The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  The fur business was booming. Between 1624 and 1632, the number of beaver pelts handled by Dutch traders increased tenfold, to more than fifteen thousand a year. But as beavers were trapped out in the areas closest to the trading forts and grew harder and harder to get—and as the supply of wampum burgeoned—the buying power of a six-foot bead string, known as a fathom, fell from two and a half pelts to half a pelt. Further complicating the exchange rate was the growing use of wampum as currency among the Dutch and English colonists themselves.

  Furs and wampum brought the Dutch and English into increasing conflict along the southern New England coast, and they also set up an incendiary situation involving the region’s Native communities, which were in tremendous flux. The conflict reached a flash point in the 1630s along a broad river running straight south from the remote fur regions down to Long Island Sound. The Dutch called this waterway the Versche Rivier (Fresh River). The English and French—mangling the Algonquian word quinetucket, or “long tidal river”—called it the Connecticut.

  The lower Connecticut and smaller rivers to the east, such as the Mystic and Thames, were home to the Pequot, who had been expanding their power in the years before the Dutch arrived. They inhabited about fifteen villages, each of which included roughly thirty wigwams (framed with bent saplings and covered with bark or mats of woven cattails), surrounded by several hundred acres of cornfields cleared from the rich bottomland forest.

  Two of the Pequot towns, home to paramount sachems, were built on high ground some distance from the water and were surrounded by palisades for additional protection. The main village was Weinshauks, also known as Fort Hill, at what the English called Pequot Harbour, the mouth of the Thames River. Mystic Fort, about five miles to the east, occupied a hill just west of where the Mystic River emptied into a deeply sheltered bay.

  Southern New England, ca. 1637

  Controlling the lower reaches of the Connecticut River, which provided access to interior fur supplies, and subjugating many of their Native neighbors, the Pequot held the balance of power in southern New England in the 1630s.

  Covering two acres and encompassing about seventy wigwams, the formidable Mystic stockade, according to one English witness, was built “close together as they can, [of] young trees and half trees, as thick as a man’s thigh or the calf of his leg. Ten or twelve foot high they are above the ground, and within rammed three foot deep with undermining, the earth being cast up for their better shelter against enemy dischargements. Betwixt these palisadoes are divers loopholes through which they let fly their winged messengers.”

  There was no gate as a European fort would have. Rather, the palisade walls formed two greatly overlapping half circles, with the long, narrow gaps between them creating entrances on opposite sides. These could be blocked off at night with barriers of brush—hardly as sturdy as a heavy wooden door, but enough to slow attackers, who would be forced to enter single file while the defending Pequots poured arrows on them.

  Under their primary sachem, Tatobem, the Pequot had solidified their position as middlemen in both the fur and wampum trades, forcing such neighboring groups as the Mohegan into tributary status and essentially ignoring Dutch insistence that they permit free trade. The Narragansett, who likewise craved an exclusive partnership with the Dutch, chafed at Pequot dominance, while some among the Mohegan—so deeply entwined with the Pequot that they were, in some ways, one people—reached out to the English to bolster them in their own internal struggles.

  Prodded by the Mohegan, and receiving pleas from a leader of the River Indians, a group that lived under the Pequot’s thumb at the mouth of the Connecticut, the English decided to test Dutch claims to the river and Pequot tolerance, grabbing a slice of the trading pie for themselves. It was the beginning of a game of brinkmanship that would have enormous and tragic consequences.

  In the summer of 1633, the Dutch built a stockaded handelshuis, known as the House of Good Hope, at what is now Hartford. A few months later, the Plymouth colonists trumped them by brazenly sailing a large, newly built bark up the river, right beneath the two Dutch “murtherers,” small cannons that could be loaded with nails, scrap metal, or anything else handy and lethal. Despite shouted threats from the garrison, however, the cannons were not fired. Landing about six miles upriver, the Englishmen hurriedly unloaded the precut frame and siding for a house, which, in the words of William Bradford, they “clapt up . . . quickly, and landed their provissions, and . . . afterwards palisadoed their house aboute, and fortified themselves better.” Safe within its stockade, the outpost was secure enough that when the Dutch commander arrived with seventy men to evict the squatters, he judged an attack on the fort impractical and left.

  Even worse for the Dutch, the Pequot were ignoring their agreement to allow other tribes unimpeded access to the trading posts. Pequot warriors, determined to maintain their monopoly, killed a group of Narragansetts in the fall of 1633. The move infuriated the Narragansett and Dutch alike, but the latter made the first move. Deciding that harsh measures were in order, the Dutch commander lured Tatobem onto a ship to trade, seized him, and demanded a bushel of wampum in ransom. The Pequot paid it, but the Dutch, driving home their point, executed Tatobem anyway. When a Pequot delegation came to Good Hope, the Dutch leveled one of their “murtherers” at them and blew another sachem to bits.

  Tatobem’s murder rocked the Pequot, but they had to tread a fine line. As the Dutch guessed, the Pequot’s need to maintain trade relations checked how strongly and directly they could respond, both to the grave Dutch insults and to the English incursion. What’s more, the Pequot leadership was in turmoil, and for the first time, smallpox was sweeping southern New England, compounding the confusion with a ghastly epidemic that killed as much as 80 percent of the Indian population. Several survivors scrambled to replace Tatobem, including his Mohegan son-in-law Uncas.9 The victor, a sachem named Sassacus, is usually described as Tatobem’s son, but little is actually known about him. The choice of a new chief sachem depended as much on personal qualities and support within the community as blood relations. Unfortunately, Sassacus was unable to hold together the fractious Pequot and their tributary villages. Some of the dissenters, including Uncas and a Pequot sachem named Wequash, who had likewise failed to succeed Tatobem, began turning to the Narragansett for protection.

  And there was still the issue of Tatobem’s death to address. The Pequot reaction came in a form any Indian would have anticipated and heartily approved of—a revenge attack on the Dutch by the family of the victim.

  As archaeological evidence makes plain, warfare was a constant in pre-contact eastern North America, but the reasons for conflict, and the approach and scale of war among Indians, were dramatically different than in Europe. Instead of employing all-out assaults by massed armies for the capture of territory, Indian warfare tended to consist of limited, hit-and-run engagements by small parties. These strikes were designed to take captives, exact revenge, and garner prestige; in most cases, war was an almost endless cycle of tit for tat between traditional enemies. This approach seemed pointless to Europeans; Indians “might fight seven years and not kill seven men,” wrote one contemptuous Englishman.

  Killing wasn’t the point, however. The societal trappings varied, but among the Five Nations and related groups in the Northeast, for instance, such offensives were known as “mourning-war,” whose main intent was to capture enemies who could either be adopted into the village as replacements for dead relatives or be ritually tortured to death to assuage the family’s grief. Mourning-warfare might entail raids by a few men (usually related through marriage to the dead person’s female survivors) or large confrontations involving hundreds of warriors. However great or small the force, the aim was not to kill but to capture; casualties were usually minimal. The 1609 battle in which Samuel de Champlain and his Algonquian allies fought against the Mohawk may have been such a mourning-war clash. If so, the deaths of several Mohawk chiefs at Champlain’s hand must have
been a terrible loss to the Iroquois.

  Ritual torture, which so shocked the first Europeans to witness it, was part of this same elaborate framework of war. Arriving at the victors’ village, a captive would be forced to run the gauntlet—two lines of people armed with sticks, knives, and hatchets, who would rain blows and abuse on the running man as he tried to reach a predetermined point of safety. Depending on his behavior in the gauntlet, a prisoner might be killed on the spot, reserved for more formal execution by torture later, or held as a slave. A number of Native languages—Oneida, Ottawa, and Ojibwa among them—had words, like the Mohawk term enaskwa, that meant both a human captive and a domestic animal.

  Captives could also serve as potent pawns in diplomacy—traded to other tribes or offered as gifts that implicitly spoke of the giver’s power and eminence. Women and children were often adopted into the community, helping to restore the population of a village reduced by disease, war, or famine. Frequently, this meant assuming the name and social obligations of someone recently dead. Among the Iroquois, this was accomplished through a condolence rite known as “requickening.” A dead person of high rank was usually replaced from within the community, but someone of lesser status might be replaced by a war captive.

  There was no question of trying to replace Tatobem—his death would be revenged against the Hollanders in a more direct manner. Biding his time, Sassacus waited until a European trader showed up along the Connecticut, then he personally led the assault on the man. Unfortunately, just as most Indians looked and sounded alike to Europeans, most Europeans were indistinguishable to many Indians. Sassacus chose the wrong nationality on which to avenge Tatobem’s murder.

  The irony was compounded by the fact that this was probably the first time in his dissolute life that the primary victim—an English rogue named John Stone—got a comeuppance he didn’t richly deserve. A member of the Virginia colony, where his behavior scarcely raised an eyebrow, Captain Stone was immensely unpopular among the Puritans and Pilgrims, who abhorred his drinking, his carousing, his piracy and smuggling, and the dark stories of his cannibalism after a Caribbean shipwreck. Stone’s appetite for liquor and larceny seem to have been about equal. At one point, Stone managed to drink his good friend, the Dutch governor at Manhattan, under the table, then ask the sozzled official to “give” him a Plymouth trading pinnace full of goods. Stone was forcing the crew at gunpoint to set sail for Virginia when the Dutch retook the ship.

  Hauled up on piracy charges, he tried to stab the Plymouth governor, Thomas Prence, and in a scandalous piece of wordplay, he called a prominent judge “a just ass.” He was caught in flagrante with a married woman and charged with adultery—a hanging offense in the Bay Colony. His pinnace was seized but he escaped, although soldiers eventually flushed him out of a cornfield and took him into custody. Because Stone had powerful friends in England, the colonists agreed to slap him with a heavy fine and banish him on pain of death. Everyone (except, perhaps, a few married women) was relieved to see Stone sail away in the summer of 1634.

  Heading back to the more freewheeling climate of Virginia, Stone decided to detour up the Connecticut River. In typical highhanded fashion, he and his men seized two Indians as “guides.” Tying their hands behind their backs, Stone didn’t realize the abduction was being witnessed by other Natives.

  That evening, part of the crew was on shore with the captives, while Stone and a few others remained on the ship. There was no guard, and everyone was drinking. Sassacus himself boarded the pinnace with his men. Stone welcomed him in a boozy haze and poured the sachem a glass. “Captain Stone, having drunk more than did him good, fell backwards on the bed asleep,” a Pequot emissary later told the English. Sassacus pulled out a hatchet and tomahawked the unconscious man to death.

  At his signal, the Pequots turned on the remaining Englishmen, killing those on shore and freeing the two Indians, while trapping the rest of the ship’s crew in the cook room. Whether by design or accident, the gunpowder store caught fire, and the Pequots dove for cover moments before the pinnace exploded. The few English survivors, burned and blinded, were quickly dispatched.

  From the Pequot’s perspective, this was a completely appropriate, well-measured response to the Dutch murder of a grand sachem—except that the victims weren’t Dutch. Even though they felt Stone asked for it when he kidnapped his “guides,” the Pequot seem to have been genuinely contrite when they realized their mistake. That October, they offered the Massachusetts colonists wampum and furs in compensation—again, a traditional Algonquian approach to settling what might be termed a wrongful death complaint.

  Estranged from the Dutch and Narragansett, the Pequot had now angered the English, who despite their ill will toward Stone were happy to use his death as an excuse to further their ambitions in the Connecticut Valley. They demanded the heads of his killers, the right to freely settle Pequot land along the river, an agreement to trade only with the English, and a lavish payment—four hundred fathoms of wampum, forty beaver pelts, and thirty otter skins, the equivalent of half a year’s tax revenue for the colony. It looked as if John Stone would prove immeasurably more valuable in death than the rascal had been in life.

  The Pequot might have agreed to the steep terms, but they wanted something the English would not provide—military protection. In Algonquian tradition, a payment of tribute entailed reciprocity, with the victors agreeing to safeguard the newly weakened people. This was not an idle concern; the Narragansett had dispatched two dozen men to capture or kill the Pequot ambassadors meeting with the Puritans in Boston. But the English agreed only “as friends to trade with them, but not to defend them, etc.” The Pequot sachems, not wanting a hugely expensive deal that would still leave them without a military ally, declined to ratify the treaty.

  For two years, animosity simmered. The English, their numbers swelled by thousands of fresh immigrants, planted new settlements well up the Connecticut Valley, forty or fifty miles upriver from the ocean. At the river’s mouth, they established Fort Saybrook, hiring a tall, thirty-seven-year-old engineer named Lion Gardener to build their first real fortification in the region.

  Gardener was a professional soldier, a veteran of fighting for the Prince of Orange against the Spanish. He expected to find three hundred men waiting for him when he arrived at Saybrook in the early winter of 1636. Instead, he found two, plus some traders relaying gifts of pelts and wampum from the Pequot.

  From the moment of his disappointing arrival, Lieutenant Gardener was a plainspoken realist. When some of the Englishmen at Saybrook, frothing about Stone’s killing, said they would rather have the Pequots’ lives instead of their presents, Gardener noted that they were soon heading back to Massachusetts. “If you make war with these Pequits, [you] will not come hither again, for I know you will keep yourselves safe, as you think, in the Bay, but myself, with these few, you will leave at the stake to be roasted.”

  Not only that, but the tiny community for which he became responsible—two dozen men, women, and children—had only two months’ supply of food and indefensible cornfields miles from the settlement. He told his employers in Massachusetts that the most pressing danger was “Capt. Hunger” and that any building had to wait until spring. Gardener, who could see the writing on the wall, pleaded that those in authority “do their utmost endeavour to persuade the Bay-men to desist from war a year or two, till we could be better provided for it.”

  By the spring of 1636, progress was being made. The fort’s palisade was finished in March, and a month later, as he was busy laying out the adjacent town, Gardener marked the birth of his son, David, the first English child born in the new Connecticut colonies.

  Tensions continued to rise. Trade wasn’t going well, and a dustup between Englishmen and Indians on Long Island that resulted in white deaths was blamed on the Pequot, despite evidence to the contrary. On the Connecticut frontier, able-bodied men were required to keep a gun, ball, and powder at the ready. Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, tri
ed several times to exploit the developing power vacuum as Pequot control weakened, and he now told his English friends that the Pequot were preparing a preemptive attack on the colonists.

  Uncas may have been playing the English against his Pequot rivals. If anything, the Pequot probably feared an unprovoked attack as well, since some of the Englishmen had been making “indiscreet speaches” about their plans for the Indians, according to Jonathan Brewster, the son of a prominent Plymouth colonist who was trading on the river. Not everyone believed Uncas’s warning, but Brewster told Connecticut Governor John Winthrop Jr. that he had come to trust the Mohegan, “whom I have found faithfull to the English.”

  Winthrop was dispatched to issue an ultimatum to the Pequot: deliver Stone’s killers or face the consequences. “If they should not give you satisfaction,” Bay Colony governor Henry Vane and his deputy, John Winthrop Sr., instructed, “declare to them that we hold ourselves free from any league or peace with them, and shall revenge the blood of our countrimen as occasion will serve.”

  In late July, the Massachusetts trader John Gallop steered his bark into Manisses (Block Island), where he recognized a pinnace owned by John Oldham riding at anchor two miles from shore. Oldham was the Bay Colony’s commercial agent, an active trader among the coastal tribes and, like Stone, not a man with a sterling reputation among the colonists. Gallop hailed the vessel, whose deck was crowded with Indians, but got no response. In fact, the Indians slipped the anchor and set sail downwind toward the mainland. Gallop, suspecting that Oldham had been attacked, steered his ship to cut them off.