true.According to Manny, here’s what happened just last week.

A note was sent home that parent/teacher conferences were being scheduled for the following Thursday, and schools would be closed. When would parents — most of them ho-meowners and taxpayers suddenly in jeopardy of losing their homes over their new assessments — be required to attend these sessions?

During the meat of the day, at 11 a.m. or thereabouts, said Manny. The parents would have to arrange for child care, take valuable hours off from earning a living, and traipse over to the school to listen to the teachers who, each making up-wards of $60,000 a year, would sit in their comfy catbird seats and tell them how their kids were doing.

Could some of this have been done in the evening? Is the haughty sense of entitlement evinced by school administra-tors and teachers — who in most Mid-Hudson communities constitute a hefty percentage of what’s left of the middle- to upper-middle class — ever going to be challenged?

A groundswell is forming, and not just among the old die-hard right-wing anti-tax crowd that has tried and failed for years to get any traction. Regular folks, many of them profes-sionals with kids in school, a group that districts used to count on as their bread-and-butter support, are getting fed up.

Despite the prodding of people like our own Assembly-man Kevin Cahill to jumpstart a movement within the state legislature to replace crushing property taxes with something more equitable, help is not on the way — yet.

The Wall Street Journal has the right idea. In the December 6, 2008 issue a couple of Steves — Hanke and Walters, both big-time economics professors at Great American Universities — opined correctly that the answer to stabilizing the housing market is not to cut interest rates, rewrite mortgage contracts or dole out bailout money to lenders and borrowers, but to cut property taxes. “This solution,” they wrote, “will not distort the market with payouts to bad actors or violate the sanctity of contracts. And it would help stimulate the economy.”

Saying that no place on Earth suffers under the yoke of property taxes more than Upstate New York, home of the ultra-powerful New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) union, the duo pointed to a number of obvious examples where, as a result of getting the property tax monkey off their backs, long-suffering municipalities were able to turn things around dramatically in a relatively short time span.

They cited Boston (as a result of Massachusetts voters re-volting and approving Prop 2½ in 1980, forcing Boston’s property tax rate down by an estimated 75 percent within two years) and San Francisco (as a result of California’s 1978 tax revolt that swept Proposition 13 into law, forcing the city to cut the property tax rate by 57 percent) as the two biggest suc-cess stories. After years of urban decay, with the middle class fleeing the staggering cities, these two propositions resulted in “massive reinvestment, repopulation and urban renewal.”

Since then, they write, “San Francisco’s population has surged 14 percent and its real, median household income is up 35 percent. Boston’s population grew 5 percent and its real in-come 26 percent.”

Interestingly, as a result, the tax base grew dramatically as well, because of all the investment that was allowed to happen once the soul-crushing tax burden was removed.

Can we achieve such a revolution here? It won’t be easy, as under our state constitution the legislature has to approve the right of the public to introduce and enact laws and constitution-al amendments and place them on a ballot for a popular vote — called the “Initiative” process — or second-guess by popular vote laws passed by the legislature (the “Referendum” process). What we really need to do is kick these power-hogging, teach-ers’ union-coddling crooks out of office and replace them with reform-minded people who don’t mind the thought of eventu-ally being put out of business by an informed and empowered electorate.

So get to work, people. Figure out where your “assemblyper-son” or state senator stands, and if it’s in the way of tax reform or giving the citizens the right to vote directly on an important measure, get him or her the f**k out of there. Let’s do it!


Indian Winter From Page 1

sales, and other such footnotes to the march of white colonial history. As far as history from the perspec-tive of local Native Americans is concerned, it’s as if they just faded away.

But they didn’t just fade away: they were dispos-sessed and dispatched as surely and nearly as swiftly as were the Kosovars, and some of their history is there, if you dig for it. The recent surge of ethnic awareness in the United States has created an environment con-ducive to study, and many of the gaps in our under-standing of Native American history, before and after Hudson’s fateful trip, are beginning to be filled in.

The knowledge that exists is based on the work of a small minority of Americans over the past 200 years whose interest in Native American culture and history never flagged, even when it was considered unfashion-able. A gentleman from Newburgh named E.M. Rut-tenber in 1872 penned a comprehensive chronicle of what archeologists call “contact period history,” titled “Indian Tribes of Hudson’s River,” which was out of print and very hard to find until Hope Farm Press in Saugerties re-published it in 1992. The late great Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an absolute junkie for any documentation of Native Americans, especially those that lived in Dutchess. Much of this stuff is in the form of ancient, crumbling books and papers archived in the FDR Library in Hyde Park.

DeCost Smith, who died in 1939, was a lifelong stu-dent of Native Americans and their customs and tradi-tions. His “Martyrs of The Oblong and Little Nine,” published posthumously in 1948, is the story of the ill-fated Moravian attempt to Christianize Dutchess County’s remaining Mahicans at Shekomeko in Pine Plains during the mid-1700s. It is as well written as anything on the subject, and provides a disturbing look at the last gasp of Mahican life in the eastern U.S.

During the ’50s and ’60s, state archeologist Wil-liam A. Ritchie, followed by his successor Robert E. Funk (from 1971 until 1996), performed ground-breaking studies that are the basis for much of to-day’s work by college-based archeologists and their students. Today, people like Christopher Lindner at Bard College and Lucy Johnson at Vassar car-ry on the quest, at the same time disseminating the fruits of their knowledge to a new generation. Culled from these and other sources, a brief synopsis of the Native American presence in Dutchess County goes something like this:

The first peopleNearly 10,000 years ago, a short time after a gigan-

tic natural dam at the Hudson Highlands broke and most of the melted glacier called Lake Albany went gushing out to sea, the first Lenni-Lenape Indians began to move from the south and west into virgin riverfront real estate now known as the mid-Hudson Valley. Like people today when encountering the ar-ea’s charms for the first time, they must have thought they stumbled into heaven, especially along the river’s eastern bank with its lush deciduous forests blanket-ing the gently rolling hills, framed on the west by the wide sparkling river and sweeping views of the high mountains beyond. They were the first human beings to set foot on this land since before the ice age and, of course, they decided to stay.

These same Lenape people multiplied over the next 100 centuries and flourished, first living nomadically and subsisting off whatever the land and river pro-vided, and later settling down in the most profitable, productive places. They eventually organized them-selves into tribes and confederacies.

By 1600, Munsee Delaware lands extended from the Mahicanituk, the river that flows both ways, westward and south into Pennsylvania. On the riv-er’s eastern shore, the Mahicans populated the valley from what is now northern Dutchess to Lake Cham-plain. Their cousins the Wappinger claimed the area between the Hudson and the Housatonic from central Dutchess through what is now Putnam, Westchester, the Bronx, Manhattan and parts of Long Island in New York, and much of western Connecticut.

The Mahicans and Wappingers were a woodland people who lived in villages consisting of long, semi-cylindrical wigwams and longhouses, as opposed to the familiar tall, conical tepees of the Plains Indians. A wigwam (which means “bark-dwelling” in Mahi-can) was constructed of a frame of wood poles cov-ered by bark and rush matting. Inside, families slept on spruce boughs covered with deerskins and blan-kets. They used cornhusks, quillwork, feathers, beads and paint to decorate deerskin clothing, baskets and other ornaments with colorful, stylized renditions of plants, f lowers, and semicircles depicting forest walking trails.

They subsisted on staples of corn, beans and squash – known as the “three sisters,” a diet augmented by fresh meat and fish (and, for river people, mollusks

and other shellfish). There was maple sugaring each year in the spring.

Men’s and women’s roles were sharply defined – women planted and harvested crops, and men spent much of their time away from the villages, hunting, fishing and trapping. Society was matrilineal, mean-ing that genealogy was established through the ma-ternal line, and the opinions of female elders weighed heavily in the decision-making of the tribe. Children were never struck and, according to native lore, were allowed considerable autonomy.

Prior to intervention from missionaries, spiri-tuality involved belief in a good Great Spirit and an evil spirit or trickster. A number of feasts and fasts were observed, including the harvest feast we have transformed into our Thanksgiving. Woodland people engaged in careful agricultural and forest management practices, clearing by burning and

Continued on Page 6

A photo of a Native American girl from the Schaghticoke Tribe’s historic collection.


Sick SudokuAs any die-hard puzzlehead knows, Sudoku is not a game; it’s either a

means of warding off dementia, or a form of dementia in itself. Either way, this seemingly harmless little pastime has become an unspeakable facet of daily existence for millions of silent addicts, and a likely root cause for the simultaneous and precipitous drop in the GNPs of several the world’s leading economic powers. Enjoy this particularly nasty little chestnut. For the solution, assuming you find yourself in the 99% of people who will be

completely stymied, go to hvchronic.com. We won’t tell anybody you gave up. Better luck next time.

Puzzle # S0001Ashley’s Pain Affects Us All

Let it not be said that Ash-ley Alexandra

Dupre didn’t come clean.

In a pair of inevi-table interviews re-cently – one in People magazine and one with the eternal ingé-nue Diane Sawyer on ABC’s vapid 20/20 “newsmagazine,” the apparently reformed hooker at the center of the Spitzer debacle told her whitewashed, well-rehearsed story.

Angling toward a career as a D-list Renaissance woman – sing-ing, modeling and “writing books” – the 23-year-old Jersey girl-next-door contritely disavowed her $4,300-a-pop past as a high-end inter-city Emperor’s Club call girl, chalking it up to having had a father who skated when she was 3, disconnecting with sex and inti-macy as a result of being raped, and having been jilted by a married scumbag who’d been keeping her and telling her stories.

She also offered an on-the-air apology to Spitzer’s long-suffering wife Silda, who still maintains complete dominion over her errant husband, both in New York and in their home in Gallatin. No apolo-gies were made to the people of New York and the Hudson Valley who voted for Spitzer and had expected great things, only to see him fritter away his approval rating cockfighting with Joe Bruno, being a tyrannical blowhard and ultimately self-destructing in a D.C. hotel room with a woman who claims she had no idea who he was.

One of the biggest victims in all this was the upcoming Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial celebration, one of Spitzer’s pet projects, which saw its funding cut in half by Gov. Paterson even before the current economic meltdown began. With state tax coffers dwindling precipitously as a result of so many Wall Street people and entities flaming out, there may not even be a Quadri-centennial.

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“... children were taken

from the arms of their mothers

and butchered in the presence of

their parents, and their

mangled limbs thrown into

the fire or water.”

cultivating low brush on the edges of their fields to at-tract small game. These actions improved their chances for survival, and created some of the rolling topography we still treasure today. Mostly, however, being a people acting in concert with nature, they left few visible traces of their long existence in Dutchess County.

Known prehistoric settlementsArcheologists by nature are notoriously wary of

questions posed by the lay person, especially when they involve the location of ancient encampments and villages. Zealous guardians of the past, they consider it part of their mission to protect these sites from degradation and harm from amateur collectors and clumsy tourists. For that reason, maps of explicit locations of ancient sites will not be part of this ar-ticle. To publish them would, in the words of former Mid-Hudson Archeological Society President Elvin Wanzer, be “irresponsible.”

The knowledge archeologists gain as they sift through the ancient soil for arrowheads, pottery shards and telltale scraps of whatever ancient locals were cooking in their fires, is one of our few tangible connections to the ancestors of the Wappingers and Mahicans. It provides great insight into the lives of the region’s inhabitants through all periods, from the Archaic to the Late Woodland, which was interrupt-ed by the coming of the Dutch. According to Lucy Johnson, “there is no evidence in this Northeast re-gion of major population shifts,” meaning that 7,000-year-old remains found at the Sylvan Lake rockshelter were likely to have been left by the direct ancestors of Wappinger Chief Daniel Nimham, killed by a Hussar bullet in 1778.

According to archeologist Christopher Lindner of Bard College, there are four “prime” sites in Dutchess County, undisturbed by human encroachment. There is a fifth, which he is modest enough not to include (it’s on his own college campus), but which nonetheless would seem to belong with the others. The sites are:

• Sylvan Lake rockshelter in southern Dutchess, which contains “fairly undisturbed remains” dating back about 6,000 years. Based on findings here, Dr. Funk worked out the chronology of cultural changes among the Hudson Valley natives;

• Shagabak, near Hyde Park, which, according to Funk, “is often submerged” with the effect that its Archaic era deposits “are gradually washing into the adjoining cove;”

• The Bowdoin Park rockshelter in Poughkeepsie, a dig managed by the Mid-Hudson Archeological So-ciety;

• South Cruger Island in the Tivoli Bays (recently expanded to include the adjacent Goat Island rock-shelter), is an important ongoing site, where remains as much as 7,000 years old have been found.

• Grouse Bluff (on the Bard campus) is Lindner’s baby, which he discovered while scouting for sites on and near the campus. What he and his students have unearthed so far is a mother lode of sorts – a 100-square-meter area containing artifacts with a density of up to 3,000 per square meter. In one section they unearthed an ancient stove – a pit filled with burned rocks.

“The question is, what were they cooking?” said Lindner during a recent visit to the site. He subsequently answered his own question, with enthusiasm: “They were roasting hickory nuts! 2,300 years ago! This is important because in our excava-tions there has always been this gap that starts at 500 B.C. and goes to A.D. 400. This site is right in the middle – right before the big transition. It holds the key to a shift in adaptation.” Looking at the three-cu-bic-foot hole in the ground, Lindner exults: “Students ask me what’s the best thing I’ve ever found – this is it.”

Historically recorded native settlements in Dutchess

Native Americans chose areas to settle in for much the same reasons we have. Paralleling today’s settle-ment patterns in Dutchess County, the shore of the Hudson between the mouth of Wappinger Creek and Hyde Park, and the flatlands in the Fishkill and Wappinger watersheds, were the most densely popu-lated during the Late Woodland period. There were villages along Wappinger Creek at New Hamburg, Wappingers Falls, Manchester Bridge, and Lagrang-eville, and at least two in Pleasant Valley.

In what is now the Town of Poughkeepsie they settled along the Casperkill, at its mouth and in-land in two spots where Vassar College now stands. Along the Fishkill (then called “Matteawan,” a name that signified “magic furs,”), the wigwams of the Wappingers extended eastward to the Taghkanic Hills.At what is now Poughkeepsie, a sheltered inlet at the mouth of the Fallkill (which the natives called the “Minnakee”) offered safe harbor for canoes navi-gating the “long reach” between Pollepel’s Island and Crum Elbow.

Indian Winter From Page 4

The Wappinger name for the place was “Apo-keepsing,” or “a place of shelter from the storms.” According to a romantic Native American legend, a group of Delaware warriors once came to the spot with some Pequot captives, one of whom was a young chief. This chief was “offered his life and honor if he would renounce his nation, receive the mark of the turtle on his breast, and become a Delaware brave.” The proud youngster spurned the offer, and was lashed to a tree in preparation for his being hacked to death with tomahawks, when his beautiful fiancée let out a shriek, startling the captors and setting them to debating the chief’s fate anew.

During the delay, some fierce Hurons interrupted the proceedings, giving the maiden the opportunity to release her boyfriend. However, during the melee the two became separated, and the victorious Huron chief grabbed the pretty girl as a trophy.

Undaunted the young Pequot chief, now lurking in the woods, devised a clever scheme to spring his beloved. Posing as a wizard, he entered the Huron camp. Simultaneously, the maiden became seriously ill, and he was retained as her physician while the Huron chief went out to battle Uncas, chief of the Mohegans, who was apparently in the area as well. At nightfall the two escaped in a canoe, with Huron guards in hot pursuit. He was able to squirrel her

moved the tribe there. He then extended an invita-tion to other Hudson Valley Tribes to join him, and more than 100 Mahican and Wappinger warriors and their families did just that over a 10-year period. While most of them eventually moved on to Mas-sachusetts to join the Stockbridge-Munsee, some of the original Schaghticoke stayed behind, where they remain today on a sliver of land between the river and the hills.

Native Americans being chased out of Connecti-cut historically found themselves slipping through the Taghkanics to Dover. In 1637, the once-mighty Pequot’s emperor Sassacus, an enemy of the Mahi-cans, f led Connecticut, his army decimated and his entire empire in f lames at the hands of the English, led by one Captain Mason. Coming into Dutchess through the gap in the mountains made by the Ten Mile River with a dozen fellow survivors, he encoun-tered a strong band of Mahican hunter/warriors.

After a skirmish, he barely escaped and hid in the watery cavern known as the Dover Stone Church, until the Mahicans moved on. He was captured and scalped somewhat later west of Albany, after mistak-enly seeking refuge with a group of Mohawk bounty hunters.

In Amenia, very little is known about the original inhabitants, except that they sold their lands to one of the first white settlers in Dutchess, a man named Richard Sackett. Sackett purchased his land in 1703, prior to the establishment of any patent. For years he and his family were the only white settlers between Poughkeepsie and New Milford, and seem to have gotten on quite well with the natives, without the benefit of a blockhouse or any defenses.

That Native Americans were plentiful in South Amenia is a fact that can be verified by Ken Hoadley, the former Amenia town historian and an amateur archeologist. Hoadley, who maintains a voluminous collection of arrowheads found in the area near Was-saic, has a theory based on the topology of the area. “I suspect the Indians drove the animals down that valley and slaughtered them in the gap,” he says.

Beekman is the home of beautiful Sylvan Lake, the site of Indian encampments from time immemorial. A Schaghticoke village once nestled in Noxon Meadow. Fishkill probably was home to more Wappinger peo-ple than any other town in Dutchess. As late as 1700, there was a large tribe of 1,000 warriors holding out at a place called Fort Hill, and more than 100 resided in the town until 1756.

The first Dutchess land sale between the natives and the Europeans occurred in Fishkill. In Febru-ary 1682, the English (actually Irish) governor of the province of New York, Thomas Dongan, approved a license for Francis Rombout and Gulian Ver Planck to purchase a tract of land from the Wappingers (Ver Planck died waiting for the deal to close and a man named Jacobus Kipp signed for his kids, and Rom-bout found a third partner in Stephanus Van Cort-land).

On August 8, 1683, the sale was closed, and on Oct. 17, 1685 King James the Second issued patent letters sealing the deal for all – 85,000 acres were sold to Rombout and his partners for: 100 royalls, 100 pounds of powder, 200 fathom of white wam-pum (and 100 more of black), 100 bars of lead, 30 to-bacco boxes, 10 “holl adges,” 30 guns, 20 blankets, 40 fathom of “duffils,” 20 fathom of stroudwater cloth, 30 “kittles,” 40 hatchets, 40 horns, 40 shirts, 40 pair of stockings, 12 coats “of R.B. & b. C.,” 10 drawing knives, 40 earthen jugs, 40 bottles, 40 knives, four ankers of rum, 10 “half fatts” of beer, 200 tobacco pipes and 80 pounds of tobacco. The partners also had to come up with an annual tribute of “six bush-els of good and merchantable winter wheat” for Gov. Dongan. Twenty-two Wappinger signatures are on the deed.

In the northeastern part of LaGrange is a wild, hilly area formerly known as “Jonah’s Manor,” Jo-nah being a Schaghticoke Indian who lived alone until a ripe old age in a cabin in the woods, well into the 19th century.

The ‘contact period’On September 3, 1609, Henry Hudson, operating

under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company, sailed his ship “Half Moon” into a wide harbor and up a broad river past rocky heights, starry-eyed that he might have found an alternate route to the Orient. At the narrows, according to Ruttenber, the ship was met by a group of natives (probably Wappingers), who boarded “clothed in mantels of feathers and robes of fur, the women, clothed in hemp, red copper tobacco pipes, and other things of copper they did wear about their necks.”

Hudson and his men were highly suspicious of the natives, who were unarmed, and whose mission was peace, according to Ruttenber’s account. He quotes Hudson as repeating that he “durst not trust them.”

In the ensuing environment of mistrust, violence was inevitable, and indeed happened the very next day when an exploring boat, far from the ship, was

away at (where else?) Apokeepsing, while he fought the Hurons off singlehandedly, saving the day.

Further north, FDR famously claimed that his estate in Hyde Park was the site of a former Indian cornfield. As proof, he pointed to the ground-hug-ging lower branches of the giant, ancient oaks in a large field. The spreading branches, he said, “could have been developed only in open spaces, and the only open spaces in Dutchess County before the co-lonial period were Indian cornfields.” In his will, he specified that the ancient fields remain under cultiva-tion, which, in a minimal way, they are. The trees, incidentally, are still there, on the lawn before the FDR Library.

The Sepascots, actually a clan of Munsee Delaware from the west side of the river, settled at Rhinebeck, and would follow a three-mile-long trail along the Landsman’s Kill to their principal seat at Sepasco Lake. It is unclear whether the Sepascots are related to the three Esopus Indians, Ankony, Anamaton and Calycoon (the Dutch term for “turkey”), who in 1686 sold some Rhinebeck property to Jacobus and Hen-drick Kip.

More Wappingers lived near Red Hook Landing, where some time before the Dutch arrived an epic battle with the Iroquois was waged. Dutch chronicles tell of the bones of the dead scattered on the ground.

In Milan, Pine Plains and NorthEast, Mahican Wawyachtonocks resided for centuries before they were eventually reduced to a single village called Shekomeko (where the hamlet of Bethel exists now, under the shadow of Stissing Mountain). Here they were chosen by a group of Moravian missionaries to be converted to Christianity. Their story, so well documented by DeCost Smith, cannot be told in the space of a paragraph or two.

In Milan, Mahicans became embroiled in local dis-putes between Tories and Whigs during the Revolu-tionary era. Those friendly to the Tories plotted with them to do violence against the Whigs, while a wom-an among them who was friendly with the Whigs managed to tip them off, saving them.

In the mid 1700s in the Harlem Valley, in what is now Dover, a remnant of the Pequot tribe called the Schaghticoke, chased out of Connecticut after hav-ing aided the Mahicans in King Philip’s War, settled for a time near the Ten Mile River. Their sachem, a man soon to be christened Gideon by the Moravians, subsequently stumbled upon a clear stream and lush meadow in the adjacent Housatonic Valley (where the Village of Kent is now), fell in love with it and


returning near dusk through a thick soup of fog and rain. Seeing what was happening, Indians embarked in canoes to help the crew. When the crew spied the approaching canoes, wrote Ruttenber, “fear seized them, the savage was more dreaded than the tempest, a falcon shot was hurled at the approaching canoes, the swift arrow replied,” hitting an English sailor named John Coleman in the throat, killing him. The Europeans managed to kill one of the rescue party and wound two more before returning to the Half Moon.

More than violence, by far the most devastating effect of “contact” was disease, from which the na-tives had no immunity. Between 1609 and 1710, about 90 percent of the county’s native population was decimated by a series of epidemics – 14 or so never-before-encountered scourges like tuberculo-sis, smallpox, measles, mumps, chicken pox, etc.

According to Lucy Johnson, many natives were killed by disease before ever having met a white man, resulting in a “cultural morass.” “Prime age adults and older adults carrying knowledge were hit first,” she says. “There were fewer people moving around, and more conflict. When there was nothing the shamans could cure, when the herbs and prayers and ceremonies didn’t do anything, there was a lot of blame – usually on the heathen across the val-ley.”

Many of the remaining adult males, as well as many non-combatant women and children, were killed in various wars and massacres up and down the Hudson. Those who stayed in the area faced a sharp reduction in resources – beaver and other game became exceedingly scarce through over-hunt-ing brought on by trade with the voracious Dutch. Much of the trade involved alcohol, which further diluted the will of the natives to stand firm, and was a major factor in their being swindled in a number of questionable land deals. By 1750 most of the sur-viving families had been bought out and chased off the land by settlers whose definition of “ownership” was quite different than their own.

Relations between the Dutch and the Hudson Val-ley natives were rarely much more cordial than in the first encounter with Hudson’s men. Dutch cat-tle, roaming free, would f latten cornfields, angering the natives, who would kill the offending beasts (in turn angering the Dutch). Petty disagreements often f lared into skirmishes, with atrocities attributed to both sides.

Intertribal relations were confused by the presence of a misunderstanding third party (“The Europeans had their own ideas of how things were supposed to work – they had no such thing as an ethnographer,” says Johnson). In the winter of 1643, according to Ruttenber, a group of 80 Mahicans (there are some, he says, who wrongly assert they were Mohawks) went south and set upon some of the old Manhat-tan Wappinger chieftancies, “for the purpose of col-lecting tribute which had been withheld.” When ap-proximately 110 of the assailed Wappingers f led to a Dutch shelter at Pavonia (near Hoboken), they were taken in and succored by a nice Dutchman named DeVries.

However, Governor William Kieft was egged on by a mob of bloodthirsty New Netherlanders led by his provincial secretary, Van Tienhoven, to take ac-tion against the refugees. On the night of Feb. 25, 1643, soldiers under the orders of Kieft moved in on the sleeping Wappingers and slaughtered them. DeVries himself was apparently an eyewitness, stat-ing how “children were taken from the arms of their mothers and butchered in the presence of their par-ents, and their mangled limbs thrown into the fire or the water.” Other sucklings were “fastened to little boards, and in this position they were cut to pieces. Some were thrown into the river, and when the par-ents rushed in to save them, the soldiers prevented their landing and let parents and children drown.”

Another source reports that soldiers played a game of kickball with their victims’ severed heads. Hearing of the atrocity, the Wappingers joined forc-es with the Mahicans in what is now called Gover-nor Kiefts’ War. Although they enjoyed a victory in the war, which ended in 1645, they lost many men, which further depleted their population.

According to Ruttenber: “The whole force of the Dutch was scarce 250 men, while the Indians were represented by 1,500 of their most expert warriors. … The position of the Dutch was perilous in the extreme. The Indians literally hung upon their necks ‘with fire and sword.’ Had they known their own strength, the last refuge of the colonists would have fallen before them, but judging from their own modes of warfare, they feared to attack the fort and contented them-selves with sweeping off the exposed plantations and with the terror that their presence inspired.”

The Esopus Indians across the Hudson from Rhinebeck had their share of battles with the Dutch, beginning with the Peach War, which started when a Dutch farmer killed an Esopus woman who abscond-ed with one of his peaches. Between 1655 and 1664, the Esopus managed to scare the pants off the Dutch

in the area, sending them packing a number of times to the fort at New Amsterdam.

By the time Governor Peter Stuyvesant took some Esopus children hostage and negotiated a truce, the Dutch were more worried about a far more deadly foe, sailing across the Atlantic. Colonel Richard Nicholls and a small squadron of English ships were proceeding with orders from the king to assemble a blockade of New Netherlands and wrest it from the Dutch for the Duke of York. By 1665, the Dutch were under control of the English. They were not gone, however, and the increased presence of both English and Dutch in the Hudson Valley tended to quicken the demise of the native population.

In the late 17th century, two additional smallpox epidemics and an outbreak of malaria once again decimated local tribes. According to a historian named Robert S. Grumet: “scarcely more than 3,000 Indian people were living in the Hudson Valley at the dawn of the 18th century.” He was counting everyone between Albany and New York City.

Starting in 1689, Mahicans, Schaghticokes, Esopus and Wappingers were enlisted by Governor Dongan to assist the English in their wars against the French. While the Wappingers were away fighting, a rapscal-lion named Adolph Phillipse fraudulently obtained a deed to their land in Putnam County, igniting a 50-year-long controversy.

Between and after the long wars, the Wappingers gathered with a group of Mahicans in Massachu-setts at Westenhuck (near Stockbridge). Many of them were converted to Christianity by missionaries during this period, forming a sort of schism within the tribe. The Wappinger leader, Daniel Nimham, later argued for their rights to lands in Putnam and Dutchess and even traveled to England in 1765, where he and a group of Connecticut Mahicans were well received. Their claims became stuck in the colo-nial courts, however, and were still unresolved when the American Revolution hit and blew their dreams to smithereens.

A war hero to the end, Nimham was killed in Westchester in 1778, trying rejoin Washington’s troops with a group of 40 Wappinger and Mahican marksmen. His valiant story was not written by an American historian, but by British Lt. Col. Simcoe, leader of a unit of British and Hussar troops. Simcoe ambushed Nimham and his group from behind, but was nonetheless wounded and pulled off his horse by Nimham, upon which one of his Hussars mortally wounded the Wappinger chief. Nimham reportedly called out to his men to f ly – “that he himself was old and would die there.”

After the war, the Mahicans and Wappingers at Westenhuck accepted an invitation from the Oneidas to move to Augusta, in Oneida County, and, ironi-cally, to nearby Stockbridge, in Madison County. In 1821 they purchased a tract of land on the Wisconsin and Fox rivers in Wisconsin and, as has previously been mentioned, have been there ever since.

Meanwhile, the Esopus had been able to resist en-croachment onto their lands, with help from nearby allies. Settlers frightened by the sight of armed Indi-ans were temporarily deterred.

The fate of the Esopus, however, would be forever linked with that of isolated groups of Mahicans and Wappingers still residing in western Dutchess in 1755.

The Stockbridge-Munsee tribe, which contains remnants of the Wappingers and Mahicans of Dutchess County, is building its first casino on the rez in Wisconsin: the Mohican North Star Casino.

It was then that an incident involving the Esopus terrified natives on both sides of the river enough to force them to move west for good. White settlers, arriving to occupy land in the area, heard of an im-pending French and Indian attack upon the Ulster county frontiers. Taking the offensive, they mas-sacred several Esopus families in their wigwams at Walden, in Orange County.

Consequently, on May 22, 1756, the British super-intendent of Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson, issued a proclamation that the Esopus clear out of Ulster and join the Mohawks to the west, for their own protection.

A similar overture was made to the Mahicans and Dutchess County Wappingers. On May 28 that year, Johnson wrote: “The river Indians whose families are at Fishkill, have had a meeting with the Mohawk Indians, and it is agreed that they shall remove and live with the Mohawks.” When Johnson returned to his residence on July 9, he found that 196 “Mohican-der, or river Indians,” were gathered there. He gave them clothing “from head to foot, gave them ammu-nition, paint, etc., in the presence of the Six Nations and the Shawanoes and the Delaware kings,” in ex-change for their slipping unnoticed into history.

For many Native Americans, according to Lucy Johnson, their mode of survival eventually was to attempt to “pass” as white. The last known state-ment of the English administration in regard to the Hudson Valley natives, written by Governor Tryon in 1774, presages their eventual blending into the coming “melting pot” of the new American nation.

“The river tribes have become so scattered and so addicted to wandering, that no certain amount of their numbers can be obtained,” wrote Tryon. “These tribes – the Montauks and others of Long Is-land, Wappingers of Dutchess County, and the Eso-pus, Papagoncks, etc. of Ulster County – have gen-erally been denominated River Indians and consist of about three hundred fighting men. Most of these people at present profess Christianity, and as far as is in their power adopt our customs. The greater part of them attended the army during the late war, but not with the same reputation of those who are still deemed hunters.”

And so it went, on and on, until there was barely a trace left. Today, there are few Native Americans living in Dutchess County. One family of Oneida an-cestry, the Chrisjohns, settled in Milan when their patriarch was working on building the Taconic Park-way. At the Dutchess County Fairgrounds there is an annual Iroquois Festival, celebrated by the ancestral enemies of the Mahicans and Wappingers.

At New Age meccas in the woods like the Omega Institute, a rainbow of practitioners of many races – but few, if any, Native Americans – routinely take part in rituals and ceremonies derived from na-tive culture: banging drums, singing spirit songs, ending prayers with the word “ho!” and so on. But for this white man, 75 percent English and 25 percent Dutch, the only words that come to mind are: “I am so, so sorry.” Let us hope that someday, something significant will be done in every commu-nity across the land to redress the wrongs against Native Americans that were perpetrated by our fore-fathers. Until then, we are all living a lie – nowhere more than here in beautiful Dutchess County.


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