The Big Apple's First Big Deal

The weather looks great again on Tuesday.  Look for highs around 80 with perhaps a few friendly white puffies late.  Now, enjoy the day because we go in the tank for the rest of the week.  First off, we have a pretty good system moving out of the Southwest that will perhaps kick off a few showers on Wednesday around here and possibly some big boppers in places like Arkansas.  As it lifts up our way, it will open up or weaken so there is nothing that overtly suggests anything ferocious on Thursday but, as the rain chances increase, we will monitor.  Now, there is a general pattern that is not just continental but almost global and as it develops, it will be a pretty stagnant pattern so that our flow will be pretty consistent.  So, we will have a series of little upper level lows that will wander by from time to time just to our south.  So, after Thursday, there will be periodic increases in rain chances from time to time through the weekend.  Keep up with the forecast as we time out the impulses cruising through in the flow.  I suspect that the pattern will finally change by next week.

On This Date In History:In the Alongonquian language, it was known as Manahatin which meant “Hill Island.”  It was a rich land teeming with wildlife and game like beaver, deer, bison and bear.  The river had sturgeon and oyster beds were common on its shores.  The northern 2/3 part of the island was occupied by an Indian tribe called the Weckquasgeeks.  The smaller remaining southern portion was where the Canarsees called home. 

On May 4, 1626 the director-general of a new Dutch colony arrived on the shores of the island with instructions from home that, if the land was occupied by Indians, they were not to be forced off. Instead, they be persuaded by giving them something or with kind words.  Well, the folks that occupied the island never claimed to own the land as they didn’t have the sense of ownership in their culture  like the Europeans.  And if they did, the Canarsees would have less claim than the Weckquasgeeks.  Well, the Dutch didn’t know all of this and, on this date in 1626, gave the Canarsees what amounted to 24 American dollars in exchange for an island they didn’t own. 

I’ve always figured that the Canarsee chief must have been like Frank Pantangoli in   The Godfather Part II when he says “the FBI guys, they offered me a deal and I said, sure…why not?”

So, the Canarasees took the money and the Dutch thought they had a good deal.  But, of course, the Dutch certainly didn’t hold on to the Island long enough to see the Hudson River polluted so that there are no more sturgeon and no more oysters.  They never saw the hills flattened and the rich soil covered  in concrete nor the disappearance of the bison, deer, beaver and bear.  Nope…the Dutch paid $24 for an Island to people who didn’t even own it and then didn’t stick around to see it become all that it would become.

Meanwhile, the Indians…if they had taken that $24 and invested it at 6% interest compounded annually they’d be sitting on $35 Billion by 1988.  If they continued that return on investment, it would be nearly $70 Billion by 2000.  Now, if they had been really smart, then they would have put that $35 Billion in 1988 in a then-new company called Microsoft.  Then in the mid 90′s, sold that and bought shares in a new company called Yahoo.  And by the early 2000′s, bought Google.  I’m not doing the math but I betcha they’d be sitting on close to a trillion dollars  Not bad for some guys from Brooklyn.

 

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