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Reflections
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Revised
03/19/2007
© The Weyanoke Association
P.O. Box 121
Charles City VA 23030
804/307-8807
weyanoke@weyanoke.org
The Pequot Massacre: An Exercise in Seeking Truth From Facts
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| Woodcut of Mystic Fort: from Capt. John Underhill, News from America (1638) |
From Colonial Times down to the present, the story of the "Pequot Massacre" has been told and retold. Virtually every text on North American Indian wars or colonization covers it in the first or second chapter. As the story goes:
"In 1636 ninety armed settlers went to raid Block Island, off the coast, because a white man had been found killed on his boat nearby Whet the armed party landed, they found that the Indians of Block Island had gone into hiding; they burned the villages and crops and returned to the mainland, where for good measure they burned down some Pequot villages. The English went after these Pequots and told them that they were held responsible for the murder. The Pequots had to hand over 'the remaining murderers' and provide assurances about future behavior. The Pequots 'obstinately' refused (in the words of an English eyewitness) and in the resulting fight several Pequots were killed and wounded, and their belongings destroyed or carried off. Thus started the Pequot War...
"The outcome of such a war was of course never in doubt. It ended with an attack by John Mason and his men on the last Pequot stronghold, their settlement on the Mystic River. 'We must burn them!' Mason is reported as having shouted, running around with a firebrand and lighting the wigwams. 'Such a dreadful terror let the Almighty fall upon their spirits that they would flee from us and run into the very flames. Thus did the Lord judge the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies, ' he reported afterward:
"The surviving Pequots were hunted but could make little haste because of their children, Mason wrote, They were literally-run to ground...tramped into the mud and buried in the swamp. ' The last of them were shipped to the West Indies as slaves...John Winthrop.. .governor once more, ...[offered] ...forty pounds sterling for the scalp of an Indian man, twenty for the scalps of women and children. The name 'Pequot' was officially erased from the map. The Pequot River became the Thames and their town became New London."2
It was this story of Captain John Mason leading his small force of Puritans and their Mohegan and Narragansett allies on a two-day overland march to catch the Pequots by surprise in their fortified village on the Mystic River, which was surrounded and set ablaze killing all inside, that historian/artist, David Wagner, was commissioned to paint by the Mashantucket Pequot elders in the late 1990's. Studying all of the early accounts and walking the ground to conceptualize the events as they happened, he came to realize that they could not have happened as the Puritan "heroes" claimed. In fact he became more and more convinced that the "massacre" never happened. That it was a story made up to cover up a military fiasco.
When, after a year of painstaking research, he returned to Mashantucket to show his findings to the Pequot elders, he was surprised to have his commission cancelled. It seems too much was invested in perpetrating the myth to allow for acceptance of the truth after all these years. Undaunted, he continued with the project without sponsorship, eventually producing over 100 paintings that are now exhibited at the Mohegan Reservation Cultural Center at Uncasville, CT. He also published The Pequot War; The War That Wasn't, containing twenty-four color illustrations along with text in 1994. In 2003, Wagner teamed up with his fellow adopted Lenape of the Quinnipiac Tribe, Dr. Jack Dempsey, a published author and college professor, to produce Mystic Fiasco; Journey To A Most Unlikely Massacre.
The Pequot War was a war of naked aggression on the part of the English colonists. The Pequots ("Destroyers" or "Invaders") were part of the Mahican Confederacy who originally lived along the Mahicanituck ("River of the Mahicans,") or Hudson, until not long before the arrival of the English in New England. They displaced other Indians, known now only as the "River Indians," who were related to and probably part of the Narragansett Confederacy. According to Deforest, History of the Indians of Connecticut (1850), the River Indians fought three battles with the Pequots before their leader, Sequassen, sought refuge among the Narragansetts. Sassacus, the leader of the Pequots, soon found himself caught between two fires, the Dutch and the English colonizers. As the English were encroaching on territory already claimed by the Dutch, it was imperative that they quickly establish forts and settlements to bolster their claim. The Pequots were in their way.
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| Sequassen, sachem who ruled the lands conquered by the Pequots after loosing a third great battle sometime around 1590. |
According to Lenape history, prior to the European invasion, a grand confederacy of the Eastern Woodlands Indians had been formed (circa 1450,) uniting the Indians of Algonquin (Lenape) and Iroquoian (Meng'we) nations. According to the Mahican sachem, Quinnauquant, (John Quinney), speaking in 1854, "This great confederacy, comprising Delawares, Munsees, Mohegans, Narragansetts, Pequots, Penobscots, and many others ...held its Council once a year, to deliberate on the general welfare, ...delegates from each tribe attended; assisted by priests and wise men ...The policy and decisions of this Council were everywhere respected and inviolably observed "3
Evidence of the success of this arrangement is the lack of archeological evidence of fortifications or defensive works built in this time, though they became common during the Contact Period.
Prior to European contact, trade brought nations together, as each could exchange the items particular to their homeland or expertise for desired items from another homeland or crafter while each remained essentially self-sufficient and autonomous. Often the hunters of the North would winter with the Hurons, or other Iroquois, trading their furs and dried meat for corn and beans and other products they could not raise in their homeland. Birch-bark canoes made it possible for them to cover great distances to bring their goods and families down from as far away as Hudson's Bay.
The Hurons, being in the most favorable position for this trade, were the dominant force in their Wyandot Confederacy, and were the "Uncles" of the Great Dawnland Confederacy. The Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians, who were acknowledged as the original stock of the Algonquians, were known as the "Grandfathers." Only these two nations could summon the Grand Council of the Nations to assemble.
According to the Iroquois historian, Arthur C. Parker, the Lenape or Algonkian-speaking peoples moved into the Dawnland in four successive waves spread out over thousands of years. The first wave he called the "Archaic Algonkian Wanderers," who hunted big game with javelins and lived in rock shelters. "The Second Period of Algonkian occupation must have been one of great length in time, " Parker concluded. "It may cover several thousand years. Certainly it was subject to a great number of intrusions."4 He mentions the "Red Paint People," the "Mississippian Mound Builders," and an early "Eskimo-like" people, among these "intruders."
"The Third Algonkian Period is quite definite in character, and its evidences are found widely scattered throughout the state [New York] ...The people seem to have feared few enemies at first, and to have scattered their hamlets over wide areas... as if the group feared no predatory enemies and felt free to wander within its known limitations. These people must have carried on agriculture to a considerable extent, for corn and beans have been found in their refuse heaps."5 Parker also noted that numerous tobacco pipes have been found from this period and evidence of trade, and that, "On the whole their implements are those of hunting and agriculture and not war."6
The final wave of Algonkian migration was that of the historic parent body, the Lenni Lenape. The prefix Lenni (meaning "Original") being used to distinguish them from earlier waves of Lenape who had mixed with others. According to the Moravian missionary, John Heckewelder: "This was the case of the Mahicanni or Mohicans, in the east, a people who by intermarriages had become a detached body, mixing two languages together and out of the two forming a dialect of their own ...New tribes again sprung from them who assumed distinct names..."
The capital of the Mahican Confederacy was at Schodack ("Place of the Ever-Burning Council Fire") on an island on the west shore of the Hudson below Cohoes Falls. They had a fortified stronghold there at the falls called Moenemines. Beyond that, was the territory of the Iroquois.
Between the time of Jacques Cartier's exploration of the St. Lawrence (1534-1542) and Samuel de Champlain's establishment of an settlement at Quebec, (from the Algonkian word for "Narrows"), which was formerly the Iroquois town of Stadacona, in 1608, war had broken out between the Huron and their Algonquian allies and the Laurentian Iroquois. Champlain joined forces with a Huron-Algonquian war party and engaged a large force of Iroquois on Lake Champlain in 1609, thus beginning hostilities that would last as long as the French were in Canada.
The Laurentian Iroquois apparently displaced the t Iroquois who were living by the Mahicans, who in turn invaded the territory of the Minsi Lenapes in the Wyoming Valley and then proceeded down the Susquehanna, becoming known to history as the "Susquehannocks." The Laurentians became known as the "Mohawks."
The first appearance of French traders among the Mahicans may have been as early as 1540, when they are believed to have established a trading fort on Castle Island near Albany. Adrian Van Loon is known to have come down from Canada to trade in 1598. Henry Hudson explored the river for the Dutch in 1609, and in 1614, they established a trading fort at Castle Island.
From the start, the presence of the Dutch traders among the Mahicans excited the envy of the Mohawks, who were determined to displace the Mahicans from the west shore on the river and capture their position in the fur trade. In 1626, a few Dutch soldiers accompanied a Mahican war party that fell into a Mohawk ambush. They were roasted and eaten.8 After that, the Dutch remained neutral in the Mahican-Mohawk War and traded guns for furs with both sides.
In 1628, many of the Mahicans were driven from their homes on the upper Hudson and in the Hoosic and Hoosatonic Valleys. The invading Mohawks drove as far south as Catskill Creek, where they were turned back by a combined force of Minsi and Mahican warriors, after heavy losses on both sides. The Mahicans stayed in force around Fort Orange (Albany), in a conflict that lasted nearly three-quarters of a century.
The old Dawnland Confederacy was thus pretty well ripped apart by European contact. The new trade, which linked the nations to a global economy of capitalist exploitation, set the nations in competition for goods, that they could not produce themselves; that rendered what they could produce obsolete. Steel knives, tomahawks and guns became essential for survival in the climate of intertribal war that ensued. To get more they over-hunted and over-trapped until their hunting grounds were depleted. Then they had to depend upon trade with nations farther inland, acting the role of middlemen, to get the items they had become dependent on. Thus the fratricidal Beaver Wars began.
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Sassacus, the last great sachem of the Pequots |
The Pequots were lucky enough to have been spared the ravages of plague and smallpox that decimated many of the New England tribes, and doubtless they were reinforced by other Mahicans fleeing the war with the Mohawks. Sassacus held sway over a territory extending from the border of Rhode Island, the territory of the Narragansetts, to the area of New Haven, where the Quinnipiacs resided, and north almost to Hartford. At the onset of the Pequot War, Sassacus could field some 800 warriors, over a dozen of them armed with matchlocks.
The decision to extirpate the Pequots was made in England by the Directors of the Company. Lieutenant Lyon Gardnier, whom they hired to build and command a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River, knew about it before setting sail. He tried to get the officials in Hartford to delay the outbreak of war until after he built his fort at Saybrook.
Sassacus also tried to put off hostilities. When the English accused the Pequots of killing a party of Englishmen on the Connecticut River, even though they knew that "River Indians" and not Pequots were responsible, Sassacus responded by sending a large delegation to Boston with presents to make peace. When this offer was spurned, he attempted to make a confederacy with the Narragansetts, but this was frustrated by the colonial governor of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, who convinced them to remain allied with the English.
Sassacus was also beset by internal rivalry, as Uncas, who strongly favored capitulation to the English, broke away from the Pequots, taking 80 to 100 warriors with him. In the words of Melissa Jayne Fawcett:
In 1635, Uncas was a Pequot sagamore (subchief) who disagreed with his sachem, Sassacus, about how to contend I with the invading English Unable to resolve their differences, Uncas broke away. He moved to Shantok on the west bank of the Thames River, where his followers declared him sachem. Uncas chose to refer to his group by the tribe's old Lenni Lenape clan name Mohegan,9 meaning Wolf People."10
The killing of a notoriously crooked Dutch trader named Oldman provided the English with the excuse to begin hostilities. They first attacked a village of Narragansetts on Block Island, then following their "commission," the force of 120 Englishmen attacked the main Pequot stronghold at Groton, killing one Indian and setting part of the village on fire. This had the desired effect of enraging the Pequots who laid siege to the unfinished fort at Saybrook for a year and ravaged the plantations of the English up and down the Connecticut River. The stage was now set for an invasion of the Pequot territory.
In May of 1637, the colonial assembly in Hartford declared war on the Pequots. John Mason was given command of a force of some 90 men and was ordered to attack the Pequot capital at Groton. He then proceeded down the Connecticut River to the fort at Saybrook, accompanied by Uncas and around 80 Mohegan warriors.
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| Uncas, great sachem of the Mohegans. Losing his bid to lead the Pequots to Sassacus, he then allied himself to the English. |
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"You say you will help, " Gardnier told Uncas, "but I will first see it. Therefore send you, now, twenty men" [to the Bass River, off the Connecticut-- where] "...yesternight... " [the English spotted] "...six Indians in a canoe, thither. Fetch them now, dead or alive. And then you shall go... " [to attack the Pequots] "...else not!" Uncas' men returned with several severed heads and a captive. Whether they were Pequots or not is never established, but the Puritans mount the heads on the walls of the fort as trophies. Strong evidence suggests that they were not Pequots but "River Indians." The captive was tortured. The Englishmen tied one of his legs to a post, then twenty men pulled on a rope tied to his other leg until he was pulled apart. Underhill finished him off with a pistol shot to the head.
Satisfied with Uncas' loyalty, the expedition proceeded to the Narragansett's capital. En route they passed the mouth of the Pequot River. Where they of course were observed by Sassacus's scouts.
The Narragansett chief, Minatanimo, also told Mason his force was too small to go up against Sassacus, but Roger Williams prevailed upon him to send along some of his warriors. According to Wagner, "Mason virtually has no plan other than a vague idea of surprising Sassacus by attacking him from landward side rather than by sea." 12
Scouts sent out by Uncas reported that Sassacus was well aware of Mason's presence and movements and had concentrated his people at Groton, abandoning the Pequot fort at Mystic. Mason decided to attack the empty fort at Mystic rather than the defended one at Groton. Only Mason, Underhill and Uncas and his scouts knew the status of the Mystic fort.
Throughout the expedition, the Narragansetts kept deserting in droves, believing they were on a "suicide mission."
Mason left thirteen of his men wi1h the boats, along with the surgeon and a reinforcement of forty men from the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts.13 The Indians were told that they should keep to the rear when they reach the fort and watch the English in action. The plan was to strike the fort under cover of darkness, but the militiamen oversleep, and the sun was well up before they began the final march to the Indian fort. Though it is the custom of Lenape and related Indians to rise early and offer prayers of thanksgiving to the rising sun, we are expected to believe that on this morning they all slept in and had no guard posted.
The seventy-some Englishmen "surrounded" the fort, hearing only the sound of a lone barking dog inside, and proceeded to pour musket fire through the gaps in the palisades into the wigwams within. The two entranceways into the fort were barricaded with brush, and it took some time to clear them Then Underhill and Mason, with a few picked men, rushed in from opposite sides of the village, while the rest guarded the exits and continued to "surround" the fort. There was still no sign of resistance.
Mason and Underhill outdid each other in claiming to have dispatched hordes of warriors inside, basically single-handedly, while at the same time firing the buildings and picking up a little loot. Afterwards, the English began the trek to join up with their boats, while their Indian allies were fleeing in another direction. Realizing that the fort was empty, they knew this meant Sassacus and his entire force were out there somewhere waiting to strike. Sassacus divided his force to strike both groups and harass their retreat.
Wagner compares it to the British retreat from Concord in the Revolutionary War. Having expended much of their ammunition shooting up an empty fort, the Puritans were now hard pressed to defend themselves and took several casualties. When they at last reached the rendezvous point, the Massachusetts militia was reluctant to come in to pick them up, fearing they would be ambushed. Eventually, the pleas of their fellow Puritans prevailed upon them to come to the rescue. The mission had been a disaster. The Pequots were still a formidable force in control of their territory, and Mason's force has been badly mauled. The Indian allies could hardly have been impressed. How were they going to put on spin on this?
But Sassacus had read the handwriting on the wall, and he decided to disband his nation and return to the old homeland on the Hudson. Many of his people joined with Uncas or other neighboring tribes. Purportedly, Sassacus' head was later delivered to Hartford by the Mohawks, where it was put on public display. But who knows whose head it really was? As Wagner points out, it is hard to believe that a Mohawk delegation could have passed through hostile Mahican territory to make such a delivery.
Mason was hailed as a conquering
hero, and eventually became Governor General of the colony. Underhill sold his
services to the Dutch as a mercenary, and is credited with another massacre
similar to that at Mystic, (that should be looked into in light of this new
evidence.) Uncas continued to play the English and preserve his people's
position on Mohegan Hill, where they are to the present day.
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2 The Conquest of America; How the Indian Nations Lost Their Continent, (1993), Koning, Hans, pp. 70-72.
3 The Mohicans and Their Land 1609-1730, (1994), Dunn, Shirley W., p. 38.
4 History of the State of New York, (1962), Flick, Alexander C., p. 55. 5 ibid., p. 56.
6 ibid., p. 59.
7 History Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations, (1876), Heckewelder, John, p. 53.
8 This is the same word as Mahican, Mohican or Mahikaner, variously spelled by the different Europeans who came in contact with them. Chief Harold Tantaquidgeon (1904-1989) humorously attributed it to the fact that "Indians didn't talk too good, and the white man didn't hear too good."
10 Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon, (2000), Fawcett, Melissa Jane, p. xi.
11 Mystic Fiasco, (2003), David Wagner & Dr. Jack Dempsey, p. 11.
12 The Pequot War. (1994), Wagner, David R., p. 58.
13 The return of these men, who will see no action, occasions the only official "Thanksgiving Day" celebrated by the "Pilgrims."
To learn more and to view the complete collection of David Wagner's paintings on the Pequot War visit the Mohegan Cultural Center at their Connecticut reservation, (follow the signs to the Mohegan Sun), or contact David Wagner: P.0. Box 373, Thompson, CT 06277, Tel. (860) 963-1075, or check out the web site at: Ancientgreece-earlyamerica.com