History is full of enterprising sales and screaming bargains. One of the most notorious, legend has it, took place in Manhattan, when the island’s Native residents sold it to the Dutch for a handful of beads and the equivalent of $24 in cash.
Or did they? Here’s how Manhattan really ended up in European settlers’ hands—and why the transaction itself remains a historic mystery.
Manhattan’s Native residents
By the time European colonists made their way to the Hudson River region, the area had long been settled by the Lenape people, who named the verdant island along the Hudson Manahatta, or “hilly island.” The Lenape, who spoke an Algonquian language and traded with a variety of other Indigenous Americans, lived a seasonal existence on the island with rich natural resources and abundant animals.
Those animals—particularly beavers—attracted the attention of the first Europeans to encounter the Lenape and Manhatta beginning in the 1500s. In fact, much of North America’s appeal to early Europeans had to do with animal pelts, which were used to produce fashionable hats and luxury items for European consumers—particularly as Europeans had hunted fur-bearing animals on the their own continent almost out of existence.
Lured by the region’s plentiful beaver furs, Dutch merchants began trading with the Lenape and soon claimed land running from what is now Delaware to Rhode Island on behalf of the Dutch West India Company, which developed a monopoly on Atlantic trade. The company established New Netherland in 1621, extending Dutch rule across the Hudson River region. By 1624, Dutch people were living on Manhatta—eventually renamed Manhattan—in a settlement called New Amsterdam.
The Dutch West India Company’s charter enabled its members to make contracts with “princes and natives” of the region, trading goods and currency for the “peopling of these fruitful and unsettled parts”—places that already served…
