A Native American people who inhabited the Hudson River valley. They shared many traits with the Iroquois to the west. European contact began when Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in 1609. Beaver and other pelts were exchanged for beads and knives, and regular trade became centred round the Dutch Fort Orange (later Albany). As middlemen for other tribes they jealously kept the Mohawk Iroquois at bay until their control was finally broken in wars of 1662–69. Thereafter epidemics and dispersal by Dutch, then English and American, colonial pressures relegated them to an increasingly lesser role through the 18th century, and, like the Delaware, they were eventually officially relocated to midwestern reservations in the 19th century.