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Phantom Indian Tribes?

© Anita Stratos

Myths have been interwoven with history since man began recording important events. Sometimes myths serve merely as embellishments, while other times they became cover-ups for unnecessary or cruel deeds. We've even seen examples of how the passage of time can sometimes fuse myth with history so completely that the two become indistinguishable. But what about complete works of fiction becoming reality just because one "historian" says so?

This actually happened in the case of the original 13 Indian tribes of Long Island. Arguably, some of the most myth-riddled historical accounts are those involving Native Americans, as these events were recorded with bias by Europeans and subsequent inhabitants of North America. In many of these situations, reality was embellished by myth in order to justify military battles against Native Americans in campaigns designed to drive them from their homelands. But the myth of the 13 Long Island tribes seems to have been concocted in an effort to bring Indian presence to a level of European understanding.

Back in the early 19th century, amateur historian Silas Wood of Huntington, New York gained a tremendous amount of fame by writing a list of 13 Indian tribes that he claimed lived on Long Island at the time of European contact. The tribes that he listed were the Canarse, Rockaway, Merikoke, Marsapeague, Secatague, and Patchague who populated the South Shore; the Matinecoc, Nissaquague, Satueket and Corchaug who lived on the North Shore; and the Shinnecoc, Manhanset and Montauk who occupied the South Fork and Shelter Island. Wood claimed that each tribe lived in a very specific territory, and nowhere else.

So convincing were Wood's statements that they became accepted as gospel. In fact, his findings were included in the 1824 book entitled "A Sketch of the First Settlement of the Several Towns on Long Island." But it didn't stop there. In 1839, historian Benjamin Thompson dedicated his book "A History of Long Island" to Wood, in which he also listed Wood's 13 tribes. And in 1902 Peter Ross published a multi-volume history again listing the same 13 Long Island tribes. In fact, this misinformation, or "mythistory", is embedded in today's textbooks, maps, and newspaper articles; schoolchildren are still being taught the names of these 13 tribes. As currently as 1970, Wood was named Long Island's "first great historian" in a Long Island historical journal.

How could such a fallacy receive so much positive attention and become accepted as known history? Historians and experts of the 21st century are finally unravelling the truth. One of these experts is John Strong, the author of "The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700". Strong is an expert on Long Island Indian history and a teacher at Southampton College. He states that Wood's findings were based on land deeds between Europeans and Indians, but that the names Wood attributed to tribes were actually place names, not tribal names. Primary documents clearly illustrate that no tribal systems existed on Long Island prior to the 1640-1645 raids called Governor Kieft's War.

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