Pequot War

Pequot War (1636–1637).The Pequot War originated in conflicts over trade and colonization in south‐central New England. From the early 1620s, coastal Indians supplied wampum (sacred shell beads, polished and strung in strands, belts, or sashes) to Dutch traders who exchanged it with inland natives for beaver pelts. The Pequots attempted in the early 1630s to control this trade but were resisted by the Narragansetts, Mohegans, and Dutch. Politically isolated, the Pequots allied in 1634 with the English colonists of Massachusetts Bay, only to find that the alliance encouraged English settlement in the Connecticut Valley and the formation, in 1636, of a new colony, Connecticut. Pequot alarm at this incursion was compounded after Massachusetts demanded restitution for the murder of English traders. When the Pequots denied the accusation, the colonies determined to punish them.

Fighting began in September 1636 when an English expedition burned Pequot homes and crops, after which the Pequots besieged Connecticut's Fort Saybrook. In April 1637 the Pequots raided Wethersfield, Connecticut, killing nine colonists and capturing two. With Mohegan and Narragansett support, the English attacked the Pequot town of Mystic on 26 May 1637. With most combatants away, Mystic's three hundred to seven hundred inhabitants were largely old men, women, and children, most of whom perished when the English burned the town. English and Indians routed the remaining Pequots by July. In the Treaty of Hartford (1638), surviving Pequots were divided as slaves or tributaries among the English and their Indian allies. The war secured Connecticut for the English and forestalled further Indian resistance in southern New England until King Philip's War in the 1670s.
See also Colonial Era; Indian History and Culture: 1500 to 1800; Indian Wars.

Bibliography

Neal Salisbury , Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643, 1982.
Alfred A. Cave , The Pequot War, 1996.

Neal Salisbury