Daniel Nimham

Daniel Nimham (also Ninham) (c. 1726 – 1778) was the last sachem of the Wappinger people and an American Revolutionary War combat veteran. He was the most prominent Native American of his time in the lower Hudson Valley.

Prior to Henry Hudson's arrival in 1609, the Wappinger People lived on the eastern shore of the today's Hudson River, a tidal estuary for some half its length. To them, it was the Muhheakantuck, "the river that flows both ways", and their territory spread from Manhattan Island north to the Roeliff Jansen Kill in Columbia County, and east as far as the Norwalk River in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The Wappinger were allied with the Mohican People to the north. Their settlements included camps along the major creeks and Hudson River tributaries with larger villages located where these streams met the river.

During the early period of European contact, the population of the Wappingers was in the thousands. They Wappinger band proper (one of a dozen or more bands in the Confederacy) are said to have occupied the highlands north of Anthony's Nose to Matteawan Creek (today's Fishkill Creek). Adriaen van der Donck, one of the earliest writers of this portion of the country, assigns them three villages on the Hudson; Keskistkonck, Pasquasheck and Nochpeems; but their principal village was Canopus, which was situated in a valley in Putnam county, and known as Canopus Hollow. To the Dutch and English they were known as the "River Indians" and the "Highland Indians". By 1700 the population of their entire Confederacy is estimated to have been reduced by disease and other causes to just 1000 individuals.

Robert S. Grumet describes Daniel Nimham as the "leader of a small peripatetic group of from two hundred to three hundred displaced Mahican- and Munsee-speaking Indian people" who wandered the "mountainous contested borderlands separating Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. They built small bark houses and log cabins on sparsely settled lands in remote valleys far from colonial roads and towns, and made meager livings weaving baskets, crafting brooms and working seasonally as laborers or servants on nearby farms.

Daniel Nimham very likely learned to speak English from his father "One Shake” / Cornelius Nimham and at the Stockbridge Mission in Stockbridge, Mass., which the Wappinger had visited in the 1740s.

After 1746, Nimham’s residence was at Westenhuck, near Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1755, during King George's War, he, with most of his fighting men, traveled to Albany and entered the English service under Sir William Johnson, In 1756, the Nimham clan and around 200 Wappingers moved to the Stockbridge Mission, primarily to protect the older people, women and children. By March 1758, he was in Stockbridge, serving as town constable, although it appears he continued to frequent the ancestral lands around Wiccopee in Dutchess County, New York, and was claimed to make up until his death an annual pilgrimage up Mount Nimham in Kent in nearby Putnam County to survey all he claimed to still be Wappinger territory.

While there he was said to stay in an encampment described as "an area west of today's Boyd's Dam, at the southwest base of the mountain." This appears to correspond to the location of the last known settlement of Wappinger on their native soil, a small band living on a low tract of land by the side of a brook, under a high hill in the northern part of the Town of Kent as late as 1811.

In 1697, Adolphus Philipse, a wealthy New York City merchant and son of the first lord of Philipsburg Manor purchased land from two Dutch squatters, Jan Sybrandt (Seberinge) and Lambert Dorlandt. As they had never had a patent, Philips subsequently negotiated a confirmation deed with local representatives of the remaining Wappinger in which they renounced title to the land. Philipse claimed the deed set the Connecticut line as the patent's eastern border.