BONUS: “The Brooklyn Indians scammed us out of Manhattan!”
The Book is Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897
by H. Paul Jeffers. Here are the relevant paragraphs about this:
“A persuasive case can be made that the City of New York began with a swindle. For generations school children have been taught that a slick trick was played on unsuspecting Indians by the director of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Minuit. In 1626 he purchased the island of ‘Manna-hatin’ for sixty gilders worth of trinkets, about twenty-four dollars.
What Minuit did not know at the time, however, was that his masterful real estate deal had been struck with the Canarsie tribe, residents of Long Island; they held no title to the land they sold to the Dutch.
