Word for the Day

Coureurs de bois–runners of the woods—was a name applied to a class of men who got their living by trapping fur-bearing animals. Their profession required them to combine the roles of explorer, woodsman, diplomat, trader, hunter, and trapper. The coureurs, though often barely civilized selves, were the pioneers of civilization in the upper Northeast.

Word for the Day

The landlords of New Netherland were called patroons. They were investors in the Dutch West India Company who were granted estates along the Hudson and other navigable rivers on the condition that they send 50 settlers within four years to occupy the land. The system never worked well, in part because the landlords—many of whom remained in Holland—were unable to manage their lands efficiently, and the tenants felt they had little stake in the colony.

Fires in the Wilderness

(1636-1748)

In This Chapter

The Pequot War

King Philip’s War

Europe’s wars come to North America

Wars in the southern colonies

War begins over a severed ear

America was and remains a synonym for hopes and dreams. America has brought out the best of which humanity is capable—a dream of justice, a hope for liberty—and it has brought out the worst. First it became a battleground on which Native Americans fought against an invasion from Europe. Then it became a battlefield on which the invaders fought one another, often embroiling the Native Americans in their conflicts. Often, the invaders retreated into the distance and let the Native Americans fight their wars for them. All in all, it was a very bloody beginning.

New England Bleeds

The only thing that’s certain is that the murder of Captain John Stone in 1634 was not the work of Pequots. As to the rest, the accounts of the Indians and the Englishmen differ.

The Pequots were a powerful Algonquian tribe settled along the Connecticut River. Resenting the intrusion of Dutch traders in the Connecticut valley, they waged a small, bitter war against the Dutch. Then, in 1634, Stone, an Englishman, was killed as his ship lay at anchor at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Never mind that Stone was a pirate, who had tried and failed to hijack a vessel in New Amsterdam, had brandished a knife before the governor of Plymouth Colony, and had been deported from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for drunkenness and adultery, and never mind that the Indians claimed Stone had kidnapped some of their people. Tensions were so high between colonists and Indians that the New Englanders demanded action against the Pequots for the murder of John Stone.

The Pequot War

For their part, the Pequots didn’t want any trouble. Although no one accused any Pequot of having laid a finger on Stone, the murder was clearly the work of western Niantics, a tribe that was nominally under Pequot control. Seeking to avert a war, the Pequots accepted responsibility and signed a treaty with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in which they promised to surrender those guilty of the murder. They also agreed to pay an exorbitant indemnity, relinquish rights to a vast tract of Connecticut land, and trade exclusively with the English rather than the Dutch. A part of the indemnity was paid, but the Pequots claimed that, of the murderers, all were dead (one at the hands of the Dutch, the others of smallpox), except for two, who had escaped.

For two years, the Massachusetts Bay colonists did nothing. Then, on June 16, 1636, Mohegan Indians warned the English that the Pequots, fearful that the colonists were about to take action, had decided on a preemptive strike. A new conference between the Pequots and the colonists was called at Fort Saybrook, Connecticut, and agreements were reached, but word soon arrived of the death of another captain, John Oldham, off Block Island. This time, the perpetrators were Narragansetts (or a tribe subject to them), and although the Narragansett sachems immediately dispatched 200 warriors to avenge the deaths on behalf of the colony, the English sent Captain John Endecott to Block Island with orders to seize the Indians’ stores of wampum, slaughter all the men they could find, and take captive the women and children for sale as slaves in the West Indies.

The Indians, anticipating just such behavior, had fled. A frustrated Endecott paid a visit to the Pequots just beyond Fort Saybrook and set about burning their villages.

Soon, all of the Connecticut valley burned, as the enraged Indians retaliated, putting to the torch one English settlement after another, and the colonists responded against the Pequots in kind.

What motivated Endecott to bring down a bloody war upon Indian and colonist alike? Racial hatred? Blind stupidity? Certainly, both of these things. But, as would be the case with all the white-Indian wars of the colonial period, there was a motive of power politics as well, in which the Indians figured as pawns ruthlessly played by the competing European powers. In the case of the Pequot Wars, both of the competitors were English. The Massachusetts Bay Colony and the settlers of the Connecticut valley disputed over possession of the valley. Whoever asserted dominion over the Pequots, whose country lay precisely within the disputed territory, would have a strong legal claim to the region. Endecott, a soldier in service to Massachusetts Bay, was eager for a fight in order to dominate the Pequots and thereby beat out the Connecticut settlers. But the very competitiveness of the New England colonies made effective unified action against the Indians almost impossible, and it wasn’t until the spring of 1637 that the disorganized colonial forces were able to enlist the aid of the Narragansetts, Eastern Niantics, and Mohegans—all rivals of the Pequots—in order to mount a counteroffensive. Captain John Mason, in command of the colonial-Indian coalition, attacked a village at Mystic, Connecticut, where he killed 600-700 Pequots—mostly women, children, and old men—in the space of an hour.

Following the Mystic massacre, the Pequots were defeated at every turn. On September 21, 1638, the Treaty of Hartford divided the Pequot prisoners of war as slaves among the allied tribes—Mohegans, Narragansetts, and Niantics—and further stipulated that no Pequot could inhabit his former country again. Indeed, the treaty proclaimed, the very name “Pequot” would be forever expunged.

King Philip’s War

An even more destructive war broke out in New England less than 40 years later, again over a murder. On June 11, 1675, a farmer saw an Indian looting his cattle. He killed the Indian. The local Wampanoag chief, called Metacomet by the Indians and (with contempt) King Philip by the English, sought justice from the local garrison. Rebuffed, the Indians took justice into their own hands and killed the hot-tempered farmer, then killed his father and five other settlers.

But the war had actually been brewing for some time. King Philip was the son of Massasoit, the chief who had been so friendly to the New Englanders. Faced with the colonists’ insatiable land hunger, their rising population, and their highhanded, contemptuous treatment of himself, King Philip was not inclined toward friendship. Beginning about 1662, he stirred rebellion among the Narragansetts and the Nipmucks as well as his own Wampanoags. At first, the colonists were hobbled by the same problem they had during the Pequot War. Disorganized and apparently incapable of unified action, the New Englanders suffered very heavy losses during the first months of the war. It was only after they managed to join forces as the United Colonies that Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the more remote “Eastern Colonies”—Maine and New Hampshire—began to take the initiative.