bark and poles, lacking the knowledge to build the log huts, which always formed the first and characteristic dwellings of the true backwoodsmen. It was a good many years before the backwoods type, so characteristically American, had opportunity to develop.
Kieft was not well pleased with the colony, and the colony was still less pleased with Kieft. From the beginning he took the tone of a tyrant, treating the colonists as his subjects. He appointed as council but one man, a Huguenot of good repute, named La Montagne, and then, to prevent all danger of a tie, decreed that La Montagne should have but one vote and he himself two. He then filled the different local offices with his own flatterers and sycophants, and proceeded to govern by a series of edicts, which were posted on the trees, barns, and fences; some of them, such as those forbidding the sale of firearms and gunpowder to the Indians, were good; while great discontent was excited by others, such as the sumptuary laws (for he made a bold attempt to stop the drinking and carousing of the mirth-loving settlers), the establishing of a passport system, and the interference with private affairs by settling when people should go to bed, laborers go to work, and the like. The Dutch were essentially free and liberty loving, and accustomed to considerable self-government; and the Manhattan colonists felt that they were