Lenape time of sustained European contact in the 1600s and 1700s the Lenape were a powerful Native American nation who inhabited a region on the mid-Atlantic coast spanning the latitudes of southern Massachusetts to the southern extent of Delaware in what anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands. Although never politically unified, the confederation of the Delaware roughly encompassed the area around and between the Delaware and lower Hudson rivers, and included the western part of Long Island in present-day New York. Some of their place names, such as Manhattan ("the island of many hills"), Raritan, and Tappan were adopted by Dutch and
Lenape River basin. Smallpox devastated Native American communities even located far from European settlements by the 1640s. The Lenape and Susquehannocks fought a war in the middle of the 17th century that left the Delaware a tributary state even as the Susquehannocks had defeated the Province of Maryland between 1642-50s. New Amsterdam was founded in 1624 by the Dutch in what would later become New York City. Dutch settlers also founded a colony at present-day Lewes, Delaware on June 3, 1631 and named it "Zwaanendael" (Swan Valley). The colony had a short life, as in 1632 a local band of Lenape