PEQUOT WAR

PEQUOT WAR (1636–1637). Tensions between English settlers and Pequot Indians, who inhabited southeastern New England and had made enemies among many other Indian tribes, developed by the early 1630s. These tensions escalated when Pequots killed English colonists and traders in 1633 and 1636. After the murder of an English captain on Block Island in 1636, both sides began to prepare for further hostilities. While English troops arrived to strengthen Saybrook Fort, located at the mouth of the Connecticut River, some Pequot Indians attacked Wethersfield further north, killing nine. This event led the general court of the recently settled river towns—Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield—to declare war on the Pequot Indians in May 1637.

Under English and Mohegan command, white and Indian troops allied against the Pequot and courted support from the Narragansett Indians. After a two-day march, the party surprised and burned the Pequot fort near present-day Mystic. Only seven Indians escaped the slaughter. English forces attacked a second Pequot stronghold two miles away the same night.

In response, hundreds of Pequot Indians decided to flee the area rather than stay and fight. The English and their allies pursued them and caught up with the group in Sasqua Swamp, near present-day Southport, Conn. The ensuing battle resulted in the capture of about 180 Pequots. The Pequots' Indian enemies adopted many of the captives into their own tribes and killed many of those who initially escaped. The war decimated the Pequot tribe as a formal political unit until the twentieth century, when Pequot descendants reorganized in southern New England.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Nobles, Gregory H. American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

George MatthewDuther/s. b.

See alsoColonial Settlements ; Colonial Wars ; Frontier ; Indian Warfare ; New England Colonies ; Tribes: Northeastern .

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

Pequot , Native North Americans whose language belongs to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock (see Native American languages ). The Pequot are of the Eastern Woodlands cultural area (see under Natives, North American ). Originally they were united with the Mohegan , but when Uncas revolted, the Pequot moved southward to invade and drive off the Niantic. The warlike Pequot, under their chief, Sassacus, had by 1630 extended their territory west to the Connecticut River. Numerous quarrels between settlers in the Connecticut valley and the Pequot led to the Pequot War (1637). The precipitating cause was the Pequot's murder of John Oldham , an English trader. The English under John Mason and John Underhill attacked their stronghold on the Pequot River and killed some 500 Pequot.

The remaining Pequot fled in small groups. One party went to Long Island, and a second escaped into the interior. A third, led by Sassacus, was intercepted near Fairfield, Conn., where almost the entire party was killed or captured. The captives were forced into slavery, mainly in New England and the West Indies. A few Pequot, including Sassacus, who managed to escape were put to death by the Mohawk. A remnant of the Pequot was scattered among the southern New England tribes; the colonial government later settled them in Connecticut. Today they live on two reservations in SE Connecticut. At Ledyard the Mashantucket Pequot established (1992) a casino, which has proved to be one of the largest and most profitable gambling establishments in the world; they also sponsor an elaborate tribal museum. In 1990 there were 679 Pequot in the United States.

Bibliography: See J. W. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut (1851, repr. 1988); K. I. Eisler, Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World's Most Profitable Casino (2001).

PEQUOTS

PEQUOTS, an Eastern Algonquian-speaking people, were located in what is now southeastern Connecticut when the Dutch began trading with them in the early 1600s. When the English replaced the Dutch after 1630, they sought control of trade and land and came into conflict with the Pequots in 1636. In 1637 the English and Indian allies attacked a Pequot village and killed some 600 Pequots. The war ended in 1638 when captured Pequots were sold as slaves or given to the English allies, the Mohegans and Narragansetts. The tribe's lands and name were taken away.

But the Pequots did not disappear. Instead, two tribes emerged, one at Noank and later Mashantucket, and the other at Paucatuck and later in Stonington. The two tribes continue to occupy their colonial-state reservations, although in the nineteenth century Connecticut passed laws reducing their acreage. The tribes have continuously governed their affairs, maintained their independence, and supported their members. In 1976, the Mashantucket Pequots filed a lawsuit to recover the land lost by state

action, and in 1983 they were federally recognized and their land claim settled. The other Pequot community also filed a land suit, then split into two groups, each petitioning for federal recognition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campisi, Jack. "The Emergence of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, 1637–1975." In The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation. Edited by Laurence M. Hauptman and James D. Wherry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Conkey, Laura E., Ethel Boissevain, and Ives Goddard. "Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Late Period." In Handbook of North American Indians. Edited by William C. Sturtevant et al. Vol. 15: Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

JackCampisi

See alsoTribes: Northeastern ; Wars with Indian Nations .

Pequot Indians, Algonquian tribe originally united with the Mohegans, which moved south to the Connecticut Valley and there dominated neighboring tribes. The war‐like spirit of the Pequot under Sassacus led to one of the most serious of the New England Indian wars (1637), after which members of the tribe were dispersed among other groups. The best account of the Pequot War is that of the English commander John Mason in his Brief History of the Pequot War, edited by Thomas Prince (1736). Another officer, John Underhill, described the war in his News from America (1638), as did the Rev. Philip Vincent in A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England (1638). William Apes was a Pequot.

Pequot War (1637) A war fought between Native Americans and White settlers in New England. The Pequot had lived peacefully alongside the mainly British settlers from 1620, but tensions increased on both sides. The British took over more and more land while the Pequot would only trade with the Dutch. In 1636 a trader was murdered, the Pequot were blamed, and the authorities destroyed Pequot villages. After several skirmishes, the Pequot camp at Mystic on the Connecticut coast near Rhode Island was surprised and set on fire, killing some 500 of the tribe, which did not recover. Poor colonist cooperation in this war led to the founding of the New England Confederation (1643).

Pequot or Pequod an Algonquian-speaking Indian tribe located in coastal southern New England. In the 1630s, the Pequots antagonized the other tribes in the area as well as the Dutch by trying to monopolize Indian-Dutch trade. Having failed to form an alliance with the English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, In 1637, the Pequot sachem Sassacus and his followers were attacked by the English and some Narragansetts and Mohegans and fled to the Mohawks who subsequently betrayed them. The defeat of the Pequots opened Connecticut to English settlement.

Pequot War a short, sharp, and decisive conflict between English colonists in Massachusetts and the Pequots in 1636–37. Punishing the Pequots for the death of an English trader, Massachusetts militia attacked men, women, and children at the stockaded Mystic village, setting it ablaze and shooting escapees.

Pe·quot / ˈpēˌkwät/ • n. (pl. same or -quots) 1. a member of an American Indian people of southern New England. 2. the Algonquian language of this people, closely related to Mohegan. • adj. of or relating to this people or their language.

Pequot War. See Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans.