Violent Cartographies
Pequot War
Before the war, armed encounters between colonists and Native Americans were primarily skirmishes provoked by individual acts of violence, theft, or kidnapping. A series of such events provided the pretext for the genocidal attack on the Pequots in 1637. The Dutch and the Pequots had engaged in a violent trade dispute years earlier. A Pequot sachem was kidnapped and then killed, even though the Pequots had paid the demanded ransom. Subsequently, an English trader was killed at the mouth of the Connecticut River in 1633. The English blamed the Pequots for the killing, but the Pequots steadfastly refused to acknowledge responsibility.
In September of 1636 a large armed force left Boston by ship and anchored in Pequot harbor (on what is now the Thames River between New London and Groton). In a meeting with the Pequots' emissary, Commander John Endicott demanded that those responsible for the murder be turned over. As in their prior responses, the Pequots said that the killers were in fact Narragansetts, that the trader, James Stone, had tried to kidnap some of that tribe's members, and that in any case, the actual killers were now dead.
Endicott refused to accept this version, and it became evident that the purpose of his expedition went well beyond a mission to punish those responsible for a crime. The Pequots were the most numerous and powerful tribe in the area and, most significantly, they controlled the production and distribution of Wampum, the small shell beads that Eastern nations used as both a mechanism for storing wealth and for effecting exchanges. Wampum had mainly ritual and cultural significance; the exchange of Wampum was not a money transaction. It was used to create sacred intra- and intertribal bonds. However, it came to be used inland by Euro-Americans to trade for Iroquois furs, which were then sold on European markets at great profit.[1]
... When the Pequots would not capitulate, and various skirmishes against their highly mobile group of warriors proved indecisive-- indeed, the encounters provoked their anger to the point where local settlers were endangered-- Captains John Mason and John Underhill abandoned the skirmish model and led a force in a surprise attack on the Pequot fort in Mystic with the largest concentration of Pequot dwellings.
Although the surprise was total, the Pequots fought back so effectively that Captain Mason gave orders to set fire to the village. He ignited one of the tepees himself, and Underhill's force detonated gunpowder at another spot. Then the English retreated from the fort to watch the intense fire kill most of the five hundred inhabitants. Those who made it outside the palisades-- men, women, and children-- were shot at or stabbed with swords, and many of those who survived the English attacks were killed by warriors in an outer ring of Mohawks and Narragansetts allied with the English.[2]