Daniel Nimham, American Patriot

The story of Daniel Nimham, the namesake of last week’s Pow Wow, is full of ironies. Here was a Native American who was baptized as a Christian. He fought for the British crown against the French only to see English land barons rob him and his people of their ancestral home, and later he fought and died with the Patriots during the American Revolution, only to see that more of his land was stolen, his benefits as a veteran were cut, and his last remaining descendants were expelled by the Congress he helped to establish as the legitimate government of this land.

Nimham’s story is the subject of a forthcoming book, by local historian Tom Maxson, Mount Nimham: The Ridge of Patriots, which he will be presenting on Thursday, August 27, to the Kent Historical Society, with all proceeds going to the Daniel Nimham Statue Fund. Maxson is running for Kent Town Board this year.

Chief Nimham was a “fierce defender of what was right” according to Maxson. In the 1750s he was asked to fight alongside the British crown during the French and Indian war, and became a veteran fighting alongside Roger’s Rangers in upstate New York and Canada. Nimham returned to the area that is now Putnam County only to find that much of his land had been stolen by British subjects.

Maxson emphasizes the particular outrage it is for American Indians to be separated from the land their ancestors lived and died on. Adolph Philipse, the namesake of modernday Phill ipstown, purchased 15,000 acres of what is now Western Putnam County, but rapidly expanded his holdings to over 200,000 acres without comp ensating the native peoples.

Nimham sued for the rights to his people’s properties twice in America, and made no progress whatsoever. This was a predictable outcome, when one accounts that his judges were also land barons from New York. Nimham traveled to England in 1766 to appear before the Lords of Trade, who were sympathetic to his cause, but unable to effect change for him. King George III issued a procl amation denounc ing settlers who stole from native peoples —to little avail for Nimham.

Having found no justice in English Courts, Nimham was prepped to fight with the Patriots during the American Revolution in 1775. He battled

alongside his son, Abraham Nimham. They fought at Morristown and the Battle of White Plains.

It was on August 31, at the battle of Kingsbridge, now an area of the Bronx, that Daniel Nimham gave his life to the cause of the new country being born. “The gratitude for his ultimate sacrifice was shortlived,” says Maxson. Benefits due to native American veterans of the Revolutionary War were cut. And Nimham’s descendants were again engaged in a pitched legal battle for what was rightfully their due.

By 1830, the last of the native peoples from Putnam County’s land were reduced to a settlement just north of what is now Route 301 in Kent. In another of what Maxson calls “the ironies of history,” the descendants of the same tribes who fought in the American Revolution were among the first tribes forcibly expelled from their land by the Indian Removal Act passed by Congress in 1830.

Daniel Nimham’s story is one that has been repeated many times in American history. Many veterans have been denied their proper claims of benefits, even some of the descendants of the Ludingtons—another notable historic military family from Putnam County. And yet his natural desire to see his own land protected, his bravery and service in two extremely dangerous wars on our continent, are to be admired today, even if they were forgotten too easily in his own.