to hunt beaver with the assistance of dogs. Elsewhere, two hunters have treed a bear while another pair course a moose in the background. Henri Abraham Chatelain, “Vignettes of Indians Hunting Beaver” (1719). Carte Tres Curieuse de la Mer du Sud, Amsterdam: 1719. Map reproduction courtesy of the Mapping Boston Collection at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.
At first, the Pequots may have taken advantage of their fortuitous placement along Long Island Sound merely to act as middlemen between the Dutch and Native communities lying farther inland. Pequot traders exchanged cloth and metal implements obtained from the Dutch and acted as a funnel through which the beaver pelts of southern New England flowed into the hands of Dutch traders. Soon, however, the Pequots sought to turn their commercial advantages into political hegemony. Direct access to Dutch firearms and other metal weaponry gave the Pequots a military advantage that allowed the nation to extend its authority over neighboring tribes.36 In 1626, Sequin, the sachem of the Wangunks, an Indian village near present-day Middletown, led a coalition of Connecticut Valley Indians against the Pequots in an attempt to break the latter’s monopoly on the Dutch trade in the region. Sequin and his allies were defeated after a series of “three desperate pitched battles” and thereafter required to pay an annual tribute to the Pequots. The Pequot demanded that a substantial portion of this tribute be paid in beaver skins.37
The strategic benefits that arose from the beaver trade spawned competition and then violence farther inland as well, in the territory lying between the Connecticut and the Hudson River. The Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had been attempting to establish their control of the beaver trade in this stretch of lands since at least the first decade of the seventeenth century. In 1628, a military offensive by the Mohawks, the easternmost of the Iroquois nations, defeated the Mahicans, whose territory had formerly encompassed the interriver region, along with their allies among the Pocumtuck, Sokoki, and Pennacook villages of the middle and upper Connecticut Valley. Reeling from this defeat, the Mahicans withdrew from the Hudson watershed to concentrate on the portions of their hunting territory that lay closer to the Connecticut. Intermittent violence followed for the next five decades. The Mahicans, Pocumtucks, and Sokokis repeatedly clashed with the Mohawks as both sides sought to control the beaver trade of the lands west and north of the Connecticut River.38 As the milliners of Europe ramped up their production of the beaver hats that had recently become the height of European fashion, violence engulfed the frontiers of Native New England.
Throughout the 1620s–1630s the Indian nations of the middle and upper Connecticut watershed—the Mahicans, the Pocumtucks, the Sokokis, and, one could add, the Nipmucs and Pennacooks—straddled three separate spheres of influence within the broader fur trade of the northeast. To the west were the lands that by 1628 had become dominated by Mohawk hunters trading with the Dutch operating out of the Hudson River. The growing political hegemony of the Pequots lay to the south. But trading opportunities also presented themselves to the north. The French founded their first permanent trading post at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 1615, just one year after Adriaen Block opened Dutch commercial relations with the Pequots. The Wabanaki nations inhabiting what would become Maine and southern Quebec maintained close commercial and political ties to the French from the early sixteenth century forward and participated actively in the fur trade. Western Abenaki nations like the Sokokis and Cowasucks maintained ties with the French and with other Native American middlemen in the north, providing their regional allies with an alternative market for their Connecticut Valley furs.
The fur trade tied the Indian hunters and trappers of the Connecticut Valley not just to European merchants and, through them, European customers and producers living across the ocean, but also to Indian manufacturers living to their south.39 Following their victory in the Mahican War of 1628, the Mohawks began extracting annual tribute from the defeated nations of the middle Connecticut Valley, a large portion of which had to be paid in wampum. Wampum was produced in largest quantities along the shores of Long Island Sound. During the 1620s, the Pequots began consolidating their control over these wampum-producing communities as a means of monopolizing trade with the Dutch. In the 1620s and the early 1630s, Iroquois tribute demands forced the middle and upper valley Indians to integrate themselves into the Dutch fur trade system by providing pelts to the Pequots in exchange for wampum. As a result, the tribes of the middle Connecticut Valley found themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place; militarily and politically envassaled to the emerging hegemony of Iroquoia to the west and commercially beholden to growing Pequot power in the south. Consequently, the nations of the valley welcomed the appearance of the English in the east, first at Plymouth in 1620 and then along Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, as an opportunity to free themselves from the control of their powerful neighbors.40
As they settled the New England coast in the early seventeenth century, English adventurers began to view the fur trade of the Connecticut Valley as theirs for the taking. Edward Winslow, the governor of Plymouth, led a successful trading expedition up the Connecticut in 1633.41 A second group of Plymouth traders, seeking to follow their governor’s example, founded a trading house on the future site of Windsor in the same year. The Dutch responded to these English incursions by establishing the House of Good Hope, a trading fort built on Podunk lands but granted to the Dutch by the hegemonic Pequots.42 Many Bay Colony leaders and merchants also began to agitate for a trade route into New England’s interior and access to the fur wealth that could be found there.43 A 1634 petition from a group of settlers eager to take up lands in what would become Hartford laid the matter bare: the Massachusetts Bay Colony needed to secure control of the Connecticut or risk losing out to either Dutch competitors or rival English colonists from Plymouth.44
A breakdown in relations between the Dutch and their erstwhile trading partners, the Pequots, finally triggered a shift in Bay Colony policy. In early 1634, a band of Pequots, jealous of their nation’s commercial monopoly in the southern Connecticut Valley, attacked a group of Narragansett Indians traveling to trade with the Dutch at the House of Good Hope. Incensed at this interference with their trade, the Dutch retaliated by imposing an embargo on their former commercial partners. In all likelihood, the Dutch reasoned that weakening the Pequots would allow them to establish a more direct commerce with the other Indian peoples of the region. In fact, this attempt to shake up the distribution of power within the fur trade of New England merely drove the Pequots into the arms of the English, with whom they sought to negotiate a new treaty of friendship at the end of 1634. In exchange for this friendship, Governor Winthrop recorded, the Pequots offered “all their right at Connecticut.”45
With the Pequots now in an uncertain position, the Massachusetts General Court moved to supplant Dutch influence in southern New England. In 1635, the court reversed its position and allowed the settlement of Newtown (later Hartford) on the north bank of the Little River (today’s Park River) at its junction with the Connecticut. This placed the Dutch House of Good Hope, located on the Little River’s southern bank, under the watchful eyes of English colonists. Also in 1635, the general court formally approved settlements at Windsor and Wethersfield (both of which had been founded without the Court’s sanction at the end of 1634). Adventurers backed by two wealthy Puritan lords founded Saybrook toward the end of 1635. Finally, wealthy merchant William Pynchon founded Springfield, the last of the original English Connecticut Valley towns, in 1636. Each of these towns owed its early settlement, at least in part, to English ambitions to dominate the beaver trade of the New England interior.
For the Pequots, the chance of a treaty with the English offered the hope of maintaining the status quo—trade with the English would replace trade with the Dutch and allow the Pequots to continue in their role as middlemen and regional hegemon. The English, however, viewed the treaty as an opportunity to bring the Pequots under their political heel. In exchange for peace and commerce, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required the Pequots to pay forty beaver skins, thirty otter skins, and four hundred fathoms of wampum. This small fortune would have given Massachusetts a strong advantage in competing for the trade of those more northerly Connecticut Valley nations who required wampum as tribute payments for the Mohawks. The Pequot delegates at Boston promised to bring the proposal to their
