The troops to be employed under your commmand are—Clintons, Maxwells, Poors and Hands Brigades and ten independent companies raised in the State of Pennsylvania—In Hands Brigade, I comprehend all the detached corps of Continental troops now on the Susquehanna and Spencers regiment—Cortlandts I consider as belonging to Clintons Brigade—Aldens may go to Poors & Butlers & the rifle corps to Maxwells or Hands according to their comparative strength and circumstances.

The 1670 Staten Island deed and the minutes of negotiations show in detail how these transfers worked. Though the papers document a Native loss, they also are evidence of a forty-year process of contestation, and more than a week of face-to-face negotiations. In the years before the deed was written, colonists had been hounding the islanders to renegotiate the twice-voided sale. The foreign population was booming, and the English colonists who had evicted Dutch officials in 1664 were looking to establish clear title to the best lands near Manhattan. The Munsees found colonists to be bad neighbors, since Europeans’ free-roaming livestock trampled Native cornfields.

A 1626 document reported that Pieter Minuit offered the Manhattan people sixty guilders of unspecified goods as compensation for the Dutch West India Company’s initial occupation of the island’s tip in either 1624 or 1625.

I know the difference of Peace and Warre better then any in my Country. But now I am old and ere long must die, my brethren, namely Opitchapam, Opechancanough, and Kekataugh, my two sisters, and their two daughters, are distinctly each others successors. I wish their experience no lesse then mine, and your love to them no lesse then mine to you. But this bruit from Nandsamund, that you are come to destroy my Country, so much affrighteth all my people as they dare not visit you. What will it availe you to take that by force you may quickly have by love, or to destroy them that provide you food. What can you get by warre, when we can hide our provisions and fly to the woods?