#130 Willem Kieft’s War

It is the early 1640s. The Dutch, who have done their level best to foster good relations with the local Indians because war isn’t good for business, have a new governor in charge at New Amsterdam. Willem Kieft is a man of extraordinary ego and bad judgment, a coward and a weasel. Kieft launches an incredibly violent war with the many tribes on and around Manhattan on a tissue-thin pretext. The bloodletting is shockingly wasteful and sad, even across the years. In the end, he turns to John Underhill, the Puritan captain who led the forces of the Massachusetts Bay against the Pequots years before. The results are every bit as ugly. The episode ends with a story about a stonemason named John Ogden, without whom you would not be listening to this podcast.

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Selected references for this episode

Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

J. Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland 1609-1664

Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland

Katherine A. Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies, Spring 2011.

Nicholas Klaiber, “Kieft’s War and Tributary Politics in Eastern Woodland Colonial Society”

Walter Giersbach, “Governor Kieft’s Personal War,” Military History Online.