Mohawks came to Fort Orange for the guns, but they stayed for the cake. When they visited Fort Orange and nearby Rensselaerswijck, they sampled Dutch cakes, cookies, and bread and took some home for others to try. The excellence of Dutch baking was universally recognized. The English word “cookie” comes from the Dutch koekje. Mohawk women made cornbread, but it may have seemed dense and mundane when compared with the treat of an airy yeasted white bread, fine cake, or cookie after making the trip to Fort Orange with a load of beaver furs and baskets of corn. To the frustration of many colonists, Mohawks’ proceeds from the fur trade allowed them to pay high prices. The Dutch colonists who introduced white bread and cakes to the region soon could not afford them.
Colonists repeatedly complained to the New Netherland Council that bakers sifted whole wheat flour and sold the white flour “greatly to their profit to the Indians for the baking of sweet cake, white bread, cookies, and pretzels,” leaving “largely bran” to sell to the townspeople. The petition concluded in horror: “The Christians must eat the bran while the Indians eat the flour.” In an effort to appease colonists, the council outlawed the sale of white bread and cake to Native customers, but, as with liquor and guns, Native demand prevailed. Bakers continued selling baked goods made from white flour to their best customers.
By high summer, hundreds of Mohawks—some years as many as a thousand—lived in Rensselaerswijck for weeks at a time, sometimes outnumbering the few hundred colonists. Some camped in fields and around town, and others stayed with Dutch or Mahican hosts. Some Dutch men and women built houses specifically for trading with and lodging customers—you can see them on colonial maps, marked as “little house” or “Indian house.”
Others reserved space in their front rooms for trading and socializing with Native men and women, selling them homemade beer, milk, butter, and cheese and letting them sleep on the floor. One Dutch colonist observed with disdain that, “not being satisfied with merely taking them into their houses in the customary manner,” some had tried to attract “them by extraordinary attention, such as admitting them to the table, laying napkins before them, presenting wine to them and more of that kind of thing.”
While this kind of hospitality seemed excessive to European observers who saw Indians as dangerous and perhaps savage, it was necessary for anyone who wanted Mohawk customers. Despite the efforts of the colonists waylaying them on the road in, Mohawks generally would go farther into Rensselaerswijck to enjoy the hospitality of individual houses and farms. In addition to cake and bread, men chose gunpowder, iron tools, shirts, and fishhooks, and women picked out hoes, awls, fabric, ribbons, and buttons. Mohawks and Dutch colonists alike carried wampum around town in elaborately decorated bags made by Mohawk women.