Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 130.

I am your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on October 15, 23, in Austin, Texas.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning

without presentism.

So we're back on the timeline.

We've been heavy on sidebars in the last month, in part because I've been out of Austin

for something like eight of the last 12 weeks, and sidebars are easier to do without having a huge pile of books at hand.

Some of you tell me you enjoy the sidebars, and for the rest of you, relief is at hand.

We are again in New Netherland.

For a fleeting moment, it is 1626.

Roughly as Peter Manui is transacting for Manhattan Island. Along a trail that ran the length of the island, for much of it along today's second

avenue, a small group of Wickech Indians, came south to trade furs, a group of Europeans, presumably a mix of men of

the many ethnicities who were already gravitating to the territory of the Dutch-West India Company,

attack the Indians and kill them, leaving only a 12-year-old boy alive. Considering only cause and effect and by no means right and

wrong, a great many people would die because those robbers let that boy live. It's now the

early 1640s. East to west, the territory of New Netherland in principle extends from the Connecticut River. The Dutch call it the Franks. East to west, the territory of New Netherland in principle extends from the Connecticut River,

the Dutch call it the Fresh River, to the Delaware River, which the Dutch call the South River.

North to South, New Netherlands stretches from the area of Albany, New York, and the Hudson,

all the way down to Cape May, New Jersey.

Staten Island and western Long Island were also within its jurisdiction.

The biggest town is New Amsterdam, which houses at most a few hundred non-Indians.

Population estimates for New Netherland vary widely, but in all of this considerable territory, the total

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