New York: "Ever Upward"

New York State has a rich past, full of wonderful stories and famous people. The first human settlement took place around 10,500 B.C., after the Ice Age. These first inhabitants who were hunters and gatherers later became farmers.

During the period after A.D. 1000, two important Native American groups appeared in New York: the Algonquians and the Iroquois. The Algonquian tribes were farmers who raised corn, squash, and beans. They also caught fish, hunted game, and gathered berries, nuts, and roots. The Iroquois were also farmers whose main crop was corn. Around 1570, five of the tribes, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, united to form the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Five Nations. In the early 1700's, the Tuscarora joined the Confederacy and the league became the Six Nations.

European explorers played a large role in discovering regions and resources of New York. Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian ship captain sailing for France, entered New York Harbor in 1524 but did not explore the region. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain explored northern New York in 1603 accompanied by French fur traders. He discovered the lake that was named after him, Lake Champlain. In 1609, the Dutch sent an English explorer named Henry Hudson to explore the region. He sailed up the river that bears his name and stopped at present-day Albany.

The Dutch West India Company established two New York settlements in 1624-one near Albany called Fort Orange and one on the lower tip of Manhattan called New Amsterdam. Peter Minuit, the governor of this colony known as New Netherland, purchased Manhattan from the local Native Americans for trinkets valued at about $24.

In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant became director general of the colony. Dutch colonists disliked him because he taxed them heavily and jailed people for having different religious beliefs. He was the last Dutch governor of colonial New York.