Montaukett (Montauk)

Who they are & the name (incl. the “Metoac” invention caveat)

The Montaukett are an Algonquian-speaking people of eastern and central Long Island, historically centered on the Montauk peninsula. Like their neighbors they were whalers, fishermen, farmers, and wampum makers (wampompeag from quahog shell) — and Montaukett whalemen were so prized that an 18th-c. New York law protected indentured Indian whalers from arrest during the hunting season.

The “Metoac” caveat (state it): “Metoac” as an umbrella name for Long Island’s Native peoples is a 19th-century invention with no Native root, treated as erroneous by modern scholarship (John A. Strong). The famous “thirteen tribes of Long Island” is a historiographic myth: ethnologist John R. Swanton’s list of Montauk “subdivisions” (Corchaug, Manhasset, Massapequa, Matinecock, Merric, Montauk, Nesaquake, Patchogue, Rockaway, Secatogue, Setauket, Shinnecock) describes place-named, kin-linked Algonquian bands, which colonists wrongly read as separate tribes. The accurate frame: one Algonquian-speaking regional culture of autonomous villages.

Territory & overlay

• Montauk peninsula — the heartland: Indian Fields (east of Great Pond / Lake Montauk), North Neck, and Fort Pond (named for a Montaukett “fort”). The last reservation lands and burial ground sit within today’s Theodore Roosevelt County Park (Indian Field): ../../south-fork/communities/26-montauk/.
• Gardiners Island — purchased from Wyandanch by Lion Gardiner in 1639 (one of the largest privately owned islands in the U.S.): ../../south-fork/communities/27-gardiners-island/.
• East Hampton, Amagansett, Napeague — the 1648 “purchase line” (today’s Hither Hills) and successive agreements pushed colonial rights east across this ground: ../../south-fork/communities/21-east-hampton/ · ../../south-fork/communities/24-amagansett/ · ../../south-fork/communities/25-napeague/.
• Freetown (near Springs/East Hampton) and Eastville (Sag Harbor) — the enclaves Montaukett families were dispersed to as Montauk was taken: ../../south-fork/communities/23-springs/.
• Sibling nation: Research — closely intermarried; many Montaukett descendants live on the Shinnecock reservation, others among the Brothertown people in Wisconsin.

History (contact, sachems, land deeds/transfers, dispossession, key episodes)

• Wyandanch (c. 1620–1659) — the dominant 17th-c. Grand Sachem, ally of colonist Lion Gardiner. 1639: Wyandanch sells Gardiner the island that bears his name. 1653: the Narragansett under Ninigret raided and burned the Montaukett village, killing ~30 warriors and capturing Wyandanch’s daughter on her wedding night; Gardiner helped ransom her and was rewarded with much of present-day Smithtown. (The town of Wyandanch, NY is named for the sachem.) After his death in 1659, his widow and daughter Quashawam led as the land passed away.
• Cockenoe — Montaukett translator captured in the 1637 Pequot War who helped produce the Eliot Indian Bible.
• 1648–1703 — the squeeze. The 1648 purchase fixed East Hampton’s western bound at Hither Hills; a cascade of agreements (1660, 1661 “Ye deed of Guift,” 1672, 1686 Dongan Patent, 1687, 1703) reduced the Montaukett to tenancy on their own land — confined to North Neck, livestock capped, and (1719) even marriage to non-Montauketts prohibited to suppress population growth.
• Missionaries: Azariah Horton (c. 1740–50) and the Mohegan Samson Occom (1749–61) preached at Montauk. Occom and the Montaukett David Fowler co-founded the Brothertown Plan (1773), leading many Montaukett and Shinnecock to migrate to Oneida country and ultimately Brothertown, Wisconsin.
• 1839 — the Amistad. Africans from the seized schooner La Amistad came ashore near Montauk (possibly Indian Fields) seeking provisions before recapture and the landmark trial.
• 1850s–1890s — the Benson takeover. Proprietors (Henry P. Hedges, Arthur W. Benson, and others) consolidated title; Benson bought the Montaukett property at Big Reed Pond, paying tribesmen $10 each, and in 1879 bought the peninsula from the Town Trustees for resort development. Montaukett families were (contestedly) “bought out” — some houses moved to Freetown, others reportedly burned.
• 1896–1917 — the land case the Montaukett brought to recover Montauk; it bankrupted them and ended in defeat.
• 1910 — Pharaoh v. Benson (69 Misc. Rep. 241). Plaintiff Wyandank Pharaoh; Justice Abel Blackmar ruled against the Montaukett and declared — to more than 20 Montauketts in the courtroom — that the tribe had “disintegrated” and ceased to exist. The infamous judicial detribalization that still governs their legal status. (A 1906 state law had tried to let them establish claims via colonial deeds; the court battle instead stripped their legal standing.)
• 1920s–30s — Robert Moses condemns Benson land for Hither Hills and Montauk Point State Parks; Carl Fisher buys the rest (1926) for his “Miami Beach of the North.”

Present-day nation (recognition fight, enclaves, current issues/litigation)

• No recognition. The Montaukett remain unrecognized at both levels because of the 1910 Blackmar ruling — a rare case of a people erased by a court rather than by Congress or statute.
• Two continuing bodies — the Montaukett Tribe of Long Island and the Montauk Tribe of Indians (Montauk Indian Nation) — filed federal letters of intent in the 1990s; neither completed a BIA petition. Work continues to reverse the 1910 decision and to revitalize the language and culture.
• The re-recognition campaign. Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. (and Sen. Kenneth LaValle) repeatedly introduced NY state re-recognition bills (2013, 2017, 2018, 2019); Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed them, arguing recognition must go through the federal process. A bill passed the Legislature a fourth time in 2022 and Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed it in December 2022. Bills continue to be filed (e.g., 2025 S9092) — all citing the “improper” 1910 removal.
• Descendants live around East Hampton/Sag Harbor (Freetown, Eastville), on the Shinnecock reservation, and among the Brothertown in Wisconsin.

Sacred / archaeological sites (forts, burial grounds, wampum, place-names)

• Indian Fields, Montauk — the last Montaukett village and burial ground, with the grave of Stephen Talkhouse (Stephen Taukus “Talkhouse” Pharaoh, c. 1821–1879), the celebrated long-distance walker and Civil War veteran; relics and house sites survive in today’s Theodore Roosevelt County Park. (Stony Brook’s Institute for Long Island Archaeology studied the Pharaoh homes here; Allison Manfra McGovern’s dissertation compares Indian Fields with Freetown.)
• Fort Pond — named for a Montaukett fortified site.
• North Neck — the 1703-era confinement ground between Great Pond and Fort Pond.
• Wampum — quahog-shell beadwork, the East End’s signature Native industry.

NARA / federal records

• naId 689409859 — “Surviving Indian Groups of the Eastern United States” (fileUnit), in the William A. Brophy and Sophie A. Brophy Papers > Indians General Files. Brophy was a U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs; the file is directly on-point for mid-20th-c. federal thinking about non-recognized eastern groups like the Montaukett. The single most relevant federal record.
• A full-text search for “Montauk Indians” (~2,159 hits) surfaces mostly NOAA Weather Bureau “Montauk” station fileUnits (e.g., naId 248559246, Montauk, October 1966) and NY State/National Register properties — place, not people. Treat the barrier-coast weather records as environmental context only.
• naId 75314999 — the Paul Cuffee gravesite NRHP record (filed under Shinnecock) is relevant here too: Cuffee is often described as of Shinnecock and Montaukett descent.

Why it matters to the corridor story

The Montaukett are the corridor’s eastern terminus — “The End” itself. Eastermost’s whole premise is standing “the furthest east you can stand in America”; that ground is Montaukett ground — Indian Fields, Fort Pond, the land under the lighthouse parklands, and Gardiners Island. Their story is the corridor’s sharpest moral fact: a people erased by a single 1910 court ruling even as their homeland became Carl Fisher’s resort and Robert Moses’s state parks, and who are still fighting for recognition in Albany in the 2020s. For an authority brand reading the East End “across time,” the Montaukett are the proof that the most beautiful end of the corridor is also the site of its deepest dispossession — handled with care, it is the corridor’s most powerful story.