which helps to explain both the war’s timing and the importance that Stone’s and Oldham’s deaths likely played in English calculations: access to Indian corn.13
Recent scholarship suggests that the specter of famine stalked the communities of southern New England—native and colonist alike—in the years 1635–1636. The prospect of hunger loomed especially dire in the newly planted English towns of the Connecticut Valley. Native Americans in New England had first seen their food security threatened by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634. The disease devastated Indian communities, incapacitating and killing hunters and agriculturalists in the prime of life. Survivors, many still recovering from the ravages of illness, struggled to maintain their subsistence as best they could even as they mourned their dead. To compound problems, a hurricane struck southeastern New England in the summer of 1635, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Only a few years old, many English towns in Massachusetts and, especially, in the Connecticut Valley still struggled to achieve self-sufficiency in food and relied heavily on trade with Indian villages to stave off starvation.14
Although they may not have always been welcome in polite society, traders like Stone and Oldham served as linchpins within this nascent regional commercial network. Few other colonists possessed the experience, knowledge, and contacts needed to strike deals with Indian villages while also successfully navigating the often-treacherous waters of the New England coast. The waterborne trade carried on by a handful of merchants like Stone and Oldham provided a lifeline to the early settlers of the Connecticut Valley. In the 1630s, English settlements still only hugged the coast of what these newcomers aspirationally labeled “New England.” The territory separating the Massachusetts Bay from the Connecticut Valley belonged to communities of Massachusetts and Nipmucs and was crisscrossed by Indian paths too rough for English carts. The deaths of Stone and Oldham threatened to cut the English towns of the Connecticut Valley off from both Indian corn suppliers and any assistance that might otherwise be forthcoming from the English settlements of eastern New England. Worse yet, if the murders of Stone and Oldham signaled a new unwillingness on the part of Indian communities to trade away their own (likely diminished) supplies of corn, then the English towns faced the prospect of a hungry future.15
War offered the beleaguered towns of the Connecticut an immediate solution to their food shortages. As the corn trade floundered amid worsening relations with the Pequots, settlers instead filled their cellars with food raided from Indian stores. Early raids against the Niantics of Block Island and the Pequots at the mouth of the Thames, ostensibly to chastise those communities for their roles in Stone’s and Oldham’s deaths, yielded large caches of corn that the English hauled back to their towns. Connecticut militiamen continued their raids for corn into 1638, long after Pequot power had been effectively crushed. Along with captives/slaves, corn was one of the principal spoils that the victorious English divided up among themselves and their Narragansett and other Indian allies at war’s end.16
This victory bought the fledgling Connecticut Valley towns a respite, but did not free them from their dependence on the Indian corn trade. In early 1638, the English—riding high after their victory over the Pequots—sought to impose greater control over the provisions trade of the Connecticut Valley by fixing the price at which corn could be purchased from Indians at five shillings a bushel.17 Unfortunately, when William Pynchon, acting as broker for the Connecticut towns, attempted to buy provisions at this rate, he encountered few willing to sell. He came away empty-handed from successive visits to the villages of Agawam, Woronoco, and Nonotuck. It was only after pushing farther north to Pocumtuck that he was able to secure five hundred bushels of corn in exchange for three hundred fathoms of wampum. Despite his having saved the residents of Hartford from starvation, the Massachusetts government fined Pynchon for overpaying. A few months later, Captain John Mason of Connecticut (a leader of the previous year’s Mystic Massacre of almost five hundred Pequots, mostly women and children) managed to procure fifty canoes loaded with corn from Indians upriver “at a reasonable rate,” but only by approaching his Indian trading partners with an armed militia at his back. The Pequot War may have laid the foundations for English hegemony in the valley, but as long as the English remained at least partially dependent upon purchased corn to feed their growing towns, the Indian communities of the valley possessed a bargaining chip with which to oppose the unwanted encroachment of English authority.18
As mid-century approached, however, the bargaining power of Indian villages in the valley began to decline. Indian traders found they could no longer rely on what had historically been their most important exports to the English towns—food and furs. After peaking in the early 1650s, fur yields in the valley began a precipitous decline until the 1670s when the regional trade effectively came to an end.19 At the same time, the early English towns of the valley, after twenty years of building and plowing, finally achieved self-sufficiency in feeding themselves. After forty years of trading with Europeans, valley Indians had to find a new commodity to offer if they were to maintain access to the European goods to which they had become accustomed (kettles, blankets, coats, knives, hatchets, guns, etc.) and thereby maintain their economies, fulfill their diplomatic obligations to powerful neighbors like the Mohawks, and maintain good relations with the English by honoring the debts that many Indian traders had run up by trading on credit. Increasingly, European merchants demanded land—rather than the resources that Native peoples harvested from it—in exchange for their goods.
After the mid-1650s, networks of English merchant credit and declining beaver yields paved the way for divorcing valley Indians from their ancestral territories. Transfers of land had long been tied up with the fortunes of the fur trade. When Wahginnacut, the Podunk sachem, approached the English in 1631 he offered the land for a new English settlement (which would eventually become Hartford) as part of the entry price he was willing to pay to break into the fur trade. Similar transfers, and numerous smaller sales, provided for the founding of the other Connecticut River towns. After midcentury, however, land went from a relatively minor, supplemental commodity in the larger fur trade to the central focus of Anglo-Indian trade and credit relationships.20
A number of considerations made land sales an attractive choice for the Indians of the valley. Decades of epidemic diseases and warfare encouraged by the fur trade had led to depopulation and the abandonment of small scattered farming communities in favor of larger, centralized village sites. Land that had fallen out of cultivation and that lay far from the village center was of little immediate use to these smaller, consolidated communities. Hunting lands, too, declined in value as there were fewer hunters to exploit them, as beaver populations declined, and as conflicts with the Mohegans and Mohawks made them unsafe to venture into. Despite these circumstances, land deeds with Europeans often included clauses stipulating that the Indian sellers could still return to deeded lands to hunt, fish, collect wild foods, and sometimes even to plant crops. With such stipulations, Indian communities worked to protect their agricultural heritage and adapt to changing conditions in the valley even as they yielded to English demands. For example, when Chickwallop and his fellow sachems among the Norwottucks sold the lands that would become Hatfield, Massachusetts, to John Pynchon in 1653 they did so with the express understanding that they would “have liberty to plant their present corn fields” and on the condition that Pynchon would “plow up or cause to be plowed up for the Indians sixteene acres of land on ye east side of the Quinnoticott River.”21
Trading away lands that were not currently under use or that were being used suboptimally made sense for Indian traders and village leaders under pressure to maintain access to both European goods, which their communities had come to enjoy and depend upon, and to wampum, which was crucial for treating with Native neighbors and for demonstrating the trader/leader’s own social preeminence. Land sales brought immediate, bulk payments of wampum and European goods equal to several years’ worth of proceeds from the fur trade into a community without the uncertainty that came from harvesting an increasingly scarce resource like beaver. In 1659, for instance, Umpanchela, a sachem of the Norwottucks, leased (and later sold) a parcel of farmland along the Connecticut north of recently founded Northampton, Massachusetts, in exchange for goods worth about 250 pounds of beaver pelts. This was in a year
