MAHICAN

also spelled Mohican, Algonquian-speaking Indians of what is now the upper Hudson Valley above the Catskill Mountains in New York state, U.S. Their name means wolf, but they were also known to the Dutch and the English as the River Indians. The Mahican consisted of five major divisions governed by hereditary sachems (chiefs) assisted by elected counselors. They lived in strongholds of 20 to 30 houses, situated on hills and enclosed by stockades, as well as in enclosed villages situated between cornfields and woodland. When first contacted by the Dutch, the Mahican were at war with the Mohawk, and in 1664 they were forced to move from Schodack, near Albany, to what is now Stockbridge, Mass. They gradually sold their territory, and in 1736 some of them were gathered into a mission at Stockbridge and became known as the Stockbridge Indians; they were the only Mahican to preserve their cultural identity. Other groups scattered and merged with other tribes. The Stockbridge group later moved to Wisconsin. The American novelist James Fenimore Cooper drew a romanticized portrait of the declining Mahican in his book The Last of the Mohicans (1826).