The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  The odds were stacked against him. Gallop was alone except for another man and two small boys, and they were lightly armed with just two muskets, two pistols, and some duck shot. There appeared to be fourteen Indians on the other vessel, with muskets, pikes, and swords, but as Gallop closed on the pinnace, he and his tiny crew fired, forcing the Indians belowdecks. Swinging back again, the gale filling his sails, Gallop gathered speed and rammed the smaller ship, almost overturning it; six of the panicked Natives leapt out to their deaths. Gallop again bore down on the pinnace, crashing his anchor into the bow, where it lodged, pinning the ships together. The Englishmen fired their guns right through the thinly hulled pinnace, flushing four more Indians into the ocean. Then they boarded Oldham’s vessel, capturing two Indians, whom they tied up. “Being well acquainted with their skill to untie themselves, if two of them be together,” Gallop shoved one of the bound Natives overboard to drown. The final two, armed with swords, remained barricaded belowdecks in a small room.

  Gallop found Oldham below as well—dead, stripped naked, his head split open, and his hands and legs almost cut off. Gallop and his companions slid Oldham’s body over the side of the pinnace and tried to tow the disabled ship back to the mainland, but the wind rose again, and they had to cut it free to drift off, the last two Indians still hiding in the hold.

  Oldham’s killers weren’t Pequots—the Manissean of Block Island were tributaries to the Narragansett, whose sachem tried to forestall English revenge by taking two hundred of his men to the island and recovering most of Oldham’s goods, along with two English boys who had been with him. Indeed, Roger Williams later became convinced that Oldham’s murder had been plotted by a group of Narragansett sachems. But the murder tipped the Bay Colony leadership over the edge where Indian relations of all sorts were concerned.

  Magistrate John Endecott, backed by nearly a hundred volunteers, sailed to Block Island in September, prepared to murder all the Manissean men and capture the women and children. The Indians, retreating to swamps, easily evaded the clumsy soldiers, who contented themselves with burning wigwams, fields, and great stores of corn. Endecott turned next to the Pequot, who were supposedly harboring a couple of the Manisseans who had attacked Oldham, but the old grudge involving Stone’s death was dredged up again. Endecott was to demand that the Pequot turn over Stone’s and Oldham’s killers, along with “one thousand fathoms of wampom for damages, etc., and some of their children as hostages.” If they refused the exorbitant demand, Endecott was authorized to use force.

  If Massachusetts really wanted peace, the colony could hardly have chosen a less suitable emissary. John Endecott was an unusually strident brand of Puritan, whom one historian called “a strange mixture of rashness, pious zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh bigotry.” He was the worst choice for delicate diplomacy.

  In this, the so-called Bay-men were taking a cocky step—essentially claiming the right to unilaterally enforce their own policies across the boundaries of other English colonies and a tangle of conflicting Indian jurisdictions. The Bay Colony’s move actually met with approval in some Native councils, among sachems such as the Mohegan Uncas and the Narragansett leader Miantonomi, who were happy to see the power of the once strong Pequot eroded.

  It was not popular, however, with those who actually lived on what would be the frontlines of a war. With Block Island in smoking ruins, the Bay-men sailed next to Fort Saybrook. Lieutenant Gardener, who was still far from prepared for fighting, was at first incredulous, until he was shown Endecott’s written orders. Then he became furious, later recalling, “For, said I, you have come hither to raise these wasps about my ears, and then will take wing and flee.”

  Guessing that diplomacy would fail and fearing the loss of the fort’s cornfields, he begged Endecott to forgo the pretty baskets and other loot his men had stolen from Block Island and bring back the most crucial booty of all—food. “Seeing you will go,” he told the commander with grim resignation, “I pray you, if you don’t load your Barks with Pequits, load them with corn.”

  The five English ships sailed off to the east. As they hugged the coastline heading for Weinshauks, the fortified Pequot town on the Thames River, the Indians ran along the shore, shouting at the armed men with the universal greeting along the New England coast: “What cheere, Englishmen, what cheere?”

  The soldiers watched in stony silence. “They not thinking we intended warre went on cheerefully until we came to Pequat river,” Captain John Underhill wrote. Here the Indians set up a new and more worried chorus: “What English man, what cheere, what cheere, are you hoggerie, will you cram us?”

  This meant, Underhill said, are you angry, will you kill us, and do you come to fight? Which is accurate enough, but the nuances of the pidgin word “cram” may have eluded him, since its derivation was Dutch, not English. It probably came from the word kwalm, meaning “dense smoke.” The Pequot were asking, Have you come to kill us and burn us out?

  Endecott wasted little time on niceties. At Weinshauks, his soldiers disembarked, formed ranks, and climbed the hill to the Pequot village. Furious negotiations followed, as the Indians tried to persuade the English to lay down their arms and parley. It smelled like a trap to Endecott’s men and may well have been one. “Seeing that they did in this interim convey away their wives and children, and bury their chiefest goods . . . we rather chose to beat up the drum and bid them battle,” Underhill wrote. The English columns opened fire, and the rest of the day was Block Island all over again—the Pequots fled with their families while the attackers burned everything they could reach. Many Pequots were injured, and at least one was killed. With acrid smoke hanging thickly over the estuary, Endecott sailed off with “a pretty quantity of corn” in his holds.

  Gardener needed the extra stores, for the Indians’ reaction was quick and bloody. Having thrown his weight around, Endecott may have considered the matter closed, expecting the Pequot to humbly accept their beating and honor English demands. But from the Indians’ perspective, the English had declared war.

  The Pequot “slew all they found in their way,” killing settlers along the Connecticut frontier, including men Gardener had sent to bring in as much of the corn harvest as they could. The fort’s granary was burned, and a sortie to bring in badly needed hay ended with three men killed and a fourth tortured to death. The fort was besieged by land, and although ships could still land there, food was running short, as Gardener had long feared.

  Gardener himself had a close brush with some Pequots that winter, ambushed while he and his men were bringing in logs. Gardener kept his men in a half-moon formation, slowly retreating under heavy fire as the wounded limped to keep up, “defending ourselves with our naked swords.” Arrows bounced off Gardener’s buff coat, a heavy leather armor common in the seventeenth century, but one penetrated deep into his thigh. The Pequots, seeing him hit with so many arrows, were later shocked to find him still alive.

  Not everyone was as lucky. Gardener eventually recovered the body of one dead Englishman, a Pequot arrowhead halfway through a rib. He carefully cleaned the bone and sent it, arrowhead still embedded, as a stark token to the Bay Colony, where some armchair experts had earlier “said the arrows of the Indians were of no force.”

  Not long after, a group of Pequots called for a parley with Gardener, asking him, “Have you fought enough?”

  “We said we knew not,” Gardener recalled. “Then they asked if we did use to kill women and children? We said that they should see that hereafter.”

  Gardener’s reply silenced the Pequots for a moment. Women and children were captured but almost never killed in intertribal raids. Perhaps everyone sensed that the rules of frontier warfare were in flux.

  No matter. “We are Pequits and have killed Englishmen,” the warriors replied, “and can kill them as mosquetoes.”

  But in truth, the Pequot were running out of friends. Uncas and the Mohegan had cast their lot with the English, and Miantonomi and the Narrag
ansett formally agreed to help the Bay Colony, sealing the pact with the gift of a Pequot hand.

  Lion Gardener’s small garrison held on through the winter, but the attacks—which had been focused on the fort—spread across the region in the spring. The settlement at Wethersfield, the most southerly of the English plantations and forty miles from the meager protection of Fort Saybrook, was attacked. For the first time, the victims included two women and a child, and two teenage girls were kidnapped. (Recognizing the military imbalance they faced, the Pequot were disappointed to find that the young women knew little about how to make gunpowder.)

  Of the 250 English colonists living in the Connecticut River valley, 30 died in Pequot attacks. The Bay Colony leaders had already decided that the war, “having bene undertaken upon just ground, should be seriously prosecuted,” but Connecticut moved even more quickly, drafting 90 men from its three plantations and dispatching them under the command of Captain John Mason.

  Another veteran of fighting in the Low Countries, Mason had immigrated in 1632 to Massachusetts, where he harried pirates off the New England coast, then became a captain in the Dorchester militia. Mason moved to Connecticut in 1635 and was the logical choice to lead the colony’s efforts against the Pequot—although not all of his colleagues shared Mason's splendid opinion of his own fighting abilities. The Connecticut ships anchored at Saybrook, and when Gardener learned of their mission, he and Underhill were distinctly underwhelmed. Neither thought much of Mason, Gardener believing the Connecticut men “were not fitted for such a design.” Nor did Gardener especially trust Uncas and his seventy Mohegans.

  Mason was under orders to land his men on the Thames River and assault the nearby stockade at Weinshauks, but he worried that doing so would be disastrous. The girls kidnapped from Wethersfield, having been rescued by a Dutch trader, warned that the Pequot possessed a surprising number of guns. Instead of a frontal assault, Mason proposed they flank the Pequot by sailing far to the east, gathering allies among the Narragansett (who had been skirmishing for months with the Pequot), and coming at the fortified towns from behind.

  Pinned down at Saybrook by contrary winds, Mason, Underhill, and the ever-cautious Gardener argued for several days. Written orders, which demanded a frontal assault, were not to be disregarded lightly, and finally Mason asked their chaplain to “commend our Condition to the Lord”—that is, to pray on the subject. By dawn, they had the chaplain’s acquiescence, and after Gardener insisted that twenty of Mason’s poorest soldiers be replaced by men from Fort Saybrook led by Underhill, the expedition set off.

  Saybrook was under constant watch; the Pequot saw the pinnaces sailing east, passing Weinshauks, and mistook their departure for a retreat. For several days, there was relief and celebration in the Pequot villages, dancing and singing well into the night.

  Mason’s flotilla, meanwhile, fought poor winds, taking three days to sail the roughly fifty miles to the west shore of Narragansett Bay, where they met Miantonomi, who agreed to give the English and Uncas’s Mohegan warriors safe passage. But the Narragansett sachem warned Mason that his numbers were too small. The Pequot, he said, were “very great Captains and Men skilful in War.”

  The weather was hot for early summer, and the English soldiers were laboring under their buff coats, leather neck stocks, and metal helmets. Lugging heavy matchlock muskets, they tramped eighteen or twenty miles west to a Niantic town, close to the Pequot border. The Niantic had been tributaries to the Pequot and were aloof enough to the English that Mason—unsure of their loyalties, and worried that word of the soldiers’ approach would leak out—ringed the town with his forces, warning the Niantic not to leave their stockade “upon peril of their Lives.”

  In the morning, though, a number of Miantonomi’s men arrived to join Mason, and soon the Englishmen were surrounded by a great circle of eager Narragansetts and Niantics, pledging to fight and boasting of the Pequots they would kill. The expedition marched off with nearly five hundred Indians leading the way.

  The sun climbed high in a clear sky, even hotter than the previous day. Short on food and water, and baking inside their gear, the colonials began to faint from the heat. Mason used the fumes from an empty liquor bottle to revive some of them. Worse, as they forded the Pawcatuck River and passed through newly planted Pequot cornfields, he found that many of the Narragansett and Niantic warriors were slipping away. Those who remained told Mason that the two Pequot forts were “almost impregnable” and that they couldn’t hope to reach Weinshauks, where Sassacus lived, much before midnight. His men beaten down by the heat and short rations, Mason abandoned his plan to strike both towns at once and decided to focus on the nearest, Mystic Fort, which was home to another major sachem, Mamoho.

  The English commander depended on the firsthand experience of Mohegans such as Uncas and the renegade Pequot Wequash. Also, Roger Williams had some months earlier forwarded intelligence from the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi to the Puritan leadership. If the Pequot saw English ships approaching, the sachem said, they would send their women and children to a swamp three or four miles away called ohomowauke, “the owl’s nest.” For this reason, he suggested exactly the kind of rear attack that Mason was undertaking. Miantonomi had also told Williams that the colonials should strike at night, “by which advantage the English, being armed, may enter the houses and do what execution they please.”

  Miantonomi did make one request, however, which Williams also conveyed: “That it would be pleasing to all natives, that women and children be spared, &c.”

  The English and Native forces marched now in silence, moving until an hour after nightfall and bivouacking less than two miles north of the Pequot village. The colonial pickets, listening in the warm moonlight, could hear singing in the town as the Pequot continued to celebrate what they assumed was the English withdrawal. It also appears the Pequot had earlier pulled most of their fighting men out of Mystic, concentrating them at Weinshauks, where the stroke was expected to fall.

  Shortly before daybreak, the allied forces, led by Uncas and Wequash, marched south to the hill where Mystic Fort lay. The ranks split—Mason to the east, Underhill to the south—ringing the fort with soldiers backed by three hundred Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic warriors.

  A dog began to bark, and from inside the fort, they could hear a man yelling “Owanux! Owanux!” (Englishmen! Englishmen!). The colonials fired a volley through the stockade walls—their muskets belching flames and smoke in the twilight—then hurried to clear the chest-high brush barricades that blocked the two entrances. Arrows began to flash through the air, pinging off helmets, as the soldiers poured into the village, slashing with their swords at anything that moved.

  Inside the compound was chaos, screams, and blood. Although Uncas and his Mohegans had been given yellow headbands before the attack, few of the Narragansetts wore anything to distinguish them from the Pequots, and many were hurt or killed by mistake.

  The Indians’ Fort or Palizado

  An illustration from Captain John Underhill’s “Newes from America” (1638) shows Mystic Fort under assault by English and Indian forces. Inside the overlapping walls of the palisade, made of logs “as thick as a man’s thigh . . . [and] ten or twelve foot high,” about seventy wigwams go up in flames, while a wall of attackers prevents anyone from escaping. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-32055)

  Mason later wrote that he and his commanders had “concluded to destroy them by the Sword and save the Plunder.” But after the initial charge, in which about thirty Pequots were killed, the Indians’ counterattack was simply too ferocious. “Seeing the fort was too hot for us, we devised a way how we might save ourselves and prejudice them,” Underhill wrote. While Mason began to torch wigwams at one end, Underhill shook out a line of gunpowder among the houses at the other, then set it alight.

  “The fires of both meeting in the centre of the fort, blazed most terribly, and burnt all in the space of half an hour,” Underhill recounted.

  Many w
ere burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others forced out, and came in troops to the Indians, twenty and thirty at a time, which our soldiers entertained with the point of the sword. Down fell men, women, and children; those that scaped us, fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us. It is reported by themselves, that there were about four hundred souls in this fort, and not above five of them escaped into our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.

  Mason wrote that the fire “did swiftly over-run the Fort, to the extream Amazement of the Enemy,” who despite the overwhelming odds tried to mount a counterassault: “Some of them climbing to the Top of the Pallizado; others of them running into the very Flames; many of them gathering to windward, lay pelting us with their Arrows; and we repaid them with our small Shot: Others of the Stoutest issued forth, as we did guess, to the Number of Forty, who perished by the Sword.” Conjuring the language of the Psalms, Mason exulted that “God was above them, who laughed at his Enemies . . . making them as a fiery Oven.”

  From the first warning dog bark until the last blow fell, the massacre took barely an hour. Only two English soldiers died.

  The Pequot were hardly broken, however. It was just five or six miles to Weinshauks, and soon the main body of Pequot warriors was attacking. The English, burdened by more than twenty wounded, some grievously, couldn’t retreat. They’d made arrangements to meet their ships at the mouth of the Thames, just beyond Weinshauks, so they advanced through the heart of the Pequot homeland, falling into ambush after ambush. But as slow and clumsy as the primitive muskets were, the steady gunfire—combined with rear-guard skirmishing by Uncas’s Mohegans—was enough to keep the Pequots largely at bay as the exhausted Englishmen continued to march southwest.