On both John Seller’s A mapp of New England, 1675 and John Foster’s 1677 A map of New-England, a stretch of land in the center of New England is marked: Seller calls it the “Pequates Country,” Foster labels it the “Pequid Country.” Homeland of the Indigenous Pequot nation, the Pequot Country between the Thames and Pawcatuck Rivers was the site of extensive competition during the seventeenth century. In May 1637, the General Court of Connecticut declared war against the Pequots in an attempt to seize control of their territory. On May 26, the colonial forces committed an unprecedented massacre by trapping and killing at least four hundred Pequot men, women, and children at their palisaded fort on the Mystic River. Throughout the seventeenth century, English colonists and Native communities took up arms, signed treaties, seized captives, forged alliances, and raided villages all to try and take control of this region. Why?

One of the factors that made the Pequot Country so contested was the role it played in enabling the tribute relationships that shaped how Southern Algonquian communities related to the land. Smaller communities regularly gave valuable items, or tribute, to Native American leaders known as sachems in recognition of their authority over a region. Tribute was therefore very important as a symbol of Indigenous territories. In his dictionary of Narragansett words, A Key Into the Language of America, colonist Roger Williams recorded the word “Púmpom,” meaning “a tribute skin when a Deere (hunted by the Indians or Wolves) is kild in the Water. This skin is carried to the Sachim or Prince, within whose territory the Deere was slaine.”¹

Tribute went beyond animal skins too. Wampum, finely carved beads made of quahog clams gathered from the Long Island Sound, sustained tributary relationships. Wampum was used as ornamentation for people of high status within communities, like sachems, as the shells represented the meeting of the land and the sea, a place of deep spiritual significance in Southern Algonquian cultures. Wampum beads were paid as tribute from communities to their leading sachems, woven into belts that made alliances between Native nations into material entities, used as dowries in marriages, to pay ransoms for captives, and as precious grave goods.

The Pequots’ tributary network covered about two-thousand-square-miles of land, including the homelands of the Mohegans and the Western Niantics, peoples who lived between the Connecticut and Thames Rivers, and Native communities on Long Island. In the Renneiu Algonquian dialect, the eastern end of Long Island was known as Paumanok, “land of tribute,” both for the abundance of quahog shells and the customary practice of tribute-payment among Native American communities.² Those nations with more centralized political structures, particularly rival groups the Narragansetts, the Mohegans, and the Pequots, dominated the production and distribution of wampum.³ In return for tributes paid in wampum, corn and animal skins, the Pequots provided their tributaries with European trade goods derived from their Dutch allies and offered protection from attacks by rival Indigenous groups, primarily the Mohawks, who lived west of the Hudson River. This security was especially important for the small, dispersed village settlements that dotted the Connecticut River valley, communities vulnerable to raids for commodities or captives from larger, more powerful Native nations.⁴

A world of wampum

Southern Algonquian communities collected whelk and quahog clams from the Long Island Sound and crafted purple and white wampum shell beads from them using awls and drills.⁵ Indigenous women were then typically responsible for stringing the beads into lengths, later called fathoms by Europeans.⁶ European colonists observed the process of collecting and making wampum beads. Roger Williams noted that Narragansett women performed “extraordinary great labour (even above the labour of men) […] in digging clammes and getting other Shelfish from the Sea.”⁷ Williams also came to the erroneous conclusion that wampum was Indian “coyne” or money. He compared wampum makers to European miners: “The sonnes of men having lost their Maker, the true and onely Treasure, dig downe to the bowels of the earth for gold and silver; yea, to the bottome of the sea, for shells of fishes, to make up a Treasure, which can never truly enrich nor satisfie.”⁸ The English shortened the Narragansett term wampumpeag (wamp- white, umpeag- strings) to wampum.⁹ Although their understanding of wampum’s true cultural complexity was profoundly limited, European colonists did recognize that it shaped the political landscape of the Northeast. As the Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks writes, wampum was “exchanged to create and maintain relationships as well as to reverse the destructive dynamic of war.”¹⁰ Wampum beads had the potential to convey great authority. After their initial exposure to aspects of Indigenous wampum diplomacy, European colonists soon tried to use wampum tributes to achieve positions of authority over Native people.

During the 1630s and 1640s Native nations outnumbered Connecticut’s colonists, so the colony decided to claim authority over whole Indigenous communities through agreements with leading sachems, rather than trying to enforce the subjection of individual Indians. Connecticut’s leaders believed that Indigenous communities could be a valuable resource rather than just a dangerous liability. They wanted to take over the Pequots’ powerful network. The English envisioned themselves at the head of a tributary network stretching up the river valley towards Springfield and Deerfield, south into the Pequot homelands, and across the Long Island Sound to the Montauketts and Shinnecocks.

In May 1637 the General Court in Connecticut declared an offensive war against the Pequot and raised a militia of ninety men for the war effort: thirty from Windsor, forty-two from Hartford, and eighteen from Wethersfield. They also draw on Mohegan and Narragansett forces who were keen to overthrow the Pequots’ domination of the Connecticut River Valley and incorporate the Pequots’ tributary network into their own communities.¹¹

On May 26, the colonial forces committed an unprecedented massacre by trapping Pequot men, women, and children at their palisaded fort on the Mystic River. The colonists and their Native allies, the Narragansetts and Mohegans, first attempted to overwhelm the fort using swords and muskets. When this proved unsuccessful, Captains John Mason and John Underhill set the village on fire, ordering their troops to surround the fort and kill all who attempted to escape. They murdered at least four hundred Pequots, with some estimates rising as high as seven hundred. Historian Alfred Cave describes the Mystic Massacre as “an act of terrorism intended to break Pequot morale.” English-allied Narragansetts present expressed horror at the ferocity of the attack and the decision to murder women and children rather than take them as captives who could be absorbed into Native communities.¹²

Connecticut attempted to cement their status as inheritors of the Pequots’ tributary network and control the Pequot Country. In 1638, they used the Treaty of Hartford to end the war and demand that the Mohegans and Narragansetts pay Connecticut an annual tribute of wampum on behalf of the surviving Pequots living under their jurisdiction. These tribute payments of corn and wampum would help the colony survive its early years of hunger and would also act as a symbol of colonial authority over local Native communities. Tribute helped to reconcile Connecticut colonists’ reality–their small population, their weakness compared to Massachusetts, and their hunger–with their ambitions for an expansive agricultural settler colony. Throughout the seventeenth century Connecticut continued to demand Native tribute payments and used the profits to bolster the colonial state by paying soldiers, interpreters, and informants using tribute wampum.

Pequot land reclamation

The community of Pequot refugees who survived the Pequot War wanted to regain their homelands. One of their leaders, Robin Cassacinamon, launched a campaign of petitions and tribute payments to try and win over influential English allies. Many English colonists wanted ownership of the land itself, but some leaders decided that making the Pequot survivors their tributaries was a more strategic move because Native populations had valuable connections, resources, and knowledge that could be used to sustain the fledgling colony of Connecticut.

Despite a series of promises from colonial leadership, in 1650 Robin Cassacinamon and the Pequots were still without a dedicated area of land set aside for them. Indeed, some Pequots complained that English colonists near New London had threatened to sell them into slavery in “the Sugar Country”—the Caribbean—if the Pequots did not leave “the Pequot Country.”¹³ In order to preserve this valuable tributary community, in May 1651 the General Court in Connecticut granted the Pequots 500 acres on the Noank peninsula. This land had been earmarked for colonial soldiers as a reward for service during the Pequot War, so the Court negotiated an exchange: the Pequots could occupy this land, and the soldiers would receive equivalent land grants elsewhere. Eventually the colony would take away this Noank grant and lay out the Mashantucket Reservation instead. Another prominent Pequot leader called Harman Garrett was facing similar violence and intransigence from English settlers further to east near Pawcatuck. This band of Eastern Pequots also campaigned in front of English colonial leaders and secured a reservation near North Stonington in 1683.

To learn more about Pequot communities’ onoging fight to hold onto their land in the face of encroaching English settlement, explore the websites and resources of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation.

The maps from John Foster and John Seller offer a particular perspective on the world of seventeenth century northeastern colonial America, revealing how cartographers in Boston and London conceived of so-called “Pequot Country.” At the same time, the phrase “Pequot Country” conceals as much as it reveals. In order to understand the history of this place, we have to go deeper into the relationships that shaped communities’ connection to the land. Asking questions about the way Native nations are depicted on colonial maps helps us to better understand New England as a place of exploitation and settler colonialism. These questions also point us to another conclusion: this region was the location of a creative variety of Indigenous resistance strategies, including the Pequots’ use of tribute as part of their homeland reclamation campaigns.

Alice King is … …

Notes