Reading the English: Uncas and the Making of Native Connecticut

On the tidal river the English would name the Thames, corn went into the ground when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel's ear, three or four kernels to a hill with a fish buried beneath. Men built weirs of lashed saplings across the channel and waited for the alewives and the sturgeon. The people along that river were Pequot and Mohegan, branches of one trunk, married into the same families and speaking one language in different accents, and around 1600 the split between them was still taking shape.

Uncas did much to shape it. A sachem with a claim to Pequot leadership, he broke away, made himself the ally of the English newcomers, and in 1637 brought his warriors into the Pequot War on the English side, including the attack on the fort at Mystic where hundreds of Pequot men, women and children died. For more than four decades after that he played the colonies against his Native rivals and his rivals against the colonies, and turned a small breakaway band into a people the English could not ignore.

His people's troubles outlived him: succession fights among his sons, a reservation fenced and whittled away, the Mohegan minister Samson Occom raising money in England for an Indian school that his mentor turned into Dartmouth College, the long decades when Connecticut treated the tribe as a remnant, and federal recognition at last in 1994. Whether Uncas saved his people or betrayed his neighbors is an argument New England has never finished.