Wampum was the tribute paid by the vanquished in war, as also the means by which threatened wars were often averted. The Long Island Indians for many years paid an annual tribute to the Pequots, a powerful tribe dwelling in Eastern Connecticut.[23] It is commonly supposed that these tribes were also tributary to the Six Nations. To the same great power were subject the clans between the Hudson and the Connecticut, and every year two aged but haughty Mohawks might be seen going from village to village to collect the tribute that was their due. It is asserted that as late as 1756, a small tribe near Sugar Loaf Mountain made an annual payment to this nation of L20 in wampum. Individual as well as national obligations were similarly satisfied. Like the early German, the Indian set a marketable value on human life, and a suitable present of wampum on the part of the murderer, if accepted, freed him from the vengeance of the dead man's friends, for the wampum belt washed away all traces of the bloody stain.[24] Perhaps desire for another's wampum sometimes prompted him to such foul deeds, as it did the white man,[25] though happily the Indian seldom stooped to theft. Thus in the rude civilization of the aborigine wampum filled a space accorded to no one article in our own. Through life it faithfully met all his varied wants, and when he came to die, his friends placed it about his dead body,[26] that it might befriend him on his journey to the spirit land, and on his arrival there gain for him admission to the realms of the god Kiehtan, the abode of the blessed. The shrewd commercial instinct of the Dutch colonists was quick to profit by wampum in their dealings with the aborigines. Happily its most extensive producers dwelt at their very doors. They obtained from the Long Island tribes in return for knives, scissors, hatchets and the like, great quantities of this novel coinage, and then exchanged it with the Indians of the mainland for hides and furs, often plunging far into the interior and drawing thence products which gold could never have won from their possessors. Did common trifles fail, wampum was the unfailing reserve whose charms the savage was powerless to resist. With such an adjutant trade became doubly flourishing and lucrative. Posts sprang up along the Hudson, in the valley of the Connecticut and as far south as the Schuylkill, through all of which ceaseless revenues poured into the coffers of the Dutch West India Company. Connecticut, alone, annually furnished to her traders ten thousand beaver skins.[27] In all this traffic wampum played a leading part, so much so in fact that fur trade and wampum trade became synonymous terms.