Professors follow trail of Lenape’s long history
Most ancestors of area’s Native Americans live
in Oklahoma today
BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer

PHOTOS BY CHRIS KELLY Monmouth University professors Kathy Smith-Wenning, Joseph Reynolds and Richard Veit gave a lecture on Native Americans, Feb. 27 at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center.

Life for Indians living in Monmouth County before the white man arrived was both harsh and bountiful, according to a trio from the Monmouth University anthropology faculty.

In a lively and well-attended presentation at the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center Friday, the professors said the Native Americans — members of the Leni-Lenape group — initially welcomed the European visitors upon encountering them. But, eventually they started moving westward to get away from the new settlers, winding up many years later in Oklahoma.

The professors — Kathy Smith-Wenning, a cultural anthropologist; Joseph Reynolds, an environmental anthropologist, and Richard Veit, an archaeologist — focused on the coastal Lenape, specifically the Navesink branch, who lived in the area that stretched from the Raritan River on the north to the Manasquan River on the south, and from the hills of Highlands on the east to the Mount Pleasant Hills in Holmdel on the west.

Reynolds said most studies of the Lenape are of those who lived in the interior, on the Passaic and Delaware rivers. He said it was the coastal Lenape who were the first to be exposed to Europeans — and the diseases they brought with them that decimated the Indians’ numbers.

Reynolds talked about life for the Lenape in the woodland period — the 1400s, 1500s and early 1600s. He said the food they ate was a varied diet — fish, meat, crops they grew and nuts and plums that they gathered. He has found no evidence of their dependence on corn or maize.

If fishing is good today, imagine what it was like 400 years ago, he asked the large crowd.

"It must have been awesome," he said.

Reynolds said the Lenape used canoes made of cedar and nets made from roots of trees to catch the fish. With coastal rivers and bays being relatively shallow, they were good for reaping both fish and shellfish, he reported. He said evidence indicates they hunted deer, black bear and wild turkeys, grew corn, beans and squash and foraged for nuts and plums.

On the other hand, Smith-Wenning said life at the mercy of the elements was harsh. She said the Lenape lived in wigwams and long houses, which were very cold in winter. If they spoiled their children, as evidence suggests, it was because they were so happy they survived infancy and wanted them to have a happy life, she said. She estimated the infant mortality rate of those early Indians to be on a par with developing countries in the world today.

For instance, Smith-Wenning said, while New Jersey today has six deaths in the first year of life per 1,000 births, Brazil has 25 deaths per 1,000 births and India has 59 deaths per 1,000. She guessed that the Lenapes’ infant mortality rate was somewhere between Brazil’s and India’s.

Smith-Wenning said Lenape is the name for a collection of separate bands of Native Americans. She said they did not live in villages, but in small groups of families together, and were not a united nation. The different bands bear such names as the Hackensack, the Canarsie and the Navesink, she continued. She is particularly interested in their contact with Europeans.

The first, she said, was in 1525 when Giovanni Verazano sailed along the coast of New Jersey.

"Verazano told of people clothed with feathers of birds who came to us joyfully," she reported.

"I would say shock and awe will come with it," she added.

A year later, Smith-Wenning said, Estevao Gomes, of Portugal, sailed into the Hudson River, landed, and captured 58 Lenape whom he took back to Spain and sold as slaves.

Veit said the numbers of Lenapes living in New Jersey, part of New York and part of Delaware has been put variously as between 800 and 12,000. He’s guessing there were about 8,000.

"Eight thousand is right in the middle and I feel that’s legitimate," he said.

Smith-Wenning said the number was decimated by the diseases the Europeans brought — smallpox, typhus, cholera and respiratory ailments. Veit said the Lenape moved west to get away from the settlers, going first to the Delaware Water Gap, then crossing Pennsylvania and arriving in Ohio in the early 1800s, where they ran up against other Native American groups. He said they moved on until reaching Oklahoma, where most now live. He said they have been affiliated there with the Cherokee Indians for the last 100 years. A few Lenapes still live in New Jersey and a few others in Wisconsin and Canada, he added.

Veit’s area of interest focuses on the period of 1650 to 1750 and the Lenape’s interaction with Europeans.

Veit said the knowledge available today about the coastal Lenape comes from three sources: oral histories, primary documents and archeological data, or artifacts.

He said with the oral histories, as the stories get retold, they often get changed. Nonetheless, he said, the Moravian missionaries were good sources of oral histories of the Indians.

Primary documents that have proved helpful, he continued, include the excellent journal kept by Robert Juet, Henry Hudson’s first mate, and the early deeds recorded in Monmouth County on the sale of land, which report what the Lenapes received in payment for their property.

Veit said 59 such deeds were recorded between 1650 and 1743. The payment the Indians received included currency, guns, gunpowder, coats, alcohol, beads and such, he said.

As for archeological data, two digs of burial grounds in Monmouth County have been enlightening — one in West Long Branch and the other in Upper Freehold, according to Veit.

He said Mrs. Wallace Markert was digging in her garden at her home at 31 Dennis Place in West Long Branch, just 200 feet from Franklin Lake in the 1930s, when she hit a human skeleton. An excavation found five skeletons of Indians buried at that location, all turned on their right side, facing east, with their knees drawn up to their chin in the fetal position, Veit said.

Veit said the other burial ground is the Lenhardt-Lahaway site at Crosswicks Creek in the Cream Ridge section of Upper Freehold, where eight skeletons were found. It was excavated in 1937-39 by employees of the Depression-era WPA, he said.

Some artifacts were found buried with the bodies, he added, but the reason why is not known.

Seven "middens" or refuse heaps with piles of shells and animal bones, even one human skeleton, have been found in the range of the Navesink, including one at Oyster Point in Red Bank, according to Reynolds. Veit confirmed for a questioner that the Hovnanian site at the end of Maple Street in Red Bank recently was the site of an archeological dig.

Veit cautioned that many archeological sites have been "dug through by gophers, groundhogs and earthworms, as well as scientists," and pointed out that many of the newly arrived Europeans settled over the Indian locales for the same reason the Native Americans chose them — to be near fresh water and good soil.

Even so, he said, "Monmouth County, I think, still has many archeological sites to be found."

Veit said the Lenape in Oklahoma have many artifacts that have been handed down from generation to generation, such as clothing and religious items.

Some books recommended by the professors included "Skull Wars" by David Hurst Thomas, several books by Herb Kraft who taught at Seton Hall, and Veit’s "Digging New Jersey’s Past."

The professors brought two display cases of artifacts with them to show the attendees. One case contained a collection of arrowheads gathered by Charles Mazza, former foreman at Lovetts Nursery in Little Silver. The other was a mix of artifacts from Pine Beach in Ocean County, including pottery, pipes and arrowheads, which were donated to Monmouth University by Doreen Brown, an employee of the school, and were collected by her aunt during a construction project at her house. Veit also brought his own half an ax head.

A man in the audience told of a sizable collection of Indian artifacts once housed in the "Wisner Museum" near Monmouth University in West Long Branch, which he said "was garage saled away," in 1970 or ’71.

Veit sympathized with him. "It would be eBayed away today," he said.