Mystic River Rising: The Pequot War and the Fall of a Nation

Along the coast of what is now Connecticut, a belt of wampum could carry a treaty, a marriage or a grief, and speak for a man two hundred miles away. Nobody spent one the way you would spend a handful of corn. Then Dutch and English traders arrived wanting beaver pelts and shell beads, and began to spend wampum as money. The Pequot held the shores where the quahog and whelk were gathered and the rivers that brought furs down from the interior, and that position made them the strongest people in southern New England when the English came.

Their great sachem was Sassacus, a man the English remembered for the way his gaze fixed on a stranger and did not move. In July 1636 the trader John Oldham was killed off Block Island, and Massachusetts sent soldiers to take revenge on the island and then on the Pequot coast. Within a year Connecticut and Massachusetts, with Mohegan and Narragansett allies, were at war with the Pequot, and on May 26, 1637, they surrounded the palisaded town at Mystic, set it on fire, and killed the people who tried to escape. Hundreds died, and most of the dead were women, children and the elderly.

Sassacus fled west toward the Mohawk, who killed him that summer. By the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 the victors divided the surviving Pequot among the Mohegan and the Narragansett and forbade the use of their name. What came after was captivity, the rise of Uncas and the Mohegan, and the long survival of the Pequot themselves. The treaty outlawed a name. The Pequot kept it.