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Updated: May 10, 2025
The Narragansets and the Mohegans now became very valiant, and eagerly hunted through the woods for the few straggling Pequots who remained. Quite a number they killed, and brought their gory heads as trophies to Windsor and to Hartford. The Pequots had been so demoniac in their cruelty that the colonists had almost ceased to regard them as human beings.
One route to the new territory by Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland route through Massachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1633, by one John Oldham, who was murdered by the Pequots two years afterward.
But they could not be very merry, and the elder, who was sixteen, said that she slipped "behind the rocks and under the trees" as often as she could to pray God to send them help. At last, after all these journeyings, they were sent back safely to their homes in Wethersfield. Soon after this, Captain Mason and his company set out from Saybrook on their expedition against the Pequots.
He was a stern, reckless man, and quite ambitious of claiming independence of Sassacus, with his powerful section of the tribe. The Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansets all spoke the same language, with but a slight diversity in dialect. The Mohegans, with apparent eagerness, united with the English.
From this time on the fort was almost besieged by Indians who lay in ambush around it, watching and waiting for a chance to attack any of the garrison who might venture out. One day two men were "beating samp at the Garden Pales," not far from the fort, when the sentinels called to them to run in quickly because a number of Pequots were creeping up to catch them.
In the treaty into which he at this time entered with the Indian embassadors, the Pequots conceded to the English the Connecticut River and its immediate shores, if the English would establish settlements there and open trade with them. Accordingly, arrangements were immediately made for the planting of a colony in the valley of the Connecticut.
The two chiefs appealed to Massachusetts for protection, and were accordingly summoned, along with Miantonomo, to a hearing at Boston. Here we see how a kind of English protectorate over the native tribes had begun to grow up so soon after the destruction of the Pequots. Such a result was inevitable.
Of the Algonquin populations, the densest, despite a recent epidemic which had swept them off by thousands, was in New England. Here were Mohicans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Penacooks, thorns in the side of the Puritan.
For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the main well considered.
But the Englishmen would not answer. And the Pequots, never thinking that the Englishmen meant war, kept running on beside the boats as they sailed up the river. "What cheer, Englishmen, what cheer?" they kept repeating. "Are you angry? Will you kill us? Do you come to fight?" But still the Englishmen would not answer. Then the Indians began to be afraid.
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