Reviews for Snow trails

The average rating for Snow trails based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-26 00:00:00 Gary Stover First published in Dutch in 1655, this was not translated properly into English until 2008. I read this book out of my interest in Native Americans and out of a realization that almost everything we think we know about Native Americans comes from Hollywood movies. And even in Hollywood movies, most of the Native Americans portrayed are from the Plains or South West. The Native Americans of the Hudson Valley made their first contact with Europeans in 1609 when Henry Hudson and his ship, the Half Moon arrived. Dutch traders, farmers, tradesmen, and merchants colonized the area rapidly. In 1644 Kiliaen van Rensselaer, Patroon of the Rensselaerswijck patent in upstate New York, hired a young Dutch law school graduate named Adrien Van Der Donck as a legal officer. The New World fascinated Van Der Donck. He explored the New Netherlands extensively, in all its aspects--geography, plants, animals, weather conditions, agricultural potential, as well as the culture of the Native Americans, with whom he documented extensively. He learned to speak three Native American languages. Of the Native Americans, he covers bodily descriptions; food and drink; dress and ornamentation of both men and women; their houses, castles and settlements; relations between the sexes; marriage and childbirth; child-rearing; funeral customs and mourning; festivals; money; character and recreation; grooming and medicine; farming; hunting and fishing; social hierarchy; war and weapons; the government structure and law; and religious beliefs. The most arresting statement by Van Der Donk is that disease had reduced the population of the Native Americans in the Hudson Valley by ninety percent. And that was in 1650.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-12-18 00:00:00 Ryu Hoon This book ended up being a valuable source for my history thesis, so I'm more than a little bit biased. Adriaen Van der Donck was setting himself up as the next governor of New Amsterdam. He had returned to the Netherlands after eight years in the colony to persuade the States General to take over (up until that point, the Dutch West India Company was doing a terrific job of botching the whole thing.) Description was meant to attract new colonists to the sparsely populated Dutch colony, which extended from Hartford to Albany. Van der Donck describes the natural history of the region and Native customs. It's a valuable primary source but definitely needs to be read with secondary context (I recommend Shorto's Island at the Center of the World.) I'm surprised Charles Gehring, who's translated pretty much everything else from the New York State Library's Dutch archives didn't work on this directly, but the translation feels honest to me.