III
The
Coming of White Men
1614–1740
THE Susquehanna Valley had been visited by Europeans several years before the Pilgrim Fathers made their landing at Plymouth. When Captain Christiaensen, the sturdy Dutch navigator, in 1614, selected Albany as the site of a trading post and erected near there a fort, he acted on knowledge already acquired concerning its relation to those routes into the Indian country which converged near the confluence of the Mohawk and the Hudson. In that year or the next, two men, of whom one was named Kleynties, set out from Fort Orange (Albany) to explore the fur country, and crossing from the Mohawk to Otsego Lake, proceeded down the Susquehanna into Pennsylvania. On the information these men secured was in part based that interesting piece of Dutch cartography called the Figurative Map, which shows not only the Connecticut, Hudson, and Mohawk rivers, but another stream, the home of" Sennecas " and " Minquas " (Mohawks).
The course of this stream, as shown on the map, does not conform to any stream we know, but there was only one river inhabited by Senecas and Mohawks beyond the river Mohawk. This was the Susquehanna and its branches. About forty years later (in 1659) another map, that of Visscher, pub-
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