John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004). Hobson tells how Europe combined ideas from India, China, and North Africa to construct its “Age of Exploration.”
William H. McNeill, The Age of Gunpowder Empires, 1450–1800 (DC: AHA, 1989). This pamphlet tells how Europe’s development of cannons and other weapons gave Western nations hegemony. More for world history than U.S. history.
Lynn Townsend White Jr. (1960), “Tibet, India, and Malaya as Sources of Western Medieval Technology,” American Historical Review 65 #3, 515–26 [517]. White shows that Europe adopted inventions not only from China, but from other Asian countries as well, then modified them, sometimes changing them into new forms.
CHAPTER 7
The $24 Myth
HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS in middle and high school face a challenge that most math and English teachers do not: they must undo the damage done to their discipline (and to their students) in elementary school. Instead of teaching what happened, elementary teachers sometimes present anecdotes that did not and could not have happened. These myths rarely get put right in high school, so students go out into the world having learned things that are flatly wrong. We shall look at one example, the imaginary purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch from the Indians in 1626.
I have asked audiences across the United States, “What was the most important purchase in the history of the U.S. ever made for the exact sum of $24, in fact for $24 worth of beads?” Across the U.S., they chorus, “Manhattan.” Acquaintance with this fable is hardly limited to the East Coast. Asked, “Did you learn this ‘fact’ in college? In graduate school?” they chorus, “No.” Most think they were first exposed to this information in elementary school.
Only once did an audience let me down. I was speaking at Laredo Community College in Laredo, Texas. Both the school and the town are about 95% Mexican and Mexican American.1 When I asked for the most important purchase made for $24 worth of beads, dead silence was the response. I saluted my audience for their ignorance for, as with the flat Earth tale, knowing nothing put them well ahead of most of their contemporaries. As Native novelist Michael Dorris put it, when learning about Native Americans “one does not start from point zero, but from minus ten.”2 Then I changed the subject.
DECONSTRUCTING THE $24 MYTH
In retrospect, I erred. Because so many Americans know the $24 myth, students need to know it, too, if only to inoculate themselves against encountering and believing it later on. It also provides a fine opportunity to show a class how our educational system teaches students material that is not even plausible. This happens particularly when our popular culture and public history convey the same inventions.
In Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, at the exact spot where this deal never took place, stands the monument presented here. It incorporates a huge flagpole, and on its base is a bas-relief showing the transaction. It states in part, “The purchase of the Island of Manhattan was accomplished in 1626. Thus was laid the foundation of the City of New York.” The monument was given to the city “by the Dutch people” in 1926, exactly three centuries after the transaction never happened.
The sculptor himself made two errors. Analyzing them can lead students into critiquing the whole story. Show students the picture and ask them what’s wrong. If they don’t respond, invite them to think about it overnight.
The alleged purchase of Manhattan for $24 worth of beads. It’s hard to believe that one scene can get so many things wrong.
Usually, the first mistake students find has to do with the headdress. Around the world, the prototypical Native American is a Plains Indian warrior on horseback, complete with eagle feather headdress. Plains Indian culture was indeed a dramatic and colorful syncretic development. So this statue offers another opportunity to teach syncretism. Apaches, Crows, Comanches, and other Natives combined elements of their own cultures with ideas about horsemanship from the Spanish—including horses themselves—to form something new.
Plains Indian culture began in the Southwest, when Pueblo Indians learned about horses and horsemanship from the Spanish who temporarily conquered them. After the Pueblo revolt of 1680, Pueblo Indians traded horses to Dineh people (Apaches and Navajos), who in turn traded with Comanches and Utes. Slowly horses and ideas about horsemanship moved up the Plains and the eastern slope of the Rockies toward Canada. Some bands of Sioux (Dakotas), the prototypical Plains Indians, did not get horses until about 1770.
From Apaches and Comanches north to Sioux and Nez Perce, Native Americans adapted the horse to their hunting and gathering lifestyles. Horses allowed the development of tepees, much larger than the previous structures that dogs and women had carried or pulled. Indeed, horses made hunting and gathering so much easier that sedentary groups like the eastern Sioux abandoned agriculture for the new Plains culture and moved west from Wisconsin and Minnesota onto the Plains. Consider this description of the flowering that followed, from a diary entry on May 24, 1855, by Lt. Lawrence Kip of the U.S. Army, describing the entrance of a long file of Nez Perce into Fort Walla Walla, Washington:
They were almost entirely naked, gaudily painted and decorated with their wild trappings. Their plumes fluttered about them, while below, skins and trinkets of all kinds of fantastic embellishments flaunted in the sunshine. Trained from early childhood almost to live upon horseback, they sat upon their fine animals as if they were centaurs. Their horses, too, were arrayed in the most glaring finery. They were painted with such colors as formed the greatest contrast; the white being smeared with crimson in fantastic figures, and the dark colors streaked with white clay. Beads and fringes of gaudy colors were hanging from the bridles, while the plumes of eagle feathers interwoven with the mane and tail fluttered as the breeze swept over them.3
Minus the horse, this is the image our Manhattan statue presents.
An eagle feather headdress works fine on a horse on the dry plains of eastern Washington. Walking about in the woods of Manhattan, a tree branch would have knocked it off within seconds. Not only is this statue off by at least 2,000 miles, it is also anachronistic. The year it celebrates, 1626, predates the heyday of Plains Indian culture by almost a century. The rise and fall of the Plains culture took less than 150 years, showing how fast cultures can develop when syncretism takes place.
Depicting a Plains Indian in New York is certainly wrong, but students have to know something to notice the error. At the least, they need to know that New York was (and but for interference by people still is) forested. It also helps if they understand that the prototypical American Indian is a Plains Indian. Teachers can supply hints and leading questions to help students catch this mistake.
The other problem with the statue requires no special knowledge. Nevertheless, it is often invisible to modern American eyes. If no one notices it, I say, “You know, I’ve been in New York City in August, and if this purchase that never took place took place in August, that is one hot Dutchman.” Audiences snicker. If no one volunteers what is wrong, I continue, “I’ve also been in New York City in January, and if this purchase that never took place took place in January, that is one cold Indian.” Again, I challenge them: “What am I driving at?” Someone will volunteer that the dress is inappropriate. They’re right: no two people ever dressed like that at one point on the Earth’s surface on the same day. So ask students why the artist did it. Hopefully they will realize that the sculptor never tried to depict the scene as it actually might have taken place. Instead, he presented a “primitive Indian” and “civilized Dutchman.” Clothing helps to convey “civilized.” Nearly naked connotes “primitive.”
Not just sculptors but textbook authors, too, equate mostly naked with primitive. One textbook describes Columbus’s 1492 arrival this way: “Who were these people who greeted them on the shore? They were practically naked. They were not dressed in fancy silk robes and jewelry….” The book is right that the Indians were practically naked. Today many Euro
peans in Haiti are practically naked Club Med vacationers. It’s a warm country. Being naked doesn’t mean one lacks sophistication or culture.
Without hints, most students do not immediately see the absurdity of the paired costumes. It is worth taking time to discuss why not. Maybe it is because we’ve grown so used to the convention. Hollywood repeatedly used the same conceit, especially in older Westerns. In the more recent IMAX documentary, Grand Canyon: The Hidden Secrets, a Spaniard “discovers” the canyon in 1540. He is dressed much like the Dutchman, but wearing a suit of armor besides. A nearly naked Native American leads him to it. As it happens, I have been in the canyon in January and July. I can attest that if the moviemakers shot that scene in January, they had to treat the actor playing the Indian for frostbite as soon as they finished, while if they filmed in July, they had to cool down the man playing the Spaniard to avoid heatstroke.
What else is wrong with this little fable? Let’s start with the price. So far as I know, the only evidence for the purchase of Manhattan written at the time is one sentence in a letter by Peter Schagen, 11/5/1626: “They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders.” Russell Shorto notes that a Dutch soldier was paid 100 guilders annually at the time. In 2008 a soldier in the U.S. Army got about $8,500 per year. So 60 guilders would be about $5,000 in 2008.4
The $24 figure turns out to be arbitrary and bogus. Schoolchildren have learned it for decades anyway. My father learned the $24 story in school—in 3rd grade, he guessed. That would be 1911. I learned it in 2nd grade, I think, which would be 1949. Last October, elementary schoolchildren learned it anew. Even if $24 equaled 60 guilders in 1626, it did not equal $24 in 1911, 1949, or today. Abraham Lincoln bought his home in Springfield, Illinois, in 1844, for $1,200. He did add a second story to it, but the original home would probably sell today for about $100,000—83 times as much.5 If $24 was the price of Manhattan in 1844 dollars, it would have been maybe $2,000 today. This $24 for Manhattan is the only figure in the Western world that has never been touched by inflation! Just like the clothing, this makes no sense, as soon as one thinks about it. A few well-placed questions can set students researching how prices have changed, so they can achieve this “aha moment” themselves.
Then there’s the beads. So far as historians can tell—the documentary evidence is almost nonexistent—beads and trinkets were not involved. What the Native Americans wanted and could not make themselves were principally five items: steel axes; steel knives; metal kettles, which they used as kettles but also made things from; guns; and brightly colored woolen blankets. For perhaps $2,400 worth of such trade goods, the Dutch bought the rights to Manhattan, probably from the Canarsies.
A MORE ACCURATE STORY
Students can go to New York City today and take the subway to Canarsie. They can do so in cyberspace at urbanrail.net/am/nyrk/nyc-map.htm. When they come out, they are in Brooklyn. Indeed, they are in east Brooklyn, at the end of the line. That’s where the Canarsies lived. Why wouldn’t they sell Manhattan? No doubt the Canarsies were as pleased with the deal as the legendary New Yorker who sold the Brooklyn Bridge to some later hapless tourist, for they got paid for something that wasn’t theirs in the first place.
The Dutch didn’t really care. They used the transaction to legitimize their presence to the next English ship that came by. The deal also made allies of the Canarsies, who otherwise might have joined with the British or with other nearby American Indian tribes. The Weckquaesgeeks, who actually lived on Manhattan and owned much of it, were not so pleased.6 They warred sporadically with the Dutch for years, until finally, around 1644, in Kieft’s War, perhaps with help from the Canarsies, the Dutch exterminated the Weckquaesgeeks as a tribe. Survivors fled to what is now Westchester County.7
At this point, students confront two very different accounts. The first tells how a tribe chose to sell their village or villages to some newcomers for $24 worth of beads—symbolized in the strands between the two figures on the monument. Second is the Canarsie/Weckquaesgeek story. As students weigh the likelihood of each story, two primary sources—images from the time—can help. On the web, they can find a John White watercolor of a Native village in northeastern coastal North Carolina, painted between 1585 and 1590.8 White’s are the best portraits we have of how eastern American Indians lived before much European contact. Being farther north, the Indians on Manhattan may have been somewhat less agricultural but probably lived in villages much like those portrayed by White.
Then students can apply verstehende to the founding of New York City. The first story asks us to believe that Native Americans would give up their villages, gardens, fields, burial ground, and gathering and hunting rights throughout Manhattan, in exchange for some strings of beads. Would they (students)? Invite students to imagine they were the Native depicted on the bas-relief. After they put on warmer clothing (assuming the Dutchman is not crazy and it’s not summertime), what would they do on the day after they made their bargain for the beads? Pack and move, of course, but to where? New Jersey? People already live there, so they’ll have to fight or negotiate with them before moving in. When they do, what next? They’ll face at least a year of hard work—clearing new fields, building new houses, planting new gardens. All for a few beads?
Of course, students today did not grow up on Manhattan around 1600, so they cannot know for sure how Native Americans of that era would have thought or acted. Notwithstanding that problem, as a first approximation it seems reasonable to project ourselves back into their moccasins. Certainly it’s reasonable to assume that people everywhere want a good life for themselves and their children.
The second image is a map of New Amsterdam, made in 1660 or earlier.9 Many students won’t even need this image, because they already have a bit of information that can help them judge these two accounts. Surely the most famous street in the U.S. is Wall Street, laid out in an east-west arc across Manhattan at the northern edge of New Amsterdam. Just north of it ran the wall the Dutch built to keep out attacks by the Weckquaesgeeks. If Natives had honestly sold their land—whatever the price—why would the Dutch need to build a wall across the whole island? In the back of our minds, Americans have always known what that wall was for, hence that the taking of Manhattan wasn’t just this happy little fable.
Indeed, asking students which account is more credible insults their intelligence. As soon as they subject it to scrutiny, the bead story falls apart. Its obvious falsity raises another question: Why, then, do teachers persist in teaching it?
FUNCTIONS OF THE FABLE
One way to approach this question is to think about what the story accomplishes. Sometimes the way in which a cultural element functions is more important than whether it is true or false. Moreover, the $24 story mythologizes much more than the taking of one small island. Excepting specialists, most Americans have no idea how “we” got our other islands, such as Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, the islands in the Great Lakes, or Long Island and Staten Island, for that matter. The $24 myth is supposed to symbolize the taking of much of a continent. Indeed, just like the Dutch, European Americans repeatedly paid the wrong tribe or paid off a small faction within a much larger nation. Often, like the Dutch, they didn’t really care. Such fraudulent transactions might even work better than legitimate purchases, for they set one tribe or faction against another while providing the newcomers with the semblance of legality to stifle criticism.
The biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803, when Jefferson “doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France,” as all the textbooks put it. With just a little guidance, students can critique the map of the Louisiana Purchase in their own textbook. These maps invariably also show the route taken by Lewis and Clark in their famous expedition to the Pacific Northwest. This makes sense: the one followed the other, and the geography is the same. Unfortunately, these maps all portray “Spanish land,” “French land,” “British land,” and sometimes “Ru
ssian land”—never “American Indian land.” William Clark’s own map of the trip is quite different. He reveals the people who lived there, whose land it was.10 Well he should, after all, because the Lewis and Clark expedition relied on contact, guidance, and help from each Native group in turn, from the Mandans in what is now North Dakota to the Clatsops on the Pacific coast. Students then may choose to ask the publisher why their textbook left Native Americans off the map of the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Students can collect references to the $24 story in our culture, such as this ad for shoes in a 1998 North Carolina newspaper. On the web, many sites refer to this conceit. Finding them will convince students that this is a cliché that cartoonists and marketers take for granted—part of our culture’s common “knowledge.” So is the joke about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, and students can find many references to this joke as well, including cartoons. The butt of the bridge joke is always the naïve tourist, who does not know that the seller has no rights to what he sells. Here, that would be the Dutchman. The Dutchman is not the butt of the $24 story, however. That would be the naïve resident, the Native American, who does not know that he is being swindled. What gets defined as funny and whose behavior gets defined as hapless depends on who holds the power today.
Not one textbook points out that this vast expanse was not France’s to sell—it was Indian land. Indeed, France did not sell Louisiana Territory for $15 million. France sold the land it did control—most of the present state of Louisiana—and its claim to the watershed of the rivers that flow into that land. In short, France sold the European claims to Louisiana Territory. To treat France as the real seller, as all our textbooks do, is Eurocentric. Students can prove this themselves. They can catalog the many Indian wars the United States fought in Louisiana Territory from 1819 to 1890 to take it from its real owners, the Native Americans. They can also compile a list of our treaties with and payments to Native American tribes to buy the territory. These total far more than what the U.S. paid France for the European rights.11
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 21