“Pyquaagg nowe called Wythersfeild”: Connecticut River Communities and Conflict in the Pequot War.

Alice Elizabeth King Boxworth, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

Master of Science with Distinction, American History, University of Edinburgh, 2017 Master of Arts with First Class Honors, History, University of Edinburgh, 2016

A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts

Corcoran Department of History

University of Virginia December, 2020

In March 1638 John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay, received a letter from

English colonists along the Connecticut River. They sought advice on a case that troubled them.

In the run up to the Pequot War, a conflict that disrupted Southern New England between 1636 and 1638, colonists from Massachusetts Bay had traveled to Pyquag, an indigenous village home to the Wangunk Indians and their sachem Sowheage. The Connecticut colonists reported that they had negotiated a verbal agreement with Sowheage that allowed them to settle near

Pyquag, establishing the village of Watertown, later called Wethersfield. Sowheage “gave the

English land there, upon condition that he might sit down by them, and be protected,” wrote

Winthrop. However, the English failed to honor the terms of the agreement. When Sowheage attempted to “set down his wigwam” in the spring of 1637, the English “drave him away by force.”1

The Wangunk sought help from the Pequot, a larger indigenous group whose tributary network stretched from the Mystic River west to the Connecticut. On April 23 1637, Pequot raiders killed six men and three women in the fields surrounding Wethersfield, and took two young women captive.2 The attack prompted the Connecticut towns to join Massachusetts Bay and declare war against the Pequot. This incident formed the basis of Connecticut’s question to the magistrates and elders of Massachusetts Bay in 1638: was Sowheage justified in seeking military aid from the Pequot in response to the broken land agreement? Massachusetts Bay scrambled together “such of the magistrates and elders as could meet on the sudden” to deliberate over the issue. They “returned this answer”: that Sowheage “might, upon this injury first offered” by the English, “right himself by force or fraud, and that by the law of nations.”

1 John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,” 1630-1649, 2 vols, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 1:265-266. I have made the decision to use the term Pyquag/Wethersfield where appropriate to describe the communities in question, reflecting the continued presence of the Wangunk Indians and contested nature of the space. Title quotation: The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, ed. J. Hammond, Trumbull, (Hartford, Connecticut: Brown and Parsons, 1850, reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1968), 1:19. 2 PRCC, 1:7. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975), 217.

King 1

Their judgement continued: “though the damage he had done them had been one hundred times more than what he sustained from them, that is not considerable in point of a just war.” The magistrates and elders also concluded that Sowheage was not bound “to seek satisfaction first in a peaceable way,” because the injury was “such an open act of hostility publicly maintained.”

“It was enough,” they concluded, that Sowheage had protested the incident “as an injury and breach of covenant.” The magistrates and elders encouraged the Connecticut council to move forward with their relationship with Sowheage, making “a new agreement with the Indians of the river.” 3

A court assembled at Hartford in April 1638 to discuss the response to their question.

They conducted a “full debate & hearing” over the “Injuries & difference between Soheage, an Indian the Sachem of Pyquaagg, nowe called Wythersfeild, & th’ English Inhabitants thereof.” The Court decided that both parties had committed wrongdoing. The English had offered “diverse Injuryes” to Sowheage, and “the saide Soheage & his men have likewise comitted divers outrages & wronges” against the English. The Hartford Court echoed the ultimate judgement of Massachusetts Bay, however, concluding that “the first breach was on the saide English prte.” They advocated no punishment for the English who had committed this breach, instead declaring that “All former wronges whatsoever are remitted on both sides,” and that Sowheage was “againe received in Amytie to the saide English.” 4

In one sense, the Pyquag/Wethersfield land case was fairly routine, one instance among many of competing understandings of land ownership between English colonists and

Indigenous people that resulted in the imposition of English ways over Indian. It captures how

English migration to the Connecticut River valley in the 1630s disrupted Native networks of power and use of land, requiring leaders and communities to decide on a response to the

3 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265-266. 4 PRCC, 1:19-20.

King 2

newcomers. English colonists did not seamlessly import their social, land, religious, or legal norms, however. The process also proved disruptive for the colonists who moved beyond the oversight of the institutions and hierarchies of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The 1638 case shows courts in Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut reckoning with the consequences of this disruption by applying religious and legal concepts with complex meanings: deciding that

Sowheage was justified by the law of nations and that the English actions constituted a breach of covenant. Why did the colonies appear to rule in favor of the Indigenous party?

In 1965, Alden Vaughan argued that the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut rulings offered an example of Puritan justice. The “Wethersfield massacre case,” writes Vaughan, refutes the “long accepted stereotype” of Puritan cruelty towards Native Americans.5 If the

Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut could “decide in favor of an Indian who had retaliated so ruthlessly” against English colonists, Vaughan argues for a general “Puritan equity towards the Indians.”6 Vaughan judges that actions of the Wethersfield colonists represented a

“relatively minor injustice” compared to Sowheage’s “violent retribution,” characterizing

Sowheage’s actions as treacherous and perfidious.7 If so, however, we might expect more instances of colonial justice in favor of Native Americans. But the Pyquag/Wethersfield case remains highly unusual. Instead, the ruling suggests that Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut tactically utilized evocative religious and legal terms to smooth over disagreements and thereby further peaceful colonization of the Connecticut River valley. Connecticut sought to construct alliances between colonists and Native people in order to expand their land holdings, and

Massachusetts Bay attempted to maintain a level of control over the Connecticut colonists who had left their orbit.

5 Vaughan, ‘A Test of Puritan Justice’, The New England Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1965), 339. 6 Vaughan, ‘A Test of Puritan Justice’, 339. 7 Vaughan, ‘A Test of Puritan Justice’, 337.

King 3

Scholarship that focuses on the importance of place offers new contexts for native-colonial conflicts over land in New England. Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin and Christine DeLucia's

Memory Lands, both 2018, address the persistent presence and enduring importance of Native people in seventeenth-century New England. Both examine Native people's impact during

King Philip's War, 1675-1678. Their scholarship reassesses the conflict, highlighting how

Natives bore the brunt of the war, as both enemies and allies of the colonists. Despite massive suffering and losses, Natives survived. This new scholarship focuses on contrasting English and Native geographies of New England. Land was foundational to communal identity for both groups. Brooks and DeLucia demonstrate that competing visions of the Northeast fueled settler violence against Indigenous owners and residents of the region.8

I hope to offer a similar reassessment of the Pequot War, 1636-1638, taking inspiration from Brooks’ and DeLucia’s treatment of New England’s layered Native and colonial geographies.9 What do we learn about the Pequot War when we view it from the perspective of the Connecticut River Valley, rather than the government in Boston? How did the conflict affect the broad range of Native peoples beyond the Pequot? Connecticut River Indians were pivotal to the coming, conduct, and outcome of the war. The war violently rearranged the region’s tributary networks, and both the River Indians and the English had to decide how to approach each other in the wake of the war. Connecticut towns sought to replace the Pequot as beneficiaries of the region’s rich agricultural production without taking responsibility for defending those Indian bands from the Mohawk, the Dutch, or the French.

8 See also work such as William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) for more on differences between Native and European relationships with the land, differences Cronon ultimately sees culminate in the devastating impact of the European market capitalism. 9 See Alfred Cave, The Pequot War, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). Cave argues that Puritan rhetoric that framed the Pequot as satanic savages was the driving force in the conflict. The English, particularly those in Massachusetts Bay, wrapped their defense of the Connecticut River plantations in Old Testament language about the children of God assembling themselves into armies to fight against the Lord’s enemies.

King 4

Scholarship has largely focused on the English military experience of the war. Alden

Vaughan, Francis Jennings, and Alfred Cave all frame the war as the result of Puritan expansion across New England. Vaughan presents this movement as spreading English justice, while

Jennings sees it as an invasion, driven by the insatiable colonial pursuit of land for settlement.

Cave portrays this process of colonization as the unfolding of Puritan desire to eradicate the

Native Americans who occupied land that God had given to the English as his chosen people.10

This project responds to the recent call of Nancy Shoemaker and Jeffrey Ostler in The William and Mary Quarterly to historicize settler colonialism theory for application to early America.11

Do the Wethersfield ‘adventurers’ fit the mold of settler colonists, agents of empire attempting to eradicate Native presence from the land? Addressing this question highlights important differences within the English colonies, from Massachusetts Bay’s reluctance to allow migration to the Connecticut River to the continued dependence of the river towns on their

Native neighbors and distant colonial authorities, despite their attempts at independence.

Katherine Grandjean has broadened our understanding of the war by highlighting colonial anxiety over food supplies in the wake of failed harvests and the influx of English immigrants in 1634. She argues that hunger pushed English colonists to take Pequot stores of maize through war, offering another explanation of the ways that the environment and

10 Alden Vaughan’s sympathies lie with the Puritans in this conflict, and he characterizes the Pequot as violent invaders. Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 136. By contrast, Francis Jennings argues that the Pequot were victims of English duplicity and greed. Jennings, Invasion of America, 213 In the most recent monograph on the Pequot War, Alfred Cave casts Puritan rhetoric against the Pequot as satanic savages as the driving force in the conflict. The English wrapped their defense of the Connecticut River plantations in Old Testament language about the children of God assembling themselves into armies to fight against the Lord’s enemies. Alfred Cave, The Pequot War, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). See for instance, John Higginson’s references to Judges 20:1-2 “Then all the children of Israel went out, and the congregation was gathered together as one man, from Dan even to Beersheba, with the land of Gilead, unto the Lord in Mizpeh. And the chief of all the people, even of all the tribes of Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God, four hundred thousand footmen that drew sword.” Higginson was a clergyman at Fort Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River, writing to John Winthrop to encourage military action against the Pequot in May 1637. John Higginson to John Winthrop, The Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, Vol. 3 1631-1637, (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1943), 3:406. 11 Nancy Shoemaker and Jeffrey Ostler, “Forum: Settler Colonialism in Early American History,” The William and Mary Quarterly, July 2019, 76:3, 361-450.

King 5

demography shaped the coming of conflict. Jenny Hale Pulsipher frames the war as deriving from contests for authority between Indians and Europeans in New England. She rightly attributes the regional instability to the shifting alliances of the Pequot, Dutch, English and

Narragansett, but her narrative neglects smaller Native groups navigating the changing landscape of power. Pyquag/Wethersfield offers a case study for the effect of these larger changes on the Wangunk. As one of the first English outposts along the Connecticut River and a key flashpoint in the escalation of violence in 1637, the conflict between English colonists and Native peoples here profoundly affected the course of the war. The attack on Wethersfield drew Connecticut into Massachusetts Bay’s military endeavor, ultimately turning the war into an English competition for control of the region.12

Although rarely mentioned by historians of New England, the Wangunk appear in anthropological and archeological scholarship focused on the Connecticut River valley. Kevin

McBride’s study of the fur trade around the Connecticut River, Lynn Ceci’s work on the importance of wampum, and Lucianne Lavin’s history of Connecticut’s indigenous peoples flesh out the physical, cultural, and diplomatic world of the Connecticut River Indians and the

Pequot.13 Timothy Ives’ 2001 thesis on the Wangunk offered the first ethnohistory of a specific

Connecticut River people and remains the only study dedicated to the Wangunk.14 Ives concludes that the Wangunk did not function as a distinct group, rather they maintained fluid

12 Katherine A. Grandjean, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War.” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2011) Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority In Colonial New England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Wethersfield largely appears in narratives of the Pequot War as a backdrop for English westward migration and the Pequot attack in the spring of 1637. 13 Kevin McBride, “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade: Native-Dutch Relations in Eastern New Netherland,” Enduring Tradition: The Native Peoples of New England, ed. Laurie Weinstein, (Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), Lynn Ceci, “Wampum as a Peripheral Resource,” in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, ed. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), Lucianne Lavin, Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples: What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Communities and Cultures, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013). 14 Timothy Ives, “Wangunk Ethnohistory: A Case Study Of A Connecticut River Indian Community.” Dissertation, College of William and Mary - Arts and Sciences, 2001. https://doi.org/10.21220/s2-xcrv- vp43, 3.

King 6

relationships with neighboring communities and relied on alliances and trade with other native and European players to survive.15 By combining these studies of the Wangunk world with

English colonial court records, land deeds, and personal papers, as well as Dutch maps and letters, my study reframes the coming of the Pequot War, lifting us out of Boston and Plymouth and placing the Connecticut River Valley at the center of the story. Andrew Lipman argues that scholars have too often drawn an artificial dividing line between English and Dutch spheres of colonial influence down the middle of the Connecticut River.16 We gain much more from thinking of the river as the center of a distinct region where a variety of people vied for dominance and self-determination: the Wangunk and other River Indian groups, the Pequot who absorbed the region into their tributary network in the 1630s, the Dutch who sought to dominate trade, and the English who came with the intent of owning, occupying, and controlling the land. Their interests converged and clashed along the river. From this vantage point, the conflict appears as a series of strategic moves by various English parties to take over the Pequots’ former tributary networks, a competition ultimately won by the Connecticut colonists in 1638.

Wangunk means “where the river bends” and the Wangunk Indians occupied a world shaped by the oxbows of the Connecticut River.17 Led by sachem Sowheage, the Wangunk occupied about a dozen villages including Pyquag, about fifty miles up the river from the Connecticut

Sound. Each year in late winter and early spring, the Connecticut would flood, prompting the

Wangunk to retreat to higher ground where they established winter hunting settlements in the

15 Timothy Ives, “Wangunk Ethnohistory,” 3. 16 Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 24. 17 PRCC, 1:19. “Wangunk,” Native North East Portal, http://nativenortheastportal.com/bio-tribes/wangunk [accessed December 4th, 2019]

King 7

woods of oak and chestnut.18 This flooding created fertile plains for maize cultivation during the summer and autumn. Pyquag means open or cleared lands, describing the meadows that ran down to the western bank of the Connecticut River.19 On a 1614 map, Dutch explorer

Adriaen Block depicts the Wangunk as occupying five villages along the banks of the river, likely the location of their summer settlements.20

During the summer, Pyquag and the other Wangunk villages buzzed with activity as bands who had separated for the winter-spring hunting season reunited. These villages contained “round or oval pole frame houses,” covered in bark. Temporary camps dedicated to specific tasks, like food, wood, and material collection, surrounded each village. These tasks included hunting, wood gathering for making fires, canoes, and baskets, maple sugaring, and sacred sites for spiritual ceremonies. Paths connected these sites to the main settlements, and connected villages to each other.21 In his description of the Wangunk and Podunk homelands along the Fresh River, the Dutch name for the Connecticut, Johannes de Laet observed that

“the natives there plant maize,” a crop central to Connecticut River subsistence.22 William

Wood described maize cultivation in southern New England in 1634: native women exceeded the skill of “our English husbandmen,” tending carefully to their corn fields with “clamshell hoes.” After harvest, they preserved the corn in brass or bark pots buried in the ground.23

18 Lucienne Lavin, “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” presented at “Indigenous Middletown: Settler Colonial and Wangunk Tribal History” December 5, 2015 at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 2. 19 “Pyqua:” open, “-aug:” land in Eastern Algonquian. Stanley Martin, “Indian Derivatives in Connecticut Place-Names.” The New England Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1939), 368. Lavin, “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” 2. 20 He labels them the Sequins. “Map of New Netherlands, as well as a part of Nova Francia and Virginia” by A.C. Block, 1614, National Archives of the Netherlands, Kaartcollectie Buitenland Leupe, 520. 21 Sherman W. Adams, The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut :Comprising the Present Towns of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, and Newington, and of Glastonbury Prior to Its Incorporation in 1693 : From Date of Earliest Settlement until the Present Time, ed. Henry Stiles, (New York: The Grafton Press, 1904), 19. Lavin, “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” 3. 22 Johannes de Laet, “New World, or Description of West-India,” Narratives of New Netherland, 1609- 1664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1909, 43. 23 William Wood, New England’s Prospect, Alden Vaughan, ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 113.

King 8

Archaeologists have found Maize kernels dating from about 1065 at Rocky Hill, site of

Wangunk village five or six miles downriver from Pyquag, suggesting that Native people have cultivated that plant for at least six hundred years before Europeans arrived in the region.24

In addition to maize, the Wangunk grew and gathered butternut squash, Jerusalem artichokes, plantain, wild rice, beech and hickory nuts, sorrel, and mustard. The Wangunk caught yellow perch, turtles, and freshwater mussels in the river, and hunted deer, rabbits and wildcats. Although seasonally mobile, the Wangunk cleared land for planting, gathered food,

25 and consumed firewood. The Wangunk system of governance centered on the “grand sachem,” Sowheage, who resided at Pyquag, and his children who served as sachems of the surrounding Wangunk villages. Colonial observers estimated their population at around four hundred people.26 The mobile nature of Wangunk life meant that they decentralized to preserve self-sufficiency in each village.27

The Pequot operated on a more consolidated and hierarchical model of social organization. Much more numerous than the Wangunk, at the beginning of the 1630s the

Pequot and their Mohegan allies had approximately 4000 men of fighting age with a total

24 Evidence from the Morgan archeological site at Rocky Hill suggests that the Wangunk occupied it between 1065 and 1365 AD. Lavin, “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” 2. 25 Lavin, “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” 2. Lavin, Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples, 207 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 48. Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500- 1650, (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 37-39. 26 “Wangunk,” Native North East Portal http://nativenortheastportal.com/bio-tribes/wangunk [accessed November 24th, 2020] The population of the Wangunk has been estimated as about 400, a number extrapolated from the journal of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay colony. Bert Salwen, “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger, (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 169. European commentators often used the ethnonym “Sequin” to describe the Wangunk, reflecting confusion that stemmed from the name of sachem Sowheage, who was sometimes referred to as Sequin. Johan de Laet, director of the Dutch West Indian Company, described them thus: “there are few inhabitants near the mouth of the river, but at the distance of fifteen leagues above they become numerous: their nation is called Sequins.” de Laet, “New World, or Description of West-India,” 43. 27 Lavin, “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” 3 Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 42- 43.

King 9

estimated population of 16,000 people.28 In contrast to the seasonal nature of riverine Wangunk settlements along the Connecticut, the Pequots’ coastal location suggests that they occupied the same villages over multiple seasons, relying on a wider range of gathered plants and animals available nearby.29 Located along the Long Island Sound, the Pequot dominated the production and movement of wampum: shell beads with spiritual and economic value that native peoples in southern New England used variously as tribute to sachems, payments for services, and diplomatic gifts.30 Kathleen Bragdon suggests that groups with “the most centralized polities,” particularly the rival groups the Narragansett and the Pequot, dominated the production and distribution of wampum.31 The Pequot tributary network covered about two-thousand-square-miles of land, including the homelands of the Mohegan and the Western

Niantic, peoples who lived between the Connecticut and Thames Rivers, and Native peoples on the eastern end of Long Island. These groups paid wampum in tribute to the Pequot. In return the Pequot provided their tributaries with European trade goods derived from their Dutch allies and offered protection from attacks by rival indigenous groups, primarily the Mohawk residents of the Hudson River valley. This security was especially important for the small, dispersed village settlements that dotted the Connecticut River valley, communities vulnerable to raids for commodities or captives from larger, more powerful groups.32

The Pequot used both wampum and warfare to create and secure alliances with surrounding Native peoples. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Pequot brought the Wangunk into their network by force. A Dutch source described the Wangunk as “subjects”

28 Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 25. This number is based on Daniel Gookin’s estimates and observations. Their largest regional rivals the Narragansett had a population of around 20,000. 29 Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 66-67. 30 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 95. 31 Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 47. 32 Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 25.

King 10

of the Pequot after “three different battles in open field.”33 Archaeologist Kevin McBride concludes that the Wangunk and the Pequot waged war at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Losing the conflict, the Wangunk became folded in to the Pequot tributary network.34

While we have no written descriptions of the precise relationship between Wangunk and the

Pequot before the early 1630s, we find clues from archeological and ethnohistorical scholarship. The first clue concerns the nature of leadership in southern New England. Scholars have often attributed the power to redistribute food and trade goods to sachems in more centralized polities, such as the Pequot. Bragdon argues that sachems exacted wampum or agricultural products like maize to “finance” their political activities, primarily wars to maintain control over the region.35 After losing to the Pequot in battle, the Wangunk (who lacked wampum) paid a tribute in maize drawn from the meadows around Pyquag and their other villages.

Archeological evidence from Pequot villages suggests a surge in Native conflict between 1600-1637, as burial evidence reveals an increase in deaths caused by trauma, and the remains of several fortified Pequot villages emerged in this period, including the Mystic fort, home of the largest number of Pequot.36 The timing of this surge in violence coincides with the

Pequots’ new Dutch alliance, suggesting that they sought to consolidate their regional dominance over smaller communities and secure their role as economic middlemen. The Dutch claimed the Connecticut River valley as part of New Netherland by right of discovery, thanks

33 H. van Beverningk, Verbael gehouden door H. van Beverningk, W. Nieupoort, J. van de Perre en A. Jongestal, als gedeputeerden en extraordinaris ambassadeurs van de heeren Staeten Generael der Vereenigde Nederlanden, Gravenhage: Hendrick Scheurleer, 1725, 607. West Indian Company to the States General, “Description of the Boundaries of New Netherland,” Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1856), 7:542-3. Wangunk submission to the Dutch was contested by Connecticut who record in PRCC that Sowheage’s son denied that the Wangunk ever sold the land to the Dutch. PRCC, 1:56. 34 Kevin McBride, “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade,” 48. Lavin, Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples, 207. 35 Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 46. 36 McBride, “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade,” 44.

King 11

to maritime exploration by Henry Hudson and Adriaen Block. New Netherland’s network of settlements and native clients stretched from the Lower Hudson River valley down to the

Delaware River.

In 1626 Pieter Barentsz, a Dutch trader, negotiated an agreement with the Pequot that allowed the Dutch to tap into the Pequot’s extensive tributary network without the expense or administrative burden of large settlements. In return, the Pequot controlled the flow of

European trade goods such as copper kettles, metal drills, cloth, and ceramics to surrounding

Native peoples.37 This trade alliance allowed the Dutch to transport wampum from the Long

Island Sound up the Hudson River to the Iroquois Five Nations and exchange it for beaver furs.38 The alliance benefited both parties, giving the Dutch a window into the rich resources of the river valley and providing the Pequot with the trade goods required to consolidate control of their tributary network, including metal drills that sped up wampum production.39 The Dutch also readily sold firearms to the Pequot, in comparison to English reluctance.

In order to protect their gains along the Connecticut River, the Dutch encouraged

Plymouth Colony to become involved in the wampum trade along the Kennebec River, diverting potential competition to the northeast.40 In 1628, Dutch merchants arrived in

Plymouth armed with linen and sugar to trade, but their most significant cargo was fifty pounds worth of wampum. The merchants informed the Plymouth colonists of the wampum trade through Fort Orange on the Hudson River, and suggested that Plymouth would be able to establish a similarly profitable trade on the Kennebec. Plymouth settlers took their advice, and

Bradford remarked that they witnessed a “great alteration” in the trading economy. Abenaki

37 Mark Meuwese, "The Dutch Connection: New Netherland, the Pequots, and the Puritans in Southern New England, 1620—1638." Early American Studies 9, no. 2 (2011): 309. 38 Meuwese, "The Dutch Connection,” 308. 39 Meuwese, "The Dutch Connection,” 309. 40 William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-164, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 203.

King 12

people “fell into it” and learned how to fashion wampum beads from shells gathered along their shorelines. Wampum became a significant commodity along the Kennebec and Bradford cautioned that “it may prove a drug in time,” warning that Native groups sought to emulate the dominance of the Pequot and Narragansett through the accumulation of wampum.41 By diverting the Plymouth operation to the northeast, the Dutch preserved their monopoly on

Connecticut Indian trade until the middle of the 1630s. The Dutch and the Pequot both saw the

Connecticut River as belonging to them, and each was determined to protect their positions.

In April 1631 Wahginnacut, a Connecticut River sachem, went on a diplomatic mission to New England. Wahginnacut led the Podunk, a native group located just upriver from the

Wangunk. He arrived in Boston with John Sagamore, a Narragansett ally, and an Indian named

Jack Straw, who had visited England. Wahginnacut sought an alliance with the English as an alternate protector to the Pequot, who they fought with in the early 1630s. Wahginnacut offered

Boston corn and eighty beaver pelts per year if they would establish settlements near the river.

Wahginnacut appears to have believed that the English would make more malleable allies, allowing the Podunk to escape domination by the Pequot. Boston’s leaders, however rejected his offer upon learning that he had become embroiled in war with the Pequot, a war that the colonists sought to avoid. When Boston’s leaders dismissed Wahginnacut as treacherous, he took his offer to Plymouth, where the leaders proved more receptive. Plymouth’s primary diplomat, Edward Winslow, accompanied Wahginnacut on a scouting mission to the

Connecticut and praised the region’s fertile land, rich forests and access to the river. Bradford records that leaders of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth discussed the possibility of joining together to take up Wahginnacut’s offer, but that these talks fell through when colonists on the

Massachusetts side “cast many fears of danger and loss and the like.”42 That caution induced

41 William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, (New York: Random House, 1981), 224-225. 42 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 258.

King 13

the Plymouth leaders to back away from the Podunk invitation. The power of the Pequots, enabled in part by their Dutch alliance, made the English reluctant to take a chance on settling in the Connecticut Valley.43

In 1633, word spread that the Dutch West Indian Company had set up a trading post called the House of Good Hope. At the site of modern-day Hartford, the Dutch “made a slight fort” where the river became shallow and “impossible to sail” in the region just north of

Pyquag.44 The House of Good Hope served as a place to purchase furs brought south down the

Connecticut River and, as a trading outpost for Pequot and Narragansett Indians and their tributaries, the new fort strengthened the Dutch claims to the region against English competition.45 Director of New Netherland Wouter van Twiller wrote to John Winthrop to assert that he had taken possession of the river “with the intent to plant &c.” Van Twiller claimed that the Dutch paid Native inhabitants “some reasonable and convenient price” for their land.46 The West India Company argued that the Pequot sold the land occupied by the

Wangunk to the Dutch in 1633, with the assent of the Wangunk. In return for the land, which measured at least a Dutch mile along the river and half a mile in depth, the Pequot received

“one piece of duffels, twenty-seven ells long; six axes, six kettles, eighteen knives, one sword- blade, one sheers, and some toys.”47 According to the Dutch, the Pequot had won this land by conquest, which then became Dutch through purchase. But Sowheage’s son later insisted that his people still owned the territory and had never sold the land to the Dutch.48

43 Cave, The Pequot War, 38. Winthrop, Journal, 61. Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 42, Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 258-259. 44 de Laet, “New World, or Description of West-India,” 43, Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 259. 45 McBride, “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade,” 40-41, 36. 46 E. B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland: or, New York under the Dutch, (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1848), 1:152. 47 An “ell” is a unit of measurement, approximately 114cm or 45 inches long. The total amount of cloth was therefore about 30 meters. Van Twiller, quoted in O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 151. 48 H. van Beverningk, Verbael gehouden door H. van Beverningk, 607. PRCC, 1:56. Writing in 1649, Director-General of New Netherland Pieter Stuyvesant attempted to clarify the boundaries of New Netherland against the encroachment of the English: the Dutch had “obtained” the “Fresh river lands” by

King 14

The Dutch expansion alarmed the colonial leaders of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies and they began to eye the river trade rather enviously. In 1633 John Winthrop speculated that the Dutch were getting “about ten thousand skins” down the Connecticut River, which might be “easily diverted” to the English if they could set up a rival trading post.49

Plymouth Colony acted first by sending a group under the command of William Holmes to establish a post at Windsor about 4 miles upriver from the Dutch. In 1636 Van Twiller said of the English motivation for moving to the Connecticut: “those on the Fresh River pretend that they do not come to trade, but to spend the rest of their days, but they are well stocked with goods and do not let any skins go by, if they are to be had." As Holmes and his crew sailed up the Connecticut, the Dutch at the House of Good Hope threatened to fire on them. When it became clear that the Plymouth colonists had arrived to set up a rival trading post, Van Twiller sent seventy soldiers to try and intimidate the English. The Dutch bristled at the audacity of

English encroachment on land that they considered theirs by right of discovery, purchase, and settlement. They failed, however, because the newcomers had sufficient armed men to produce a standoff. The Dutch and English narrowly avoided blows as they competed for control of this river corridor.50

In 1633, the Dutch position suffered from new tensions with the Pequot. Their alliance began to fray over a disagreement about the purpose of the House of Good Hope. The Pequot sought to preserve their control as middle men of the trade in Dutch goods with other Native groups

“lawful purchase and conveyance from the Natives and right owners,” referring to the Pequot and Wangunk. West Indian Company to the States General, “Description of the Boundaries of New Netherland,” Holland Documents 7:542, 546. 49 Winthrop, Journal, 1:110. The real number was probably closer to 7 or 8,000 skins. McBride, “Source and Mother of the Fur Trade,” 35. 50 A. J. F. van Lear, “Letters of Wouter van Twiller and the Director General and Council of New Netherland to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, August 14, 1636.” New York History 50, no. 4 (1969): 45. Daniel Howard, A New History of Old Windsor, Connecticut, (Windsor, 1935), 8-9.

King 15

along the Connecticut River. To maximize potential profits, the Dutch wanted to trade with any and all Indians. In protest, the Pequot killed several Native Americans who approached the trading post in 1633. Historian Mark Meuwese identifies these Indians as Narragansetts, the

Pequot’s main indigenous rival during the 1630s. By killing the interlopers, the Pequot asserted control over movement and trade within their tributary network. In response, the Dutch attempted to intimidate the Pequot into submission. In the winter of 1633, the Pequot sachem

Tatobem boarded a Dutch ship to trade, but the Dutch kidnapped him and demanded a bushel of wampum as ransom. Although the Pequot paid, the Dutch executed him anyway.51

In response, the Pequot killed John Stone, a Virginian trader aboard a boat at the mouth of the Connecticut. According to John Underhill, captain during the Pequot War, the Pequot claimed to have mistaken him for a Dutch trader, conceiving all white colonists “to be one

Nation.”52 The Pequot error proved to have bloody consequences. Despite initially placing the responsibility for Stone on his native Virginia, in 1636 Massachusetts Bay used Stone’s death as justification for military action against the Pequot, seeing an opportunity to gain entry into the fur and wampum market along the Connecticut.53 The Pequot-Dutch trade alliance proved untenable because both parties saw themselves as sovereigns of the Connecticut river. The inability of both parties to cooperate as equals generated a violence that the English exploited to interfere in the region.

The loss of their leader plunged the Pequot into uncertainty. Their Mohegan allies, led by Uncas, Tatobem’s son-in-law, shifted between Pequot and English alliances between 1634 and 1636, attempting to find a position of security amid the changing geopolitics of the region.

The Pequot population also suffered heavy losses from epidemic disease. Although unaffected by the earlier 1619 outbreak of fever that harmed other eastern coastal Native populations, a

51 Meuwese, “The Dutch Connection,” 311-314, Cave, The Pequot War, 58-59. 52 John Underhill, Newes From America, (New York: De Capo Press, 1971), 10. 53 Winthrop, Journal, 1:118.

King 16

devastating outbreak of smallpox reached them in 1633, reducing their population by up to 80 percent. Those losses weakened the Pequots’ power to retain control over their tributaries.54

They became so desperate that they even appealed to the English for assistance during the autumn of 1634, when a delegation went to Boston to negotiate a treaty with Massachusetts

Bay. Winthrop records that the Pequot offered a tribute of two wampum bushels in exchange for English friendship and trade to replace that which had been lost with the Dutch. The Pequot ambassadors also offered “all their right at Connecticut” if Massachusetts Bay would send people to “settle a plantation there.” They sold access to the region’s resources, rather than full ownership of the land itself. The Pequot tried to secure an English alliance to protect their access to European trade goods and the power to disperse those goods to their extensive tributary network. They also sought military protection against the Dutch and the

Narragansetts. 55

But before further treaty terms could be discussed, the English sought an explanation regarding John Stone’s death. The Pequot ambassadors related that Stone had seized two

Pequot men to serve as guides for the river, but they had killed Stone to secure their freedom.

To exploit the Pequots’ weak negotiating position, Governor Henry Vane put forth a series of exorbitant demands. In order to secure English trade, the Pequot had to hand over Stone’s murderers, – who they protested were already dead – “four hundred fathom” of wampum, and

“forty beaver, and thirty otter skins.” Vane promised to send “a pinnace with cloth to trade with them” in return. However, the English explicitly denied any obligation to “defend” the Pequot against the Narragansett who were already allies to the New Englanders. While the Pequot ambassadors in Boston signed the treaty, the onerous terms meant that the Pequot council refused to ratify the treaty.56

54 Oberg, Uncas, 45-49. Cave, The Pequot War, 67. 55 Winthrop, Journal, 1:138-140. 56 Winthrop, Journal, 1:138-140. Four hundred fathoms of wampum equated to about 132,000 individual wampum beads. Ceci, “Wampum as a Peripheral Resource,” 62. Cave, The Pequot War, 71.

King 17

While the Pequot failed to secure an English trade and military alliance, English settlers seized the opportunity presented by the Pequot rupture with the Dutch. During the summer of 1634, ten so-called “adventurers” from Watertown, Massachusetts arrived at Pyquag to establish farms. Led by John Oldham, these men came without the blessing or support of the colonial court of Massachusetts Bay. The diffusion of settlers to the Connecticut River alarmed the leaders of Massachusetts Bay, who felt that social cohesion and moral order benefitted from clustering people together under the supervision of ministers and magistrates. In September

1634 Thomas Hooker proposed to lead some residents of Newtown, Massachusetts westward to settle along the Connecticut River. Hooker cited the desire for more land for cattle and “the fruitfulness and commodiousness of Connecticut, and the danger of having it possessed by others, Dutch or English,” as reasons for the “strong bent of their spirits to remove thither.”

Governor John Winthrop records that the General Court countered this by arguing that “in point of conscience, they ought not to depart from us, being knit to us in one body, and bound by oath to seek the welfare of this commonwealth.”57 The Connecticut River towns threatened to diffuse and fracture the Massachusetts Bay colony. Winthrop reasoned that physical proximity offered safety and economic strength in numbers. William Bradford added the fear that dispersing colonists would divide and dilute church order.58 Bradford and Winthrop equated a scattered population with a weakened church community, the essential bond of fellowship sustained by regular attendance of public worship and church meetings – and daily moral oversight by fellow parishioners. In 1632, as colonists dispersed inland from Plymouth and

57 Winthrop, Journal, 1:132-133, Whether the Connecticut River Valley fell under Massachusetts Bay’s charter or Plymouth’s jurisdiction was unclear, but Massachusetts Bay attempted to seize control in the mid-1630s. Massachusetts Bay’s General Court dispatched constables and arms to the fledgling outposts, and appointed eight men to enact the business of government within the colony as freemen of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Increase N. Tarbox, “How the River Towns Came to be Planted.” in Memorial History of the County of Hartford, Conn., Vol. l, ed. J.H. Trumbull, (Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1886), 22-23, Jennings, Invasion of America, 198. 58 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 253.

King 18

Boston, Bradford feared it would be “the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there,” and would “provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them.”59

For John Oldham, a leader in early Wethersfield, the economic potential of the valley outweighed the religious and social concerns of the colonial leaders. In September 1633 he made an exploratory trade trip to the Connecticut River, returning to Massachusetts Bay with beaver, hemp, and black lead, having “lodged at Indian towns all the way.” The first group of

Wethersfield colonists became proprietors-inhabitants, men who both owned the land and resided there. This group had grown frustrated with the governance of Massachusetts Bay, leaving before the Court could rule on their move.60 They occupied a legal limbo because they did not acknowledge Massachusetts Bay’s jurisdiction over them. On May 6, 1635, the

Massachusetts General Court finally granted “liberty” to the “inhabitants of Waterton to remove themselves to any place they shall thinke meete to make choise of,” on the condition that “they continue still under this government.”61 Twenty more people followed the original colonists to Wethersfield. Although Massachusetts Bay regarded the Connecticut River colonists as still under their jurisdiction, this proved difficult to enforce. The original group of colonists to arrive in Pyquag held their land as “adventurers,” independent occupants of the land who did not derive their titles from any colony’s authorization.62 Their title rested on their occupation of the land and their purchase from Sowheage and the Wangunk.63

They did not record this purchase at the time, however. We do not know how many colonists were party to it, or if any Wangunk other than Sowheage subscribed to the deal. Nor do we know exactly when this “sale” took place. Unlike Plymouth colonists along the river at

59 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison, 254. 60 Adams, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 20. 61 Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay In New England. Vol. 1, (Boston: William White, 1853, reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1968), 146. 62 Adams, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 28. 63 Roy Hidemichi Akagi, The town proprietors of the New England colonies; a study of their development, organization, activities and controversies, 1620-1770, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1924), 17-18.

King 19

Windsor who secured written land titles from indigenous groups in order to compete with

Dutch traders, the Wethersfield men had negotiated a verbal agreement.64 Retroactive English accounts described the sale, including an 1665 affidavit signed by George Hubbard who surveyed the land of the original purchase. One of the 1634 adventurers, Hubbard attests that they “gave so much unto Sowheage as was to his sattisfaction for all their plantations lyeing on both sides the great River.”65 Hubbard’s affidavit asserts that the purchase reached “six miles deep from the River westward, and three miles deep from the River eastward,” including the islands in the river. The subsequent Pequot attack on Wethersfield and the drawn-out court case suggest that, in fact, Sowheage felt dissatisfied with the payment and behaviour of the colonists.66

Sowheage’s initial decision to welcome the colonists reflected the local consequences of the devastating small pox epidemic that struck the Connecticut River valley in the winter of

1633-1634. William Bradford paints a grisly picture of the general impact when it erupted upriver at Windsor in the spring of 1634: “those Indians that lived about their trading house

[Windsor], fell sick of the small pox and died most miserably.” He describes native communities struggling to treat the disease, their skin “cleaving” to their hard mats, leading to wounds that became infected. Weak with “cold and other distempers,” the Connecticut River

Indians “die[d] like rotten sheep.” In Bradford’s account, the Windsor colonists aided their native neighbors, providing them with water, wood, victuals, and a decent burial after death.67

The Pyquag Wangunk’s kinship and trading networks stretched up towards the Windsor region, making it highly likely that they experienced its devasting effects. In January 1634 three colonists reported to Massachusetts Bay that the small pox had travelled “as far as any Indian

64 Jennings famously referred to this competition as “the deed game.” Jennings, The Invasion of America, 135. 65 Winthrop, Journal, 1:108. Adams, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 41. PRCC, 1:5. 66 PRCC, 1:5. 67 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 302-303.

King 20

plantation was known to the west,” and that one impact of its widespread devastation was a lack of trade to be had with Native people.68 The epidemic weakened the social fabric of the

Wangunk: fewer hands for food preparation, fewer hunters to send into the woods, families dealing with the psychological impact of their first experience of a European disease.

The Wangunk therefore confronted the pressure of disease and social uncertainty, making tough choices in the face of these new challenges. The English arrival in Pyquag offered Sowheage and the Wangunk an opportunity to escape from their dependence as tributaries to the declining Pequot. An alliance with the Wethersfield colonists offered

Sowheage a way to protect his community and their access to the meadows, river, and forests that sustained them, even as it permitted the English to occupy and farm this fertile valley. This agreement did not signal a capitulation to European concepts of land ownership or to total

English sovereignty over them. Rather Sowheage sought to improve his leverage by to incorporating European players into his own network. The plan appeared to have worked: for at least two years, the Wangunk and English lived side-by-side in Pyquag/Wethersfield without any major incidents of note. Up and down the river, however, English ambition was growing.

Embracing English colonists proved to be a risky alternative for the Wangunk. The

Wethersfield colonists represented just one of the many English parties jostling along the

Connecticut, more concerned with securing their own positions than respecting agreements with Native residents. In June 1635 Sir Richard Saltonstall, one of the signatories to the

Massachusetts Bay Charter, passed through Boston with a “a bark of forty tons” and “twenty servants” in order to plant at Connecticut.69 Saltonstall’s efforts faltered and on the return journey to England his pinnace wrecked upon the shores of the French-controlled Isle Sable of the coast of Acadia in October 1635.70 While Saltonstall’s plans floundered, other aristocratic

68 Winthrop, Journal, 1:118. 69 Winthrop, Journal, 1:152. 70 Winthrop, Journal, 1:163.

King 21

planters set their sights on Connecticut. In the same month, John Winthrop the Younger arrived from Plymouth, England on the Abigail, with a commission from Lords Say and Brook to

“begin a plantation at Connecticut and to be governor there.” Say and Brook provided men, ammunition, and £2000 to build “a fortification at the mouth of the river.”71 Lion Gardiner arrived a month later as the engineer to oversee construction of the fort. Winthrop Junior supplied him with “carpenters and other workmen” in order “to take possession of the place,

(for the Dutch intended to take it,) and to raise up some buildings.”72 Massachusetts Bay encouraged Winthrop Junior’s efforts, recognizing him as Governor of Connecticut, even as his power failed to extend beyond the walls of Fort Saybrook in reality.

While leaders like Saltonstall, Say, and Brook made grand plans for Connecticut, common settlers from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth spearheaded occupation on the ground. In the autumn, a group of sixty men, women and children from Massachusetts Bay

“went by land toward Connecticut.” Accompanied by their livestock, they made the “tedious and difficult journey” of about a hundred miles, arriving safely.73 Other parties of settlers followed to occupy other stretches of the river in 1635. In August 1635, Governor Bradford of

Plymouth complained that the arrival of “the Dorchester men” near Windsor was “an injury, in regard of their possession and purchase of the Indians, whose right it was.”74 Bradford objected to the encroachment of Massachusetts colonists onto land he considered to belong by right to Plymouth. The new colonists brought their own quarrels to an already volatile region simmering with Indian feuds. As the Pequots’ hold on their network faltered, settlers attempted to snatch up land owned by Pequot tributaries, heightening tensions rather than bringing a new order to the region.

71 Winthrop, Journal, 1:161. 72 Winthrop, Journal, 1:166. 73 Winthrop, Journal, 1:163. 74 Winthrop, Journal, 1:157.

King 22

These small, new settlements relied on native allies and supplies from eastern colonial towns.75 In October 1635, two shallops stocked with supplies for Connecticut wrecked near

Gurnett’s Nose, the end of a peninsula in Plymouth Bay. All the men on board drowned, and the much-needed supplies were lost to the sea.76 Want prevailed throughout New England during the 1630s, as English immigration swelled, and local crops and cattle failed to feed them all. Often arriving in the summer, the immigrants came too late in the year to help cultivate the crops that they needed for themselves. A hurricane and a hard winter in 1635 damaged farms, especially those along the Connecticut River.77 In December 1635, seventy men and women returned to Massachusetts in desperation. They had travelled to the river mouth to meet barks sent to supply them with provisions. Failing to find them, the colonists instead sailed on the Rebecka, a ship recently freed from the frozen waters of the Connecticut. Several “perished with famine” during the five-day journey back to Massachusetts.78 While hungry Englishmen and women boarded the Rebecka, a Dutch sloop arrived, sent to “take possession of the mouth of the river.” Armed men from Fort Saybrook barred them from landing, temporarily securing their tenuous hold on the river mouth. Famine and the Dutch alike threatened the survival of these English colonial outposts.79

75 Winthrop, Journal, 1:132-133, 180-181. 76 Winthrop, Journal, 1:160. 77 “Plain hunger, greatly exacerbated by the awkward and uncertain communication patterns that made it difficult for the exploding numbers of immigrants to New England to feed themselves, lay at the core of the frenzied English stumble toward war,” argues Grandjean. Katherine A. Grandjean, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January 2011), 78. 78 Winthrop, Journal, 1:166. 79 Winthrop, Journal, 1:166. Exact numbers of colonists in the Connecticut River towns and outposts are difficult to pin down. Ten men originally migrated from Watertown, with a group of about 20 following them in spring 1635. More families followed in 1635, but with the harsh winter of 1635/36 it is possible that some from Wethersfield joined those colonists further down the river who fled back to Massachusetts Bay. Hooker led a migration of about a hundred colonists in June 1636. The Connecticut River populations therefore represent a very small fraction of the twenty odd thousand English people who arrived in New England in the 1630s. Forrest Morgan, Connecticut as a Colony and as a State, or One of the Original Thirteen, Vol. 1, (Hartford, Conn: The Publishing Society of Connecticut, 1904), 106-107.

King 23

While the fledgling Connecticut River towns occupied a precarious position, their native neighbors were better prepared for harsh winters and environmental disasters like the

1635 hurricane. Connecticut River Indians kept maize underground in storage pits, and their diverse diet enabled them to respond to shortages with flexibility.80 While the colonial records from Connecticut are sparse until 1637, the colonists supplemented their scant supplies from the east with purchased or stolen Indian corn – as had the early settlers of Plymouth Colony.

They depended on corn supplied through the Pokanoket tributary network for the first three years of settlement.81 In April 1636, the first English court meeting in Connecticut sanctioned

Henry Stiles for trading “a peece [a firearm] wth the Indians for Corne.” They ordered Stiles to regain the gun, but not to return the corn, a commodity far too valuable to give back.82

Oldham’s Wethersfield party quickly got to work planting their own corn, however, a fact that became clear after Oldham’s death in July 1636. Another colonist found his body on a small boat near Block Island, apparently killed on the orders of Narragansett sachems in order to stem his attempts to trade with the Pequot.83 Massachusetts Bay used Oldham’s death as a rallying cry for war against Native people along the Long Island Sound. Katherine Grandjean argues that Oldham’s trade in supplies highlighted the fragility of the colonial economy in a time of food scarcity.84 In the wake of his death, the Connecticut General Court met at

Wethersfield to commission an accurate inventory of Oldham’s estate, and to order Thurston

Rayner to “continue to looke to & prserue the Corne of Mr. Oldham,” harvest it in the autumn, and bring an account of the harvest to Court.85 By 1636, therefore, the Wethersfield colonists

80 Grandjean, “New World Tempests,” 83-84. 81 Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500- 1643, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 116-117. 82 PRCC, 1:2 83 Winthrop, Journal, 1:183-185. Andrew Lipman frames Oldham’s death as the result of a maritime contest for control of trade. Andrew Lipman, “Murder on the Saltwater Frontier: The Death of John Oldham,” Early American Studies, (Spring, 2011): 270. 84 Grandjean, “New World Tempests,” 91. 85 PRCC, 1:3-4.

King 24

had begun planting corn on the fertile land that stretched between Broad Street and the river, possibly aided by the experienced Wangunk.

By 1637 the people of Wethersfield felt more secure, secure enough to renounce their agreement with Sowheage. Their numbers had swelled from ten to dozens of families and they covenanted a church in April 1636. By 1637 around 250 people had settled at Wethersfield,

Hartford, and Windsor.86 Wethersfield’s settlers began to create a bounded entity, an established town in the style of Massachusetts Bay, not a precarious outpost dependent on their native neighbors.87 They expanded their land holdings, organized a town watch, and instituted monthly militia training.88 As a result, they drove away Sowheage and the Wangunk from the space that they had shared for three years. The dispute probably erupted in early 1637 when

Sowheage’s band returned to Pyquag after their winter migration to higher ground, given the timing of the April attack in response. The 1638 letter the General Court of Connecticut sent to Massachusetts Bay stated: “When [Sowheage] came to Weathersfield, and had set down his wigwam, [the Wethersfield colonists] drave him away by force.”89 In the face of this broken covenant, Sowheage faced a difficult choice, just as he had when Oldham and the Wethersfield men had arrived in Pyquag. He had limited options: giving up his right to Pyquag and move elsewhere, fight back swiftly and directly, or seek help from their former protectors, the Pequot.

Sowheage chose the latter. Winthrop thought that Sowheage had not the “strength to repair this injury by open force,” owing to the damage smallpox had wrought on the Wangunk.90

86 A court at Hartford raised a force of ninety men to contribute to the Pequot war effort in 1637: thirty from Windsor, forty-two from Hartford, and eighteen from Wethersfield. PRCC, 1:2. 87 By 1640 the Wethersfield plantation had developed into a town based around Broad Street and the High Street, which were joined by the square that contained the meeting house and the church. North of the meeting house, an area of common land joined the High Street to a bend in the river that served as a port. https://connecticuthistory.org/connecticut-and-the-west-indies-trade/ [accessed December 10th, 2020]. 88 PRCC, 1:2-9 89 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265. 90 Winthrop, Journal, 1:206.

King 25

Sowheage reverted to his alliance with the Pequot in search of protectors. On April 23,

1637, Pequot warriors entered Wethersfield village, killing one woman and capturing two girls, the teenaged Swaine sisters. They then killed six men and two women in a field on the edge of the village. The Pequot sailed downriver, threatening an attack on Fort Saybrook. The master of a passing Dutch ship from the House of Good Hope offered assistance, promising to

“endeavour to the utmost of their abilities to release those two captive Maids.”91 They sailed to the “Pequeat River” and attempted to trade with Sassacus for the Swaine sisters. When

Sassacus refused this offer, the Dutch “allured seven Indians” back to their ship and took them hostage. They threatened to cast the Pequot captives “over-boord in the maine Ocean” if they did not receive the Swaines in exchange. The Pequot delivered up the English captives and the

Dutch ship sailed back to Fort Saybrook.92 The Swaine girls’ return to Wethersfield did not put an end to the matter, however, because the colonists sought revenge on the Pequot warriors.

Connecticut colonists requested assistance from Massachusetts Bay, the major colonial power in the region. Writing to John Winthrop in an appeal for help, John Higginson, chaplain at Fort Saybrook, framed the Pequot attack as the Lord’s “gratious warning to all the English in the land” to renounce their “deeply-rooted securitie and confidence in our owne supposed strength.”93 He cautioned Boston and Roxbury against complacency, arguing that war threatened all New England. If the English failed to “take down the insolencie of these now- insulting Pequots,” the region’s watching Indians would join the conflict, spreading death and destruction to Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay.94 Thomas Hooker described the Pequot’s arrival in Wethersfield as a “suddayne surprisall.” He called for the colonies to unite and enact

91 Underhill, Newes From America, 27. 92 Underhill, Newes From America, 27. 93 John Higginson to John Winthrop, May 1637, Winthrop Papers, 3:404. 94 Higginson to Winthrop, May 1637, Winthrop Papers, 3:405.

King 26

the “Lords revenge.”95 The colonists portrayed the Wethersfield attack as a violent, insolent surprise that required swift vengeance.

Rather than a random outburst of violence, the Pequot had enacted a strategic retaliation on behalf of a member of their tributary network. The English were familiar with the basic workings of Native tributary networks: in the 1634 Pequot-English negotiations, the Pequot had asked for English military protection, a request denied by the English. Similarly, colonial accounts acknowledged that Sowheage had secured the right to be “sit down by them, and be protected.”96 Connecticut colonists, however, chose to ignore their role in provoking the attack and presented it instead as an excuse for the escalation of military action against the Pequot.

The Connecticut towns and Plymouth colony raised troops to join Massachusetts Bay’s invasion force. In May 1637 the General Court declared “an offenciue war agt the Pequoitt,” and raised a militia of ninety men for the war effort: thirty from Windsor, forty-two from

Hartford, and eighteen from Wethersfield.97 On May 26th, the colonial forces committed an unprecedented massacre by trapping and killing at least four hundred Pequot men, women, and children at their palisaded fort on the Mystic River. After first attempting to overwhelm the

Pequot using swords and muskets, the English, led by Captains Mason and Underhill, set the village on fire, ordering their troops to surround the fort and kill all Pequots attempting to escape. Alfred Cave describes the Mystic massacre as “an act of terrorism intended to break

Pequot morale.” English-allied Narragansetts expressed horror at the ferocity of the attack and the refusal to take women and children as captives.98

The colonists spent the rest of the summer trying to round up Pequot refugees to parcel out among English-allied Native groups or to sell into West Indian slavery. English and

95 Thomas Hooker to John Winthrop, May 1637, Winthrop Papers, 3:407-408. 96 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265-266. 97 PRCC, 1:9. 98 Jennings, The Invasion of America, 225. Cave, The Pequot War, 151.

King 27

Mohegan soldiers also pursued Pequot sachem Sassacus towards New Netherland.99 In August a delegation from Connecticut including Hooker and Pynchon arrived in Boston bearing “a part of the skin and lock of hair of Sasacus and his brother” who had been killed by the Mohawk in the Hudson River valley. Winthrop estimated that the number of Pequot casualties or captives totaled between eight and nine hundred people.100 The war devasted but did not completely destroy the Pequot, creating a power vacuum along the Connecticut River valley.

After the victory, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay sought to shift blame for the conflict onto the colonists of Wethersfield. In March 1638, John Winthrop received letters from the

Connecticut colonists seeking advice about the “onslaught at Weathersfield the last year.”101

The Massachusetts magistrates and elders ruled in favor of Sowheage, arguing that the law of nations supported his right to seek Pequot aid in his response to the English. Although the

Pequot raid inflicted “one hundred times more” damage on the colonists than they had inflicted on Sowheage, the conflict remained a just war by the Wangunk because Sowheage had complained about his treatment before retaliating.102 The magistrates recommended that the

Connecticut council make “a new agreement with the Indians of the river.”103 In the same journal entry, Winthrop describes the migration of John Davenport and Peter Prudden to

Quinnipiac. They sailed with “many families,” motivated by the promise of fruitful land and distance from dangers posed by the possibility of a new royal governor, “who was feared to be sent this summer.”104 In contrast to his earlier hesitancy about westward migration, Winthrop supported the endeavor as a means to bolster the security of “our friends at Connecticut.”105

English colonists along the Long Island Sound would act as a buffer against Dutch and Native

99 Cave, The Pequot War, 159. 100 Winthrop, Journal, 1:229-230. 101 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265. 102 Winthrop, Journal, 1:266. 103 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265-266. 104 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265. 105 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265.

King 28

groups and frustrate any “intended evil” designs of the English crown to consolidate and control Puritan New England.106 With this in mind, the Massachusetts magistrates’ sought to neutralize the potential threat Sowheage, a former Pequot ally, posed at the conclusion of the war. Beyond fear of retaliatory action by Pequot survivors and former allies, the Massachusetts elders tried to position themselves as brokers of the relationship between Connecticut River

Indians and colonists, securing settler and Native dependence alike.107 The Pequot War was not just a colonial-Native or a Native-Native conflict: it also encouraged competition for control over the Pequots’ former tributary network between Massachusetts Bay and

Connecticut.

In April 1638 the Connecticut General Court acknowledged that the English had committed “divers Iniuryes” against Sowheagee. While he had offered “divers outrages and wronges” in return, the “first breach” had been on the part of the English. They therefore remitted “all former wronges” and welcomed Sowheage back into amity. The court ordered

Thomas Staunton, Rev. Samuel Stone, and William Goodwin to go to Sowheage and settle a new agreement with him. A year later, however, the matter remained unresolved. The court again encouraged Goodwin to finish “the treaty […] of the Towne of Wethersfeeld” with the

Wangunk to clarify ownership of land on the eastern bank of the river.108

At the meeting of the General Court on August 15 1639, however, the Connecticut settlers began to reject the recommendation of Massachusetts Bay. Rather than seeking a reconciliation, now the court complained of the “manifold insolencyes” offered by Indians of late, arguing that these unspecified instances reminded them of an unsolved matter: the presence of Pequot murderers in their midst. They claimed that Sowheage was harboring

106 Winthrop, Journal, 1:265. 107 Katherine Grandjean describes the Pequot War, especially the Mystic Massacre, as “a great fist” that struck New England, sending Pequots scattered in all directions and leaving New Englanders reeling with fear about retaliation. Katherine Grandjean, “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies, 9:2 (Spring 2011): 393. 108 PRCC, 1:19.

King 29

“several guilty persons” at Mattabessett. The court proposed raising a force of 100 soldiers to capture the Pequot refugees, claiming that Sowheage had been unresponsive to peaceful forms of persuasion. A note of caution closed proceedings. The court resolved to consult their “friends att Quinnipi[ocke]” to secure their agreement before proceeding, out of concern for the “safety of the new plantacons.” Within two weeks they had an answer from the colonists at Quinnipiac.

They agreed with the sentiment, but urged caution, seeking to avoid stirring up a new war which would “hinder the coming of shipps” to supply the new outposts.109

On August 26, the General Court heeded their request and decided instead to target the

Pequot captives held by Uncas and Miantonomi. The 1638 Treaty of Hartford, signed between the Connecticut colonists, the Mohegan and the Narragansetts, had divided surviving Pequots among those Native groups who had fought as allies with the English. The treaty notably excluded Massachusetts Bay, revealing Connecticut’s desire to dominate the Connecticut River valley in the wake of the war. Tribes that took in Pequot captives after the war had to pay a wampum tribute for each male Pequot within their bounds.110 For every Pequot man, the

Narragansetts and Mohegans had to pay the English a fathom of wampum, for each male youth, half a fathom, and for each male infant, a hand of wampum, deliverable annually at the “Killing time of Corn.” The treaty also stipulated that the Pequot could not to live in “the country that was formerly theirs” but now belonged to the English by conquest.111

Rather than hunting down suspected Pequot murderers hiding among the Wangunk and risk stoking another conflict with the River Indians, the Court turned its focus to enforcing this provision of the treaty. They targeted Pequots who had “planted againe part of the land wch was conquered by us,” contrary to the terms of an agreement they had not been invited to sign.

Instead of detaining the offending Pequot, however, the Court ordered that forty men from the

109 PRCC, 1:31-32. 110 Daragh Grant, “The Treaty of Hartford (1638): Reconsidering Jurisdiction in Southern New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 72:3 (July 2015): 465, 476. 111 Grant, “The Treaty of Hartford,” 497.

King 30

Connecticut plantations should go immediately to “gather the Corne there planted by them.”

The Court encouraged the governor to supply the soldiers with twenty firearms, two shallops, and two cannons.112 The colonists’ sought to retain Native people, even their former enemies, as dependents kept on enclaves within easy reach of colonial settlements. Colonial leaders sought to subordinate and retain local Native people in order to draw on them for agricultural resources and as a labor reserve.113

Massachusetts Bay’s recommendations regarding Sowheage, the Connecticut colonists’ deference towards their brethren at Quinnipiac, and the General Court’s decision to harvest Pequot corn reveal a post-war world where the English along the river realized the potential advantages offered by their Native neighbors – provided they remain weak and in submission. While the Connecticut colonists initially meant to fight a defensive war, after the conflict they realized the benefits of an outward-looking approach, seeking to replace the

Pequots as head of a tributary network that would supply them with wampum and corn. They decided to keep the Wangunk close at hand, rather than diving them away to join the colonists’ rivals such as the Mohawk or the French in Canada, or reuniting with surviving Pequot. Better, the colonists thought, to keep the Wangunk and other river Indians on enclaves enveloped by settlements. In this way, the colonists could draw upon the enclave Indians for dependent labor, a source of food and handicrafts, and military auxiliaries in wartime. The river Indians had become essential assets to the construction of the colony of Connecticut, and the General Court meant to protect their access to them, asserting their control in defiance of Massachusetts Bay.

112 PRCC, 1:32-33. 113 Katherine Grandjean argues that “competition for food” repeatedly “sparked violence” in English New World colonization, thereby “thwarting peaceful relationships.” Scarcity did not simply disappear in the wake of war, however. In Connecticut, colonial food instability actually compelled the colonists to pursue peaceful relationships with local Native people in order to retain access to their maize supplies at will. Grandjean, “New World Tempests,” 75.

King 31

The Pequot War therefore blew open the fault lines that existed not just between colonists and

Natives in the Connecticut River valley, but between the colonists themselves.

King 32

Bibliography: Primary Sources: Beverningk, H. van. Verbael gehouden door H. van Beverningk, W. Nieupoort, J. van de Perre en A. Jongestal, als gedeputeerden en extraordinaris ambassadeurs van de heeren Staeten Generael der Vereenigde Nederlanden, Gravenhage: Hendrick Scheurleer, 1725. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-164, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647. New York: Random House, 1981 O’Callaghan, E. B. ed. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York. Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1856. de Laet, Johannes. “New World, or Description of West-India.” In Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664, edited by J. Franklin Jameson. Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1909. Jameson, J. Franklin. Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909. Lear, A. J. F. van. “Letters of Wouter van Twiller and the Director General and Council of New Netherland to the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, August 14, 1636.” New York History 50, no. 4 (1969): 44–50. The Massachusetts Historical Society. Winthrop Papers, Vol. 3 1631-1637, Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1943. Shurtleff, Nathaniel B. ed. Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, In New England. Vol. 1 1633-1640. Boston: William White, 1855, reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1968. Shurtleff, Nathaniel B. ed. Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay In New England. Vol. 1, Boston: William White, 1853, reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1968. Trumbull, J. Hammond, ed. The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut. Hartford, Connecticut: Brown and Parsons, 1850, reprinted New York, AMS Press, 1968. Underhill, John. Nevves from America, London 1638. Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1971. Vaughan, Alden T. Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789. Vol. 19, New England Treaties, Southeast, 1524-1761, edited by Daniel E. Mandell, Washington, D.C.: University Publications of America, 1979. Winthrop, John. Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England,” 1630-1649. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. Wood, William. New England’s Prospect, edited by Alden Vaughan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.

Secondary Sources: Adams, Sherman W., The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut: comprising the present towns of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, and Newington, and of Glastonbury prior to its incorporation in 1693: from date of earliest settlement until the present time, edited by Henry Stiles. New York: Grafton Press, 1904.

King 33

Akagi, Roy Hidemichi. The town proprietors of the New England colonies; a study of their development, organization, activities and controversies, 1620-1770. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1924. Andrews, Charles. The River Towns of Connecticut. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1889. Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400- 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bragdon, Kathleen J. Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Brooks, Lisa. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Cave, Alfred. The Pequot War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Grandjean, Katherine A. “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68:1 (January, 2011): 75-100. Ceci, Lynn. “Wampum as a Peripheral Resource,” The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, edited by Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, New York: Hill and Wang, 2003 De Forest, John William. History of the Indians of Connecticut From the Earliest Known Period to 1850, Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1964. DeLucia, Christine. Memory Lands: King Philip's War and the Place of Violence In the Northeast, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Grandjean, Katherine A. “The Long Wake of the Pequot War,” Early American Studies, 9:2 (Spring 2011): 379-411. Grant, Daragh. “The Treaty of Hartford (1638): Reconsidering Jurisdiction in Southern New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 72:3 (July 2015): 461-498. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Howard, Daniel. A New History of Old Windsor, Connecticut. Windsor, CT, 1935. Ives, Timothy. “Reconstructing the Wangunk Reservation Land System: A Case Study of Native and Colonial Likeness in Central Connecticut.” Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (January, 2011): 65–89. Ives, Timothy. “Wangunk Ethnohistory: A Case Study Of A Connecticut River Indian Community.” Dissertation, College of William and Mary - Arts and Sciences, 2001. https://doi.org/10.21220/s2-xcrv-vp43 Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. New York: Norton, 1976. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Settling with the Indians : The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980.

King 34

Lavin, Lucienne. Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples: What Archaeology, History, and Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Communities and Cultures. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013. Lavin, Lucienne. “Pre-Colonial History of the Wangunk,” presented at “Indigenous Middletown: Settler Colonial and Wangunk Tribal History” December 5, 2015 at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Lipman, Andrew. ““A Meanes to Knitt Them Together”: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 65:1 (January, 2008): 3-28. Lipman, Andrew. The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Lucas, Paul Robert. Valley of Discord: Church and Society Along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1976. Martin, Stanley. “Indian Derivatives in Connecticut Place-Names.” The New England Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1939), 364-369. McBride, Kevin. “The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade: Native-Dutch Relations in Eastern New Netherland,” in Enduring Tradition: The Native Peoples of New England, edited by Laurie Weinstein. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. Morgan, Forrest. Connecticut as a Colony and as a State, or One of the Original Thirteen, Vol. 1. Hartford, Conn: The Publishing Society of Connecticut, 1904. Oberg, Michael Leroy. Uncas: First of the Mohegans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. O’Brien, Jean M. Dispossession By Degrees: Indian land and identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. O’Callaghan, E. B. History of New Netherland: or, New York under the Dutch. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1848. Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. Subjects Unto The Same King Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Salwen, Bert. “Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period,” in Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 15: Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978. Silverman, David J. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community Among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600-1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Starna, William A. “The Pequots in the Early Seventeenth Century,” The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation. Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry, eds. Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

King 35

Taylor, Alan. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Penguin, 2001. Tarbox, Increase N. “How the River Towns Came to be Planted.” In Memorial History of the County of Hartford, Conn. Vol.l, edited by J.H. Trumbull. Boston: Edward L. Osgood, 1886. Roberts, Strother E. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy: Transforming Nature in Early New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Vaughan, Alden T. “A Test of Puritan Justice.” The New England Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1965): 331-339. Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965.

King 36