a demand represented a double insult to the Pequots. It would likely have beggared the nation to gather such a wealth of wampum, forcing the Pequots to lean heavily upon their tributary networks and likely stirring resentment. In Indian diplomacy such a one-sided payment of wampum held strong symbolic meaning, marking the paying nation as a political subordinate of the recipient. In effect, the Bay Colony’s leaders, through their demand, had declared the Pequots a dependent nation of the English. In the face of these insults, and despite the risk of being shut out of the fur trade, the Pequot council rejected the treaty’s terms.47
Their commercial and political rivalry with the Pequots shaped how English colonial officials reacted to the deaths at Indian hands of two English traders, the first in 1633 and the second in 1636.48 In late 1633, Captain John Stone of Virginia—a man who had formerly been banished from Boston for drunkenness and suspicion of piracy—kidnapped two Western Niantics, whom he forced to act as pilots for his pinnace while trading up the Connecticut River. The next night, while at anchor, a party of Niantics boarded Stone’s ship to rescue their captive comrades. Stone and the other Englishmen aboard were killed during the rescue, and the powder stores of the ship were accidentally set alight, causing it to explode. News of Stone’s death arrived in the Bay Colony in January of 1634. Many in Massachusetts and Plymouth took the view that Stone deserved his fate—one Massachusetts colonist even suggested that the Niantics had acted as God’s divine retribution against the sinful Captain Stone. Publicly, however, Massachusetts blamed the Pequots—to whom the Western Niantics were tributary—for Stone’s death and for sheltering his killers. The Pequots insisted that the Niantics were justified in their actions and, besides, had not known that Stone was English and instead thought they were killing Dutchmen. Within the context of the Anglo-Pequot trade negotiations taking place in 1634, English insistence on restitution for Stone’s murder provided the Pequots one more reason to reject the Bay Colony’s extortionary demands.49
In July of 1636, another English trader, John Oldham, was discovered dead upon his pinnace, which had run aground on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast. Oldham had been exiled from Plymouth Plantation in 1624 for conspiring against the colony’s government, but had subsequently settled in Massachusetts and prospered through trade with the Indians and other English colonies. Massachusetts officials strongly suspected that Oldham’s murder had been engineered by a group of Narragansett leaders angry that the Englishman had been trading with their Pequot rivals. However, Narragansett ambassadors insisted that these conspirators had fled Narragansett territory and been given sanctuary among the Pequots. English leaders proved surprisingly willing to accept this somewhat unlikely story, and the fallout from a Narragansett plot became the Pequots’ problem.50
A force of 90–120 men from Massachusetts first launched a retaliatory raid against the Indians of Block Island, and then, after being joined by troops from Connecticut, continued on to a large Pequot village at the mouth of the Thames River. The English demanded that the Pequots surrender those responsible for Oldham’s murder. In the process they also renewed their demand that John Stone’s killers be turned over and further insisted that the Pequots accept the extortionary terms of the 1634 treaty of friendship. Unable to satisfy these demands (the Narragansett Indians guilty of Oldham’s death were beyond their reach, the Niantics who had led the assault against Stone’s ship had since all either died of smallpox or been killed by the Dutch, and the demands of the 1634 treaty remained infeasible), the Pequots prepared for war. Their demands unmet, the English attacked the Pequots at the mouth of the Thames only to find their village deserted.51
These hostilities came at an especially disastrous time for the Pequot nation. Their villages had been particularly hard hit by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634, in which three out of every four Pequots died. Then, in the summer of 1635, a hurricane made ground in southern New England, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Hunger stalked New England from 1635 to 1636, striking European and Indian communities alike. Shortages in maize harvests may have placed further strain on subordinate villages who owed tribute to the Pequots, and the specter of famine likely contributed to the English rush to war. Raiding parties, especially those coming out of the hard-hit Connecticut Valley, made the seizure of Pequot corn supplies a wartime priority.52 Finally, the wealth and authority that came from the fur trade had not been evenly distributed among the villages and sachems of the Pequot nation. By the 1630s, a group of Pequot leaders who had been shut out of the inner circles of power, led by the sachem Uncas, had formed a splinter nation, the Mohegans, who sought their own commercial and military alliance with the English at the expense of the larger Pequot confederacy.53 Reeling from natural disasters and beset by enemies both without and within, the Pequots had, by 1636, reached the nadir of their military and political power.
Despite now being outnumbered by the English, the Pequots retaliated in 1637, leading to a full-scale war for political control of southern New England. Rival nations (most notably the Narragansetts), eager to see the Pequots defeated and their hold over the regional fur trade destroyed, allied with the English. Meanwhile, many of the Indian communities whom the Pequots had reduced to political subordination, and upon whom the Pequots depended for military assistance, abandoned their erstwhile political masters. The Mohegans became key allies of the English, while many Connecticut Valley villages chose to remain neutral in the conflict. English colonists waged a campaign of fire and wanton slaughter against the hopelessly outnumbered Pequots. The majority who survived the war were either taken captive by their Indian opponents or enslaved by the English. Many of the latter were sold to the West Indies, joining other victims of the transatlantic slave trade to toil on tobacco and cotton plantations, and perhaps contribute their labor to the development of the still nascent sugar economy. Only a small fraction of the nation escaped to reconstitute a community on the Thames River. Having violently expelled the Pequots from their position in the New England fur trade, English traders eagerly began a direct commerce with the Indian nations of the lower and middle Connecticut Valley.
English entry into the valley fur trade quickly disrupted relationships between competing Native American nations in the region. Competition between European traders—both between individual English traders and between the English and the Dutch—led to a sharp uptick in the quantity of manufactured goods flowing into the hands of Indian traders. At the center of this new English fur trade in the valley sat the town of Springfield. William Pynchon and the other founders of Springfield located their town at the site where the Connecticut River was joined by the Westfield River; the latter’s basin being especially renowned among early traders for the density of its beaver populations.54 The town’s location to the north of the other Connecticut Valley towns granted William Pynchon, and later his son John, an advantage in wooing Indian traders traveling down the Connecticut from the north. Since Springfield was located just above what became known as Enfield Falls, the Pynchons were well-situated to intercept Indian traders who otherwise would have needed to portage their canoes around the rapids. Writing in 1645, Edward Johnson, author of the first printed history of New England, declared that the fur trade at Springfield had already become “of little worth” through the practice of competing merchants “out-buying one another.”55 In 1650, the Dutch director-general at New Amsterdam wrote to the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England to complain that English terms of trade were far too generous. As a result the Dutch found their trade “damnified and undervalued.”56
Local Connecticut Valley Indian nations proved the winners—at least in the short run—in this competition between colonial European merchants. For English and Dutch merchants in New England, and the French farther north, their bidding war represented yet another front in the commercial contest being waged by their respective empires in the early seventeenth century. Indian nations in the northeast willingly and shrewdly exploited these interimperial tensions to their own gain. In doing so, they parleyed access to European goods—especially firearms and other metal weaponry—into military and diplomatic power within the shifting network of Indian alliances that defined political relationships in the region.
Local Indian leaders established new trading relationships with first William and, later,
