The best place to trade with the Indians for furs was the Schuylkill River, which flowed into the Delaware at a point where Philadelphia was afterwards built.There were at that time Indian villages where West Philadelphia now stands.The headwaters of streams flowing into the Schuylkill were only a short distance from the headwaters of streams flowing into the Susquehanna, so that the valley of the Schuylkill formed the natural highway into the interior of Pennsylvania.The route to the Ohio River followed the Schuylkill for some thirty or forty miles, turned up one of its tributaries to its source, then crossed the watershed to the head of a stream flowing into the Susquehanna, thence to the Juniata, at the head of which the trail led over a short divide to the head of the Conemaugh, which flowed into the Allegheny, and the Allegheny into the Ohio.Some of the Swedes and Dutch appear to have followed this route with the Indians as early as 1646.
The Ohio and Allegheny region was inhabited by the Black Minquas, so called from their custom of wearing a black badge on their breast.The Ohio, indeed, was first called the Black Minquas River.As the country nearer the Delaware was gradually denuded of beaver, these Black Minquas became the great source of supply and carried the furs, over the route described, to the Schuylkill.The White Minquas lived further east, round Chesapeake and Delaware bays, and, though spoken of as belonging by language to the great Iroquois or Six Nation stock, were themselves conquered and pretty much exterminated by the Six Nations.The Black Minquas, believed to be the same as the Eries of the Jesuit Relations, were also practically exterminated by the Six Nations.** Myers, "Narratives of Early Pennsylvania", pp.103-104.
The furs brought down the Schuylkill were deposited at certain rocks two or three miles above its mouth at Bartram's Gardens, now one of the city parks of Philadelphia.On these rocks, then an island in the Schuylkill, the Swedes built a fort which completely commanded the river and cut the Dutch off from the fur trade.They built another fort on the other side of Bartram's Gardens along the meadow near what is now Gibson's Point; and Governor Printz had a great mill a couple of miles away on Cobb's Creek, where the old Blue Bell tavern has long stood.These two forts protected the mill and the Indian villages in West Philadelphia.
One would like to revisit the Delaware of those days and see all its wild life and game, its islands and shoals, its virgin forests as they had grown up since the glacial age, untouched by the civilization of the white man.There were then more islands in the river, the water was clearer, and there were pretty pebble and sandy beaches now overlaid by mud brought down from vast regions of the valley no longer protected by forests from the wash of the rains.On a wooded island below Salem, long since cut away by the tides, the pirate Blackhead and his crew are said to have passed a winter.The waters of the river spread out wide at every high tide over marshes and meadows, turning them twice a day for a few hours into lakes, grown up in summer with red and yellow flowers and the graceful wild oats, or reeds, tasseled like Indian corn.
At Christinaham, in the delta of the Christina and the Brandywine, the tide flowed far inland to the rocks on which Minuit's Swedish expedition landed, leaving one dry spot called Cherry Island, a name still borne by a shoal in the river.Fort Christina, on the edge of the overflowed meadow, with the rocky promontory of hills behind it, its church and houses, and a wide prospect across the delta and river, was a fair spot in the old days.The Indians came down the Christina in their canoes or overland, bringing their packs of beaver, otter, and deer skins, their tobacco, corn, and venison to exchange for the cloth, blankets, tools, and gaudy trinkets that pleased them.It must often have been a scene of strange life and coloring, and it is difficult today to imagine it all occurring close to the spot where the Pennsylvania railroad station now stands in Wilmington.
When doughty Peter Stuyvesant became Governor of New Netherland, he determined to assert Dutch authority once more on the South River, as the Delaware was called in distinction from the Hudson.
As the Swedes now controlled it by their three forts, not a Dutch ship could reach Fort Nassau without being held up at Fort Elfsborg or at Fort Christina or at the fort at Tinicum.It was a humiliating situation for the haughty spirit of the Dutch governor.To open the river to Dutch commerce again, Stuyvesant marched overland in 1651 through the wilderness, with one hundred and twenty men and, abandoning Fort Nassau, built a new fort on a fine promontory which then extended far out into the river below Christina.Today the place is known as New Castle; the Dutch commonly referred to it as Sandhoeck or Sand Point; the English called it Grape Vine Point.Stuyvesant named it Fort Casimir.
