Kieft endeavored to tax the Indians, extorting payment in corn and furs.  This exasperated them.  Their reply, through one of their chiefs, would have done honor to any deliberative assembly.  Indignantly the chief exclaimed: 

“How can the sachem at the fort dare to exact a tax from us!  He must be a very shabby fellow.  He has come to live in our land when we have not invited him; and now he attempts to deprive us of our corn for nothing.  The soldiers at fort Amsterdam are no protection to us.  Why should we be called upon to support them?  We have allowed the Dutch to live peaceably in our country, and have never demanded of them any recompense.  When they lost a ship here, and built a new one, we supplied them with food and all other necessaries.  We took care of them for two winters until their ship was finished.  The Dutch are under obligations to us.  We have paid full price for everything we have purchased of them.  There is, therefore, no reason why we should supply them with corn and furs for nothing.  If we have ceded to them the country they are living in, we yet remain masters of what we have retained for ourselves.”

This unanswerable argument covered the whole ground.  The most illiterate Indian could feel the force of such logic.

Some European vagabonds, as it was afterwards clearly proved, stole some swine from Staten Island.  The blame was thrown upon the innocent Raritan Indians, who lived twenty miles inland.  The rash Director Kieft resolved to punish them with severity which should be a warning to all the Indians.

He sent to this innocent, unsuspecting tribe, a party of seventy well armed men, many of them unprincipled desperadoes.  They fell upon the peaceful Indians, brutally killed several, destroyed their crops, and perpetrated all sorts of outrages.

The Indians never forget a wrong.  The spirit of revenge burned in their bosoms.  There was a thriving plantation belonging to DeVrees on Staten Island.  The Indians attacked it, killed four of the laborers, burned the dwelling and destroyed the crops.  Kieft, in his blind rage, resolved upon the extermination of the Raritans.  He offered a large bounty for the head of any member of that tribe.

It will be remembered that some years before an Indian had been robbed and murdered near the pond, in the vicinity of the fort at Manhattan, and that his nephew, a boy, had escaped.  That boy was now a man, and, through all these years, with almost religious scrupulousness, had been cherishing his sense of duty to avenge his uncle’s unatoned death.

A very harmless Dutchman, by the name of Claes Smits, had reared his solitary hut upon the Indian trail near the East river.  The nephew of the murdered savage came one day to this humble dwelling, and stopped under the pretence of selling some beaver skins.  As Smits was stooping over the great chest in which he kept his goods, the savage, seizing an axe, killed him by a single blow.  In doing this, he probably felt the joys of an approving conscience,—­a conscience all uninstructed in religious truth—­and thanked the great spirit that he had at length been enabled to discharge his duty in avenging his uncle’s death.