Up the South River, on its east bank, at a strategic trading site also previously selected by Captain May, a new Fort Nassau was built. It was opposite the confluence of the Schuylkill River and the Delaware, the tongue of land on which Philadelphia was later founded by William Penn but which at the time of the Dutch arrival was the seat of probably the largest Lenni Lenape community in the valley. There, at Passyunk, lived the great chief of all the lower river Indians. Fort Nassau, the new Dutch trading post across the Delaware River, stood at the mouth of Timber Creek within the present limits of Gloucester, New Jersey. Some soldiers and traders, together with a few of the Walloon farmers and their families who were originally to have settled a farming plantation on the lower west side of Delaware Bay, were eventually installed at Fort Nassau. There, they established trade relations with the natives. Others, it is said, with the addition of new recruits from Holland the following spring, were sent still higher up the river to build a house and operate a trading station on Verhulsten Island, near the present site of Trenton. This island, at the head of navigation just below the falls, was named for Captain May’s successor in 1625, William Verhulst, who made his headquarters on the South River. The site of the falls was an important Indian crossing from the valley of the Hudson, where the Lenni Lenape traditionally traded with other tribes. The Lenni Lenape Indians, later called the Delaware by the English, were an Algonquin nation that inhabited all the immense valley of the Delaware. Tribal relatives occupied important villages even in the lower valley of the Hudson River. Relatively peaceful, the Lenni Lenape made their homes beside placid streams, in grass-matted huts thatched with the bark of cedar, the men fishing and hunting while their women tilled gardens of corn, beans, tobacco and squash. The men hunted fur-bearing animals whose pelts would be useful for winter body coverings. The women scraped the pelts with stone tools and dried them on wooden stretching racks, rubbing the animals’ brains and livers into the skins to help in the suppling process. All was not quiet and peace for the Lenape however. They were subject to terrifying raids by the Susquehannocks (Minquas, the Dutch called them) as well as by the Iroquoian relatives of the Susquehannocks who lived farther up the valley of the Susquehanna River. These fearsome marauders stole their women, burnt their houses and devastated their gardens. Trapping beaver and muskrat for blankets or hunting the raccoon too far away from native grounds was a precarious venture for Lenape braves. In fact, some tribes had fled their more isolated villages for the safety of Passyunk on the Schuylkill before the white men came. Others, on the west bank of the lower river, had crossed over the Delaware to settle on the safer east bank.