The Pequot Invasion of Southern New England: A Reassessment of the Evidence

The Pequot Invasion of Southern New England: A Reassessment of the EvidenceAuthor(s): Alfred A. CaveSource: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 27-44Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/366208 .

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The Pequot Invasion of Southern New England: A Reassessment of the Evidence

ALFRED A. CAVE

FORTY years after the Pequots were vanquished by the En- glish in a brief but bloody war, the Puritan historian

William Hubbard declared that the tribe was not indigenous to southern New England. Describing them as "a more fierce, cruel, and warlike people than the rest of the Indi- ans," Hubbard asserted that shortly before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Pequots had invaded coastal Connecti- cut from "the interior of the continent" and, driving away the peace-loving original inhabitants, "by Force seized upon one of the goodliest places near the sea, and became a Ter- rour to all their Neighbours." Hubbard gave no specific source for his claim but stated simply that the Pequot invasion "was commonly reported about the time when New England was first planted by the English."' Following Hub- bard's lead, historians of New England have generally described the Pequots as alien invaders, and some have devel- oped theories based on a "fact" they have failed to examine. Clearly an assessment of Hubbard's assertion is long overdue.

I A reading of Puritan tracts and chronicles from the ear-

liest years of English settlement raises serious questions about Hubbard's claim. William Wood, the first New En- gland writer to mention the Pequots, characterized them in

'William Hubbard, The History of the Indian Wars in New England, ed. Sam- uel G. Drake, 2 vols. (Roxbury, 1845), 2:6-7.

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PEQUOT INVASION: A REASSESSMENT 29

1634 as an "affable" people, "just and equal in their deal- ings, not treacherous either to their countrymen or the En- glish." Wood regarded the Pequots as indigenous to southern New England. In his analysis of Indian relations in the region, the Mohawks of New York and the Abenaki of Maine, but not the Pequots, periodically threatened the well-being of the Puritans' Indian neighbors.2

The English assessment of the Pequots' character changed drastically after tribal leaders became embroiled in a controversy with the Massachusetts Bay Colony when they refused to yield to Puritan demands to apprehend and surren- der the murderers of Captain John Stone, a disreputable West Indian trader, smuggler, and privateer temporarily operating out of Virginia who had been killed by Indians on the Connecticut River in 1633. The Pequots' failure to pay a substantial tribute allegedly promised to the English in negotiations at Boston in 1634 also exacerbated Anglo- Pequot relations, which were further inflamed by rumors of a Pequot conspiracy to attack English traders and settlers in the Connecticut Valley. Claims that the Pequots were shel- tering the murderers of John Oldham, a Bay Colony com- mercial agent killed by Narragansetts and Niantics on Block Island in 1636, finally led to a punitive raid against the tribe which soon escalated into a full-scale war.3 In justifi-

2William Wood, New England's Prospect (1634), ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Am- herst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 75-83.

3Assessments of responsibility for the outbreak of the Pequot War vary. Early New England writers, of course, blamed the Pequots, but some nineteenth-century scholars suggested that the war had been provoked by Puritan high-handedness and intolerance. (See, e.g., George E. Ellis's "The Indians of Eastern Massachusetts," in vol. 1 of The Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Windsor [Boston, 1880].) Most twentieth-century writers have been somewhat critical of the English, but Alden T. Vaughan, in New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), pp. 122-54, offered a spirited defense of the Puritans' conduct predicated on the assumption, based on Hubbard, that the Pequots were aggressive invaders who threatened not only the English but the peaceful Indians of the region. More recently, however, Vaughan, who first ana- lyzed the conflict in "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," Wil- liam and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 21 (1964): 256-69, stated that "I am less sure than I was fifteen years ago that the Pequots deserve the burden of blame" (see the revised edition of New England Frontier [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979], pp. 256-69, xxiv). Francis Jennings, by contrast, is absolutely persuaded of



30 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

cation of that war, early Puritan chroniclers created a new image of the Pequots as "the devil's instruments."4 They were described in narratives of the Pequot War as "vicious," "cruell, barbarous and bloudy" and were declared guilty of "intolerable wrongs and injuries" against fellow Indians and English alike.5

It is striking, however, that one searches in vain throughout that hyperbolic war propaganda for confirmation of Hubbard's invasion story. Contemporary sources contain not one line about a recent Pequot intrusion into southern New England. The Puritans had long been aware of conflict between the Pequots and other tribes in the region. Both Winthrop and Bradford recorded in the early 1630s that several "River Indian" sachems had invited the English to settle in the Connecticut Valley, but both concluded that the sachems' motive was to use the Puritans to regain the power they had lost to the Pequots. Neither Winthrop nor Bradford regarded the River Sachems as victims of an exter- nal aggressor but rather viewed them as "treacherous" con- nivers who hoped to manipulate the English.6 While Puri-

the Puritans' guilt. See The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976), pp. 177-227. Also critical of English conduct is Anna R. Monguia, "The Pequot War Reex- amined," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 (1975): 13-21. P. Rich- ard Metcalf, in "Who Should Rule at Home? Native American Politics and Indian- White Relations," Journal of American History 61 (1974): 651-65, argues that the dissident Pequot sachem Uncas manipulated the English to further his own ambi- tions in an intra-tribal power struggle.

4John Underhill, "Newes from America" (1638), in The History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardiner, ed. Charles Orr (Cleveland, 1897), p. 166.

5Lion Gardiner, "Relation of the Pequot War" (1833), in History of the Pequot War, p. 119; Edward Johnson, Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence (1654), ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910), p. 147; John Ma- son, "Brief History of the Pequot War" (1736), in History of the Pequot War, p. 23.

6John Winthrop, Winthrop's "Journal History of New England," 1630-1649, ed. James K. Hosmer, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), 1:61; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1976), pp. 257-58. In a letter written to John Winthrop in 1636 or 1637, Roger Williams reported that the Nipmucks had once lived on the seacoast but had been driven inland by the Pequots (The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. John Russell Bartlett, in The Complete Works of Roger Williams, 7




tan writers would later seek to represent the Pequot War as a crusade to protect good Indians from bad, clearly the Pu- ritan magistrates initially placed the Pequots' local rivals, not the Pequots, in the "bad Indian" category.

On the eve of the Pequot War, the Winthrops, Roger Wil- liams, William Bradford, and others corresponded at some length about the presumed Pequot threat to English secu- rity, in part detailing diplomatic efforts to enlist Indian al- lies against the tribe. If a recent Pequot invasion of coastal Connecticut were, as Hubbard maintained, common knowledge, one would expect the English to have made use of the animosities that event would have generated in their overtures to the Narragansetts and Niantics. Lacking any such reference, those documents instead convey anxiety over the possibility that the Pequots might succeed in forging a pan-Indian alliance against the English. Far from being regarded as alien intruders, the Pequots, the correspondence demonstrates, had easy access to the council fires of all the neighboring tribes. Even the Narragansetts, recently at war with the Pequots (probably over control of European trade) welcomed Pequot ambassadors and gave serious consider- ation to joining them in resisting the English. The Narra- gansetts' decision to support the Puritans against the Pequots was made only after long deliberation.7

vols. [New York: Russell and Russell, 1965], 6:6-7). Later historians regarded the division of the Niantics into two branches living to the east and the west of the Pequots as evidence of a Pequot intrusion which had split the tribe in two. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the Pequots, at some time which cannot be deter- mined, lived in the interior of New England, but, as this article will demonstrate below, there is no persuasive evidence of an extra-regional origin for the Pequots.

7The extant correspondence relating to Indian diplomacy and the conduct and immediate aftermath of the Pequot War may be consulted most conveniently in the Win- throp Papers, ed. Allyn B. Forbes, 5 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 3:176-77,267,270-72,282-85,296-98,319-21,381-82,391-93,404-8,410- 14, 417-20, 426-31, 433-59, 478-83, 488-91, 494-96, 500-503,508-9. Included are letters from John Winthrop, William Pynchon, Jonathan Brewster, Henry Vane, Roger Williams, Lion Gardiner, Edward Winslow, John Higginson, Thomas Hooker, John Humfrey, Daniel Patrick, Israel Stoughton, Hugh Peter, and Richard Daven- port. The most important and detailed letters are from Roger Williams and may also be consulted in Works, 6:6, 7, 13, 17, 28, 46, 48, 52, 85, 98, 102, 117, 120, 135, 185, 201, 238, 385. See also Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence, pp. 162-63; Mason, "Brief History," pp. 19, 24.




With the single exception of William Hubbard, later seventeenth-century Puritan chroniclers and historians of New England also made no mention of a Pequot invasion of southern New England. Hubbard's rival, Increase Mather, echoed the conventional rhetoric about Pequot treachery and tyranny but said nothing about their purported extra- regional origin.8 The most diligent collector of Indian lore in Puritan New England was Daniel Gookin, the Bay Col- ony's superintendent of Indian affairs. In a book written the same year as Hubbard's, Gookin listed the Pequots in an enumeration of tribes indigenous to southern New England, and his other writings on Indian history and culture contain no references whatsoever to a Pequot intrusion into New England on the eve of English settlement.9 In a recent sur- vey of the cultural traits Gookin and other contemporary observers attributed to various New England Indian tribes, Dean R. Snow has concluded that the Pequots did not differ from their neighbors in any significant way.'0

The English settlers were not, of course, the first Euro- peans to observe the Pequots. Dutch traders made contact with the tribe several years before the Pilgrims landed, but Dutch sources also fail to corroborate Hubbard's story. Cap- tain Adriaen Block, exploring the New England coast in 1614, found the Pequots residing in exactly the same loca- tion east of the Connecticut River on the banks of the Thames where the Pilgrims were to find them a decade later.1 One Dutch chronicler related that the Pequots had defeated a grand sachem of the River Indians in a desperate battle fought several years before Dutch traders entered the

8Increase Mather, A Relation of the Troubles which have happened in New En- gland by reason of the Indians there. From the year 1614 to the year 1675 (London, 1677), pp. 24-25.

9Daniel Gookin, "Historical Collections of the Indians in New England," in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 1st ser. 1 (1792): 155.

'oDean R. Snow, The Archaeology of New England (New York: Academic Press, 1980), p. 85.

11Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), pp. 42-44.




Connecticut Valley in the 1620s, and in 1626 another Dutchman noted that all of the coastal Indians in eastern Connecticut and Long Island paid tribute to the Pequots.'2 Had the Pequots recently invaded the region, the Dutch, given their close trade relations with the Indians of the Con- necticut Valley and their own conflicts with the Pequots over granting rival Indians access to that trade, surely would have been aware of that fact and would not have ne- glected to report it in their dispatches and chronicles.

Despite the manifest lack of corroborating evidence, Hub- bard's story of the Pequot invasion has found its way into histories of Connecticut from Trumbull down to the present, and it has played a key role in interpretations of the origins of the Pequot War.'3 Hubbard's nineteenth-century editor, Samuel Drake, dealt somewhat obliquely with the problem of corroboration in a footnote, where he noted that Hubbard was an adolescent at the time of the Pequot War. Drake went on to argue, however, that Hubbard was "doubtless personally acquainted" with the Puritan com- manders and that his account thus should be accepted as a primary source, even when unsupported by contemporary documents.14 Most other historians of early New England have either ignored or failed to recognize the problem Drake finessed.

Some scholars have not only uncritically accepted Hub- bard's tale but added some fantastic embellishments of their own. Mathias Spiess, writing in celebration of the Connecti- cut bicentennial in 1933, claimed that the Pequots, prior to their invasion of the southern New England coast, had split

'2E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland, 2 vols. (New York, 1845), 1:149-50; Jameson, Narratives of New Netherland, p. 13.

'3To cite a few Connecticut historians, see Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete His- tory of Connecticut, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1818), 1:41; Alexander Johnston, Connecti- cut (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), p. 28; Robert J. Taylor, Colonial Con- necticut: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979), p. 11. The story's persistence in textbook literature written by even the most perceptive of historians is revealed in Gary B. Nash's Red, White and Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 82.

14Hubbard, History of Indian Wars, 2:6-7.




off from the Lenni Lenape, entered New York, and joined the League of the Iroquois as "members of Hiawatha's clan of Muchkaneek, meaning 'wolves.'" Following the logic of his fanciful reconstruction of Pequot history, Spiess could not understand why records of the period failed to explain the Pequots' refusal "to obey the orders issued from the great council of the Five Nations at Onondaga, after they had disturbed the peaceful tribes of Connecticut by invasion."15 Since there is no evidence whatsoever that the Algonquian-speaking Pequots were ever affiliated in any way with the League of Iroquois, the foregoing statement is an extreme example of the persistence of romantic fiction in the historiography of the Indians of New England. Most recent historians, of course, have been far more scrupulous. Since the only contemporary reference to a Pequot-Iroquois alliance, in a letter dated 1637, does not claim any actual connection but simply expresses fear that under pressure from the English the Pequots might seek such a union, the notion that they owed allegiance to Onondaga soon disap- peared from the scholarly literature.'"

A theory of Pequot origins only slightly more plausible than the fantasy summarized above, however, did hold sway throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. According to that theory, the Pequots were off- shoots of the Mahican, an Algonquian tribe of the upper Hudson Valley. Under pressure from the Iroquois in the late sixteenth century, a number of Mahicans were forced to abandon their homeland and migrate to the southeast, where they eventually displaced some of the indigenous inhabitants of coastal Connecticut. In support of this thesis, historians have pointed to references to an eastward migration in Pequot-Mohegan folklore and to the similarity of the tribal name "Mahican" and "Mohegan," the name Uncas's

'5SMathias Spiess, The Indians of Connecticut (New Haven: Tercentenary Com- mission of the State of Connecticut, 1933), p. 36.

'6Williams, Works, 6:13.




renegade Pequot faction assumed after 1636. Some have also pointed to the presence of the name "Mohegan" on Adri- aen Block's 1614 map of the southern New England coast as further evidence of kinship between the Pequots and the Mahicans of the upper Hudson Valley.

A historian of the Pequot War writing in 1936 summarized the prevailing view when he declared the Pequots alien invaders of New England, "the terror of all the tribes of Connecticut ... warriors who had come into the region, over-powering the native tribes and dominating them im- periously."'7 More recently, Alden Vaughan has used the Pequot invasion story to support his argument that the Pequot War was not a racial conflict. "The Pequot tribe," he wrote, "had incurred by its forced intrusion into New England the enmity of its Indian neighbors, and it had won a notorious reputation for brutality."'8 While Vaughan's pro-Puritan bias has been highly controversial, his acceptance of the customary account of Pequot origins elicited no comment from his reviewers. Even Francis Jennings, a se- vere critic of Vaughan and of Puritan historians such as Hubbard, left the Pequot invasion story unchallenged in his scathing critique of the standard historiography of the Pequot War.19 Only recently have a few historians familiar with some of the archaeological and anthropological literature begun to hint that claims about the Pequots' extra- regional origins may be without foundation."2 But to most historians of New England, that literature has been, and remains, terra incognita. Since no historian has carefully re- viewed all of the data from other disciplines relevant to this question, a hoary historical myth has been perpetuated.

'7Howard Bradstreet, The Story of the War with the Pequots Re-Told (New Ha- ven: Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut, 1933), p. 5.

'8Vaughan, New England Frontier, p. 123.

'gJennings, Invasion of America, p. 188. 20Monguia, "Pequot War Reexamined," p. 17; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and

Providence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 263-64.




II The first historian to employ linguistic evidence in an ef-

fort to corroborate the Pequot invasion story refused to accept the implications of his own findings. John W. DeFor- est's History of the Indians of Connecticut, published well over a century ago, remains a useful work, but among its scattered inaccuracies one finds the persistent notion that the Pequots were Hudson River Mahicans who had invaded New England "not long before 1600." Unable to find sup- porting evidence in the documentary record, DeForest at- tempted a rudimentary linguistic analysis. Having prepared a list of some sixty words from the Pequot, Massachusetts, Naugatuck, and Mahican dialects, DeForest discovered, to his dismay, that the Pequot language "bears a closer resem- blance to the Massachusetts and Naugatuck languages" than to the speech of the New York Mahicans. Nonetheless, he refused to abandon the invasion myth and only with reluc- tance added the qualifier "probably" to his claim that the Pequots were intruders from the upper Hudson Valley.21

In the seventeenth century, Wood, Williams, and Gookin commented upon the similarities among all the Algonquian dialects spoken in southern New England.22 Efforts to define the precise nature of the differences among those dialects have been somewhat frustrated by the paucity of adequate texts of the eastern Algonquian languages, most of which survive only in scanty and possibly inaccurate word lists, but the application of linguistic theory to an analysis of the surviving remnants of Mahican and Mohegan-Pequot (both better documented than most other dialects) quickly reveals beyond any reasonable doubt that the two dialects were "not closely related."' The leading authorities on the Pequot-Mohegan language, Frank G. Speck and J. D.

21John W. DeForest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, 1852), pp. 37, 40, 491.

22Wood, New England's Prospect, p. 103; Williams, Works, 2:20; Gookin, "His- torical Collections," p. 149.

23Truman D. Michelson, "Notes on Algonquian Languages," International Jour- nal of American Linguistics 1 (1917): 56-57.




Prince, reported in 1903 that their analysis of its structure "shows a more striking kinship with the idiom of the Rhode Island Narragansetts and with the present speech of the Canadian Abnakis than with the language of the Lenni Len- ape Mahican... it seems probable that either the Pequot- Mohegans were only distantly akin to the Mahicans of the Hudson River region, or that the Pequots had modified their language to a New England form during the years of their migration into Connecticut. The former theory is the more likely of the two."24 The subsequent discovery and analysis of additional texts, including the diary of Fidelia Fielding, the last native speaker of the language, did not alter that conclusion. Speck finally declared unequivocally that linguistic evidence offered no support whatsoever for the theory of an extra-regional origin for the Pequots. "We cannot trace any earlier habitat through identities of speech either among the Delaware, the Mahican, or elsewhere." He concluded that there could be no doubt that the Pequot language devel- oped within New England."25

Recent linguistic scholarship has offered further support for that conclusion. Ives Goddard's comprehensive analysis of phonological innovations in eastern Algonquian languages discloses greater similarity between the speech of the Pequots and the dialects spoken by the neighboring Narra- gansett and Massachusetts tribes than between Pequot and any other Algonquian language spoken outside New En- gland.26

The archaeological data is somewhat less conclusive but, on balance, also suggests that the Pequots were native to New England. Ceramic remains in southern New England are scarce, due to the climate, the high acid content of the

24J. D. Prince and F. G. Speck, "The Modern Pequots and Their Language," American Anthropologist 5 (1903): 195.

"Frank G. Speck, "Native Tribes and Dialects of Connecticut: A Mohegan- Pequot Diary," Annual Reports of the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology 43 (1928): 213-16, 222-23.

26Ives Goddard, "Eastern Algonquian Languages," in Handbook of North Amer- ican Indians: The Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington, 1978), pp. 72-76.




soil, and the destruction of sites as a result of post-contact construction.27 Remnants of seventeenth-century Pequot- Mohegan pottery have been found at Fort Shantok, Uncas's stronghold on the Thames River a few miles south of Nor- wich, Connecticut, at Fort Corchaug on Long Island, and at a few other isolated sites.2 Fort Shantok ware differs in some respects from the various "Windsor" ceramic types that predominated in Connecticut on the eve of English settlement. Archaeologists have been puzzled by those differences.29 Uncertain as to whether the Shantok style should be regarded as "a restricted development" or as "intrusive," Irving Rouse, writing in 1945, first noted strong similarities between potsherds from Fort Shantok and ceramic remains from two other sites, "one in eastern Massachusetts, the other on Long Island." Perhaps, he suggested, they were "separately derived from a common Iroquoian source." Rouse went on to conjecture that in the case of Shantok ware, the Iroquoian influence may have entered Connecti-

27Lucianne Lavin, "Pottery Classification and Cultural Models in Southern New England Prehistory," North American Archaeologist 7 (1986): 1-2.

zIrving Rouse, "Styles of Pottery in Connecticut," Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society 7 (1945): 4-7; Lorraine Williams, "Fort Shantok and Fort Corchaug: A Comparative Study of Seventeenth-Century Culture Contact in the Long Island Sound Area" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1972).

29The points of divergence are: 1) Fort Shantok potsherds are shell tempered; most, although not all, Windsor ware is stone tempered; 2) vessel fragments from Fort Shantok are thinner than Windsor remnants, less reddened in color, and have a waxy as compared with a gritty texture; 3) Fort Shantok vessels were probably globular, while Windsor ware was cylindrical or ovoid; 4) Shantok ware was also more elaborately ornamented, with more prominent necks, collars, and rim points than Windsor ware, and sometimes also contained features such as bosses, ridges, and representations of objects such as ears of corn, the human face, and human body parts not found on earlier New England ceramics; 5) the walls of Shantok vessels tended to slope inward, while Windsor rims were usually everted; 6) Wind- sor vessels had thick, flat tops, but Shantok potsherds revealed tapering, round rim tops; 7) Shantok ware apertures were often rectangular in shape, while Windsor pots were always round; 8) surfaces of Windsor shards were usually roughened, whereas Shantok surfaces were smooth. Irving Rouse adds to the list: "affixation, modelling and incision are found on the Shantok potsherds; the impression and dragging of shells seem typical of Windsor specimens. The designs consist in the former case previously of hatched bands and the latter, of horizontal rows of impressions or lines . . . the Shantok style has a limited geographical distribution . .. the Windsor style is more characteristic of Connecticut" ("Pottery in Connecticut," pp. 4-7).




cut through the intrusion of Mahicans from the upper Hud- son Valley. The first careful investigation of Connecticut ceramic evidence thus appeared to offer some support to the traditional belief that the Pequots migrated to southern New England from New York.

Rouse's later comparison of Fort Shantok potsherds and Mahican ceramics quickly shattered that assumption, however, and he was forced to conclude that Mahican pottery "cannot be ancestral" to the Mohegan-Pequot ceramics from Fort Shantok.30 Indeed, after further investigation, southern New England pottery of the immediate pre-contact period generally revealed some degree of Iroquoian influence. The plausible explanation of similarities between some Iro- quoian ware and Fort Shantok pottery, then, seemed to cen- ter less on Pequot intrusion into southern New England than on a lively inter-regional Indian trade.31

Recent analysis of Mohegan-Pequot pottery suggests, moreover, that its divergence from other southern New En- gland ceramics was initially overstated. Bert Salwen has pointed out that it so closely resembles contemporary, post- contact pottery from Narragansett and Wampanoag sites that it is highly unlikely that the Pequots initiated their stylistic conventions outside of New England, especially since divergence from the earlier Windsor style was a common regional phenomenon in the seventeenth century.32 Indeed,

3?Irving Rouse, "Ceramic Traditions and Sequences in Connecticut," Archaeo- logical Society of Connecticut Bulletin 21 (1947): 25.

31H. J. Brumbach, "Iroquoian Ceramics in Algonquian Territory," Man in the Northeast 10 (1945): 17-28.

32The new style in southern New England ceramics was characterized by a col- lared, sometimes castellated mouth, smooth surface, and globular or semi-globular body, with differences between Fort Shantok ware and other ceramics of the same period limited to relatively minor "modes of paste application and decoration." Comparison of Fort Shantok ware with five clay vessels of Narragansett origin found on Jamestown Island, Rhode Island, and with some shards from Great Neck Rock shelter near Kingston, Rhode Island, disclosed that, "in addition to their for- mal similarities, both groups are shell tempered and smooth on both surfaces, and in both cases, the linear decoration of the collar is impressed, rather than excised." Although Wampanoag samples are sparse and poorly documented, comparison with Fort Shantok ware revealed close similarities, which were also present in pot-




the most recent excavations have suggested that Fort Shan- tok ware was made by post-contact-period Mohegans, not Pequots, who, in the seventeenth century, crafted a closely related ware now termed "Hackney Pond." These findings have also lent support to Salwen's recognition of similarities between Shantok ware and other post-contact ceramic innovations in the region.33 In any discussion of Shantok ware, then, two facts must not escape notice: first, the "Shantok tradition" was apparently a post-contact development and, second, there is clear evidence that the distinctive decora- tions on Shantok ceramics, such as the "ear of corn" motif, were commonplace in post-contact pottery in areas as dis- tant from Connecticut as the upper Delaware and the Sus- quehanna River Valleys. Ann McMullen of the American Indian Archaeological Institute at Washington, Connecti- cut, has offered the provocative theory that the motifs on Shantok ware can be characterized as "female," as "an expression of women's emergence as leaders in a movement to reject the values, desires, and laws of the Europeans ... resistance to change, that is, safeguarding original values

sherds of unknown origin excavated at Guida farm near Westfield, Massachusetts. The conclusion to be drawn is that while Fort Shantok ware cannot be placed with certainty within established ceramic traditions, its antecedents will probably be found not in "an out of area source" but rather "in the earlier pottery of our own locality." See Bert W. Salwen, "A Tentative 'In Situ' Solution to the Mohegan- Pequot Problem," in An Introduction to the Archaeology and History of the Con- necticut Valley Indian, ed. William R. Young (Springfield, Mass.: Springfield Mu- seum of Natural History, 1969), pp. 81-88. Archaeologists have been uniformly frustrated in their efforts to trace Shantok antecedents. See Douglas D. Byers and Irving Rouse, "A Re-Examination of the Guida Farm," Archaeological Society of Connecticut Valley Bulletin 30 (1960): 36; Gustavus D. Pope, "The Pottery Types of Connecticut," Archaeological Society of Connecticut Bulletin 27 (1953): 3-10; Bert Salwen, "European Trade Goods and the Chronology of the Fort Shantok Site," Archaeological Society of Connecticut Bulletin 34 (1966): 5-39; William S. Simmons III, "The Ancient Graves of Conanicut Island," Newport History 40 (1967): 153-75; Ralph S. Solecki, "The Archaeological Portion of Historic Fort Corchaug, L. I., and Its Relation to Contemporary Forts," Archaeological Society of Connecticut Bulletin 24 (1950): 3-40.

aKevin A. McBride, "Prehistory of the Lower Connecticut Valley" (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1984), pp. 126-28, 159-69; Lavin, "Pottery Classifica- tion," p. 9.




[was] encoded in pottery." If McMullen's hypothesis is cor- rect, then it follows that the absence of pre-contact antecedents for Fort Shantok ware, and for Hackney Pond ceramics, in New England does not suggest an extra-regional origin for the two stylistic traditions; rather, as McMullen argues, both traditions were "expressions of ideas that began for native Americans only during the contact period ... the contact period is full of innovations and reactions that were different from what we see for the late Woodland- why should pottery be so different?"34

III Scholars reluctant to accept a New England origin for the

Pequots have pointed to oral traditions which seem to support Hubbard's claim that the tribe invaded Connecticut on the eve of English settlement.35 In his field work among the Mohegans early in this century, Frank Speck recorded the testimony of three aged Indian informants whose recollections of tribal lore appeared to confirm the belief that the Pequots had originally "come from the Hudson moving eastward to the Connecticut, then following the river to Long Island Sound." Fidelia Fielding told Speck that her forebears had once lived among the Mohawks of New York; he noted "this knowledge of the Mohawks and the ancient fear in which the latter were held, is still a live resentment in the Mohegan village." Another elderly woman related that "when a child of 7 years, my great-great aunt used to take my sister, brother, cousin, and myself on the hill near where the church now stands, point to the northwest, and tell us that was the way her folks came, and that we must never forget it, away to the hills of Taughanick, and that after

34Ann McMullen, "Shantok Pots, Mohegan Women and Power," unpublished manuscript, quoted by permission of the author.

35Mary Guilette Soulsby, review of Bruce Trigger's, Handbook of North Ameri- can Indians: The Northeast, in Archaeological Society of Connecticut Bulletin 43 (1980): 97-99.




several years, she used to impress upon our minds that was something we must not forget." A third informant related that from his great-great grandfather had come a story of his people's migration across a great desert and a great body of fresh water, and of conflicts with the Mohawks which finally drove them to the east bank of the Connecticut.36

Speck has often been cited in support of the thesis that the Mohegan-Pequot were recent migrants from the Hudson River Valley, but it must be emphasized that his work on Algonquian comparative linguistics led him to abandon that position. He concluded instead that the stories told him by his Mohegan informants were probably distorted reflections of an earlier, more widespread Algonquian migration myth, of which the Walum Olum, the great oral epic of the Dela- ware, was an expression.37 The continental scope of the third informant's migration story, paraphrased above, en- courages that supposition. The antagonism toward the Mo- hawks expressed in the other stories, moreover, probably had its roots in recollections of Mohawk raids into western New England in the early colonial period. Josselyn in 1677 reported that the Indians near the Massachusetts Bay Col- ony generally believed that when the Devil sent "infernal spirits" to plague them, they resembled either Mohawks or Englishmen.38

There are, finally, some highly revealing documentary records of seventeenth-century Indian testimony that un- equivocably discredit Hubbard's assertion. Depositions taken from a group of Pequot and Narragansett Indians in connection with land claims asserted by the Mohegan sachem Uncas indicated that all of the Indian witnesses, re-

36Speck, "Native Tribes and Dialects," pp. 216-18. See also his "Notes on the Mohegan and Niantic Indians," Anthropological Papers, American Museum of Natural History 3 (1909): 183-210.

37Speck, "Native Tribes and Dialects," pp. 219, 223. 38Joseph Josselyn, "An Account of Two Voyages to New England," in Massachu-

setts Historical Society Collections, 3d ser. 6 (1833): 91-92.




gardless of their tribal affiliation or attitude toward the claim, agreed that Uncas was descended from Pequot ruling sachems and that his forebears had lived on the Thames River "long before the Pequots were conquered by the En- glish." If the Pequots had in fact invaded the region within the historical memory of any of the neighboring tribes, one is hard pressed to explain why they maintained that Uncas and his Pequot ancestors "had been immemorably of and entitled to" land in Connecticut. One may argue that the Indians simply lacked any sense of history. But how can that be squared with Hubbard's claim that the Pequot invasion was common knowledge among the Indians of the region? Moreover, in 1679 Uncas dictated a statement of genealogy that traced his ancestry through four generations of Pequot sachems residing in Connecticut, some of whom, he noted, had intermarried with the ruling families of the Narra- gansett and other local tribes. If Uncas's recollection of his ancestry was at all accurate, his Pequot forebears must have lived in the region, and on reasonably congenial terms with their neighbors, for at least a century and a quarter prior to their first contact with the Dutch and the English.39

A reassessment of the evidence thus demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the Pequot invasion story was a be- lated embellishment to the Puritan propaganda of the Pequot War. The absence of corroborating testimony in contemporary documents written by Europeans raises doubts; archaeological and linguistic data suggest those doubts are well founded; and the depositions of seventeenth- century Pequots and Narragansetts settle the issue. The Pequot invasion of southern New England occurred only in the pages of historians who have echoed uncritically a

39Carroll Alton Means, "Mohegan-Pequot Relationships, as indicated by the Events Leading to the Pequot Massacre of 1637 and subsequent Claims in the Mo- hegan Land Controversy," Archaeological Society of Connecticut Bulletin 21 (1947): 26-33; Charles J. Hoadly, "Pedigree of Uncas," The New England Histor- ical and Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal 10 (1856): 227-28.




seventeenth-century writer who either misunderstood his informants or consciously spun a tall-tale to give added force to his demonic characterization of the Pequots. The persistence of that tale over the years is, finally, far more remark- able than the story itself.

Alfred A. Cave, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at The University of Toledo, is the author of "Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire."



Documents

The Pequot Invasion of Southern New England: A Reassessment of the Evidence