Americans, especially New Yorkers, are familiar with the 1626 purchase of Manhattan Island by Peter Minuit for a pathetic $24. But there is much more to that story, and we must understand what was going on socially and politically at the time. Peter Minuit was the governor of New Netherlands--the future New York-- at the time. He saw the purchase of Manhattan as a way to expand the colony and also bond with the Native Americans as potential allies.
The local Indians were the Canarsie tribe, who lived in what is now Brooklyn (Hey youse guys--gedaddahere!). Minuit approached them with a proposition: You sell us Mana-hattin (which is what the Natives called it) and we'll give you a fair price. Modern Americans feel that the Canarsie had been taken for a ride on the sucker train, but that is really not so. See, American Indians had no concept of buying and selling real estate. The land, like the water and the sky, had been given by The Great Spirit to be enjoyed by all. Owning land was just not practical, especially when the different tribes migrated periodically. For instance, in my post about the village of Caughnawaga, I pointed out that the Mohawks (my ancestors) moved the village several times because of tragedies such as plague or war. Not owning land as the white people conceived real estate, the Mohawks simply said, "Here's a nice place--let's build our new village here." And they did. The same case is true of the Canarsie. They didn't "own" Manhattan in the same sense as we have today. So when the Dutch offered them garage-sale goods for the island, the Canarsie took the goods. The value was sixty guilders--and in today's currency that would have been about $1000. Not bad, really, for an island that the Dutch could have had for nothing! But really, nobody got swindled. The Dutch gave the Canarsie a bunch of stuff that was really useful to them: Iron cooking pots, hatchets, and beaded jewelry to make them look nice. But above all, this trade cemented a friendship with the Dutch that would have made them allies against enemies. So the Canarsie thought that the Dutch were being nice to them by giving them all this good stuff, because again, they had no concept of the business of land trade. So in the end, nobody really got fleeced, everyone was happy, and they all departed friends.
Yup. BTW the value of 60 guilder, invested conservatively at the time, would now be roughly $180million (still cheap compared to the land value of Manhatten of course).
