50 Events That Shaped American Indian History, Volume I and II

1491		Scholars estimate that between 8.4 million and 112.5 million American Indians inhabit the Americas.
1492		On his first Atlantic crossing, Christopher Columbus may have introduced the first “Old World” infectious diseases in the Americas.
1492–96		Mass depopulation of Indians due to enslavement and diseases on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti-Dominican Republic) that had been colonized by Columbus since 1492.
1521		Smallpox epidemic contributes to the fall of the Aztec empire.
1633–34		Smallpox epidemic decimates Native American populations in New England and elsewhere.
1763		British officers consider the use of biological warfare (using blankets contaminated with the smallpox virus) against American Indians during Pontiac’s War.
1775–82		Smallpox epidemic devastates Native American tribes. On the Great Plains, this epidemic tips the balance of power in favor of nomadic tribes over sedentary tribes.
1796		In England, Dr. Edward Jenner develops cowpox vaccination as an effective way to prevent smallpox infection in humans.
1801		President Thomas Jefferson performs first vaccination on Indian tribal delegation led by Miami chief Little Turtle.
1832		Congress adopts an act to vaccinate American Indians against smallpox.
		Vaccination programs start the following year.
1833		Start of vaccination program for American Indian communities.
1837		Smallpox epidemic devastates unvaccinated tribes.
c. 1900		The American Indian population in the United States reaches its nadir with an estimated 237,000.
1921		Snyder Act provides funds for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to create health programs for American Indians.
1928		Meriam Report draws federal attention to the bleak social, economic, and medical circumstances on American Indian reservations.
1955		Indian Health Service created when the government moves health care from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Public Health Service.
1975		Indian Self-Determination Act allowed tribes greater control over health care programs.
1978		Indian Child Welfare Act ends foster programs that remove children from Native American homes. The act requires that children be placed in tribal homes if possible.
2000		Census records indicate that there are 4,119,000 American Indians/Alaska Natives in the United States (of whom 2,476,000 identify themselves as Native American, and 1,643,000 of mixed ancestry).

Introduction

Although warfare, removal, enslavement, and colonialism characterized the American Indian experience with Europeans, diseases introduced by the invaders had the greatest impact on American Indian populations. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they unknowingly carried deadly germs with them. Among the most lethal of these was smallpox. It is hard to estimate mortality rates caused by diseases, but scholars believe that Native populations may have declined by as much as 95 percent by 1900. The diseases not only devastated tribes demographically, but also weakened them politically, socially, psychologically, and militarily.

Even though Native American populations began to recover in the 1900s, American Indians continue to face health problems that are often related to the socio-economic and psychological consequences of colonization: tuberculosis replaced smallpox as the main killer of American Indians between the 1850s and 1950s, and modern-day diseases, such as diabetes, also appear to be related to poor socio-economic circumstances in many American Indian communities.

Pre-Contact American Indian Communities

Historians disagree on the number of American Indians living north of Mexico in 1492. Estimates range from 1.15 million to as many as 18 million. Native American population numbers reached a low point around 1900 with around 237,000 in the United States.

Pre-Columbian American Indians were not free of diseases. Paleopathologists compiled a list of health problems that afflicted pre-Columbian Native populations. Among the bacterial and viral infections suspected to exist before European arrival were streptococcus and staphylococcus (potentially fatal in infants), salmonellosis, meningitis, pneumonia, legionellosis, Lyme disease, tuberculosis, anthrax, botulism, tetanus, and influenza. Other types of infections included rheumatoid arthritis, (non-) venereal syphilis, pinta, yaws, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Colorado Tick Fever, New World Leischmaniasis, and different types of fungal infections. Some form of typhus and dysentery may have existed also. Tapeworms and other parasites were usually ingested from infected meat or from contaminated drinking water. Nutritional deficiency diseases included goiter and scrofula (scurvy). In addition to these diseases, scholars discovered many cases of broken bones that may have resulted from hunting accidents or warfare.

The disease patterns in the Americas were different from those in Europe, Asia, and Africa. “Crowd-type” diseases, such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, and the bubonic plague, were wholly absent from the Americas, possibly because American Indians rarely domesticated animals, which might be the original bearers of these infections, and because the relatively small populations in the Americas caused crowd-type diseases to die out with their hosts before they could be passed on to other communities (Newman 1976, 667–72).

Pre-contact diseases and accidents drastically reduced life spans. Average life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. Infant mortality rates were high. Many children did not survive the first five years of their lives. Death rates increased again between ages 18 and 30 because of complications during childbirth for women and hunting accidents and warfare for men. Only a small number of people lived beyond age 40. Mortality rates due to malnutrition increased during droughts, wars, and at the end of winter when food supplies dwindled. The situation was hardly better in sixteenth-century Europe, where life expectancy levels fluctuated between 21 and 36 years.

To fight pre-contact diseases, American Indians developed many treatments, including sweat lodges, purgatives, laxatives, and other emetics to rid the body of toxins; rawhide or clay casts to set broken bones; medicines from plants and animals; psychotherapy and dream analysis; and simple surgical procedures such as sucking disease-causing objects from a patient’s body. Because many Indian tribes believed that diseases were caused by witchcraft or taboo violation, the treatment often consisted of two parts: first the treatment of the physical symptoms (such as fevers and wounds), and the second included chants, prayers, and smoking to address the supernatural cause of the injury (Vogel 1990).

Post-Contact Diseases

Although quite efficient at treating a wide range of maladies, nothing prepared American Indian doctors for the onslaught of infectious germ-based diseases introduced by Europeans. Through the Columbian Exchange, Europeans introduced a large number of diseases into the Americas, including chicken pox, bubonic plague, yellow fever, whooping cough, cholera, mumps, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, influenza, measles, smallpox, and others. Often, several diseases struck American Indian communities at the same time, multiplying mortality by an unknown factor. Epidemics followed each other so fast that populations did not have enough time to recover. A succession of epidemics had a snowball effect upon the reproductive capacities of the group. These epidemics sometimes moved back and forth across the continent to repeatedly devastate communities (Thornton 1987 and 1997).

The new diseases, especially smallpox, caused tremendous physical and psychological anguish. Smallpox caused fevers, vomiting, severe head and body aches, and rashes that develop into painful pustules (the “pox”), which turn into scabs. The pustules often break the skin, causing matter to ooze from the lesions. At various stages in the infection, patients can die from pain, anxiety, lack of nutrition, and other complications. Those fortunate to survive would be scarred for life physically as well as psychologically (Fenn 2002, 16–18).

Aztec smallpox victims in the 16th century. Indians in the Americas had no immunity to diseases brought by Europeans. Researchers believe that smallpox deaths alone claimed more Native lives than wars and exceeded the deaths in Europe due to the Black Death. (Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University)

Other factors compounded the deadliness of epidemics, such as droughts and lack of food resources at the end of winter, which lowered resistance. Because epidemics struck whole communities at once, they often incapacitated the entire population, preventing men from hunting, or women from tending to their fields or looking after the sick and burying the dead. Secondary infections, such as colds and pneumonia, were common side effects that further reduced a victim’s chances for survival. Political factors, such as warfare, removal, enslavement, and the systematic destruction of Native resources such as buffalo, deer, and fish, also affected disease patterns and population decline. Such stress factors also resulted in lower birthrates, causing populations to shrink further. Whereas epidemics drastically reduced populations, these stress factors prevented them from rebounding (Thornton 1997).

Political, Social, and Economic Consequences

Diseases also led to social, economic, military, and political instability among American Indian tribes. Indeed, more so than warfare with Europeans and Euro-Americans, diseases changed power relations in the Americas. Diseases helped topple the Aztec empire. The murderous Ponce De Leon, Coronado, and DeSoto expeditions may also have introduced diseases to tribes north of Mexico. Established Pre-Columbian trade routes may have carried infections to other parts of the North American continent. Thus, when other European powers arrived later, they believed that they had stumbled upon a “virgin land” rather than a “widowed land.” It is possible that epidemics dealt the final blow to the Mississippian and other struggling civilizations in North America before Europeans entered these areas.

European settlers often saw the hand of God in the destruction of American Indian communities through diseases. In 1620, King James I of England believed that “by God’s Visitation … a wonderfull Plague” had removed the Native People, thus allowing the English to colonize the land. Some Puritan settlers in New England also believed that God had opened the lands for them in this way. For example, after a smallpox epidemic in 1634, Governor John Winthrop wrote, “God hathe hereby cleared our title to this place” (Jones 2004, 2 and 27).

Colonialism and diseases often went hand-in-hand. As a general rule, warfare often created conditions in which infectious diseases could spread more rapidly. Recognizing the horrendous and destructive power of smallpox, British General Jeffrey Amherst suggested spreading the disease to opposing Indian nations through contaminated blankets and textiles during Pontiac’s War (1763). Indeed, smallpox-contaminated blankets and handkerchiefs were given to Indian diplomats during this conflict with the explicit intention to spread the infection (Kelton 2015, 102–36).

Epidemics also changed balance of power relationships between Indian tribes. On the Great Plains, they tipped the balance of power in favor of nomadic over sedentary tribes. Sedentary tribes were particularly vulnerable to crowd-type diseases because as centers of trade they might attract infected people from surrounding areas. Furthermore, their families lived in compact towns, allowing contagious infections to spread more rapidly, and trash heaps attracted rodents that could carry diseases as well. In many instances, however, European and Euro-American traders carried deadly germs to these Indian nations. Still, nomadic tribes also suffered greatly from infectious diseases. For example, an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 Blackfeet died in the smallpox epidemic of 1837 (Jones 2004, 105).

Epidemics often caused political and spiritual crises as well. Regarding epidemics as a form of supernatural punishment, people sometimes lost confidence in their spiritual leaders, who had failed to prevent such a catastrophe. When survivors from different towns came together to form a new community, political tensions might ensue as the different groups competed with each other for supremacy. Factionalism often further weakened such groups in their struggles against enemies.

Native Americans responded in different ways to the diseases. Believing that diseases had supernatural causes, they often responded by strengthening religious traditions. They sometimes killed fur traders and other non-Indian visitors who, they suspected, had introduced the diseases by way of witchcraft (van de Logt 2013 and 2015). Certain tribes developed successful countermeasures, such as quarantining the sick (Kelton 2004), or preventative treatments such as variolation, in which active smallpox germs were rubbed on a superficial skin wound on the arm or leg of an otherwise healthy person to allow the body to develop resistance before the infection reached vital organs. After Edward Jenner’s discovery that vaccination with cowpox prepared humans to fight off smallpox, American Indians also quickly accepted this method of prevention. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson performed the first-ever vaccination of Indians on a group Miamis under Chief Little Turtle.

Woodcut of Native Americans suffering from an epidemic in colonial Massachusetts. Tribes faced waves of different epidemics every few years including measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, cholera, and diphtheria. (North Wind Picture Archives)

The U.S. government and certain missionary organizations sponsored the vaccination of American Indian tribes. The “Indian Vaccination Act” of 1832 provided $12,000 in funding to vaccinate Indian peoples against the dreaded smallpox. However, certain tribes were initially excluded from the program because they were considered “undesirable.” Furthermore, Indian agents, who were usually also fur traders, preferred to vaccinate tribes with whom they maintained lucrative trade relations rather than other tribes. Consequently, unvaccinated tribes would suffer tremendously in the smallpox epidemic of 1837 (Pearson 2003).

Disease Patterns after the Indian Wars

Although vaccination programs proved effective, new types of diseases became more prevalent after Indian tribes were confined to reservations. As natural resources dwindled and Native diets changed, diet-related sicknesses became a greater problem. Tuberculosis (a.k.a. “consumption” and “scrofula”) replaced smallpox as the greatest killer. Trachoma and kidney diseases were also common on the reservations, partly as a result of poor drinking water and sanitation. The poor quality of government-issued medical care aggravated the situation, in part by disallowing Native healing practices to continue. The alarming rise of tuberculosis coincided with the creation of reservations and the rising poverty on these reservations. Around 1900, Indians were three to four times more likely than whites to die of tuberculosis. In 1879, one desperate agency physician remarked bitterly that tuberculosis “is slowly but surely solving the Indian problem” (Jones 2004, 118).

Of great concern also was alcohol abuse resulting from poverty, demoralization, and the loss of self-esteem. In the late 1800s, two powerful revitalization movements sought to counteract the demoralizing effects of forced acculturation and alcohol abuse. The Ghost Dance promised that God would destroy the white people and restore the old ways of life. The peyote religion, with its ceremony aimed at restoring a person’s self-esteem, gave people the strength to combat their alcohol addiction. Although the Ghost Dance movement declined and almost disappeared after 1900, the peyote religion remains a viable force in many American Indian communities today (Stewart 1987).

Although the government increased the number of agency physicians from zero in 1837 to 81 by 1888, these were responsible for 200,000 patients. Over the next 40 years, Indian health statistics remained bleak. The 1928 Meriam Report stated that the “health of the Indians as compared with that of the general population is bad” and added that death and infant mortality rates were unacceptably high, with tuberculosis as the most serious health threat to American Indians. In the 1930s, death rates caused by tuberculosis had fallen to 41 per 100,000 among whites but remained as high as 775 per 100,000 among tribes in Montana. The Indian Reorganization Act provided more funds for Indian health care, but despite improvements since the 1930s, American Indian health lags behind the general population still today (Jones 2004, 171–72 and 195–220).

The Snyder Act of 1921 directed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to create health programs for American Indians. In response, the bureau created the Indian Medical Service (IMS). To increase its efficiency, the IMS transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Public Health Services of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1955 and was renamed Indian Health Service (IHS). Unfortunately, the IHS was often insensitive to the needs and cultural practices of Native communities. In 1970, the Navajos launched a plan to create their own medical school. The Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975 allowed American Indian communities to assume increasing responsibility for healthcare programs (Indian Health Service, n.d., 9–10).

Contemporary Problems

American Indian populations in the United States began to recover after 1900, although the Spanish flu pandemic of the 1920s as well as the Great Depression and World War II made the recovery sluggish. Improved health care, and the presence of a young and therefore reproductive population, contributed to the growth after the war. A significant part of the twentieth-century increase, especially after the rise of the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, can be attributed to the fact that more people are comfortable identifying themselves as American Indian. Today, there are some 2.5 million enrolled Native Americans and 1.6 million self-reported or racially mixed Native Americans. Depending on which number one uses, American Indians represent 0.9 percent or 1.5 percent of the total U.S. populations.

These encouraging numbers may obscure the fact that in matters of health and life expectancy, American Indians still lag behind white Americans (Sahota 2012, 12). Today, American Indians face a whole new range of health problems. According to studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), compared to any other ethnic or racial group in the United States, American Indians “are more likely to have poorer health, unmet medical needs due to cost, diabetes, trouble hearing, activity limitations, and to have experienced feelings of psychological distress in the past 30 days.” A 2006 study showed that American Indians have an infant death rate that is 48.4% greater than the rate among whites. They also have “the highest rate of motor vehicle-related deaths, one of the highest rates of suicides, and the second highest death rate due to drugs (includes illicit, prescription, and over-the-counter) compared with other racial/ethnic populations.” American Indians are also “among those with the highest prevalences of binge drinking, one of the highest number of binge drinking episodes per individual, and the highest number of drinks consumed during binge drinking.” In addition, American Indian youths between the ages of 12 to 17, as well as 18 years and older, “had the highest prevalence of current smoking compared with other racial/ethnic populations” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention link these issues to poverty, high-school drop-out rates, and other socio-economic factors. To make matters worse, 28.3% of American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN) under the age of 65 lacked health insurance in 2014 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2010, 1–20 and 2014, n.p.).

Table 1. U.S. Census Enumerations of Native Americans, 1900–2000

U.S. Census		Population

1900		237,000
1910		291,000
1920		261,0001
1930		362,000
1940		366,000
1950		377,000
1960		552,000
1970		827,000
1980		1,420,000
1990		1,959,000
2000		4,119,000
2000 Native American alone		2,476,000
2000 Native American and Other Race		1,643,000

1Probably an effect of the Spanish flu pandemic.
Source: Thornton 2008, 270.

Sidebar 1: Isolated Indian Tribes Still Suffer from Diseases Introduced by Non-Indians

Non-Native diseases continue to devastate Indian communities albeit in the Amazonian rainforests of South America. Brazil’s Indian affairs department (FUNAI) announced that in the remote Brazilian state of Acre, members of an isolated Amazon tribe had contracted influenza after making voluntary contact with the outside world. This flu virus is potentially deadly to these Amazon people. According to the FUNAI announcement, a government medical team treated the newly infected tribes people and gave them flu immunizations. The contacted people then slipped back into their forest home—a development that alarms many researchers. “We can only hope that [the FUNAI team members] were able to give out treatment before the sickness was spread to the rest of the tribe in the forest,” says Chris Fagan, executive director at the Upper Amazon Conservancy in Jackson, Wyoming. “Only time will tell if they reacted quickly enough to divert a catastrophic epidemic.” (Pringle 2014)

Some tribes link the rise of diabetes to dietary changes due to European colonization (such as the disappearance of the buffalo, the salmon, and certain Native crops), and to U.S. policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that led to “food scarcity, unemployment, dependence on government rations, and later, commodity foods” (Sahota 2012, 15).

Certain Native American psychologists attribute problems such as depression, suicide, homicide, and substance abuse to past traumas. Present-day Indians may not have experienced these past traumas first hand, but they often live with the consequences of colonization that include the loss of ways of subsistence, land, and cultural traditions. Denied full access to mainstream society and far removed from their own Native American traditions, Native American youths are sometimes lost in a psychological no-man’s land that can manifest itself in self-destructive behavior, including alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, or suicide. Whereas American Indian societies in the past had their own ways to respond to traumatic experiences, these old ways were systematically destroyed. Rites of passage designed to prepare young people to face the hardships of life, for example, were replaced by new and unhealthy forms of initiation that often involve alcohol, with devastating consequences (Duran and Yellow Horse Brave Heart 1998, 63, 65, 67, 68).

Western responses to these problems often made matters worse. For example, between 1969 and 1976, the Indian Health Service (IHS) performed thousands of sterilizations on American Indian women (in many cases, without adequately informing patients of the procedure), ostensibly as an effective remedy against poverty and economic deprivation. Racism and paternalism often lay at the bottom of these actions (Torpy 2000; Carpio 2004). Sterilization of Indian women sometimes caused hardships for Indian families, including higher rates of marital problems, alcoholism, drug abuse, psychological difficulties, shame, and guilt (Lawrence 2000, 410).

The policy of placing Indian children and infants in white foster homes also caused great harm. Apart from the emotional violence committed against Indian parents, Indian children disproportionately suffered from mental problems in adolescence and early adulthood. These problems caused mental health experts to call for a halt of the policy, which was effected through the adoption of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which stipulated that American Indian children could not be removed from their own cultural background (Duran and Yellow Horse Brave Heart 1998, 69).

Although medical facilities and access to health care improved greatly in the twentieth century, American Indian health continues to lag behind that of the rest of the American population. The main cause for this disparity is not genetic or behavioral, but rather the gap in wealth and power that American Indians have endured since colonization.

Biographies

American Indian Medical Practitioners

Like everything else, American Indian medicine changed over time. The introduction of hitherto unfamiliar diseases after European contact caused major adaptive problems. Sometimes Indians responded by completely rejecting white ways, including the white man’s medicine. In most cases, however, American Indians added non-Native treatments to traditional medicine. Thus, American Indian medicine today is both a mixture of traditional and modern approaches. In contrast, Western science-based medicine was more reluctant to consider the value of American Indian ways of healing. Not until recently has there been a shift toward greater integration with Native American medicine.

Sidebar 2: Comparing Health and Life Issues between American Indians and Alaska Natives and Whites in the United States

The below table shows figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), presenting how certain problems faced by Americans compare between Native Americans and whites in the United States.


Problem	AI/AN*Americans	White Americans

High-school drop-out rate	21.10%	10.70%
BA degree	13.60%	31.80%
Below federal poverty level	24.40%	8.70%
Divorced/separated	15.60%	10.00%
Smoking	32.70%	22.50%
Male moderate to heavy drinking	23.80%	31.00%
Female moderate to heavy drinking	11.60%	14.70%
Former drinkers	21.80%	14.40%
Maintain healthy weight	29.00%	39.00%
Obesity among women	39.70%	23.00%
Heart Disease	14.70%	no data
Hypertension	34.50%	25.70%
Diabetes	17.50%	6.60%
Hearing Trouble	5.50%	3.20%

*American Indian/Alaska Native.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Minority Health: American Indian & Alaska Native Populations,” http://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/populations/REMP/aian.html, accessed 18 September 2014.

Before the arrival of Europeans, American Indian doctors had developed effective treatments against numerous ailments. These treatments addressed physical symptoms and discomforts but also removed the supernatural causes of the ailments. Most Indian societies believed that diseases, injuries, and unexpected deaths were caused by taboo violation or witchcraft. In short, to American Indians, diseases and medicine could never be detached from religion and social conditions. Non-Natives often incorrectly referred to American Indian doctors as “shamans,” “sorcerers,” “witches,” or “conjurers.” Doctors stood in high regard in Native communities because they had been favored by the supernatural powers; they usually received their curative powers from (animal) spirits who bestowed their power on worthy individuals. Doctors with similar specialties or similar patron-spirits formed medicine societies. Sometimes, these medicine societies would compete with each other at ceremonies at which they displayed their powers.

Following the arrival of the Europeans, American Indian societies experienced major social, political, and demographic upheavals, in which diseases and acculturation problems were among the most traumatic. Apart from infections, health problems were usually associated with poverty, including poor nutrition, moral devastation, loss of self-esteem, and alcohol abuse. To reverse these problems, Indians sometimes advocated a return to traditional medicines and lifeways. Among the most famous advocates of revitalization were Handsome Lake (Seneca), Neolin (Delaware), Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), and Smohalla (Wanapum). Although their message often hinted at Christian doctrines of the Resurrection, these “prophets” usually rejected white civilization, and several, Neolin and Tenskwatawa especially, allied themselves with military resisters, such as Pontiac and Tecumseh. Still, American Indians quickly adopted non-Native medical treatments, such as quarantine and vaccination, and made these part of their own medical repertoire.

Following the Indian Wars of the west, attempts by the U.S. government to assimilate American Indians included discouraging Native medicinal practices. In the 1880s, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs banned traditional Native healers from practicing their skills. Although the policy was easier to proclaim than to enforce, it nevertheless led to a steady erosion of Native medicine that caused much resentment among American Indians. Not surprisingly, this period also witnessed the rise of new Native movements, especially the Ghost Dance and the peyote religion. Unlike earlier movements, they were more closely associated with Christian ideas and doctrines. Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, had a vision of Jesus, who promised to restore all land and resources to the Indians, as well as bring back to life all of those Indians lost since the coming of the whites. The peyote religion included Christian objects and incantations (crucifixes, Bibles, and prayers) and revolved around the communion with God through the consumption of peyote. The peyote religion proved quite successful in combating alcohol addiction. In 1918, the Native American Church was incorporated in Oklahoma. It has since become a fixture in many Native American communities, although the religion is still under pressure from some state governments.

The reservation period also witnessed a rise in the number of Western-trained doctors, including Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Sioux, 1858–1939), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai, 1865–1923), and Suzanne LaFlesche-Picotte (Omaha, 1865–1915). Though trained in Western medicine, these doctors became passionate advocates for Indian rights. They not only defended religious liberty and called for political self-determination, but they often also defended Native cultural and medicinal practices. Eastman and Montezuma became founding members of the Society of American Indians in 1911. They were also highly critical of the hypocrisy of Anglo-American culture. Suzanne LaFlesche-Picotte became the first Native American woman doctor in the United States in 1889 and became a lifelong advocate of temperance after her husband, Yankton Sioux Indian Henry Picotte, died in 1905 following a battle with alcoholism. Her support of the peyote religion, as an effective Native remedy against alcohol addiction, brought her in conflict with white agency doctors, and in 1913, she opened a hospital on the Omaha reservation. Despite their Western education, Eastman, Montezuma, and LaFlesche-Picotte, continued to take traditional medicine more seriously than their non-Native counterparts. They recognized the role of American colonialism in the health crisis among their people.

Modern-day American Indian doctors now often integrate Western scientific approaches with Native medical traditions, and they support the use of traditional therapies in conjunction with Western medicine. Indeed, there has been ample research that shows that patients benefit most from holistic treatments that focus on the physical as well as the psychological well-being of patients. Among the advocates of this approach is the Association of American Indian Physicians (AAIP). Founded in 1971 as an educational, scientific, and charitable non-profit corporation, AAIP’s mission is “to pursue excellence in Native American health care by promoting education in the medical disciplines, honoring traditional healing principles and restoring the balance of mind, body, and spirit.” Apart from offering educational programs and services, it seeks to motivate AIAN students to pursue careers in the health professions and biomedical research. Sadly, whereas the Native population in the United States has grown in recent years, the number of Natives entering the medical field has been lagging behind. Some voices suggest that this decline is a result of the perceived conflict between science-based Western medicine and American Indian traditional medicine. However, as history has shown, both forms of medicine stand to benefit much from each other.

Jeffrey Amherst and Biological Warfare

Lord Jeffrey Amherst (1717–1797) made a career in the British army during the imperial wars with France. In 1758, he led the successful British conquest of Louisbourg, and in September 1760, he helped capture Montreal, which effectively ended the French and Indian War (1754–1763). The victory at Montreal prompted his promotion to Major-General in the British Army and his appointment as Governor-General of British North America. In this capacity, he was confronted with the Indian “uprising” under Ottawa chief Pontiac in 1763.

Pontiac’s War proved taxing for the British. In 1763, Amherst suggested to Colonel Henry Bouquet that he infect the “disaffected tribes of Indians” with smallpox. “We must,” he wrote, “on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” At Bouquet’s recommendation, Amherst approved the use of blankets and other gifts to spread the disease: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate the execrable race.” It is unclear whether Amherst’s plan was ever put into effect, but there is strong evidence suggesting that blankets and other materials contaminated with the smallpox virus were distributed as gifts to an Indian delegation visiting Fort Pitt a few weeks before Amherst wrote his letters to Bouquet. Some historians, therefore, suggest that the British may have used similar tactics elsewhere, but usually kept these a secret because this kind of warfare was considered uncivilized and unbecoming of the British Army. Other historians, however, maintain that Amherst’s order was the exception rather than the rule.

Although racism was clearly a factor, it may not have been the primary motive behind Amherst’s plan. After all, biological warfare had been used in European history before without race playing a role. For example, during his Italian campaign in 1155, German emperor Frederick Barbarossa poisoned water wells with human bodies, and in 1495, the Spanish contaminated wine with the blood of leprosy patients to sell to French forces in Naples, Italy. Racism alone, then, may not entirely account for Amherst’s plan. Indeed, there were plenty of other considerations. First, the French and Indian war had been extremely costly to the British financially as well as in terms of dead, wounded, and permanently disabled soldiers. In 1763, British taxpayers suffered from war fatigue. Spreading smallpox through infected blankets was a cheap alternative to costly military expeditions. Second, Amherst’s suggestion to use biological warfare may also have had a tactical component: The Indians were difficult to find and even more difficult to fight. Hence, infection with smallpox might accomplish what a military campaign might not. Third, the plan illustrates that the Indians were such formidable foes that Amherst considered using such tactics even though they would most likely, perhaps even primarily, affect non-combatants such as children and the elderly.

Pontiac’s Rebellion caused some damage to Amherst’s reputation when Indian agents William Johnson and George Croghan criticized his handling of the war. Amherst was called to London for investigation but eventually received a new promotion to Lieutenant-General in 1768. Military historians generally remember him as an “organizer of victory” rather than as a talented field commander. The modern era has been even less lenient toward Amherst, who has been variously labeled as a white supremacist and a war criminal. In early 2016, the trustees of Amherst College voted to remove “Lord Jeff” as the mascot of the college, as well as to rename a college-owned hotel, which was named the Lord Jeffrey Inn. The college was named for the town, however, not directly for Lord Amherst.

If the use of biological warfare against Indians is clear during Pontiac’s War, there is no conclusive evidence to suggest it was used against Indians elsewhere in the United States. Nor is there evidence that American Indians themselves ever used biological warfare. There is, however, evidence that Indians used “witchcraft” as a form of “supernatural warfare” that appears similar to biological warfare. For example, Lewis and Clark met Arikara chief Kaakaáwiíta, who was renowned for his ability to “scatter an epidemic at a distance and upon villages that he wishes to harm.” In the 1850s, the Comanches accused the Kitsai Indians of “having blown or poisoned the waters that intersect their route to the north.” Southwestern tribes reportedly also used “witchcraft” against others, and around 1700, a confederacy of Pueblo tribes destroyed the village of Awatovi, reportedly to avenge Awatovi’s use of witchcraft against them. Although present-day scholars would not consider such techniques truly biological warfare, to past Indian societies there was effectively no difference between spiritual and biological warfare. Had they understood germ theory, they probably would have considered it biological warfare through witchcraft.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Smallpox Ravages Native American Communities in New England

In 1633–34, Puritan Governor William Bradford recorded the effects of smallpox epidemics on neighboring American Indian communities. Bradford believed that the epidemics were caused by the wrath of God, who wanted to punish the Indians for their “pride” and for conspiring with Dutch traders against English colonists.

I am now to relate some strang and remarkable passages. Ther was a company of people lived in ye country, up above in ye river of Conigtecut, a great way from their trading house ther, and were enimise to those Indeans which lived aboute them, and of whom they stood in some fear (bing a stout people). About a thousand of them had inclosed them selves in a forte, which they had strongly palissadoed about. 3. or 4. Dutch men went up in ye begining of winter to live with them, to gett their trade, and prevente them for bringing it to ye English, or to fall into amitie with them; but at spring to bring all downe to their place. But their enterprise failed, for it pleased God to visite these Indeans with a great sicknes, and such a mortalitie that of a 1000. above 900. and a halfe of them dyed, and many of them did rott above ground for want of buriall, and ye Dutch men allmost starved before they could gett away, for ise and snow …

This spring, also, those Indeans that lived aboute their trading house there fell sick of ye small poxe, and dyed most miserably; for a sorer disease cannot befall them; they fear it more then ye plague; for usualy they that have this disease have them in abundance, and for wante of bedding & lining and other helps, they fall into a lamentable condition, as they lye on their hard matts, ye poxe breaking and mattering, and runing one into another, their skin cleaving (by reason therof) to the matts they lye on; when they turne them, a whole side will flea of at once, (as it were,) and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearfull to behold; and then being very sore, what with could and other distempers, they dye like rotten sheep. The condition of this people was so lamentable, and they fell downe so generally of this diseas, as they were (in ye end) not able to help on another; no, not to make a fire, nor to fetch a litle water to drinke, nor any to burie ye dead; but would strivie as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burne ye woden trayes & dishes they ate their meate in, and their very bowes & arrowes; & some would crawle out on all foure to gett a litle water, and some times dye by ye way, & not be able to gett in againe. But those of ye English house, (though at first they were afraid of ye infection,) yet seeing their woefull and sadd condition, and hearing their pitifull cries and lamentations, they had compastion of them, and dayly fetched them wood & water, and made them fires, gott them victualls whilst they lived, and buried them when they dyed. For very few of them escaped, notwithstanding they did what they could for them, to ye haszard of them selvs. The cheefe Sachem him selfe now dyed, & allmost all his freinds & kinred. But by ye marvelous goodnes & providens of God not one of ye English was so much as sicke, or in ye least measure tainted with this disease, though they dayly did these offices for them for many weeks togeather. And this mercie which they shewed them was kindly taken, and thankfully acknowledged of all ye Indeans that knew or heard of y e same; and their mrs here did much comend & reward them for ye same.

Source: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1898), 387–389.

Mandan Chief Four Bears Blames Whites for Bringing Diseases

In 1837, an American steamboat carrying the dreaded smallpox virus spread the infection to the friendly Mandan Indians. An estimated 90 to 95 percent of all the Mandans perished in the epidemic. One of those who contracted the disease was chief Four Bears (Mato Tope), who scorned the whites for bringing the disease to his people.

My Friends one and all, Listen to what I have to say—Ever since I can remember, I have loved the Whites, I have lived With them ever since I was a Boy, and to the best of my Knowledge, I have never Wronged a White Man, on the Contrary, I have always Protected them from the insults of Others, Which they cannot deny. The 4 Bears never saw a White Man hungry, but what he gave him to eat, Drink, and a Buffaloe skin to sleep on, in time of Need. I was always ready to die for them, Which they cannot deny. I have done everything that a red Skin could do for them, and how they have repaid it! With ingratitude! I have Never Called a White Man a Dog, but to day, I do Pronounce them to be a set of Black harted Dogs, they have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers, has turned Out to be my Worst enemies I exhalt in, but to day I am Wounded, and by Whom, by those same White Dogs that I have always Considered, and treated as Brothers. I do not far Death my friends. You Know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even the Wolves will shrink with horror at seeing Me, and say to themselves, that is the 4 Bears the Friend of the Whites—

Listen well what I have to say, as it will be the last time you will hear Me. think of your Wives, Children, Brothers, Sisters, Friends, and in fact all that you hold dear, are all Dead, or Dying, with their faces all rotten, caused by those dogs the whites, think of all that My friends, and rise all together and Not leave one of them alive. The 4 Bears will act is Part.…

Source: Annie Heloise Abel. Chardon’s Journal at Fort Clark, 1834–1839, 124–25. Pierre, South Dakota: Department of History, State of South Dakota, 1932.

Further Reading

Bidgood, Jess. “Amherst College Drops ‘Lord Jeff’ as Mascot.” New York Times, January 26, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/us/amherst-college-drops-lord-jeff-as-mascot.html?_r=0

Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” The William and Mary Quarterly (3rd Series) 33:2 (Apr. 1976), 289–299.

Duran, Bonnie, Eduardo Duran, and Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart. “Native Americans and the Trauma of History,” in Russell Thornton, ed., Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 60–78.

Fenn, Elizabeth. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New York: Hill & Wang, 2002.

Jones, David S. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Kelton, Paul. Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518-1824. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

Lawrence, Jane. “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women,” American Indian Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2000), 400–419.

Pearson, J. Diane. “Lewis Cass and the Politics of Disease: The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832,” Wicazo Sa Review 18:2 (Fall 2003), 9–35.

Pringle, Heather. “Members of previously uncontacted tribe infected with flu,” Science Magazine, 21 July 2014. http://news.sciencemag.org/latin-america/2014/07/members-previously-uncontacted-tribe-infected-flu]

Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

Thornton, Russell. “United States Native Population,” in William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, v. 2, Indians in Contemporary Society, ed. by Garrick Bailey (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2008), 269–274.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. “Health Characteristics of the American Indian or Alaska Native Adult Population: United States, 2004–2008,” National Health Statistics Reports 20 (March 9, 2010), 1–20.

Virgil J. Vogel. American Indian Medicine. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Spanish Entradas and Mississippian Chiefdoms, 1492–1600s

Alan G. Shackelford

Chronology

1492		Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas and Caribbean.
1513		Ponce de Leon makes first recorded European landfall on Florida.
1519		Cortez invades Aztec Empire in Mexico.
1521		Spaniards kidnap a young Indian man from South Carolina’s coast and name him Francisco de Chicora.
1526		Ayllon attempts to colonize the coast of South Carolina. Francisco de Chicora returns to his people.
1528		Narvaez expedition founders near Tampa Bay, Florida.
1528–1534		Cabeza de Vaca makes his way overland from Florida to New Spain, peacefully encountering many different American Indian communities along the way.
1532		Inca Empire of Andes is conquered by Pizarro.
1539–1543		De Soto’s entrada leaves a swathe of destruction through American Indian communities as it marches through much of the Southeast.
1560		The Luna expedition returns to chiefdom of Coosa, previously attacked by De Soto, and finds it in political decline.
1565		Spanish found St. Augustine on east coast of Florida.
1566–1568		Pardo expedition revisits chiefdom of Cofitacheque, previously looted by De Soto, and finds it in political disarray.
1600s		Renewed European presence in the interior of the Southeast finds Mississippian chiefdoms replaced by a variety of American Indian confederacies that are multiethnic and multilingual.

The Entradas from Spain

The 1500s in American history are often referred to as the “Spanish century” because during those years, Spaniards were the most active European colonial presence in what would become the United States. Most of this activity originated from Spanish colonies previously established in the Caribbean and in Mexico. As a result, their presence was most heavily felt in the Southeast and the Southwest. Native Americans, in what would become the states of Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, would witness the arrival of Spaniards. Yet, despite their widespread appearance in Native North America, these Spanish activities resulted in only one permanent settlement in the sixteenth century, St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565. It would not be until the end of the 1500s that Spanish settlement resumed with the founding of New Mexico in 1598. The Spanish often referred to these efforts as entradas, meaning “entries” or expeditions to unknown lands. Yet, such an understanding of these events is overly benign from many Native American perspectives. For American Indians, these episodes emerged as extremely violent, if brief, episodes that left their world in disarray as it faced renewed efforts at European colonization in the 1600s.

Despite the fact that these expeditions resulted in very few Spaniards settling in the lands of the future United States, they did have a lasting impact on American Indians throughout the Southeast. When the Spaniards came to North America, they ushered in a whole host of environmental changes that are collectively referred to as the “Columbian Exchange.” The changes included the introduction of new biological organisms to North America. For instance, the Spaniards brought with them horses and pigs. Even as the Spanish expeditions retreated back to the Caribbean or Mexico, they unintentionally left numbers of these livestock behind to become the founding generations of wild horses and pigs in North America. Horses eventually would transform the lives of many American Indians, particularly on the Great Plains. And wild pigs became new prey for Indian hunters as well as inconvenient pests for Indian farmers throughout the South. But most importantly for Indian peoples, these invading Spaniards introduced new contagious diseases to which the Indians had yet to develop immunity. Diseases like smallpox, influenza, and the measles raced through Native communities. In addition to killing large numbers of people, these epidemics had profound cultural and social consequences for the survivors. As Indian farmers and hunters were debilitated or killed, communities became impoverished. When political and religious authorities died, traditional institutions that helped order communities weakened. And when elders died, traditional knowledge often disappeared with them before they could pass it to the succeeding generation. In a sense, these diseases served as the “shock troops” of colonization by weakening Indian communities and making them vulnerable to later colonial invasions.

Portrait of the Spanish conqueror Juan de Onate (1550–1630), who established the colony of New Mexico for Spain. He served as the colonial governor of New Mexico and led brutal Spanish expeditions in search of gold to the Great Plains, Colorado River Valley, and the Southwest. (Bettmann/Getty)

To understand what drew Spanish attention northward to the Southeast and Southwest, we need to understand how colonization in the Caribbean impacted American Indians there. As the Spaniards colonized Caribbean Islands, they turned to Indian labor in order to economically develop their colonies. Indians tended crops and livestock and mined for what little gold was present. This was forced labor that at times took the form of a labor tax but at others took the form of slavery. The conditions in which this was done were horrific. Often food was very limited as Indian farmers struggled to feed both themselves and their Spanish overlords. Spaniards did not hesitate in using violence to motivate and intimidate their new Indian subjects. Throughout this period, the presence of both the Spanish Crown and the Church were weak, so there were initially few institutional limits on the exploitation and abuse of Indians by new and often desperate colonists. Finally into this desperate atmosphere was added an array of deadly, new diseases. As a result, the Indian labor force upon which the Spanish were dependent began to die at a dramatic rate.

Sidebar 1: The Columbian Exchange

The “Columbian exchange” is a term coined by the historian Alfred Crosby to refer to the biological exchange that occurred across the Atlantic Ocean after 1492. The exchange included plants and animals, including important bacterial and viral infectious diseases. The sixteenth century entradas of the Spanish were among the early agents of this exchange and were also witnesses to it.

Diseases were among the elements of this exchange that had an immediate and dramatic impact on American Indians. Because Indian populations had no experience with the diseases introduced by Europeans, they had developed no immunity to them. This meant that diseases that had relatively minor impacts on European populations were devastating when introduced to Indians. Additionally, these new diseases came to American Indian communities in rapid succession, giving them little respite between epidemics. The records of the de Soto entrada included encounters with Indians who reported that epidemics had recently struck their communities, suggesting that new diseases were already on North American shores by 1540. The records reveal that several Spaniards were ill during the entrada’s march, suggesting these Spaniards were themselves potentially sources of new disease-causing microbes.

Another of the ecological legacies of the De Soto entrada very well might be the wild pigs, often called javelinas or “razorbacks,” once commonly found across the American South. Swine are not Native to the Americas and only made their appearance with the arrival of Europeans. De Soto brought a herd of hogs with him to serve as a mobile meat locker with which to feed his men. Not surprisingly, many of De Soto’s pigs escaped or were abandoned, and it is believed this stock became the foundational generation of the wild pigs that would eventually give so much character to the American South’s backwoods.

In response to the decline of their captive labor force, Spaniards began to kidnap Caribbean Indians from neighboring islands they had yet to colonize. Soon they devastated these communities, too, opening up new lands to settlement but also intensifying the demand for Indian labor. It was this ever present search for Indian labor in the early 1500s that brought the first Spaniards to the coast of continental North America. The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, famed for his search for the fabled “fountain of youth,” in all likelihood first came to Florida in 1513 seeking Indian slaves as much as youth. Given the ever-present threat of being kidnapped by Spanish slavers, it is not too surprising that Calusa Indian warriors killed de Leon when he returned to Florida in 1521.

It was not only the desire for Indian slaves that brought Spaniards to North America in the 1500s. The experiences of Spanish conquistadors in Mexico and Peru also inspired many Spaniards to look north to the American Southeast. The conquest of Aztec Mexico by Hernan Cortez in 1521 and the conquest of Incan Peru by Francisco Pizarro in 1536 made both men and the members of their relatively small armies very wealthy. Both the Aztec and Incan empires had great wealth in gold and silver, and they both presented large pools of labor upon which to build new, prosperous economies commanded by colonial conquerors. These expeditions differed significantly from those of the Spanish slavers. Slaving expeditions were technically illegal and were undertaken without sanction from either the King of Spain or the Catholic Church. Entradas were sanctioned by the King and had the tacit approval of the Church. Unlike the slaving expeditions, the conquistadors were supposed to operate within the framework of Spanish and international law. They were supposed to respect Indian political authorities and Indian rights. Yet, in practice there were no royal officials in America to enforce such expectations. Additionally, as it became apparent that great wealth was at stake, many Spaniards, including the King and his officials, found it expedient to ignore the aggression and violence exhibited by the conquistadors toward American Indians. As a result, aspiring conquistadors, probably best translated as “conquerors,” started looking for the next wealthy Indian empire to conquer, and not surprisingly many looked northward to the Mississippian Indian communities of the Southeast, with their large populations, monumental architecture, and complex political institutions.

In 1526, Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon led an expedition of Spanish colonizers to the coast of the Carolinas. Ayllon was motivated in large part by rumors of fabulously wealthy Indian communities that originated with a Catawba Indian slave from South Carolina named Francisco de Chicora. The expedition resulted in Ayllon’s death and ended in disaster as the survivors faced shipwreck, disease, starvation, and attacks from Indian communities angered by Spanish slaving. The survivors, finding no wealthy Indian kingdoms, limped back to the Caribbean colony of Hispaniola. But there were two important legacies from this dismal failure. First, Francisco and other Indian slaves escaped the Spanish and returned home with stories and intelligence about the men who came from the sea to kidnap Indian people and now threatened invasion. Second, the stories of fabulous wealth to be found among the Indians of North America persisted among the Spaniards.

Two years later, in 1528, Panfilo de Narvaez led another officially sanctioned entrada that ended in disaster for most of its participants. Like Ayllon, Narvaez was motivated by the pursuit of fabulous wealth. Narvaez had experienced the successful conquest of Mexico and had first-hand knowledge of the kinds of wealth that such a conquest promised. Landing near Tampa Bay, Florida Narvaez encountered local Timucua and Apalachee Indians who already had experience with Spanish slavers. The Apalachees initially were cautiously friendly toward the Spaniards. But after Narvaez attempted to seize an Apalachee chief as a hostage, they responded with flight and harassing ambushes. Needing to feed themselves, the conquistadors looted Indian food stores, leaving whole communities to face food shortages and possible starvation in the near future. Finding no gold, hungry, and constantly harassed by Apalachee guerilla warfare, Narvaez and his men made their way back to the Gulf Coast. Unable to locate their supply ships, they built rafts in order to float along the Gulf Coast back to the Spanish colony of New Spain in Mexico.

Several of the rafts with their crews came up short of their destination and washed ashore on the coast of Texas. Most of these men drowned, were killed by local Karankawa Indians, or starved. But a few survived and were taken in by local Indian communities as either slaves or servants. Among this handful of survivors was a Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca. De Vaca soon became renowned among the local Indian communities as a healer or shaman. In exchange for de Vaca’s services, these communities gave him shelter, food, and protection. Unlike the typical conquistador, he spent his life among the Indians utterly vulnerable to them and dependent upon them. And unlike most other conquistadors, de Vaca came to have great respect for the American Indians, who helped him make his journey by foot from Texas back to Spanish Mexico. Upon his return to the Spanish world, de Vaca became a critic of Spanish treatment of Indians, particularly their practices concerning slavery and forced labor. But although de Vaca reported that he found no wealth among the Indians he visited, tales of his epic journey fueled Spanish fantasies about fabulous Indian wealth to be found in the North and inspired further entradas.

Like Narvaez, Hernando de Soto was a veteran of a successful entrada, Pizarro’s invasion and conquest of the Inca Empire in South America. He parlayed the wealth and glory he had won in that conquest into a royal sanction for another entrada, this one into the North American Southeast. He planned to land where Narvaez had on the Florida coast, and he attempted to recruit De Vaca to guide the expedition. But de Vaca had encountered no fantastic wealth in North American. And he anticipated the brutality that was to be shown to the Indians and declined the offer. The successful conquests in Mexico and South America had proven certain tactics in dealing with Native populations very effective. These included the capture of Indian leaders under false pretenses of peace, the looting of Indian food stores, both to supply the conquistadors and to demoralize potentially resistant Indian populations, and the use of Indian captives and servants to keep ranging Spanish expeditions supplied. De Soto planned to use all of these as he aggressively pushed from the coast into the interior of North America in pursuit of wealth and glory.

De Soto’s quest for wealth failed, but he and his band of conquistadors traversed a sizeable portion of what would become the Southeastern United States and encountered a diverse array of American Indian communities. The region would never again be the same after what some have come to call “de Soto’s death march.” This conquistador invasion not only resulted in frequent violent encounters with Indians, the march disrupted Native economies, displaced sizeable Native populations, and destabilized political institutions and relationships across the broad region. Additionally, it is likely that de Soto’s men introduced new diseases to the region, further adding to the disruption of American Indian lives there. The consequences of this entrada were felt by American Indians long after it ended.

The aftermath of Hernando de Soto’s attack on the town of Mabila. The Battle of Mabila on October 18, 1540, between Choctaws and Spaniards resulted in the deaths of 2,500 Indians. European diseases devastated the Indian population, who had no immunity. Hernando de Soto led European expeditions searching for gold into Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas, where he died in 1542. (North Wind Picture Archives)

In May of 1539, de Soto and a force of over 600 men landed near Tampa Bay. The large numbers of horses, mules, and pigs he brought with him belied his plans for an extensive inland campaign. Amongst the local Timucua Indians, de Soto encountered a Spanish shipwreck victim named Ortiz, who had learned enough of Native languages to allow him to serve as an interpreter. The Spanish force did not cow the Timucua Indians, but they encouraged de Soto to seek wealth by heading north toward their rivals, the Apalachees. De Soto listened to their advice and occupied the Apalachee capital of Anhaica, near the site of present-day Tallahassee, Florida. The Apalachees abandoned the town ahead of the Spanish advance, allowing de Soto to winter there while sheltering in Indian homes and eating Indian from food stores. The Apalachees avoided large-scale battles and instead harassed the Spaniards whenever possible. The rich agricultural economy and the elaborate political structure of the Apalachee chiefdom impressed the Spaniards, but despite this apparent complexity, they had none of the promised treasure the invaders had hoped to find. This set a precedent for the Mississippian communities that de Soto’s entrada would encounter across the Southeast. They would exhibit a great deal of cultural, political, and economic complexity, but they would have no gold and silver.

Sidebar 2: Mississippian Peoples Warfare

We often assume that Spanish conquistadors had a tremendous military superiority over the American Indian peoples they encountered because of a technological advantage associated with European weapons. Spaniards brought firearms, steel swords and armor, and crossbows, all generally viewed as superior to the weapons of stone and wood wielded by Mississippian warriors. Yet, Spanish technology rarely gave the invaders an absolute advantage when facing Mississippian warriors. On many occasions, the conquistadors emerged from combat with a healthy respect for their opponents and their weapons.

Mississippian chiefdoms could muster large armies of thousands of warriors that dwarfed the force of de Soto that at its peak mustered some 620 men. At the Battle of Mabila, the Spaniards were heavily outnumbered by a force of some 2,000 to 3,000 warriors. Yet, the Indians who encountered the entrada tended to avoid large-scale battles on open ground. Rather, they preferred to wage small-scale attacks and ambushes when small groups of Spaniards were vulnerable, something that occurred frequently as the conquistadors scouted the land and scoured it for food and captives. Such skirmishes left the invaders particularly impressed with Mississippian bows, whose arrows could penetrate their armor.

The Spaniards came to realize the advantages posed by their weapons were dependent upon the contexts in which they were used. Firearms and crossbows could be used to their greatest effect on open ground when faced by masses of opponents, but Indian warriors rarely chose to meet the Spaniards in such an environment. In the close quarters of forests, thickets, or even Indian towns, such weapons were of much more limited use. Rather, steel swords were more useful in fighting with Indians in hand-to-hand combat. As a result, Indians often used surprise to attack small Spanish parties from cover with bows and arrows, while avoiding close combat where Spanish swords were of the most use.

From Anhaica, de Soto’s entrada marched northward through Georgia and into South Carolina with only rumors of wealth as its guide. Near the present-day town of Camden, South Carolina, de Soto’s force encountered the city of Cofitachequi, the largest Indian community it had yet encountered. The community contained some 1,200 residences and was home to some 6,000 to 10,000 residents. At the center of the community were a large earthen, pyramidal mound and a plaza. These structures spoke to Cofitachequi’s political significance as the Spaniards learned that the community was an important town in a chiefdom that included at least five other sizeable towns and that stretched from the Atlantic coast west to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. After de Soto professed peaceful intentions to a delegation of diplomats from the town, the town’s leader, a female chief, came out to negotiate directly with the Spaniards. De Soto demanded corn to feed his army and inquired about wealth. The female chief promised food and shelter but stated that they did not have any gold or silver. The Spaniards soon ate through the food provided them and assumed that the “princess” of Cofitachequi was lying because she wore a string of freshwater pearls. As a result, the Spaniards seized the Indian woman and ransacked the community, looking for wealth and additional stores of food. They found little of either, but they did find several items of European origin, revealing that Spanish slavers, conquistadors, and shipwreck victims were already making a mark on Indian people. The presence of these items perhaps corresponded to the epidemic that the Cofitachequis reported they had so recently experienced.

From Cofitachequi, the Spaniards headed west across the Smoky Mountains, into what is today Tennessee. There they followed the Tennessee River valley through the extensive and agriculturally bountiful chiefdom of Coosa. Again finding no gold or silver, the Spaniards settled for stealing food and coercing Indians into service as bearers to carry their supplies. South of Coosa, the Spaniards almost met defeat. In the chiefdom of Tascaloosa, the chief lured de Soto and much of his army into the palisaded town of Mabila. There, over 1,000 Indian warriors waited in ambush. The Spaniards successfully fought their way out of the town and the ambush, but in the process they lost most of their food, much of their equipment, and, more importantly, many horses, which were very useful in combat and scouting roles. Much of the Indian army was left trapped within the town, which the Spaniards set on fire. The ensuing slaughter was terrible, with upward of 3,000 Tascaloosa warriors killed. In their records of the battle, the Spaniards admitted that they rendered fat from dead Indian warriors to treat the wounded, since they had exhausted their supply of medicines.

From the devastated Mabila, the badly mauled entrada marched west into Mississippi and later crossed the Mississippi River into what is now Arkansas. For another year and half, the conquistadors battled and pillaged their way through the lower Mississippi Valley, hoping to find gold and silver. They encountered many more Mississippian chiefdoms but found no wealth. In the spring of 1542, de Soto died of disease. At that point, the remnants of the expedition decided to head overland through Texas to Spanish Mexico. But Mississippian chiefdoms and their rich stores of corn did not extend that far west. So, instead they returned to the Mississippi River and traveled south to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. There, they opted to follow the example of the Narvaez expedition and built rafts on which to follow the coast back to Mexico. In September of 1543, about 300 members, under half of the expedition’s original number, arrived exhausted and starving at a coastal Mexican town.

Following the failed de Soto entrada, the Spanish presence on the Southeast’s coasts continued, though the establishment of Christian missions overtook the efforts of illegal slavers. But the Spaniards remained largely absent from the region’s interior for almost two decades. In 1559, the Spaniards returned to the interior. In attempting to establish a colony on Florida’s coast, Spaniard Tristan de Luna sent expeditions northward into central what is now Alabama in order to establish alliances and to acquire supplies of Indian-produced food. There, the Spaniards retraced the steps of de Soto’s expedition through the once-proud chiefdoms of Tascaloosa and Coosa. But much had changed. Both chiefdoms had seen their political power and economic productivity decline after de Soto’s departure. At the same time, another small Spanish expedition pushed inland from South Carolina’s coast into what had been the chiefdom of Cofitachequi. Again, the Spaniards encountered a chiefdom that had fallen on hard times in the wake of de Soto’s visit. Its population had declined, and it lost control over communities that had once recognized its authority and paid it tribute. These expeditions, like de Soto’s, left no permanent Spanish presence in the Southeast’s interior, but they bore witness to the profound changes that Indian communities had experienced during the previous two decades.

Biographies

Francisco de Chicora

We have few records that give us insight into the lives of specific American Indians during the sixteenth century. While literacy was spreading among the Indian peoples in Mexico at that time, few North American Indians had yet to learn the literacy that would allow them to author their own historical records. The records authored by Spaniards and other Europeans are problematic. Spanish conquistadors were generally unable to speak Indian languages and thus could not accurately understand, much less record, Indian perspectives. Additionally, Spaniards often carried an attitude of cultural superiority into their encounters with Indians. This attitude left them unable to fully appreciate or understand the Indian cultures they observed. Yet, we do occasionally get glimpses into the life of an individual American Indian through documents written by colonizers. One such Indian man was known to the Spanish as Francisco de Chicora.

Chicora was the indigenous name the Spaniards used to refer to coastal North and South Carolina. Thus, after the Spaniards kidnapped a young Catawba Indian man from the coast of South Carolina in the early 1520s, they named him Francisco de Chicora in honor of his homeland. His baptismal name of Francisco indicates that he converted to Christianity and was baptized. Francisco’s capture was technically illegal under Spanish law, since he had not been captured in a “just war.” Yet, when presented with the fact, Spanish official Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon deemed that it was better to keep him in “civilized” captivity than to return him to “savage” freedom.

The practice of kidnapping Indians from the coast of North America was commonly practiced by Europeans during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While Indian slavery was technically illegal in the Spanish empire, its practice continued surreptitiously, and such captives were sold into slavery in the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean. But as Europeans began to plan to explore and colonize North America, such captives took on a new value. Europeans purposely targeted young men and boys whom they believed would be more susceptible to being educated in European ways. These captives were taught to speak European languages, converted to Christianity, and taught European ways. The hope was that these Indians educated in the European way of life would serve as translators, guides, diplomats, and missionaries on behalf of European efforts to colonize the continent. Francisco de Chicora’s experiences closely follow this model.

Francisco was taken to Spain, where his sponsor, Ayllon, used him to convince King Charles I to support efforts to colonize the coast of Carolinas. Apparently, Francisco had learned enough Spanish to demonstrate his conversion to Christianity and to convincingly tell the King’s court stories of fabulous wealth back in his homeland. In addition to Spanish language, Francisco appears to have learned enough about Spanish motivations to manipulate them into returning him home. In the wake of the conquest of Aztec Mexico, a conquest that enriched both conquistadors and the King, such stories were sure to attract interest. And since the successful Spanish conquest of Mexico had depended upon the cooperation of Indian diplomats and translators, Francisco very well may have thought that such stories would secure such a position for him and allow him to return home.

If that was his scheme, it worked. King Charles gave Ayllon a grant allowing him to colonize the coast of the Carolinas. In 1526, Ayllon’s expedition composed of some 600 colonists on seven ships, arrived off the coast of South Carolina. Among the colonists were Francisco de Chicora and several other kidnapped Indians from the region who were to serve as guides and translators. Almost immediately, Ayllon’s plans went awry. Francisco and the other Indian guides abandoned the Spanish party at the first chance, leaving them without important geographic knowledge and the cultural skills necessary to open peaceful relations with neighboring Indian communities. Several of Ayllon’s ships wrecked, including the one carrying most of the expedition’s provisions. Many members of the expedition, including Ayllon, died from disease. Adding to these difficulties, local Indians, spurred by their history with Spanish kidnappings and Francisco’s warnings, were hostile. Finally, the surviving colonists abandoned the effort to establish a colony and returned to Hispaniola in the Caribbean.

Although the colony did not endure, Francisco and the other liberated Indian slaves no doubt told enduring stories to their Native communities about the world of the Europeans. Such information was valuable intelligence in an era when Europeans could sail to and reconnoiter the Americas, but American Indians could not do likewise to Europe. When De Soto’s entrada marched into eastern South Carolina two decades later, Europeans were no longer strangers to the American Indians living there.

Lady Cofitachequi

In April of 1540, the de Soto entrada marched headlong into a trackless forest in pursuit of fabled wealth. Having spent almost a year traveling from the area of Tampa Bay in Florida to central Georgia, the conquistadors had encountered many American Indian communities but had yet to discover fabulous wealth. While resting and resupplying at the Indian chiefdom of Cofaqui, de Soto was informed that the chiefdom had a rival to the north. This rival was noted for both its wealth and the important role a female chief played there. Unfortunately, this fabled community, referred to as Cofitachequi, was several weeks travel away, and the intervening wilderness offered neither a well-marked trail nor local Indian communities that might provide both provisions and the bearers needed to transport them. Nonetheless, the Spaniards set forth for Cofitachequi and its famed female chief.

Over two weeks later, De Soto’s starving, bedraggled army emerged from the wilderness, arriving on the border of the chiefdom of Cofitachequi, near what is today Camden, South Carolina. While the Spaniards were uncertain of their own location, the people of Cofitachequi had anticipated their arrival for days. That they had not fled or taken defensive precautions is indicative of the confidence with which the people of Cofitachequi viewed their own position relative to that of the conquistadors.

Before the Spaniards could cross the river that stood between them and Cofitachequi, a woman carried on a litter was brought to the opposite bank of the river. From there, she boarded a special canoe equipped with an awning and cushions for her comfort. Servants then paddled the esteemed woman and her retinue across the river to the Spaniards. As she addressed the Spaniards, those accompanying her stood respectfully silent and still. She welcomed the Spaniards with gifts of animal skin robes and strings of freshwater pearls. Afterward, she ordered that canoes transport the visitors across the river. Once the Spaniards were in the town, she had half of it evacuated so as to house the guests. Large quantities of food were brought to feed the guests.

The Spaniards were struck by the dignity and apparent authority that this woman carried. They referred to her as the “Lady of Cofitachequi.” Their Indian interpreter, Perico, told them that that she was not the chief but rather a niece of the chief and that she had been sent to Cofitachequi to demand that it pay adequate tribute. Yet, the Spaniards continued to regard her as the ultimate authority in the community, in part because she so ably acted the part.

Despite the hospitality shown the conquistadors, they soon made themselves unwelcome. In their search for wealth, they pillaged Indian cemeteries. They also rapidly ate through the food supply of the community. As the Spaniards became increasingly belligerent in their search for food, the Lady of Cofitachequi fled the community. When the conquistadors turned to one of her trusted lieutenants to help locate her, he committed suicide rather than betray her. The Spaniards did succeed in recapturing the “lady,” and they forced her to accompany them as they marched west toward the Appalachian Mountains in search of yet another chiefdom of fabled wealth.

On the march, De Soto made it clear that the lady was his captive, but he did allow her to be accompanied by several servants. Despite being treated as a captive by the Spaniards, she continued to be shown deference by the Native communities through which they traveled, and she could still command the delivery of bearers and provisions. As the entrada entered the mountains, several African and Indian slaves took advantage and fled knowing that the rugged terrain would make pursuit difficult and time-consuming. The Lady of Cofitachequi, perhaps emboldened by the slaves’ examples or perhaps realizing that she was approaching the boundary of her own political authority, made a similar escape. Conquistadors sent in pursuit of her reported that she had joined an escaped African slave and was returning to Cofitachequi.

The experience of De Soto’s entrada with the Lady of Cofitachequi gives us a great deal of insight into the workings of the societies of Mississippian chiefdoms. Many of these societies appear to have had male chiefs and elders, yet it appears these positions of status were passed through female lines. Thus, a chief’s status was acquired through one’s mother or sister rather than through one’s father. This gave women a great deal of social status and political power even though men often formally occupied the position of chiefly authority. Thus, it appears the Lady of Cofitachequi could and did wield considerable authority, not only at Cofitachequi but throughout the chiefdom of which it was a part. The conquistadors were in part enchanted with a notion of a female chief because their own patriarchal notions allowed them to believe that they could dominate Indian politics by dominating Indian women. As the Lady of Cofitachequi demonstrated, such domination was easier to imagine than to enact.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

The Conquistadors Aggressively Hunt for Indian Captives

This excerpt is from an account of the de Soto entrada that was first published in 1577 and is known as The Account by a Gentleman from Elvas. It describes the conquistadors, who have just recently come ashore in Florida in May of 1539, aggressively hunting for Indian captives. In the course of this effort, they stumbled upon a previously shipwrecked Spaniard, referred to in the document as “the Christian,” who had been living among the Indians of Florida for some years. This man, named Juan Ortiz, had learned Native languages and became a valued translator for the expedition. We also get a perspective on the relative qualities of Spanish and Indian military technologies and see the effectiveness of Indian resistance at times.

From the town of Ucita the Governor sent the Chief Castellan, Baltasar de Gallegos, into the country, with forty horsemen and eighty footmen, to procure an Indian if possible. In another direction he also sent, for the same purpose, Captain Juan Rodriguez Lobillo, with fifty infantry: the greater part were of sword and buckler; the remainder were crossbow and gun men. The command of Lobillo marched over a swampy land, where horses could not travel; and, half a league from camp, came upon some huts near a river. The people in them plunged into the water; nevertheless, four women were secured; and twenty warriors, who attacked our people, so pressed us that we were forced to retire into camp.

The Indians are exceedingly ready with their weapons, and so warlike and nimble, that they have no fear of footmen; for if these charge them they flee, and when they turn their backs they are presently upon them. They avoid nothing more easily than the flight of an arrow. They never remain quiet, but are continually running, traversing from place to place, so that neither crossbow nor arquebuse can be aimed at them. Before a Christian can make a single shot with either, an Indian will discharge three or four arrows; and he seldom misses of his object. Where the arrow meets with no armour, it pierces as deeply as the shaft from a crossbow. Their bows are very perfect; the arrows are made of certain canes, like reeds, very heavy, and so stiff that one of them, when sharpened, will pass through a target. Some are pointed with the bone of a fish, sharp and like a chisel; others with some stone like a point of diamond: of such the greater number, when they strike upon armour, break at the place the parts are put together; those of cane split, and will enter a shirt of mail, doing more injury than when armed.

Juan Rodriguez Lobillo got back to camp with six men wounded, of whom one died, and he brought with him the four women taken in the huts, or cabins. When Baltasar de Gallegos came into the open field, he discovered ten or eleven Indians, among whom was a Christian, naked and sun-burnt, his arms tattooed after their manner, and he in no respect differing from them. As soon as the horsemen came in sight, they ran upon the Indians, who fled, hiding themselves in a thicket, though not before two or three of them were overtaken and wounded. The Christian, seeing a horseman coming upon him with a lance, began to cry out: “Do not kill me, cavalier; I am a Christian! Do not slay these people; they have given me my life!” Directly he called to the Indians, putting them out of fear, when they left the wood and came to him. The horsemen took up the Christian and Indians behind them on their beasts, and, greatly rejoicing, got back to the Governor at nightfall. When he and the rest who had remained in camp heard the news, they were no less pleased than the others.

Source: Edward Gaylord Bourne. Narratives of the career of Hernando de Soto in the conquest of Florida as told by a knight of Elvas. Volume I. New York: A.S. Barnes and company, 1904, 25–27.

The Indians Disrupt Conquistador Conquests

This excerpt is also from “the gentleman or knight” of Elvas. It details how Spanish conquistadors ruthlessly ranged through Native America in pursuit of wealth and captives. Note in this excerpt how the Spaniards see the natural world in terms of valued natural resources. Also note that Indian communications networks often warn Indians of the impending arrival of the conquistadors, allowing the Indian people to escape. An Indian woman, originally captured by the Spaniards, then captures a “Christian” (a Spaniard) herself, who has to be rescued by his fellow Christians. Finally, this excerpt illustrates how dependent the conquistadors were upon the Indians for food and shelter.

Tuesday, September 23, the Governor and his army departed from Napituca and came to the river of the Deer. This name was given to it because there the messengers from Ucachile brought thither some deer, of which there are many fine ones in that land; and across this river they made a bridge of three great pine-trees in length and four in breadth. These pines are well proportioned and as tall as the tallest in Spain. After the whole army had finished crossing this river, which was on the 25th of the this month, they passed through on the same day two small villages and one very large one, which was called Apalu, and they came by nightfall to Ucachile. In all these villages they found the people gone, and some captains went out to forage and brought in many Indians. They left Ucachile on the following Monday, the 29th, and having passed by a high mountain, they came at nightfall to a pine wood. And a young fellow named Cadena went back without permission for a sword, and the Governor was going to have him hanged for both offences; and by the intervention of kind persons he escaped. Another day on Tuesday, the 30th of September, they came to Agile, subject to Apalache and some women were captured; and they are of such stuff that one woman took a young fellow named Herrera, who staid alone with her and behind his companions, and seized him by his private parts and had him worn out and at her mercy; and perhaps, if other Christians has not come by who rescued him the Indian woman would have killed him. He had not wanted to have to do with her in a carnal way, but she wanted to get free and run away.

On Wednesday, the first of October, the Governor Hernando de Soto, started from Agile and came with his soldiers to the river or swamp of Ivitachuco, and they made a bridge; and in the high swamp grass on the other side there was an ambuscade of Indians, and they shot three Christians with arrows. They finished crossing this swamp on the Friday following at noon and a horse was drowned there. At nightfall they reached Ivitachuco and found the village in flames, for the Indians had set fire to it. Sunday, October 5, they came to Calahuci, and two Indians and one Indian woman were taken and a large amount of dried venison. There the guide whom they had ran away.

Source: Edward Gaylord Bourne. Narratives of the career of Hernando de Soto in the conquest of Florida as told by a knight of Elvas. Volume II. New York: Allerton Book Co., 1904, 77–79.

See also: European Diseases, 1492–1837

Further Reading

Clayton, Lawrence, Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Edward C. Moore, eds., The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

Duncan, David E. Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Etheridge, Robbie. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Galloway, Patricia. Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Galloway, Patricia, ed. The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and the “Discovery of the Southeast.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Hoffman, Paul E. A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient: The American Southeast during the Sixteenth Century. Baton Rouge: LSU University Press, 1990.

Hudson, Charles. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Hudson, Charles and Paul E. Hoffman. The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566–1568. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

Milanich, Jerald T. Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

Milanich, Jerald T. and Charles Hudson, eds. Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992.

Resendez, Andres. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Smith, Marvin T. Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation during the Early Historic Period. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University of Press, 1992.

Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. The Only Land They Knew: American Indians in the Old South. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Young, Gloria A. and Michael P. Hoffman, eds. The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi River, 1541–1543. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993.

The Pequot War, 1634–1638

Drew Lopenzina

Chronology

10000–5000 BCE		Indigenous peoples move into the Connecticut River valley following the retreat of glaciers and migration pattern of caribou, mastodon, and other game, and begin forming stable village communities.
2000 BCE–1000 CE		Agricultural practices begin to take hold with maize (corn), squash, and beans as primary dietary staple for northeastern Native Peoples who ultimately establish themselves as Pequot.
1000–1500 CE		Manufacture of wampum is begun, facilitating trade and diplomacy with Native groups from present-day Delaware to as far north as the Saint Lawrence River Valley. In the region of present-day New York State, Hiawatha invents the wampum protocols that bring peace to the land and mark the foundation of the Five Nations of the Iroquois.
1500–1600 CE		Fishermen, pirates, and exploratory expeditions from England and elsewhere establish trade relations with Pequot and other northeastern Natives.
1614		Dutch explorer Adrian Block, on his map of Long Island Sound, first ascribes the region of what is today southern Connecticut as belonging to the Pequots. First mention of “Pequot” name in colonial records.
1614–1618		Pandemic diseases having spread via trade goods and other forms of contact begin to wreak havoc with indigenous communities of the northeast, taking countless lives and causing untold grief and destruction. For some communities, up to 90 percent of the original population is wiped out through sickness, grief, and other cultural disruptions exacerbated by disease.
1620		English settlers establish first permanent settlement at Plymouth.
1630		Massachusetts Bay Company establishes colony in what is today Boston, Massachusetts, helping to consolidate English power along the northeastern seaboard.
1633		Dutch settlers establish fort in Connecticut River Valley in attempt to corner the wampum trade. Pequot sachem Tatobem captured by Dutch and held for ransom of one bushel of wampum. The Pequots pay ransom, but Tatobem is killed nevertheless. Smallpox epidemic rips through Pequot community, killing up to 90 percent of the population, devastating social order and reducing any hope of self-defense against European intrusions.
1634		Wampum trader John Stone holds two Pequot hostage for wampum bounty. Stone and six crew men are killed in retaliation by a party of Niantic Indians. The Massachusetts Bay Colony signs a treaty with the Pequot, hoping to turn them against the Dutch and to become exclusive trading partners. Plymouth Colony establishes a trading post on the Connecticut River in area of present-day Hartford, Connecticut, to cut off trade to the Dutch.
1635		English Lords Saye and Sele win patent for Connecticut Colony, and John Winthrop, Jr. is appointed governor. Lion Gardiner sent to Connecticut to establish a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River, christened Fort Seybrooke. John Oldham sent to collect wampum tributes in accordance with 1634 treaty between English and Pequot. Pequot refuse to pay, truthfully claiming that they had never actually ratified the treaty in question.
1636		John Oldham is killed aboard his ship by Indians near Block Island, most likely by Narragansett. The Pequot War officially commences. John Endicott leads a division of men to avenge Oldham’s death, and burns Block Island villages to the ground, although Native residents evacuate prior to the assault. Fledgling colony of Wethersford attacked by Pequot. Six men and three women are killed in attack, and two English “maids” taken captive.
1637		Captains John Mason and John Underhill lead English troops to surprise assault on Pequot stronghold, setting fort on fire. In the conflagration, 400–700 Pequot are slain.
1638		Treaty of Hartford declaring the Pequots null and void as a people and decreeing that their ancestors should never set foot in former lands again.
1650		Pequot begin to reorganize due to efforts by Pequot leaders Herman Garret and Cassacinamon to lobby for land.
1666		The Mashantucket Reservation is established.
1983		The Pequots are federally recognized by United States Government as an Indian Nation.

The Pequot War

The 1636–38 Pequot War stands at the epicenter of colonial encounter in the American northeast—a rupture of unspeakable violence and yet a poignant portal into the mechanisms of history-keeping that persist under a system of settler colonialism. The conflict between the indigenous Pequot and the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut colonies resulted in the near destruction of the Pequots as a people while establishing the English as the dominant powerbrokers in the northeast. But the war and its causes remain largely misunderstood, wrapped as they are in the rhetoric of Puritan history-keeping, which defined every colonial victory as God-ordained and colonization itself as a spiritual struggle between cosmic forces of good and evil. The handful of participants who offered commentary on the war and its causes failed to view the indigenous peoples of New England as fully human and callously dismissed Native claims to community, land tenure, and spirituality. The historical record concludes that the Pequots were a “barbarous and bloody people,” godless minions of Satan, deserving of nothing less than extermination (Johnson 1867, 147). By acting decisively upon such beliefs, the Puritans were able to legitimize their usurpation of Pequot land and resources and set an example of their own power to other Native nations, a chilling lesson for all who absorbed its meaning. Buried in most historical accounts of the war is any sense of the Pequots as legitimate stakeholders in the region—a people with longstanding traditions in regard to community structure, religious belief, and diplomatic and economic exchange. Because the Puritan settlers were not invested in recording such dynamics, later historians carried forward the assumption that the Pequots, alongside all other Native groups, lacked the basic fundamentals that, in the eyes of Europeans, constituted civilization.

Scenes from the defeat of the Pequot tribe in Connecticut in 1637. The Pequot War was the first conflict between Native Americans and New England colonists. The English and their Narragansett allies defeated the Pequot and signed the Treaty of Hartford in 1638. The majority of Pequot survivors were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Author unknown, illustration printed in John Underhill, “Newes from America,” 1638. (Library of Congress)

The Pequot

The Pequots claim the general region between the Connecticut River Valley in southern New England and the Pawcatuck River as their traditional home. Their ancestors entered the area some ten thousand years ago, encouraged by the recession of the great ice sheets, tracking herds of caribou, mastodon, and other game. As the climate grew more hospitable, they organized themselves into clans and villages, becoming cultivators of the land who produced corn, beans, and squash as the staples of their diet. By the early seventeenth century, the Pequot population consisted of approximately 8,000 men, women, and children, situated in some 15 to 20 communities. Although not a nomadic people, they would relocate to fishing or hunting grounds, depending on the season. Private property was not a relevant concept in the Native northeast, freeing families to move about to locations of greatest advantage in accordance with the time of year. As with other Native groups in the region, the Pequots became expert at managing the space they inhabited, learning the most efficient means of extracting a sustainable living from their environment. Certain colonial reporters were quick to notice how Native Peoples had developed agricultural innovations that greatly reduced labor. They practiced crop rotation, fortified soil to increase productivity, and used controlled burns to clear planting and hunting grounds of underbrush and other obstacles. Like all peoples, their traditions, rituals, community structure, and beliefs were tightly centered in the successful strategies and lifeways that had sustained them for 1,000 years or more.

The first Europeans to come into contact with the Pequots were fishermen who had been visiting the region to trade and replenish supplies many decades prior to any attempts at settlement. But it was the Dutch explorer Adrian Block who first mentioned the Pequots by name, apportioning a place for the “Pequats” in his 1613–1614 charting of Long Island Sound (Ceci 1990, 57). While it is difficult to know precisely how Natives felt about visitors like Block entering their domain, early accounts suggest that, like most other Native nations of the northeast, the Pequots were willing to trade and forge alliances. Nicholas Van Wassenaer, who kept a record of early Dutch settlement, remarked that the Natives were “found to be very well disposed so long as no injury is done them” (Van Wassenaer 1909, 80). To the Dutch, who were looking to establish a viable fur trade, it became apparent that the Pequots had extensive trade relations with other indigenous peoples as far away as Quebec in New France. This “Great Traffick,” as the Dutch historian John De Laet referred to it in 1625, stretched the length of the Hudson River and beyond, providing an entryway for the Dutch to insinuate themselves into its vast networks (De Laet 1909, 48).

The Wampum Network

Dutch traders soon discovered the value of wampum—white and purple beads manufactured from the quahog shell—to the local exchange economy. Earlier explorers to the region, like Henry Hudson, had commented upon the ubiquitous “stropes of Beades” favored by the Indians, but it was not until the Dutch began their permanent settlements on Manhattan and Long Island in the 1620s that they began to apprehend the relevance of these beads, or zeewan, as the Dutch called it (Juet 1909, 22). Wampum is often mistakenly referred to by historians as “Indian money,” viewed as a vital component of a tributary system in which weaker indigenous nations paid tribute to stronger nations. This understanding of wampum is colored by the perspective of colonial reporters who saw the world as inherently mercantile, constructed around the imperative of accessing and controlling resources in a bid for economic dominance. Indigenous lifeways, however, followed different models of exchange and control that operated well outside the mandates of capitalism.

Sidebar 1: Other Important New England Tribes

The Pequots were only one Native group occupying the American northeast in the seventeenth century. Directly to their east were the Narragansetts, another powerful Native nation, according to Puritan sources, often in conflict with the Pequots for regional dominance. The Narragansetts occupied modern-day Rhode Island. When the Puritan radical Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, he was extended shelter by the Narragansett sachem Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomo. Williams lived with the Narragansetts for a number of years, learned their language, and found them to be a people of remarkable social stability, generosity, and political acumen. To the northeast of the Pequot were the Wampanoag, led by the sachem Massasoit (or Osamequin). The Wampanoags were the first to interact peacefully with the Plymouth Bay colonists. The tradition of Thanksgiving in the United States stems from relations established between the fledgling colony and the Wampanoag people who taught the English how to sustain agricultural productivity in the rough northeastern soil. With increased incursions by the settlers upon their lands, however, the Wampanoags were ultimately forced into war with the English. King Philip’s (or Metacom’s) War broke out in 1675, as Massasoit’s son Philip attempted to forge a coalition of the region’s indigenous population against the settlers. This nearly proved successful in breaking up colonial presence in the region, but the English, whose style of warfare was more relentless than indigenous warfare, were ultimately able to regroup and turn back the tide against Philip and his coalition. Other local Native groups included the Nipmucs, Mohegans, Pocumtucks, Abenakis, and Schaghticokes.

For indigenous peoples of the Northeast, wampum held great ceremonial and diplomatic significance. Although tradition varied from nation to nation, in every case wampum stood at or near the center of ceremonial life. For the Iroquois or Haudenosaunees, who inhabited lands west of the Connecticut River Valley, the invention of wampum was an integral part of their creation story as a nation. The culture hero, Hiawatha, first strung wampum beads together in hopes that someone would use them to console his grief over the deaths of his daughters. Since that time, the exchange of wampum signified the desire to move beyond traumatic events and establish peaceful relations. It was enlisted in a ritual wiping of the tears from the eyes and dirt from the ears, so parties might hear and see one another more clearly, free of the blinding anguish that typically accompanies conflict. As such, it was a necessary component in any diplomatic agreement. Often, the wampum was fashioned into elaborately designed belts that served as a record of those agreements. Many diplomatic treaties between the settlers and northeast Natives have been preserved in wampum, but despite its intricate cultural relevance, settler culture regarded wampum exchange as a curiosity at best and recognized it primarily in terms of its trade value. For Europeans, it was a revelation that such “worthless” shells collected on the sea shore might be exchanged for extremely valuable furs. Once this knowledge was fully comprehended, however, the race was on to control the flow of wampum in the region.

Causes of War

The Pequots, it just so happened, were located on the northern coastline of Long Island Sound, where the shells used for wampum manufacture tended to wash ashore. As such, they had long stood at the source of wampum trade networks. In 1622, the Dutch trader Jacques Elekes kidnapped a Pequot sachem (chief) aboard his ship, holding him ransom for one hundred forty fathoms of wampum. This tactic was likely repeated up and down the Connecticut River Valley, pressuring the Pequots to join in an exclusive trade pact with the Dutch. As English settlers began to apprehend the value of wampum, they too entered into the extortion racket, attempting to squeeze out the Dutch by forcing the Pequots into a one-sided trade agreement that demanded heavy wampum tributes and ceded total control of Pequot lands to English occupation. The Pequots’ refusal to accept such terms was eventually trotted out as a provocation to war (Winthrop, 2005, 74–76). To make life even more complicated for the Pequot, disease struck in 1633, sweeping through their villages and laying waste, according to Plymouth Governor William Bradford, to as much as 90 percent of their population. The Pequots were in the midst of a series of devastating challenges that cut into the very fabric of their social order (Bradford 2006, 329–30).

The primary cause of the war, however, at least as typically cited by historians, was the deaths of two Englishmen, John Stone and John Oldham. Captain Stone was a privateer of dubious character but with ties to the English gentry that prevented him from being severely disciplined for his misbehavior. Although he had fallen out with the Puritans at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, he continued his trading operations among the Dutch. The circumstances surrounding Stone’s death remain clouded in the fog of war, but the Pequot maintained that Stone had captured two Niantic Natives and held them hostage. When other Natives came to the rescue, the ensuing altercation resulted in Stone’s death and those of six of his crew. Stone’s death might also have been provoked, however, by the murder of the Pequots’ principle sachem, Tatobem, who, held hostage by the Dutch for a large sum of wampum, was nevertheless killed directly following the payment of the ransom. According to indigenous law, this murder demanded some kind of equivalent retribution, and Stone’s death may have served this purpose. As for John Oldham, he had been sent by the English the following year to gather wampum tributes from the Block Island Natives and, in a series of events that are also murky at best, became a victim of growing regional tensions (Winthrop 118; Cave 1996, 59).

Sidebar 2: Horrific Pandemic Disease

Pandemic diseases were contagions newly transported to the American continent for which indigenous peoples had no developed immunities. These diseases spread rapidly across the entire continent, following the movement of contaminated goods along established trade routes. Diseases tended to come in waves, but they were ultimately responsible for an unimaginable loss of life on the American continent, the likes of which had previously been unknown in human experience. These losses were of course responsible for ruptures in the social and political fabric of indigenous lifeways. Plymouth Bay Colony Governor, William Bradford, describing the epidemic among the Pequots in 1633 observed, “it pleased God, to visit these Indians with a great sickness, and such a mortality that of a 1000, above 900 and a half of them died, and many of them did rot above ground for want of burial … they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering, and running one into another; their skin cleaving (by reason thereof) to the mats they lie on; when they turn them, a whole side will flay off, at once (as it were) and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold.” The Pequots fell too quickly to care for one another, observe traditional mourning practices, or even bury their own dead, and as Bradford horrifically observed, “they die like rotten sheep” (Bradford 329–330).

The New England settlers, who regarded Captain Stone as a blasphemer and nuisance, were initially unconcerned with his death and accepted the Pequots’ claims to innocence. But when the Pequots refused to enter the one-sided trade agreement offered them, the English suddenly found Stone’s “murder” to be an unforgiveable crime. Later accounts of the war would build and elaborate upon this casus belli. The Puritan historian William Hubbard would write of the Pequots that “they treacherously and cruelly murdered Capt. Stone [and] not long after, within the compass of the next year, they in like treacherous manner slew one Mr. Oldham” (Hubbard 1865, 16). Thomas Prince, another early historian of the war, observed that “The most terrible of all those nations were the Pequots;… in 1634, they killed Capt. Stone and all his Company, being seven besides Himself, in and near his bark on Connecticut River. In 1635, they killed Captain Oldham” (Mason 1897, 6). Prior to the war, however, not a single observer held the Pequots responsible for these murders. The Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, concluded that the Narragansetts, who were traditional rivals of the Pequots, had been behind Oldham’s murder, and it was understood by all that the Niantics had killed Stone (Winthrop 184). But as Winthrop began promoting the buildup to war, he changed his tune and was quick to remind his neighbors of “Capt. Stone, etc., for whom the war was begun” (Winthrop 214). The rhetorical turnaround has more to do with a change of English objectives than any sudden change in Pequot character. The deaths of the two unpopular seamen, Stone and Oldham, simply provided rhetorical fodder to launch an offensive war.

The War and Its Aftermath

The first attack by the English took place at Block Island in August of 1636, ostensibly in retaliation for Oldham’s death. The expedition of over 90 volunteers, led by John Endicott, had orders to kill every man they encountered, enslave the women and children, and claim possession of the island for the English (Winthrop 186). When they arrived, however, they found that the Natives had deserted their village. In response, the English force burned the entire village to the ground, destroying not only domiciles and property, but laying to waste 200 acres of cornfield as well, ensuring that the Block Island Natives would starve, if not die, in battle. From there, the army continued to the mainland at the mouth of the Pequot River, where they parlayed with a handful of Natives on the shore. When discussions broke down, the Natives withdrew, and the English once again destroyed the villages and fields, determining that all men, women, and children alike must suffer for crimes of which they likely had no knowledge (Underhill 1971, 54–55).

The war escalated in the spring of 1637, when the Pequots, in retaliation for the loss of their own villages, attacked the fledgling settlement of Wethersfield in Connecticut Colony, where six men were killed, and two Puritan maids taken captive. Skirmishes began to break out around Fort Seybrook, an English stronghold at the mouth of the Connecticut River commanded by Lyon Gardiner. Gardiner had protested the rush to war, fearing that his outpost was too vulnerable, but the war came to his doorstep nonetheless, and in the days that followed, he would place the heads of defeated Pequot warriors upon stakes along the ramparts as trophies (Cave 91–92; Winthrop 219).

The decisive battle of the war, however, took place on May 26, 1637, when English forces, led by Captain John Mason and accompanied by roughly 200 Narragansett warriors, took by surprise the Pequot stronghold at present-day Mystic, Connecticut. Mason determined that, rather than launch a direct assault against the Pequot as ordered, he would rapidly march his troops through the dense swamps and forests of southern Connecticut, guided by local Native allies who knew the approach, thereby catching the Pequots off guard. It proved to be a successful strategy. The Pequot fort at “Mistick” was, in reality, a large village enclosed within a fortified barrier of “palisadoes,” or tall wooden stakes driven into the ground. According to varying accounts, there were anywhere from 400 to 700 people within the fortress, the majority of them being women, children, and elderly males. The village’s location in the swamps was intended as a protective hideout more than an armed fortress—a place to safeguard noncombatants from the dire consequences of armed conflict. Nevertheless, there was a contingency of Pequot warriors present, and they put up stiff resistance when the English first attacked in the hour before dawn.

Recent archeological work has helped us to map out the particulars of the battle. Mason split his forces, leading one group of English to the northeast entrance and sending another group, led by Captain John Underhill, to circle around to the southwest entrance of the fortress. Excavations show that the heaviest fighting took place at Mason’s point of attack. Mason and his men were, in fact, repelled from the fort, but as Mason was retreating, he thought to pull a burning brand from a nearby wigwam and set the structure on fire. The domiciles within the fortress were built of poles made of saplings, bound together and covered with heavy bundled mats of rushes or swamp grass. These materials quickly caught flame in the stiff morning breeze, and before long the whole fort was ablaze.

The English were able to regroup outside and, quickly forming a ring around the perimeter, they began to fire at anyone attempting to escape the burning fortress. Within an hour, Mason reported, the devastating conflagration had succeeded in destroying all life within the village. Far more than a military rout, the battle at Mystic was a designed massacre, leaving no provision for the taking of prisoners or the sparing of innocent lives. The English had acquired a great deal of expertise in burning Native villages to the ground by this point and fully understood the consequences of their action. Even if they had not, at any point they might have allowed an orderly evacuation of the enclosed fort. Instead, they chose to maintain their perimeter as the flames burned themselves out. According to one report, the Narragansetts who had accompanied the English and stood witness to these events, protested, “mach it, mach it; that is, it is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious and slais too many men” (Underhill 84). The English, however, had less delicate sensibilities. Plymouth Colony Governor, William Bradford, who initially opposed the war, would later report how awful a sight it was “to see them thus frying in the fire, and the stream of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.” Nevertheless, for Bradford, the “Mistick” massacre proved a “sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them” (Bradford 355–56). Mason too, would obscenely conclude that “burning them up in the fire … and dunging the Ground with their Flesh” was “the Lord’s Doings” (Mason 35).

In the months that followed, the Puritans were able to round up the remaining Pequot forces. The men and boys were mostly put to death, while the women were either kept as house servants to the English or sold into slavery in the West Indies. The Pequots’ principle sachem, Sassacus, son of the murdered Tatobem, who had led an effective resistance up until the devastating blow at Mystic, sought relief from the Mohawks to the west. The Mohawks were loath to get involved, however, and Sassacus’s scalp was reportedly returned to the English as a kind of warrant of neutrality. John Underhill, in his account of the war published a year later, would challenge critics back in England who questioned the ruthless behavior of the New England settlers and their lack of Christian mercy toward Indian foes. He responded that certain people were so vile, savage, and reprehensible that they did not warrant God’s mercy, and in such cases “scripture declareth women and children must perish with the parents” (Underhill 40). It is unclear how the Pequots achieved such infamy, but explanations of this type sufficed for the Puritans, who quickly passed a proclamation in the 1638 Treaty of Hartford, that the Pequot should never again “inhabit their Native country, nor should any of them be called Pequots anymore” (Mason 40).

The historian Alfred A. Cave reminds us that “Puritan writers advanced interpretations of Pequot character and intentions based on prejudice and supposition rather than hard evidence” (Cave 3). The various contemporary accounts of the war by Underhill, Mason, Bradford and others perform the function of trying to make outrageous acts of colonial violence acceptable to Christian audiences. But the fact of the slaughter, its provocations, and its final solutions proved so troubling that it quickly became understood that the Pequots themselves must be made to vanish as a people, their very name stricken from the record books. But the Pequots were not, in fact, vanquished. A number of them managed to blend in with the neighboring Mohegan, Narragansett, and Wampanoag tribes. Others proved unwilling servants and escaped from their captivity in English households, despite insistent reports by English pamphleteers that the surviving women and children had become compliant Christians. The Pequots were ultimately able to reorganize their communities and continue today upon the shores of the Thames River (formerly the Pequot River), in the heart of southern Connecticut.

History still labors to view the Pequot War as a conflict between two incompatible peoples existing at widely divergent stages of civilization. But although the Pequots differed greatly from the English in regard to belief systems and cultural organization, there is little reason to view their culture as incapable of adapting to modernity or as inferior in regard to technological and political acuity at the time of contact. Decimated by disease and confronted with an unrelenting foe who practiced a form of total warfare unknown to Native culture, the Pequots, along with other Native Peoples of the American continent, were relegated to a subaltern status in what would become the United States and would go on to fight a centuries-long battle for the recognition of their civil rights, their claims to the land, and their very ability to exist as a people.

Biographies

Tatobem

Tatobem was the principle sachem of the Pequot in the 1630s as the indigenous world of the Northeast began to be aggressively colonized by settlers from Europe. Little is known of Tatobem despite the fact that he presided over one of the more influential and powerful indigenous groups in the Northeast region. Sachems in New England were by no means absolute rulers. As the Puritan outcast Roger Williams noted, “The Sachims … will not conclude of ought that concerns all, either Lawes, or Subsidies, or warres, unto which the people are averse, and gentle perswasion cannot be brought” (Williams 1936, 143). Williams’s observation suggests that indigenous leaders, although often occupying hereditary positions, depended upon rhetorical skill, experience, and the ability to build consensus as the keys to their power. Given the vast reach of Pequot influence and trade, Tatobem was likely to have been an effective leader. Nevertheless, he was captured by the Dutch in 1633 and held for a ransom of wampum. Despite the fact that the Pequot promptly paid the ransom, all they received in return was Tatobem’s corpse. The murder of the Pequots’ principle sachem, and not the retaliatory deaths of Stone and Oldham, must rightly be considered the cause for the outbreak of the Pequot War.

Sassacus

Son of Tatobem and heir to the position of principle sachem, Sassacus inherited the primary leadership position in the Pequot Nation at its moment of greatest crisis. 1633 not only marked the brutal murder of his father, but it saw the first shock wave of pandemic disease to sweep through Pequot communities. The resulting loss of life, community structure, and shared traditional knowledge was simply unimaginable. Sassacus also had to face challenges from within the ranks of power as various other sachems, such as Wequash and Uncas, vied for the leadership position, perhaps due to differences in opinion over how to manage the impossible strife that had ripped their world apart. It remains unclear whether Sassacus was involved in the death of Captain Stone, although, in keeping with indigenous law, he would have been within his rights to call for Stone’s death in retaliation for the murder of his father. Either way, Sassacus would go on to lead an effective resistance against Puritan invaders that held up for two years before the fatal blow at Mystic that, although far from a decisive military victory, broke the back of the already fragmented Pequot coalition. Sassacus, along with another prominent Pequot leader, Mononotto, was able to escape the clutches of his Puritan pursuers in the skirmishes that followed. He made his way west in an attempt to join forces with the Mohawk who had been long time trading partners with the Pequot for wampum and other goods. But the Mohawks, wary of English retaliation, reportedly rejected Sassacus’s plea, and Sassacus was reportedly slain, his scalplock returned to Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor, John Winthrop. Sassacus has been wrongly vilified in both history and literature as the leader of a bloodthirsty people in the midst of a savage war. But there is little to suggest that he was anything other than a man thrust into power at a time of ultimate crisis, who did his best to defend his nation and its longstanding position of sovereignty and influence in the Northeast.

William Bradford

Longstanding Governor of Plymouth Colony, Bradford was among the first group of permanent English settlers to establish themselves in New England in 1620. Having been driven from England as a result of his unpopular religious views, he hoped to establish a colony in America founded in Calvinist doctrine. Bradford holds a cherished place in colonial lore as a pilgrim progenitor of American beliefs and institutions, having landed on Plymouth Rock and played an important role in the forging of the Mayflower Compact and the first Thanksgiving harvest. He saw the early settlement through its harshest winter seasons, witnessing the death of his wife and other loved ones, which seems to have contributed to the mournful tone of his famous history of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford objected to the Pequot War, suspecting that the more powerful Massachusetts Bay Colony was attempting to leverage control of the Connecticut River Valley for its own purposes. Nevertheless, he rejoiced at the destruction of the Pequots and, through his Calvinist lens, interpreted the destruction of the Mystic village as a proper offering to God.

John Winthrop

Winthrop was the most influential of the Puritan leaders and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony when the Pequot War broke out in 1636, although he would regain his former position of governor before the war was ended. Winthrop, a lawyer with both land and wealth in England, was a principle organizer of the large flotilla that crossed the Atlantic in 1630 to establish the most successful of the early New England colonies. He is often viewed as a firm but prudent ruler whose occasional harsh judgments were necessitated by the vicissitudes of early settlement. A strict Calvinist, he was nevertheless a shrewd powerbroker who understood how to build coalitions and wield both authority and scripture in promotion of his own objectives. Winthrop clearly prized the Connecticut River Valley as land ripe for colonization and had already made moves to install his son, John Winthrop Jr., in the role of Connecticut Colony Governor when he began to ratchet up his rhetorical campaign against the Pequots. Winthrop also understood the necessity, from his perspective at least, of controlling the flow of wampum in order to corner the fur market and squeeze out Dutch competition. Following the Pequot War, wampum would become the de facto currency of the colony, thus gaining its reputation as “Indian money.” Winthrop was disdainful of Native People in general, and some of his fellow Englishmen accused him of “provoking the Pequods” to war for his personal gain (Winthrop 194).

John Mason

Mason, like many of the soldiers who fought against the Pequots, was a battle-hardened veteran of the 30 Years War in Europe prior to relocating to New England, where he must have understood that his skills and services would be in demand. His military expertise proved useful in the construction of fortifications for Boston and Charlestown. For two years, he served the town of Dorchester as representative to the Massachusetts Bay General Court before moving again to the frontier settlement at Hartford (Cave 137). Mason was placed in charge of Connecticut Colony’s forces in 1637 and charged with 160 men, and he moved quickly to reinforce the vulnerable Seybrook outpost at the mouth of the Connecticut River. In consultation with Lieutenant Gardiner and Captain John Underhill, Mason devised the plan for the surprise assault upon the Mystic Village. It was Mason who, during the assault, declared, “We shall never kill them after that manner … We must Burn them,” and proceeded to torch the village wigwams (Mason 29). He would remain a fixture of Connecticut Colony government for the next few decades and would later be awarded the property on the very hill where the Pequot village once stood (Mason 29).

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

“Newes from America” about the Slaughter of the Pequot People

In May 1637, forces from Connecticut—joined by the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, along with the Narragansetts and the Mohegans—slaughtered more than 400 inhabitants of the main Pequot village. Captain John Underhill (c.1608–1672) was an English colonist and a commander of the English militia. However, unlike others who regarded the ruthless and horrific slaughter of men, women, and children, who were burned alive in their village in Mystic, as justified because the Pequot were not Christian, Underhill seems to have some compassion and dismay at the killings, as well as admiration of the courageous Pequot people. This account comes from Underhill’s “Newes from America,” published in 1638.

Most courageously these Pequeats behaved themselves. But seeing the fort was too hot for us, we devised a way how we might save ourselves and prejudice them. Captain Mason entering into a wigwam, brought out a firebrand, after he had wounded many in the house. Then he set fire on the west side, where he entered; myself set fire on the south end with a train of powder. The fires of both meeting in the centre of the fort, blazed most terribly, and burnt all in the space of half an hour. Many courageous fellows were unwilling to come out, and fought most desperately through the palisades, so as they were scorched and burnt with the very flame, and were deprived of their arms—in regard the fire burnt their very bowstrings—and so perished valiantly. Mercy did they deserve for their valor, could we have had opportunity to have bestowed it. Many were burnt in the fort, both men, women, and children. Others forced out, and came in troops to the Indians [the Narragansett who accompanied the English], twenty and thirty at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword. Down fell men, women, and children; those that scaped us, fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us. It is reported by themselves, that there were about four hundred souls in this fort [Mason says Six or seven hundred], and not above five of them escaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in war, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along. It may be demanded, Why should you be so furious? (as some have said). Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?

Source: John Underhill, “Newes from America; Or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England; Containing, A Trve Relation of Their War-like Proceedings These Two Yeares Last Past, with a Figure of the Indian Fort, or Palizado.” London: Printed by J.D. for Peter Cole, 1638.

The Treaty of Hartford Sells Pequots into Slavery

The Treaty of Hartford, signed on September 21, 1638, in Hartford, Connecticut, officially ended the war between the English colonists and the Pequot tribe. The Pequots had been virtually extinguished as a tribe during the conflict, and this treaty provided that any surviving Pequots would be sold into slavery to either the Narragansetts or the Mohegans. The treaty is remarkable because it grants to the English colonists the right to mediate any disagreements between the Indians of southern New England. From the Treaty of Hartford (1638) between the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Connecticut Colony, and the Narragansett and Mohegan Indian Nations:

And whereas there be or is Reported for to be [among] said Narragansetts and Mohegans, 200 Pequots living that are Men besides Squaws, 120, The English do give unto Miantinome and the Narragansetts to make up the Number of Eighty with the Eleaven they have already and to Poquin his Number and that after they the Pequots shall be divided, as aforesaid shall no more be called Pequots but Narragansetts and Mohegans and as their Men or either of them are to Pay for every Sannop One fathom of Wampampeag [wampum] and for every Youth half so much and for every Sannop Papose [infant child] one hand to be paid at hilling time of Corn at Connecticutt Yearly and shall not Suffer them for to live in the Country that was formerly theirs but now is the English by Conquest—neither shall the Narragansets nor Mohegans possess any part of the Pequot Country without leave from the English. And it is always expected that the English Captives are forthwith to be delivered to the English such as belong to Connecticutt to the Sachems there and such as belong to the Massachusets—The said Agreements are to be kept inviolably by the Parties abovesaid and if any make breach of them The other Two may Joyn and make Warr upon such as shall break the same unless Satisfaction be made being reasonably required.

Source: O’Callaghan, E.B., ed. Laws and Ordinances of New Netherlands. 1638—1674. Albany, NY: Weed, Parson, 1808.

Further Reading

Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation, Ed. Caleb H. Johnson. United States, Xibris Corporation, 2006.

Ceci, Lynn. “Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World System.” The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation.

De Laet, Johannes. “New World.” Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1909, pp. 31–60.

Dincauze, Dena F. “A Capsule Prehistory of Southern New England.” 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.

Gardener, Lion. “Leift Lion Gardener his relation of the Pequot Warres.” The History of the Pequot War, Ed. Charles Orr Cleveland: Helman Taylor Co., 1897, pp. 113–149.

Hauptman and James D. Wherry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 1990, 19–32.

Hubbard, William. The History of the Indian Wars in New England from the First Settlement to the Termination of the War with King Philip in 1677. Roxbury, MA: W. Elliot Woodward, 1865.

Johnson, Edward. Wonder Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England. Andover: Warren F. Draper, 1867.

Juet, Robert. “The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson.” Narratives of New Netherland 1609-664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1909, 13–28.

Lopenzina, Drew. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012.

Mason, John. “A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the memorable Taking of their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637.” The History of the Pequot War. Edited by Charles Orr. Cleveland: Helman Taylor Co., 1897, pp. 3–46.

McBride, Kevin. Currie, Douglas. Naumec, David. Bissonette, Ashley. Fellman, Noah. Pasteryak, Laurie. Veniger, Jaqueline. Battle of Mistick Fort: Site Identification and Documentation Plan, Public Technical Report. Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.

Parker, Arthur C. “The Constitution of the Five Nations.” Parker on the Iroquois. Edited by William Fenton. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968.

Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England 1500-1643. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Underhill, John. Newes of America. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971.

Wassenaer, Nicholas Van. “Historisch Verhael.” Narratives of New Netherland 1609–1664. Edited by J. Franklin Jameson. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1909, pp. 63–96.

Winthrop, John. Winthrop’s Journal: History of New England 1630–1649, Vol. 1. Edited by James Kendall Hosmer. New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1908.

The Pueblo Revolt, 1680

Terry Ahlstedt

Chronology

1539		May 7 to September. Expedition of Hernan Cortez north along the Pacific Coast; leads to the first Spanish sighting of the Pueblos; greatly exaggerated tales of Pueblo riches relayed by black slave Esteban, who was eventually killed in the Zuni pueblo.
February 1541–April 1542		Expedition of Francisco Coronado into the “Northern Territory,” financed largely on the basis of Esteban’s exaggerated claims of Pueblo riches; Coronado’s men brutalize Pueblo people in order to supplement their meager supplies.
1542		Charles V passes the “New Laws.”
1573		July 13. Philip II strengthens “New Laws” with the “Laws of Discovery.”
1595		September 21. Viceroy Luis de Velasco gives Don Juan de Onate permission to lead 200 men into New Mexico and establish a permanent colony at his personal expense; the poorly provisioned expedition finally sets out on February 7, 1598, with 129 of the original 200 men.
1598		December 1. Juan de Zaldivar, a member of Onate’s expedition, arrives at the Acoma Pueblo with a small contingent of soldiers;
		Zaldivar and 14 others killed trying to extort supplies from the inhabitants.
1599		January 21. In retaliation for the killing of Zaldivar and his men, his brother Vicente de Zaldivar, sargento mayor, begins an expedition of 70 men to punish the inhabitants of Acoma. 800 of about 1,300 inhabitants are killed outright; of the 500 left, males over the age of 25 have one foot cut off and are sentenced to 20 years of servitude. Males aged 12 to 25 and women 12 or over are sentenced to 20 years of servitude; children under 12 are put under Spanish “protection.”
1601		May 22. Viceroy Velasco sends a report to Governor Onate indicating the dissatisfaction of the colonists, who are unable to extract sufficient food and provisions from the Natives. In September, approximately two thirds of the colonists flee south to Mexico.
1609		January 29. Despite the significant costs involved, Velasco decides to retain New Mexico under Spanish control in order to provide “protection” to Native converts to Christianity and prevent other European powers from colonizing the area.
1618		Juan de Eulate is named governor of New Mexico and begins, among other things, trading Native Pueblos as slaves.
1627		Eulate tried and convicted in Mexico City for engaging in the slave trade and misusing government equipment (arms and wagons) to transport captives and plunder for his personal gain.
1632		Two metizo (half Spanish, half Native) soldiers take part in a Native baptism ceremony in San Juan, resulting in significant tensions between the clergy and local government officials and undermining the clergy’s ability to eradicate Pueblo religious practices.
1632		February 22. Inhabitants of the Zuni Pueblo kill Fray Francisco Letrado.
1633 (ca.)		Inhabitants of the Hopi Pueblo poison Fray Francisco de Porras.
1639		Diego Martin leads an uprising in the Taos Pueblo that kills one friar and two soldiers.
1659		Bernardo Lopez de Mendizabal is named governor of New Mexico; leaves suddenly during the winter of 1659–1660 after his efforts at exploiting indigenous labor significantly interfere with Franciscan attempts to inculcate Christian religious practices.
1662		April 30. Four men are arrested with illicit profits from the New Mexico territory; Lopez de Mendizabal is apprehended shortly thereafter.
1680–1692		Pueblo revolt drives Spanish out of New Mexico.
1692		August. Diego de Vargas marches to Santa Fe unopposed along with a converted Zia war captain, Bartolomé de Ojeda, sixty soldiers, 100 Indian auxiliaries, and seven cannons.
1692		September 13. De Vargas arrives at Santa Fe. He promises 1,000 Pueblo people assembled there clemency and protection if they would swear allegiance to the King of Spain and return to the Christian faith. After much persuading, the Spanish finally made the Pueblo agree to peace on September 14, 1692. De Vargas proclaims a formal act of repossession.
1693		December. De Vargas having returned to Mexico and gathered together about 800 people, including 100 soldiers, returns to Santa Fe. He encounters Pueblo opposition. He executes 70 Pueblo Warriors and sentences their families to ten years of servitude.
1696		The Indians of 14 pueblos attempt a second organized revolt. They murder five missionaries and 34 settlers using weapons the Spanish themselves had traded to the Indians over the years. De Vargas’s retribution is unmerciful, thorough, and prolonged. By the end of the century, the last resisting Pueblo town had surrendered, and the Spanish reconquest was essentially complete. Many of the Pueblos flee New Mexico to join the Apache or Navajo tribes or attempt to resettle on the Great Plains. Some settle in what is today Kansas, founding El Quartlejo (latter destroyed by the Spanish).

Warfare in Seventeenth-Century North American Southwest

The late 17th century was a time of warfare in North America, and in the contact zone between Europeans and Indians, many conflicts raged. In the Southwest, the Pueblo Revolt ushered in what Jack Forbes describes as “the Great Southwestern Revolt” (Forbes 1960, 177) as the Janos, Sumas, Conchos, Tobosos, Julimes, and Pimas resisted Spanish authority ravaging missions and settlements in an “epidemic” of Indian rebellions that swept across Northern New Spain. One of these revolts resulted in the victory of the Pueblo people of today’s Southwestern United States over the Spanish.

In the late 16th century, the Spanish crown wished to create a buffer zone to protect its silver mines in the Nueva Vizcaya region of what is today northern Mexico. Official permission was required before settlement could be permitted, and this was granted to Juan de Oñate, whose family was prominent in the silver mining in Nueva Vizcaya. Oñate hoped to find new silver deposits in the north. In 1598, using his own financial resources, Oñate ventured into New Mexico with a party of 129 men and women hoping to find riches and fortune.

Oñate and his settlers observed that the Pueblos were peaceful, “very affable and docile,” willing to submit to Spanish authority (Knaut 1995, 32–34). The Pueblos, remembering earlier violent encounters with the Spanish, acted with wariness, seeking to appease the newcomers. Outnumbered by the Native population, Oñate set the stage for future Spanish rule emphasizing that “the greatest force we (Spaniards) possess at the present to defend our friends and ourselves is the prestige of the Spanish nation, by fear of which the Indians have been kept in check” (Knaut 1995, 42). In order to maintain control, he emphasized authoritarian discipline combined with a degree of distance, both physically and psychologically, between Indian and settler where the Spaniard acted as patriarch, judge, and punisher. The pattern for the method of implementing Spanish authority is seen by Oñate’s reply to resistance by the Indians at Acoma Pueblo. After their killing of Spanish soldiers, he reacted with swift brutality. When Oñate asked for new settlers, he requested married men in the hope of preventing intimacy with the Pueblo Indians.

Oñate believed that through a show of violence, Franciscan friars, monks dedicated to missionary work who accompanied the military, would present the peaceful alternative of submission as opposed to the violent consequence of resistance. Seeking to convert “savage” Indians into Christians, the friars lived with the Indians, teaching them to abandon Native ways and beliefs. The Indians feared harsh retribution for the rejection of the Christian message and sought to tolerate the “messengers” of the Christian religion. The monks used this tolerance to their advantage. Over the years, they had learned methods that would help in the conversion of Indians. First, the monks wowed the Indians with displays of finery, music, paintings, and statuary of sacred images. They then lavished the Indians with gifts. The gifts established a sense of mutual obligation between Native and Franciscan.

Once this was done, the friars sought to integrate themselves within the Indian society by forming friendly relationships among those leaders most favorable to their message and seeking to replace unfavorable leaders with these favorites. They found that children were especially receptive to their message and were more easily taught Castilian Spanish. The introduction of the Spanish language helped to bring the Indian population into the Spanish cultural orbit. To encourage conversion, the Friars took advantage of stores about miracles their colleagues had allegedly preformed along with attempts to create an image of their spiritual superiority over tribal priests.

Sidebar 1: Expanded Chronology of the Revolt


1675		Governor Juan Trevino orders the arrest, imprisonment, and corporal punishment of 47 Pueblo medicine men following accusations that they “bewitched” a local friar. Three are hanged, and one commits suicide.
		To achieve the release of the medicine men, 70 Pueblo warriors take the governor hostage and threaten revolt, and he acquiesces, releasing the remaining prisoners.
		One of the medicine men released is Popé, who would eventually lead the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
1677		Forty-three new soldiers enter New Mexico to bolster the Spanish presence; 40 are convicted criminals sentenced to serve tours of duty in New Mexico.
1675–1680		Popé makes preparations for the Pueblo Revolt, the details of which are not completely understood.
August 1680		August 12, 1680, chosen by Popé as the date of the revolt; runners are dispatched on August 9 with knotted ropes, one knot to be untied each day, that inform the other Pueblos of the exact date of the revolt.
August 9, 1680		Governor Antonio de Otermin is informed of the plans for the revolt by leaders of San Marcos, San Cristobal, and La Cinega.
August 10, 1680		Fray (Friar) Juan Pio and his escort Pedro Hidalgo approach Tesuque; they confront a crowd of Pueblo Indians, and Pio is killed.
August 12, 1680		Francisco Gomez returns from a reconnaissance to report that “all of the people of the pueblos from Tesuque to San Juan are in rebellion, and a large number of them are fortified in the pueblo of Santa Clara.” He also reports the deaths of two friars and several soldiers and the kidnapping of a captain.
August 13, 1680		Hispanic inhabitants of Santa Fe informed of further deaths in the New Mexico territory; horse herds, crucial to Spanish military might, are reported captured.
August 15, 1680		Pueblo people are seen on the outskirts of Santa Fe.
		Popé meets with Otermin and gives him the choice of abandoning the territory or fighting the Pueblos; Otermin, in turn, offers to give the Pueblos a full pardon if they will return to their pueblos and submit to Christianity.
		Battle ensues in which many Pueblos and Spaniards are killed; Pueblos are armed with “harquebuses” and other weapons taken from Spaniards in the countryside. Otermin and his troops retreat into his palace.
August 18, 1680		Pueblos cut off the water supply to Santa Fe; Otermin is forced to attack.
August 20, 1680		Otermin counterattacks and expels the Pueblos from Santa Fe; 300 Pueblos are killed, and 47 captured. Otermin interrogates the 47 prisoners and summarily executes them.
August 21, 1680		Otermin determines that he must abandon Santa Fe, stating that “[it is decided] to withdraw, marching from this villa in full military formation until reaching the pueblo of La Isleta.”
September 19, 1680		1,946 settlers, including 155 men “considered capable of bearing arms,” approach El Paso del Norte. A total of 380 settlers are estimated dead.

Source: Knaut 1995.

While the Church sought to alter the social fabric of Pueblo society, their lay colleagues sought to alter their economic structure. The Spanish crown granted the governor of New Mexico with a right of economic exploitation known as the encomienda. This royal right was extended to the lending members of the colony. Through the encomienda, these leaders were allowed to collect tribute from the Indian households of specific pueblos. This tribute was collected twice a year: cotton cloth and hides in May, and corn in October. The encomienda resembled a feudal system whereby the encomendos were expected to provide for the spiritual well-being of the Indians as well as to provide military protection against marauding Apache and Navajo.

This system had inherent instabilities. First, the amount of tribute was unreliable. The tribute depended on a steady Indian population, but drought and disease resulted in a drop in the size. Eventually, the authorities determined that due to a decline in the Pueblo population, the tribute should be shifted from households to individuals. This change increased the burden on Pueblo families, leaving some in such a desperate state that they sought refuge among their enemies the Apache. Second, many encomenderos acquired land next to subject Pueblos presumably for the purpose of making tribute payments easier but actually with the desire to steal Indian land and to use Indians as an illegal source of labor.

In the past, the Pueblos had moderated the raiding of their Navajo and the Apache neighbors through trade. Seeing a profit in peace, these neighbors were less anxious to make war with the Pueblos, and the Apaches and Navajos became dependent on their goods. But with the arrival of the Spanish, the Pueblos had little left for trade. Added to this scarcity of goods was the decree from the Spanish government outlawing all trade between the Pueblos and their neighbors. These neighbors decided that what they could not take by trade, they could take by force, and raided the Pueblos. The raids, combined with the drought, forced the eastern Pueblos to abandon their homes and flee to their kin living on the Rio Grande.

The Franciscans established a dominant position in the new colony. Among the Hispanic newcomers they were the most united. All the monks were members of the Friars Minor. Nor were they subject to any authority from some distant bishop.

The missionaries’ power rested on their relationship with the Indians. This turned out helpful for saving the colony when the viceroy recommended its abandonment. To prevent this, the friars hastily baptized, or claimed to baptize, the whole colony, convincing the king to maintain the settlement. The Spaniards, both secular and clerical, believed that the continuance of New Mexico as a colony rested with the Franciscans, viewed as having great influence with the Spanish crown.

Rapid conversion of Indians resulted in a superficial form of Christianity. While Indians submitted to Christ, they continued to maintain many of their old beliefs. The Franciscans were anxious to advertise their success in bringing Indians to Christ and were willing to overlook their syncretism, a practice whereby the Indians secretly practiced their old religion while giving credence to the friars’ faith. They hoped that under their guidance the Indians’ faith in Christianity would grow. In return, the Indians gained the use of domestic animals: horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens. The friars taught them about new crops like wheat and new kinds of fruit trees. They offered new skills in the use of metal. Awed by the spiritual power and the technical innovations offered by the monks, some Indians actively took up the Christian faith, and most Indians were willing to bow to the authority of the friars.

Spaniards and their Pueblo subjects seemed to have much in common. Both used altars, religious calendars, and aids for prayer. The priest wore elaborate costumes for ceremonies and engaged in ritual chants. Christian baptism was similar to the Pueblo practice of head washing. The Catholic ideal of sainthood was similar to the elevation of Pueblo heroes into sprit beings. The Catholic use of incense and holy water reminded Indians of rain rituals and the use of consecrated water to help ailing patients. Both cultures believed that the world was ordered according to divine sanction and that fate was defined by dominions beyond human control and that disease, death, and drought resulted from either evil spirits or divine displeasure.

But the differences were profound. The Pueblo world view was greatly different. To them, the underworld, not the heavens, was the focus of life. They had no primary god, creator of all matter. Everything—gods, men, animals, and plants—came from an opening in the underworld’s roof, the navel of the earth. They believed that in the beginning, the gods lived with men teaching them how to cope with the world. Patterns and procedure originated in that long-ago time. All that came to the Pueblos—their homes, their crops, their culture, tools, and weapons—came from that time. To ignore or violate these customs taught to them by the gods could bring about misfortune or even extinction.

Unlike the Spanish, the Pueblos did not see the world as God’s footstool, nor did they view its resources as things that men were free to exploit as they saw fit. The Pueblos’ place in the world was part of a great circle that radiated from a center. Everything in this circle had a place. “Everything from points on the compass to changing seasons was bounded and controllable because the earth was an orderly environment that circumscribed the harmony of all good things.” So, “Instead of wishing to escape this world or destroy it through exploitation, Pueblos affirmed their existence to it and husbanded their lives along with nature as parts of a single sanctified life system” (Henry Bowden 1975, 223–24).

While Franciscans were willing to use Pueblo religious practices as a means to convert Indians, they were convinced that the Indians practiced no religion or, at the very most, nothing more than idolatry based on superstition, guided by the influence of the devil. To the friars, the Indians were barbarous children needing firm parental care. Indians were expected to attend mass, and to surrender all religious paraphernalia. They were treated like children, and those who resisted authority faced their father’s wrath: torture or even death, for it was believed that one must never spare the rod, lest he spoil the child.

The missionaries and the encomenderos worked well together. Each relied on the other for survival through mutual exploitation of the indigenous population. The encomendero offered military power to support the missionaries, and the missionaries provided the legitimacy of spiritual authority. Together they formed a partnership that offered the friars a reward of souls, and the encomendero a reward of corn and cotton mantas.

Through Spanish control, the Pueblo Indians benefited from organization, improved food storage, and defense against Athapascan tribes (the Apaches and Navajos). The Spanish ruled through a “divide and conquer” strategy that pitted Pueblo against Pueblo. The Pueblos were never a united people and were prone to rivalries and warfare. To reinforce this discord, the Spanish appointed Pueblo governors willing to inform against rival tribes. Through this method, they suppressed revolts in 1645 and 1650. Spanish superiority could be maintained only as long as the environment of the Pueblo Indian were tolerable enough to allow inter-Pueblo animosity to take precedence over anti-Spanish feeling.

This grip was weakened by a prolonged drought that resulted in famine. By 1672, most of the population, Indian and white, were forced into eating “hides that they had and the strips of straps of carts, preparing them for food by soaking … and roasting them in the fire with maize, and boiling them with herbs and roots” (Garner 1974, 54–55). One friar reported, “A great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in ravines, and in their huts.” Added to hunger were outbreaks of disease (Weber 1992, 133–34).

The Franciscans sought control of food for famine relief, but this further disrupted trade between the Pueblos and their neighbors, resulting in more raids on Pueblo maize. Franciscan concentration of grain supplies and the raiders’ acquisition of Spanish horses made theft easy. The Spanish offered military protection, but they had only 170 soldiers to guard all of New Mexico. It became necessary to enlist the services of Christianized Pueblos. This contributed to the narrowing of the technology gap between Spaniard and Indian. These Indians were described as “good horsemen and as experienced as any Spaniard in the use of fire arms (and) well acquainted with the entire territory of New Mexico” (Garner 1974, 52).

During this time, Spanish supremacy eroded from within. Isolated, with a harsh life and poor economic prospects, few settlers and traders came to New Mexico. The growth and continuance of the Spanish presence in New Mexico depended on mixing with the local indigenous population. By 1680, most inhabitants were the product of marriages to Indian or mestizo women, resulting in few actual Spaniards.

Four generations of racial mixing drove a cultural and biological wedge between the members of the Northern Colony and their southern counterparts in the Spanish mainstream. Pueblo culture, centuries old, resisted Spanish efforts to change it. Instead, Spanish settlers began to assume many aspects of Pueblo culture. Nature and acculturation worked together to blur the distinction between the cultures. Mestizos were asked to perform the functions of Spaniards. Many were asked to fill government posts, unheard of in the rigidly caste-oriented Spanish-American Empire. The large mestizo population destabilized the colony. While looked down upon by purebloods as “half breeds,” they were still expected to fill roles of responsibility within the colony. Mestizos found themselves pushed in different directions. Frequently, the tension they felt erupted in violence against the Spanish. The friars feared that revival of Puebloan religious practices could sway “those of low degree such as mestizos” (Knaut 1995, 140–41).

The fear of an eroding Spanish influence led to an upsurge in Spanish religious restrictions, and the Friars became more directly involved in Pueblo activities. At the same time, clashes between civil and religious authorities diminished the Friars’ moral authority. To the Pueblos, civil and religious authority was a unified process. If a civil authority were to begin to question a religious leader, than his spiritual authority would be brought into question.

In 1675, Governor Juan Francisco Treviño, fearing a threat to his authority, arrested 47 Pueblo holy men, most of whom came from the Tewa Pueblos. Declaring them “sorcerers,” he hanged three of them and flogged and imprisoned the rest. Enraged, an angry mob of Tewa Pueblo Indians marched on Santa Fe. Holding the governor at bay, they demanded the release of their religious leaders. To their amazement, the startled governor agreed to their demands. One of the released prisoners was a 45-year-old shaman form San Juan Pueblo, Popé, who dreamed of a world without the Spanish. Even while the Spanish sought to intensify religious restrictions as part of a Spanish nativist reaction to Pueblo religious activities, Indians like Popé believed that intensified Pueblo nativism was the only way that their people could be saved. They believed that Spanish reactionary policies were a threat to the existence of the Pueblo people. To end that threat, Popé contacted priests and war captains of the other pueblos and asked them to hear his plan and embrace his vision of a world without Spain.

While Popé advocated the destruction of all Catholic imagery and rituals, some of his ideas showed borrowings from Christianity. He claimed contact with three Gods and spoke of “one father of all Indians” who “… had been so since the flood.” He promised peace with the Athapascan raiders, an end of famine, and the preservation of cultural identity by ending Spanish intolerance of his culture that he believed was jeopardizing Pueblo well-being, and even survival. While the Spanish would latter claim that the rebellion of 1680 was a repudiation of Catholicism, the Pueblo rebels were motivated by a need to return to their old ways. They believed that Spanish culture removed them from their ancient path. The death and famine they suffered were the result of this. Popé felt that his people needed to be purified of corrupting Spanish influences and that Spanish authorities would never let them accomplish what they needed: a total immersion in the Pueblo way.

The circumstances of the 1670s provided the conditions whereby Popé’s leadership could be effective. These conditions came with the disappearance of positive attitudes and elements of Spanish rule, along with the growth of Spanish nativism, Native disaffection, and the growth of Indian nativism to produce the elements that allowed the rise to leadership of Popé. But it is unrealistic to overemphasize the role of one man in what was a mass movement. Indications are that after the revolt, Popé lost his position of leadership, but the revolt continued. Van Hastings Garner states, “The movement was neither the expression of nor dependent on one sagacious Indian; rather it was the consequence of the collapse of a long series of delicately balanced human relationships between foreign settlers and indigenous peoples.” To the Spanish and possibly the Indians as well, “Popé was there to personify aboriginal frustration and antagonism” (Garner 1974, 60).

Photograph of ruins of Spanish mission at Pecos Pueblo, seat of the 17th-century Pueblo Revolt, New Mexico. Religious repression, violence against Pueblo women, and punishment of spiritual leaders by the Spanish, led to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. (North Wind Picture Archives)

In 1680, after 80 years of relative peace, the Pueblo Indians rose up in a rebellion with such speed and fury that it overwhelmed the astonished Spanish. Outlying settlements were wiped out, and frightened survivors fled to Santa Fe and the loyal Isleta Pueblo. Within weeks, the terrified refugees found their situation hopeless and fled south to the safety to El Paso.

For the Pueblos, victory over the Spanish brought a brief time of freedom, but the old ways did not return. Instead, they encountered famine and raids by neighboring tribes. Popé was obsessed with destroying all things Spanish, but there were many Spanish things that the Pueblos had grown fond of. Soon his followers grew tired of his reactionary ways. They staged a coup, and he was toppled from power. Before long, the Pueblos began to fight amongst themselves. In 1691, Don Diego de Vargas returned with the Spanish. The Pueblos resisted him, but through force and the old axiom of “divide and conquer,” Vargas returned New Mexico to the Spanish crown. After 1696, the Pueblos were too exhausted and depleted to fight again. But the Spanish, fearful of another revolt, offered no more provocations. Exploitation of Indians would remain but in a subdued form, the encomienda system was abolished, and the new friars were less zealous against Pueblo religious practices. With the reduction of Spanish provocation, tensions diminished, leading to peaceful coexistence between Spaniard and Indian.

Biographies

Popé

Popé or Po’pay (1630–ca. 1688) was a Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh (known since the colonial period as San Juan Pueblo). He led the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 against Spanish colonial rule. This revolt was the first successful insurrection against the Spanish. As a result of the revolt, the Pueblos expelled the colonists and kept them out of the territory for 12 years.

Popé is first historically recorded in 1675. In that year, he was one of 47 religious leaders of the northern Pueblo arrested by the Spanish for “witchcraft.” Punishment was harsh, three were executed, one committed suicide, and others were sold into slavery. Many were whipped and imprisoned in Santa Fe. The Pueblo people were outraged by the action, and 70 warriors traveled to the governor’s office and politely, but doggedly, demanded that Popé and the others be released. Facing pressure from raiding Apaches and Navajos, the governor complied, showing, for future reference among the Pueblo people, the weakness of the Spanish colonial position. Descriptions of Popé come from the Spanish, who considered him to be a fierce and dynamic individual who inspired respect bordering on fear in those who dealt with him.

Though released, Popé was embittered by his treatment and, while residing in the remote Taos Pueblo, began to plan a rebellion. Popé’s agenda was to destroy the Spanish and remove their influence from Pueblo life. He believed this would allow them to return to a fabled time of peace, prosperity, and independence strengthened by a return to traditional Pueblo culture. His revolt had all the markings of a revitalization movement where a charismatic leader and a core collection of followers would spread his message to a wider group of people. As a revitalization movement, its goal was to transform Pueblo culture and community.

For years, Popé meet secretly with leaders form all other pueblos. Disgruntled with Spanish rule, the leaders agreed to start the revolt on August 13, 1680. Only the Tiguex area, close to the seat of Spanish power in Santa Fe and perhaps the most acculturated of the Pueblos, declined to join in the revolt. The Southern Piros were apparently not invited to join the revolt. To coordinate the kickoff date of the revolt, runners were sent out to each Pueblo with knotted cords. The number of knots on the cord told the local pueblo how many days were left before the revolt. Remarkably, the various leaders, even those who declined to join or were not asked, refused to tell the Spanish, and the plans remained secret. But impatience to end Spanish revolt meant that the revolt actually began before the planed date.

The revolt was successful, and Popé succeeded in expelling the Spanish from New Mexico. Accounts of Pueblo affairs after the revolt come from prejudiced Spanish reports that claim that Popé set himself up as the sole ruler of all the Pueblos. He attempted to destroy every trace of the Spanish presence in New Mexico. “The God of the Christians is dead,” he proclaimed. “He was made of rotten wood.”

But the expulsion of the Spanish had not brought peace and prosperity to the Pueblos. Droughts that had earlier plagued the area continued despite traditional religious measures. The Apaches and Navajos noticed that the Spanish were gone, and stepped up their raids on the Pueblos. Some Pueblos recalled that the Spanish had provided some protection from the raiders. Once the common enemy—the Spanish—was removed, traditional rivalries divided the Pueblo villages. Popé’s efforts were resented and many considered him a tyrant. Efforts to restore traditional Pueblo life were hampered by the fact that many Pueblos were sincere Christians with ties of family and friendship with the Spanish. Without Spain as a common enemy, the coalition of the Pueblo unraveled.

When Popé died, probably in 1688, his dreams were already falling apart. Matthew Martinez says of Popé that “it took a unique individual to orchestrate the revolt across two dozen communities who spoke six different languages and were sprawled over a distance of nearly 400 miles” (“New Mexico Office of the State Historian: Popé”).

Diego de Vargas

Diego de Vargas Zapata y Luján Ponce de León y Contreras (1643–1704), commonly known as Don Diego de Vargas, was a Spanish governor of the New Spain territory of Santa Fe de Neuvo México, today the U.S. states of New Mexico and Arizona. He acted to assume power in New Mexico from 1690 to 1692 and became effective governor from 1692 to 1696 and from 1703 to 1704. He is most famous for leading the reconquest of the territory in 1692 following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This reconquest is commemorated annually during the Fiestas de Santa Fe in the city of Santa Fe.

Diego de Vargas was born in Madrid in 1643 to Alonso de Vargas and María Margarita Contreras y Arráiz. For four generations the Vargas family were holders of knighthood in the prestigious Order of Santiago. Though distinguished the family were in financial disrepair, and Diego’s father Alonso was forced to seek employment in the Americas. In 1650, he took a post in Guatemala. After the death of Diego’s mother, Alonzo remarried. Over the years, Alonso moved up the ladder of importance in colonial government. He died at age 43, never having returned to Spain.

A year before his father’s death, Diego married Beatriz Pimentel de Prado Vélez de Olazábal, the daughter of neighbors of the Vargas estate at Torrelaguna, north of Madrid. It was a happy marriage, and the couple had five children in quick succession before 1670. But as Vargas’s household grew, is debts grew even bigger. He had earlier tried to successfully manage the family estate, but he lacked the interest or the talent to succeed. Vargas felt that his talents were better suited in the political arena.

Facing mounting debts, and possessed of an even greater ambition to excel in public service, he sought work with the Spanish crown. To do that sort of work, he felt obligated to leave his family in Spain and find work with the crown in the Americas. So, in 1673 he followed in his father’s footsteps and sought work in New Spain. After gaining a recommendation from the Queen, Vargas was appointed by the viceroy of New Spain to the post of justicia mayor, or chief judge, in the jurisdiction of Teutila in what is now the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

In 1679, six years after his arrival in New Spain, Don Diego was promoted to justicia mayor of Tlalpujahua, a declining mining area northwest of Mexico City, in what is now the Mexican state of Michoacán. By that time, he had started a family outside matrimony with Nicolasa Rincón and was maintaining a home in Mexico City, on the Plazuela de las Gayas. In 1683, Vargas was promoted again, to the office of alcalde mayor, or royal administrator of Tlalpujahua.

During his tenure at Tlalpujahua, Don Diego was able to dramatically increase royal receipts from the silver mines there. His abilities as administrator were repeatedly recognized within the viceregal court. The Viceroy Conde de Paredes recommended him for even higher office. By the middle 1680s, Vargas was actively pursuing appointments in Guatemala, Peru, and New Mexico. Instead, he was appointed Governor of New Mexico in 1688. Bureaucratic red tape prevented him from assuming his duties until 1691.

In 1688, Don Diego de Vargas was appointed governor of New Mexico, though he did not arrive to assume his duties until On February 22, 1691 when Capitan General y Governador Don Diego de Vargas began the task of reconquering and pacifying the New Mexico territory for Spain. In July 1692, de Vargas and a small contingent of soldiers reached Santa Fe. They surrounded the city and called on the Pueblo people to surrender, promising clemency if they would swear allegiance to the king of Spain and return to the Christian faith. After meeting with de Vargas, the Pueblo leaders agreed to peace, and on September 12, 1692, de Vargas proclaimed a formal act of repossession.

De Vargas’s repossession of New Mexico is often called a “bloodless reconquest,” since the territory was initially retaken without any use of force. Later, when de Vargas returned to Mexico in early 1693 to retrieve a group of settlers, they had to fight their way back into Santa Fe. Warriors from four of the pueblos sided with the colonists, but most opposed them. When the capital had been taken, Don Diego ordered some 70 of the Pueblo men killed. Women and children were distributed as servants to the colonists. Similar bloody fighting occurred at many of the other pueblos before the governor felt that the Native People had truly submitted to his and the king’s authority. The end of widespread hostilities did not mean an end to Pueblo resentment over continued heavy-handed treatment by the colonists. The plundering of Pueblo stocks of corn and other supplies, to sustain the struggling colony, was a periodic occurrence that inflamed animosity. By the end of the century, the Spanish colonization was essentially solidified.

De Vargas had prayed to the Virgin Mary, under her title La Conquistadora (The Conqueress), for the peaceful re-entry. Believing that she had heard his prayer, he celebrated a feast in her honor. Today, this feast continues to be celebrated annually in Santa Fe as the Fiestas de Santa Fe. Part of those annual fiestas is a novena of masses in thanksgiving. Those masses are also done with processions, from the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, to the Rosario Chapel. The actual statue of La Conquistadora is taken in the processions. After the novena is completed, she is taken back to the Basilica. This is all in honor of Diego de Vargas and his reconquest of Santa Fe.

De Vargas had hoped to restore his family fortune and to return to his wife and children in Spain, but he died of illness in New Mexico in 1704, never having returned to his home.

DOCUMENT EXCERPT

The Laws of the Indies

The Laws of the Indies (Spanish: Leyes de Indias) are the entire body of laws issued by the Spanish crown for the American and Philippine possessions of its empire. They regulated social, political, and economic life in these areas.

The Spanish crown sought order in its colonies. In order to maintain this order, it decreed the Laws of the Indies. When the Spanish settled in New Mexico, they were subject to these laws. The Laws of the Indies (Spanish: Leyes de Indias) are the entire body of laws issued by the Spanish Crown for the American and Philippine possessions of its empire. They regulated social, political, and economic life in these areas. The laws are composed of myriad decrees issued over the centuries and the important laws of the 16th century, which attempted to regulate the interactions between the settlers and Natives, such as the Laws of Burgos (1512) and the New Laws (1542).

Throughout the 400 years of Spanish presence in these parts of the world, the laws were compiled several times, most notably in 1680 under Charles II in the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de Indias (Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies). This became considered the classic collection of the laws, although later laws superseded parts of it, and other compilations were issued. The 1680 compilation set the template by which the laws were organized.

To guide and regularize the establishment of presidios (military towns), missions, and pueblos (civilian towns), King Phillip II developed the first version of the Laws of the Indies. This comprehensive guide was composed of 148 ordinances to aid colonists in locating, building, and populating settlements. They codified the city planning process and represented some of the first attempts at a general plan. Signed in 1573, the Laws of the Indies are considered the first wide-ranging guidelines towards design and development of communities. These laws were heavily influenced by Vituvius’s Ten Books of Architecture and Leon Battista Alberti’s treatises on the subject.

In Book IV of the 1680 compilation of The Laws of the Indies, plans were set forth in detail on every facet of creating a community, including town planning. Examples of the range of rules include:

Those [Colonists] who should want to make a commitment to building a new settlement in the form and manner already prescribed, be it of more or less than 30 vecinos (freemen), (know that) it should be of no less than twelve persons and be awarded the authorization and territory in accordance with the prescribed conditions.
Having made the selection of the site where the town is to be built, it must, as already stated, be in an elevated and healthy location; [be] with means of fortification; [have] fertile soil and with plenty of land for farming and pasturage; have fuel, timber, and resources; [have] fresh water, a Native population, ease of transport, access and exit; [and be] open to the north wind; and, if on the coast, due consideration should be paid to the quality of the harbor and that the sea does not lie to the south or west; and if possible not near lagoons or marshes in which poisonous animals and polluted air and water breed.
They [Colonists] shall try as far as possible to have the buildings all of one type for the sake of the beauty of the town.
Within the town, a commons shall be delimited, large enough that although the population may experience a rapid expansion, there will always be sufficient space where the people may go to for recreation and take their cattle to pasture without them making any damage.
The site and building lots for slaughter houses, fisheries, tanneries, and other business which produce filth shall be so placed that the filth can easily be disposed of.

These rules are part of a body of 148 regulations configuring any settlement according to the rule of Spain and its colonies. This continued as a precedent in all towns under Spanish control until the relinquishing of the land to others, as in the case of the American colonies and their growth. The Laws of the Indies are still used as an example of design guidelines for communities today.

The laws specify many details of towns. A plan is made centered on a plaza mayor (main square) of a size within specified limits, from which 12 straight streets are built in a rectilinear grid. The directions of the streets are chosen according to the prevailing winds, to protect the plaza mayor. The guidelines recommend a hospital for noncontagious cases near the church, and one for contagious diseases further away.

Most townships founded in any part of the Spanish Empire in America before the various parts became independent countries were planned according to the Laws of the Indies. These include many townships with Spanish names located in what is now the United States. The creation of a central square and rectilinear grid of streets was different from the haphazard and organic growth that led to meandering streets in many old townships in Iberia.

Source: Garcia Icazbalceta, Joaquín “Colección de documentos para la historia de México” “Leyes y ordenanzas” (Dada en la ciudad de Barcelona, a veinte días del mes de Noviembre, año del nacimiento de nuestro Salvador Jesucristo de mill e quinientos e cuarenta y dos años) y addenda 4 de junio de 1543; 26 de junio de 1543; 26 de mayo de 1544.

Further Reading

Adelman, Jeremy and Aron, Stephen. “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” American History Review, Vol. 104, No. 3 (Jun. 1999), 814–841.

Bowden, Henry Warner. “Spanish Missions, Cultural Conflict, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680,” Church History, 44 (June 1975): 217–228.

Forbes, Jack D. Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1960.

Garner, Van Hastings. “Seventeenth Century New Mexico,” Journal of Mexican American History, Vol. IV (1974): 41–70.

Gutiérrez, Ramon A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Knaut, Andrew L. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

Medrano, Ethelia Ruiz. Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories 1500–2010. Boulder, CO: University Press, 2010.

Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar. Roots of Resistance: Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680–1980. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Preucel, Robert W., ed. Archaeologies of the Pueblo Revolt: Identity, Meaning and Renewal in the Pueblo World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2002.

Roberts, David. The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Spicer, Edward Holland. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain Mexico and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962.

Weaver, Hillary. “Indigenous Identity: What Is It, and Who Really Has It?” The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 2001), 240–45.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University, 1992.

Weber, David J., ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? Readings Selected and Introduction by David J. Weber. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Metacom’s Rebellion, 1675–1678

Christine DeLucia

Chronology

Note on dates: Due to an historical Euro-American calendar shift, dates occurring in January through March were once associated with the previous year. Both are indicated where necessary (e.g., January 1674/75).

1620s–1670s		Algonquian communities engage with New England colonizers in negotiations over land rights and uses, attempting to share space but also experiencing mounting pressures on traditional homeland resources.
1640s–1670s		Natives interested in affiliation with Christianity gather in “Praying Towns” of central-eastern New England. Puritan missionaries intend these places to acculturate Natives, yet indigenous affiliates maintain many traditional kinship connections and patterns of mobility alongside changing spiritual systems.
April 1671		Metacom/Philip, acting as a Wampanoag sachem following the deaths of his father, Massasoit, and elder brother Wamsutta/Alexander, comes to Taunton, Massachusetts, in response to a colonial summons. English authorities attempt to achieve his subjugation, and an agreement is arranged that requires Philip’s surrender of firearms.
January 1674/75		Native translator and cross-cultural broker John Sassamon is killed at Assawompset Pond, provoking a later trial of his alleged murderers and disputes over Native-colonial jurisdiction and sovereignty.
June 1675		Violence breaks out in Wampanoag country by Swansea, Massachusetts, east of Philip’s homegrounds at Mount Hope. Initially, it appears the conflict may remain a localized struggle.
Summer 1675		Escalating violence brings larger numbers of colonial troops into key tribal parts of southeastern New England. By the wetlands of Pocasset, these troops attempt to corner Philip, but he and sunksqua Weetamoo successfully relocate their people to other parts of the region.
September 1675		Native forces in the fertile mid-Connecticut River Valley push back troops by Squakheag, Pocumtuck, and Northampton, compelling numerous colonists’ withdrawal from nascent plantations.
October 1675		Natives at Natick are rounded up and removed to Deer Island in Boston Harbor. They are forced to spend autumn and winter in under-provisioned conditions, causing many to die before survivors are permitted to leave the following spring.
December 19, 1675		Narragansetts gathered at Great Swamp, along with refugee Wampanoags, are attacked in their protective palisade by United Colonies forces. The assault becomes an indiscriminate massacre that devastates the group and their stockpiled supplies.
February 10, 1675/76		Natives attack Lancaster, Massachusetts. They appropriate and redistribute resources, and take captives such as Mary Rowlandson, intending to leverage them for ransom payments. Rowlandson later composes an influential memoir of her experiences in Nipmuc country and the Connecticut River Valley.
Spring 1676		Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, “River Indians,” and others establish presence at Peskeomskut, a waterfall in the mid-Connecticut River largely beyond centers of English habitation and surveillance. Near this ancient traditional fishing place, they plant crops to restore food security.
May 19, 1676		At dawn, William Turner leads colonial troops in an attack upon the multi-tribal encampment at Peskeomskut, causing enormous casualties and diaspora of survivors. Colonists interpret the so-called “Falls Fight” as a wartime turning point.
July 2, 1676		Nipsachuck, a swampy, hilly area with possible ceremonial significance in present-day northern Rhode Island, is attacked by Connecticut Colony mounted infantry as well as Mohegan and Pequot allies. The attack kills sunksqua Quaiapan and many relations, compromising Narragansett resistance.
August 12, 1676		Philip is tracked down at Mount Hope and killed. His body is dismembered and displayed by colonists, who interpret his death as the war’s endpoint.
September 1676		Penacooks at Cocheco (along the Piscataqua River by the present-day Maine–New Hampshire border) take in refugee Natives. Colonial leader Richard Waldron seizes many under false pretenses, and has them sent to captivity and/or enslavement.
1676–1678		Violence continues in Wabanaki country, especially by Casco Bay and northern coasts and rivers, until a peace settlement in 1678.
Late 1670s		As part of a sizable Algonquian diaspora, certain Native survivors relocate northward to the St. Lawrence River, coming into New France Catholic missionary sites like Sillery, Quebec.
Late 1670s		Native captives are sentenced to bondage within New England and around the Atlantic World. Some return to their communities after finite terms of servitude, while others remain enslaved indefinitely.
1676 onward		Algonquian communities pursue postwar rebuilding. Colonial authorities attempt to limit Native habitations to specified enclaves, though these geographically restrictive regulations are never fully implemented. This era brings renewed waves of tribal land loss as well as adaptations to changing economies and demographics.
1836		William Apes[s] delivers his Eulogy on King Philip to Boston audiences. This Pequot’s oration memorializes the Wampanoag leader and recuperates his legacy. Apess asks New Englanders and Americans to redress contemporary injustices being perpetrated against tribes across the continent.
Ongoing		Tribal commemorations of wartime sites and ancestors continue to take place across the Native Northeast.

Metacom’s Rebellion against Colonials

Metacom’s Rebellion was a major indigenous uprising of the late seventeenth century that dramatically transformed communities across the Northeast. Beginning with small-scale violence near Pokanoket-Wampanoag homelands and the struggling English colony at Plymouth, it rapidly escalated into a regionwide crisis enveloping a diversity of Algonquian and New England colonial communities. In less than three years, it caused tremendous material and social devastation and left lasting legacies for tribal landholdings, sovereignties, economies, and cultures. Closely associated with the charismatic Wampanoag sachem Metacom, also known as King Philip, who played an influential role in mobilizing Natives, the conflict has been called by additional names including “King Philip’s War” and the “Narragansett War” (Brooks 2013). It was the culminating military conflict in southern New England, but only the first of many in northern Wabanaki areas. As such, it proved a formative experience for early American colonists on the Atlantic seaboard, and influenced subsequent approaches towards Indian affairs and popular representations of indigenous resistance.

Depiction of a battle between the New England colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans during Metacom’s Rebellion, 1675-1678. The Wampanoag had peaceful relationships with the Pilgrims for 50 years until 1675, when they rebelled against constant encroachments on tribal lands. (Library of Congress)

No single cause sparked the war or caused it to accelerate across a wide geography. The clearest short-term factor was the death of John Sassamon, a Massachusets Native who studied briefly at Harvard College, located in Cambridge in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Adept in English literacy and affiliated with Protestant Christianity, the adult Sassamon moved fluidly across cultural domains. Yet his liminal position bred suspicion toward him from both Natives and colonists, Metacom included, even as they frequently turned to him as an interpreter and go-between. When Sassamon was found dead at frozen Assawompset Pond in 1674/75, English authorities decided to try several Wampanoag men for his murder—and to do so within an English legal system rather than leaving the matter up to tribal justice protocols (Lepore 1998). Their trial and eventual execution appeared to Metacom and nearby Natives as a substantial challenge to indigenous authority, requiring a clear response to reassert Native sovereignty and rebalance power relations.

As the seventeenth century proceeded, Native Peoples in the region confronted myriad effects of English colonization that pressured everyday survival and the continuance of traditional practices. Epidemic diseases, likely first transmitted by European fishermen and coastal traders, repeatedly decimated Algonquian populations that lacked immunity to foreign pathogens. These epidemics—exacerbated by social stresses of colonization—created voids in important tribal social roles and political structures, causing instabilities. Land also emerged as a persistent source of contention and misunderstanding. Beginning in 1620 at Plymouth (established within the indigenous place known as Patuxet), English settler colonialism continuously required more acreage for colonizers, their houses, and their farms. A series of dubious land negotiations—including many spanning Wampanoag homelands—incrementally undermined traditional land bases, resources, and patterns of mobility. Territorial dispossessions also bore profound cultural effects for communities who had inhabited specific terrain and water since “time out of mind” and maintained intergenerational ties to these environments and the ancestors who dwelled within them.

As English settlers brought different systems of agriculture and animal husbandry, their wandering swine and cattle trampled indigenous fields, contributing to food insecurity. When Native parties sought restorative justice for those and other problems, English court systems tended to render justice asymmetrically, to the benefit of colonial parties. Simultaneously, certain tribal groups endured enormous punitive fines of wampum, the valuable white and purple beads painstakingly formed from whelk and quahog shells. Narragansetts struggled to produce the required wampum in adequate amounts, drawing them into deep spirals of indebtedness. While Natives in southern New England might have been inclined to simply disregard mounting colonial demands, they had historical reasons to be careful in their responses. In the 1630s, the Pequot War shocked Native witnesses with the wholesale violence of colonial tactics, and a nearly genocidal treatment of Pequots near Long Island Sound. They recognized that English military reprisals could endanger their kin’s lives; therefore, they repeatedly endeavored to negotiate with ever closer Euro-American neighbors.

In religious domains, Puritan missionaries labored to convert Natives to Protestant Christianity. They promoted a series of “Praying Towns” designed to resettle Natives in more English-style enclaves to hasten acculturation. While Natives at places like Natick exercised considerable agency in deciding how to interact with missionaries, and to incorporate new spiritual dynamics of monotheism into longstanding systems of relating to manitou (power), the introduction of these imported beliefs and practices carried the possibility of language loss and erosion of traditional spiritual ways. Finally, the New England colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, New Haven, and Connecticut did not all recognize the full sovereignty of tribal nations. By mid-century, they increasingly attempted to treat these nations as subordinates or subjects. These factors (and more) reached a critical point by the 1670s. For tribal leaders like Metacom, the weighty decision to resort to violent resistance could seem a necessary strategy for rebalancing relations.

Small-scale violence initially broke out in Wampanoag homelands, near Metacom’s principal location at Mount Hope and an English colonial settlement at Swansea. In midsummer 1675, it might have remained a mostly localized conflict. Indeed, throughout the 1640s and 1650s, a series of rumored uprisings and pan-tribal resistances had swept through the region yet never amounted to concrete actions. But these first engagements of 1675 proved the harbinger of a different outcome. As several New England colonies began to mobilize military forces, and as a series of back-and-forth skirmishes unfolded, the conflict assumed the contours of a larger multi-tribal and multi-colonial war. American historians have tended to describe the emerging war through minute accountings of troop maneuvers and campaign planning. Yet that approach can conceal more fundamental dimensions of this intercultural crisis, and the techniques that tribal leaders and communities used to continuously seek shelter, regroup, and remain in ever more precarious homegrounds.

One recurrent indigenous strategy was proactively relocating an endangered community to wetlands areas (swamps). These semi-inundated locales were largely feared and poorly navigated by colonists, who perceived them as “devilish” haunts. Yet for Natives—accustomed to harvesting reeds for home-building and medicinal plants from wetlands—such resource-rich places could afford concealment from English soldiers whose firearms and horses functioned unreliably there. The swamps by Pocasset served this purpose in the war’s formative days, as Wampanoags successfully evaded military pursuit east of Narragansett Bay. The area was too fraught for them to remain there, however. Metacom and Weetamoo, a sunksqua (female leader) of a Wampanoag subgroup, thus retreated west. Metacom moved toward inland Nipmuc country to cultivate alliances with prospective Native supporters there, while Weetamoo moved west of Narragansett Bay to seek protection with relations among the Narragansetts, who had previously refrained from outright involvement.

During the war’s early months, strategies of targeting food resources unfolded in several theaters. As colonial troops proceeded down Cawsumpsett, the fertile peninsula surrounding Mount Hope, they methodically destroyed indigenous cornfields. By disrupting customary planting and harvest cycles, colonists realized they could seriously challenge tribes’ abilities to sustain themselves. Similarly, Natives sometimes targeted colonial fields and livestock to prevent regrouping in the wake of an assault. One consequence of this mounting food insecurity was tribal communities’ need to relocate to less exposed areas where they could reliably plant, fish, and hunt; so along the middle stretches of the Kwinitekw (Connecticut) River, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, “River Indians,” and others began to re-establish themselves in a seemingly secure zone.

Sidebar 1: Pan-Indian Visions in the Northeast

Metacom’s Rebellion drew together multiple Algonquian tribes in alliance and solidarity against colonial pressures: Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, Wabanakis, Pocumtucks, and others. While each brought their own local experiences and motivations to the table, over the course of 1675–78 a careful series of diplomatic alliance-building efforts gathered together an effective coalition. Within this shifting array of communities and nations, Metacom acted as one important leader among many.

It was not the first instance of pan-Indian thinking and organizing in the Northeast. Indeed, it built upon previous decades of indigenous experiences with English and other European colonizers. More than once, tribal leaders considered strategic responses through uniting previously disparate—and often fractious—tribal nations, which were nevertheless closely related.

One important precedent was the pan-Indian proposal articulated by Miantonomo, a Narragansett sachem active in the early- to mid-seventeenth century. In the 1640s, following the devastating Pequot War of the mid-1630s, Miantonomo urged regional Natives to come together. He warned that if they continued to maintain separate paths, they would face more difficulty responding to the New England colonies, which themselves were increasingly connected. He expressed this vision as follows:

“For so are we all Indians as the English are, and say brother to one another, so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall all be gone shortly.”

By stressing a common “Indian” identity rather than discrete tribe- or band-specific ones primarily, Miantonomo called for increased commitment to shared challenges and responsibilities.

While this proposal did not immediately gain the traction that Miantonomo had hoped (and he was killed shortly thereafter during colonial and inter-tribal conflict), his aspirations for solidarity influenced regional tribal thinking. Additionally, this episode invites comparative study with other pan-tribal solidarities and uprisings across North America, such as the Pueblo Revolt and Pontiac’s Rebellion.

Note: For context, see Michael Leroy Oberg, “ ‘We Are All the Sachems from East to West’: A New Look at Miantonomi’s Campaign of Resistance,” New England Quarterly 77:3 (Sept. 2004): 478–99.

Relocation was not always a proactive choice by tribal people. As the conflict gained momentum, colonial authorities began considering forced relocations. In autumn 1675, Natives in the vicinity of Natick, one of the “Praying Towns” situated on the Charles River, were forcibly removed to Deer Island in Boston harbor. These Natives had developed affiliations with Christianity and the missionary John Eliot, and ostensibly this action was for their own protection. Yet Boston-based authorities sensed that increasing surveillance over groups who might decide to join the resistance, as well as physically curtailing their mobility, could quell a wave of indigenous alliance-building. Deer Island proved a traumatic site for these internees. They had inadequate shelter, food, and tools for subsistence on the windswept island. Hundreds died on the site (and possibly on nearby islands). Survivors who eventually were released back to the mainland long recalled the painful experiences of island incarceration.

For Algonquians who strategically relocated within the Northeast by their own volition, security could be tenuous. At Great Swamp, an expansive wetlands area west of Narragansett Bay, Narragansetts had gathered in an interior elevation and fashioned a protective palisade. They had shifted away from their initial neutrality and taken in Wampanoag refugees. This act provoked colonial authorities, who attempted to forbid Narragansetts from harboring perceived opponents of the English. The winter of 1675–76 was unusually cold, occurring within the larger climatic trend of the Little Ice Age. Normally, the swamp’s waters would not freeze through, making the environment itself a defensive moat for the fortified structure within. But that year the water froze, allowing United Colonies troops—directed to the location by a Native man—to access the interior in late December 1675, breach the palisade, and attack the gathered Narragansetts and Wampanoags.

What may have commenced as a military engagement rapidly turned into a massacre. United Colonies soldiers killed Native women, children, and elders along with warriors, and burned their wetuash and stockpiled corn. Colonial troops experienced significant casualties and withdrew to other parts of Rhode Island in the aftermath. Natives suffered immense losses, estimated at hundreds of dead. While later Euro-American commentators tended to describe the events at Great Swamp as causing the wholesale defeat and destruction of Narragansetts, such narratives of indigenous finality were selective representations. In actuality, many Narragansetts survived the attack and regathered strength in other wetlands areas as well as in zones like the Connecticut River Valley.

One of the complexities of Great Swamp was that colonial troops fought alongside Native allies. Mohegans and Pequots served as valuable scouts and soldiers throughout the war, guiding colonial soldiers into territory with which they were less familiar. Mohegans and Pequots had their own self-protective rationales for forming these alliances with colonists—particularly those of Connecticut—rather than supporting Philip’s uprising (Warren 2014). At Great Swamp, certain subsequent oral traditions sometimes held that these English-allied Natives had actually fired their weapons high rather than outright targeting the Narragansetts and Wampanoags. Accurate or not, such reports suggest the importance of considering how indigenous combatants might have treated their Algonquian relations in distinctive ways. Additionally, other Algonquian communities sought to maintain neutrality during the war to protect their own lands and inhabitants from being targeted. Wampanoag enclaves along Cape Cod and on Noepe/Martha’s Vineyard, many of which had become deeply enmeshed with Christian missionizing, tended to adopt this approach (Silverman 2005). The sunksqua Awashonks, who held responsibility for people and lands at Sakonnet on the east side of Narragansett Bay, also navigated this challenging diplomatic terrain. Overall, Metacom’s Rebellion was never simply a Native-colonial conflict (Drake 1999). Diverse Northeastern peoples made unique choices about how best to align themselves, drawing upon tribally specific histories and localized relations with neighbors to inform their deliberations.

Wintertime brought a fresh bout of struggles. In January 1675/76, Job Kattenanit and James Quanopohit, two Natives affiliated with the Praying Towns, traveled westward from Boston into Nipmuc country, where scores of Natives had established themselves away from direct sightlines of the English. The pair had been directed to gather intelligence for the English about the whereabouts of Natives in the interior, but also had their own motivations for traveling among kin. By Menemesit, they heard a range of indigenous responses to the ongoing conflict, including fears of being sent into overseas captivity. They also learned that as food supplies dwindled, Natives intended to attack specific New England towns to gather resources for redistribution. In February, such an attack occurred at Lancaster, Massachusetts. Along with resources, Native parties took a number of captives, the colonial minister’s wife Mary Rowlandson among them. The purpose of taking English captives was to carry them away from English centers, then use them to gain ransom payments. Rowlandson was eventually redeemed, and authored a narrative about her experiences in captivity. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) strongly shaped colonial perceptions of Native Peoples. In addition to Rowlandson’s deeply pious Puritan outlook and sometimes derogatory ethnographic descriptions, it conveyed real details about Native survival during wartime, and interior Native settlement and travel geographies.

Rowlandson and her captors traveled into the middle stretches of the Connecticut River Valley. This emerged as a vital locale in 1676 as indigenous refugees from across the region coalesced around Peskeomskut, a major waterfall. Natives had been fishing at Peskeomskut for thousands of years, as oral traditions and archaeological evidence attest, as well as planting crops in the fertile surrounding valley soils. Situated north of the English river towns of Springfield, Hadley, Northampton, and Pocumtuck/Deerfield, Peskeomskut appeared an ideal site for the resistance to build strength for renewed offensives. But word spread to the river towns about a concentration of Natives at the falls in the spring of 1676. After negotiations for peacemaking failed (owing to burdensome terms proposed to Native signatories), colonial leaders adopted a more violent approach. In mid-May 1676, William Turner led a contingent of troops upriver under cover of night, and at daybreak took the sleeping encampment by surprise. As at Great Swamp, they attacked indiscriminately. Hundreds of Natives likely perished in the massacre, either by firearms or by being forced over the waterfalls. In the nineteenth century, Euro-American antiquarians mounted a campaign to re-name the falls in his recognition, creating the problematic place name “Turner’s Falls” that endures today.

The cataclysm at Peskeomskut constituted another major blow to the Native resistance. It did not end immediately there, as enduring groups gathered at locales like Mount Wachusett. But the continuous violence and resource scarcity took a toll, making it seem increasingly impossible to sustain opposition to the United Colonies. In midsummer 1676, Metacom returned to the vicinity of Mount Hope. He died there in August 1676 after being tracked into a swamp. For New England colonists, it was an event to be celebrated and memorialized, marking the closure of what Puritans perceived as searing spiritual “trials” by God. Metacom’s body became a potent signifier for colonists: rather than allowing surviving Wampanoags to mourn their leader in customary ways, colonists dismembered Metacom and posted his head on a pike outside Plymouth. There it stood for years, intended to remind colonists of their victory over “savages,” and to instill fear in Natives who passed by it.

The war’s fallout was devastating for indigenous communities. Multitudes who survived faced captivity and forced servitude and/or enslavement in colonial New England households or overseas in the English Atlantic World. Slave trading provided a source of profit for English towns and colonies left impoverished by wartime damages, as well as a means of containing and exercising surveillance over Native men, women, and children. Some Natives, like the “surrenderers” who entered into Mohegan spheres of influence, were placed under the oversight of other tribal communities. Others were exported to far-flung Atlantic points like the West Indies, possibly Bermuda, and Tangier in North Africa. While colonial documents register aspects of these hemispheric and global trajectories, details can be difficult to determine, not to mention the nature of the new lives these captives may have built (DeLucia 2012, Newell 2015).

It is possible that some captives managed to return to their traditional homelands. In the 1680s, Natives sent to labor on galley ships at Tangier conveyed a message to John Eliot, asking him to lobby for their return. Whether this was accomplished, or whether they remained in the Mediterranean world, is uncertain. Overall, these instances of indigenous bondage as a consequence of colonial conflict demonstrate that the origins of slavery in early American and Atlantic contexts were thoroughly linked to indigenous experiences and dispossessions, as well as those of Africans carried into the transatlantic slave trade. While indigenous slavery eventually became banned or curtailed in New England, bondage in the postwar period tended to assume other, less immediately visible, forms. Indebtedness, for example, repeatedly led Native families to “bind out” their children to colonial households as indentured servants.

Metacom’s Rebellion did not conclude with Metacom’s death. The conflict continued through 1677 in Wabanaki areas. Natives in those northern places—the Casco Bay region, Black Point, Kennebec and Penobscot River watersheds—responded to a distinctive set of colonial pressures, such as English bids to remove firearms from tribal possession, and encroachments into places necessary for subsistence. In that northern theater, the trajectory and ultimate outcome of conflict stood in marked distinction to southern New England. A “peace” negotiated in 1678 (Treaty of Casco) compelled English colonists to pay annual tribute in corn to Natives, rather than comprehensively drawing tribes into relations of subjugation. Moreover, the northern dimensions of the conflict became part of a decades-long series of contestations that increasingly drew French colonists into long-distance, inter-imperial struggles.

In another sense, the conflict continued for generations as tribal communities across New England continued to face land loss, denials of their sovereignty, and bids to overwrite or denigrate traditional cultures, spiritualities, and languages. In the ensuing centuries, Algonquians developed creative adaptations to changing circumstances: migrating to urban areas, working globally as whalers and mariners, intermarrying with “people of color,” and using legal tools, writing, and grassroots activism to maintain important lands, resources, and heritages (Calloway 1997). Current research by tribal communities, historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, preservation groups, and others continues to re-examine the nature of both the war itself, and vital practices of survival that followed. For Algonquian communities today, Metacom’s Rebellion has remained a sensitive and powerful touchstone for memorialization, and for recounting other narratives of this period besides colonial storylines that overwhelmingly insisted on the war as a moment of indigenous decline, erasure, and eventual disappearance (DeLucia 2012, 2015; Rubertone 2012). At Mount Hope, Deer Island, Plymouth, Great Swamp, Peskeomskut, Bermuda, and other places, community members and supporters have gathered periodically to remember the losses and struggles of ancestors, and to affirm enduring solidarities and sovereignties.

Biographies

Metacom (c. 1638?–1676)

Metacom was an influential Pokanoket-Wampanoag leader of the seventeenth century who played a critical role in mobilizing and maintaining a regional indigenous uprising against the New England colonies. At different points in his life, he also went by the names Philip or King Philip. (Within Algonquian contexts, individuals sometimes assumed new names at transformative life-stages or in connection with new societal roles.) The conflict discussed here has frequently been linked directly to Philip, and his name used to characterize the entirety of a widespread phenomenon. Without downplaying Philip’s centrality, it is also important to recognize that the authority he exercised occurred within a wider, multigenerational set of relations that required acting in consultation with numerous other Native leaders and community members, including female sunksquas.

Metacom was the son of Massasoit, also known as Ousamequin, a sachem (or principal leader) of the Wampanoags at the time of first contacts with English colonizers. As English migrants established a precarious settlement they called “Plymouth” within Patuxet lands, Massasoit pursued strategic diplomacy with them. Recent epidemics had decimated area Native populations, likely making Massasoit more amenable to alliances with newcomers than he would have been at prior moments. The nature of these relations has often been represented in popular accounts as straightforwardly amiable or peaceable, particularly in relation to a 1621 treaty. More accurately, these dynamics involved careful efforts to make space within Wampanoag homelands for a foreign presence, and to do so while retaining tribal resources and sovereignty. Massasoit expended great energy forging political and interpersonal links with Plymouth colonists. When he died circa 1660–1661, the sachemship descended to his elder son, Wamsutta. Wamsutta also was known as Alexander, following a request he made to English leaders to offer him an English name. In the same context, his younger brother, Metacom, acquired the name Philip, which appears in many subsequent documents of the period. Both of their adopted names are believed to have referenced ancient Macedonians and their supposed requests for Christian teachings (Lepore 1998).

Wamsutta’s sachemship was short-lived, however, since he died suddenly—and perhaps suspiciously—in 1662, leaving leadership to descend to Philip. When Philip stepped into this role, he already had witnessed sweeping changes within his people’s ancestral homelands. Land loss; the arrival of an insistent new religious system; bids by English colonial authorities to curtail Wampanoag power: all of this shaped his decision-making in the 1660s and 1670s. Philip actively rejected certain English and Puritan overtures, but incorporated some practices and outlooks in compellingly hybrid ways. He never affiliated with Christianity, and may have resented the growing influence of other Wampanoags who had embraced aspects of that imported religion. He relied on English-literate John Sassamon as an interpreter and scribe, though became increasingly suspicious of Sassamon’s perhaps self-interested motivations. His clothing, as described in period accounts, demonstrated an eye-catching combination of traditional garments and goods fashioned from European trade items. Like many Algonquians, he readily perceived the utility of Euro-American firearms and developed skill with that form of weaponry. Thus, when colonists summoned him to Taunton in 1671 and pushed for his subjugation as well as relinquishment of firearms, the demand seemed especially galling. Plymouth also attempted to steer Philip’s Wampanoags away from raising swine—a livestock practice they adapted from colonial neighbors—but Wampanoags likely continued that animal husbandry (Anderson 1994).

As sachem, Philip’s authority was not absolute or perpetual. Algonquian leadership protocols revolved around consensus building and continuous consultation with community members: a sachem maintained a following through careful deliberations and stewardship over resources critical for community survival. Should he fail to live up to those expectations, community members might transfer their loyalty to another individual. Philip navigated that fine balance, acknowledging that various groups and individuals within the Wampanoag confederacy held divergent views about best practices going forward, including on the omnipresent topic of appropriate relations with Euro-American colonists. Philip also operated within a complex web of relations that involved female leaders, such as the sunksquas Awashonks and Weetamoo (see below).

By the time violence broke out in the mid-1670s, Philip could draw upon many prior experiences and approaches to leadership. While his father had actively pursued policies of peacemaking, Philip seemed to sense that regional power imbalances had proceeded too far for that to continue as a viable tactic. Yet he knew that the decision to engage in violence, even as a strategy of restorative justice, could invite fatal consequences. One local tradition centered on Kickemuit Spring, near Mount Hope, held that Philip wept at news of the war’s outbreak at Swansea, perhaps foreseeing this future (DeLucia 2015). Yet once begun, the war escalated quickly and expanded into new areas of the Native Northeast, owing to concerted diplomacy and alliance building. Philip’s own trajectory during 1675–76 crisscrossed the Northeast, taking him from the Narragansett Bay area, into interior Nipmuc lands, west to the Connecticut River Valley, and as far as present-day Albany and upstate New York—Mohawk territory. Each of these areas had its own tribal leadership figures. Philip likely interacted, or at least communicated, with major sachems and sunksquas like Canonchet (Narragansett), Quaiapan (Narragansett), Matoonas (Nipmuc), and many others. He likely also followed the actions of sachems who maintained wartime neutrality or actively allied with the English: Uncas (Mohegan), Ninigret (Niantic), and Robin Cassacinamon (Mashantucket Pequot).

Philip’s extensive circles of allies led to a number of wartime successes. But as food and attendant resources dwindled, and massacres at Great Swamp and Peskeomskut compounded Native losses, the momentum of the resistance wavered. By midsummer 1676, Philip had circled back from his far-flung travels and returned to the Mount Hope area. In August, English rangers under Benjamin Church, in the company of a Native soldier named Alderman, tracked Philip into a swamp and shot him. They dismembered his body and posted his head on a pike outside Plymouth, where it remained for years as a graphic bodily testament to English conquest, and a warning to indigenous survivors to quell future ideas of resistance. Philip’s lineage did not end there, however. His wife, Wootonekanuske—sister of Weetamoo—was taken captive along with their young son (name unknown). Following heated debates among Puritan authorities about how to dispose of these prisoners, Philip’s son was reported to have been shipped into slavery, perhaps to the West Indies, Bermuda, or another Atlantic World node, where he may have survived and cultivated new senses of heritage and identity.

Equally important, Wampanoags as a cultural and political entity did not cease with Philip’s death. Significant numbers survived the war, and rebuilt their lives in its aftermath—some in positions of bondage, some free, some within autonomous Wampanoag enclaves on Cape Cod and the islands that had retained neutrality. In the centuries following Philip’s short-lived yet sweepingly transformative uprising, he was alternately vilified by colonial commentators, who depicted him as a savage threat to English civility and prosperity, and memorialized by indigenous descendants, who respected his efforts to restore and maintain indigenous integrity. In the wake of twentieth-century American Indian activism at Plymouth, a memorial plaque there now narrates Philip’s life and death. He continues to resonate as a symbolically significant icon across the Northeast and beyond, among communities still reckoning with the consequences of settler colonialism in Native spaces.

Weetamoo (16??–1676)

Weetamoo was an influential Wampanoag leader of the seventeenth century. The daughter of Corbitant, Weetamoo grew to young adulthood along the coastal and inland stretches of Wampanoag country east of Pokanoket. As an Algonquian female, she would have been instructed in diverse skills necessary to enable her family’s and community’s endurance: tending corn and related crops, processing them into food, gathering rushes and reeds to construct wetuash (rounded dwellings fashioned from saplings and woven mats), and caring for children. Additionally, she assumed significant political responsibility as a sunksqua among the Wampanoags—one of several female leaders who were counterparts to male sachems. In her diplomatic interactions with Plymouth Colony authorities, Weetamoo faced challenges linked to her gender. While English colonizers’ own cultural contexts included traditions of female authority (e.g., queenship), New England colonists frequently failed to recognize or respect the full extent of power possessed by Algonquian sunksquas. Colonists’ patriarchal social structures limited their understandings of Algonquian ones premised on different gender norms and roles.

Despite colonial interlocutors’ periodic intransigence, Weetamoo continued to extend her influence through a growing network of relations. Commonplace among Algonquians were practices of multiple marriages, whereby an individual could set aside one spouse and assume a new one at various points. This option was open to women as well as men. Weetamoo engaged in this practice, and with each relationship she cultivated ties to more families and communities. One marriage made her the spouse of Wamsutta/Alexander (Philip’s elder brother), thus making her sister-in-law to Philip. While Wamsutta’s sudden death ended that marriage, Weetamoo retained close ties to Philip in the aftermath and acted as a vital consultant and counterpart as the war gained momentum. Philip and Weetamoo did not always act in unison: when they parted ways after the colonial assault on Pocasset, they did so strategically, with Philip reaching out to Nipmucs and Weetamoo to Narragansetts. Narragansetts historically experienced acrimonious relations with Wampanoags on the other side of Narragansett Bay, but recent developments had fostered stronger ties. So did Weetamoo’s marriage to the Narragansett Quinnapin.

Like Philip, Weetamoo relocated purposefully across the Northeast during the war. She appeared in Nipmuc country in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, described as wearing elaborate material culture like necklaces that signified her stature. In the course of her travels, she experienced the loss of her child. Weetamoo died in 1676, with colonial accounts (perhaps uncorroborated) reporting that she drowned in the Taunton River in Wampanoag country. As with Philip, colonists transformed her body into a physical trophy of conquest by displaying its dismembered parts by Taunton. Over the centuries, Euro-American commentators had little flattering to say about Weetamoo, often invoking gendered language to describe her as beastly and unfeminine. Within Wampanoag and related tribal contexts, however, the sunksqua’s leadership and unrelenting guidance of her people to safer locales during conflict gave her legacy an alternative significance.

DOCUMENT EXCERPTS

Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative (1682)

Mary Rowlandson, wife of a colonial minister at Lancaster, Massachusetts, experienced several months’ captivity among Native groups during 1675/76. After her “redemption,” she authored an account of her time in Nipmuc country and the Connecticut River Valley. Her memoir included detailed descriptions of foods that Natives were eating when faced with resource scarcity, and their deliberate movements through interior landscapes and riverscapes (characterized as “removes”). In this excerpt, she relates material exchanges in which her skills with domestic tasks accrued value. Metacom/Philip also interacts with Rowlandson. Northampton, a town in the River Valley, constituted an important source of colonial livestock that Natives appropriated and redistributed among their own networks of relations.

Now the Indians gather their Forces to go against North-Hampton: over night one went about yelling and hooting to give notice of the design. Whereupon they fell to boyling of Ground-nuts, and parching of Corn (as many as had it) for their Provision; and in the morning, away they went. During my abode in this place, Philip spake to me to make a shirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a shilling. I offered the mony to my master but he bade me keep it; and with it I bought a piece of Horse flesh. Afterwards he asked me to make a Cap for his boy, for which he invited me to Dinner; I went, and he gave me a Pancake, about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat beaten, and fryed in Beares grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life. There was a Squaw who spake to me to make a shirt for her Sannup, for which she gave me a piece of Bear. Another asked me to knit a pair of Stockins, for which she gave me a quart of Pease. I boyled my Pease and Bear together, and invited my master and mistress to dinner, but the proud Gossip, because I served them both in one dish, would eat nothing, except on bit that he gave her upon the point of his knife. Hearing that my Son was come to this place, I went to see him, and found him lying flat upon the ground. I asked him how he could sleep so? He answered me, That he was not asleep, but at Prayer; and lay so that they might not observe what he was doing. I pray God he may remember these thing now he is returned in safety. At this Place (the Sun now getting higher) what with the beams and heat of the Sun, and the smoak of the Wigwams, I thought I should have been blind. I could scarce discern one Wigwam from another. There was here one Mary Thurston of Medfield, who seeing how it was with me, lent me a Hat to wear: but as soon as I was gone, the Squaw (who owned that Mary Thurston) came running after me, and got it away again. Here was the Squaw that gave me one spoonfull of Meal, I put it in my Pocket to keep it safe: yet notwithstanding, some body stole it, but put five indian Corns in the room of it; which Corns were the greatest Provisions I had in my travell for one day.

The Indians returning from North-Hampton, brought with them some Horses, and Sheep, and other things which they had taken: I desired them that they would carry me to Albany upon one of those Horses, and sell me for Powder: for so they had sometimes discoursed. I was utterly hopless of getting home on foot, the way that I came. I could hardly bear to think of the many weary steps I had taken, to come to this place.

Source: Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together, With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Commended by her, to all that desires to know the Lords doing to, and dealings with Her (Cambridge MA: Samuel Green 1682), 24–26.

John Eliot’s Account of Native Enslavement (1683)

Numerous Natives were taken captive and sold into bondage during and immediately after the war. Their experiences spanned a spectrum from indentured servitude within New England colonial households close to traditional homelands, to lifelong enslavement in far-flung points of the Atlantic World, including plantation and maritime economies of the West Indies. These forced removals carried detrimental consequences for indigenous survivors remaining in the Northeast, who grappled with the absences of fathers, mothers, leaders, warriors, medicine specialists, and storytellers. One group was transported to the English outpost at Tangier (present-day Morocco). There they were pressed into onerous labor on Mediterranean galley ships. In this excerpt, Puritan missionary John Eliot corresponds with English scientist and missionary supporter Robert Boyle about these captives.

I desire to take boldness to propose a request. A vessel carried away a great number of our surprised Indians, in the time of our wars, to sell them for slaves; but the nations, whither they went, would not buy them. Finally, she left them at Tangier; there they be, so many as live, or are born there. An Englishman, a mason, came thence to Boston: he told me, they desired I would use some means for their return home. I know not what to do in it; but now it is in my heart to move your honour, so to meditate, that they may have leave to get home, either from thence hither, or from thence to England, and so to get home. If the Lord shall please to move your charitable heart herein, I shall be obliged in great thankfulness, and am persuaded, that Christ will, at the great day, reckon it among your deeds of charity done unto them, for his name’s sake.

Source: Letter from John Eliot to Robert Boyle, November 27, 1683, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, For the Year 1794, Vol. III (1794; reprinted Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1810): 183.

William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836)

In 1836, amid turmoil over Indian Removal in the Southeast, William Apes[s] delivered a striking oration about the meanings and legacies of Metacom’s life. Taking the stage at Boston’s Odeon Theater, Apess, who publicly stressed his own Pequot heritage, radically inverted conventional narratives about Metacom’s Rebellion that colonial authors had long promoted. Instead of vilifying Metacom/Philip and justifying colonial dispossessions of Algonquians, Apess honored the Wampanoag sachem as a visionary leader attempting to maintain his people’s lives and ways amidst rising tides of colonialism. Apess explicitly linked the contested history of the seventeenth-century Northeast to ongoing struggles across Indian country, and invoked King Philip’s War to urge his listeners—many of them non-Natives—to reform their own actions and mentalities towards tribal peoples.

How deep then was the thought of Philip, when he could look from Maine to Georgia, and from the ocean to the lakes, and view with one look all his brethren withering before the more enlightened to come; and how true his prophesy, that the white people would not only cut down their groves but would enslave them. Had the inspiration of Isaiah been there, he could not have been more correct. Our groves and hunting grounds are gone, our dead are dug up, our council-fires are put out, and a foundation was laid in the first Legislature, to enslave our people, by taking from them all rights which has been strictly adhered to ever since. Look at the disgraceful laws, disfranchising us as citizens. Look at the treaties made by Congress, all broken. Look at the deep-rooted plans laid, when a territory becomes a State, that after so many years, the laws shall be extended over the Indians that live within their boundaries. Yea, every charter that has been given, was given with the view of driving the Indians out of the States, or dooming them to become chained under desperate laws, that would make them drag out a miserable life as one chained to the galley; and this is the course that has been pursued for nearly two hundred years. A fire, a canker, created by the pilgrims from across the Atlantic, to burn and destroy my poor unfortunate brethren, and it cannot be denied. What then shall we do? Shall we cease crying, and say it is all wrong, or shall we bury the hatchet and those unjust laws, and Plymouth Rock together, and become friends. And will the sons of the pilgrims aid in putting out the fire and destroying the canker that will ruin all that their fathers left behind them to destroy? (by this we see how true Philip spake.)

Source: William Apes[s], Eulogy on King Philip, As Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street, Boston, by the Rev. William Apes, An Indian (Boston: Published by the Author, 1836), 53–54.

Further Reading

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 51:4 (Oct. 1994): 601–624.

Brooks, Lisa T. “Turning the Looking Glass on King Philip’s War: Locating American Literature in Native Space.” American Literary History 25:4 (Winter 2013): 718–750.

Calloway, Colin G., ed. After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Edited by Calloway. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997.

DeLucia, Christine M. “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast after King Philip’s War.” The Journal of American History 98:4 (March 2012): 975–997.

DeLucia, Christine M. “Locating Kickemuit: Springs, Stone Memorials, and Contested Placemaking in the Northeastern Borderlands.” Early American Studies 13:2 (Spring 2015): 467–502.

Drake, James. King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Newell, Margaret Ellen. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.

Pulsipher, Jenny Hale. Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Rubertone, Patricia E. “Monuments and Sexual Politics in New England Indian Country.” In The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects. Eds. Barbara Voss and Eleanor Casella. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 232–251.

Silverman, David J. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Warren, Jason W. Connecticut Unscathed: Victory in the Great Narragansett War, 1675–1676. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

Pontiac’s Rebellion, 1763

Roger Carpenter

Chronology

November 29, 1760		Having not been resupplied for over a year, the French garrison at Fort Detroit surrenders to the British.
1760–1761?		Neolin (the Delaware Prophet) initiates a Native spiritual movement that emphasizes a return to a pre-contact past and the avoidance of Europeans and their goods.
1760–1763		General Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of British forces in North America, forbids the giving of gifts to Indians, and restricts the trade of gunpowder and shot to Native People.
February 10, 1763		France surrenders all of her North American possessions to Great Britain and Spain in the Peace of Paris.
April 27, 1763		Invoking his version of Neolin’s message, Pontiac addresses a meeting of his followers and outlines his plan for an attack on Detroit.
May 5, 1763		Pontiac meets with Native Peoples who have not yet sided with him and encourages them to do so, citing alleged English abuses.
May 7, 1763		Pontiac initiates hostilities when he attempts to seize Fort Detroit by subterfuge. However, post commander Major Henry Gladwin has been tipped off, and the garrison is ready for a surprise attack. Pontiac aborts his planned attack and begins a siege of Detroit the next day that will last into the fall months.
June 2, 1763		Unaware that other British posts are under attack, the garrison at Fort Michilimackinac is tricked by group of visiting Ojibwa and Sauk Indians. The warriors play a game of lacrosse outside the fort. One player launches the ball over the wall of the fort, and the warriors rush in through the open gates, killing most of the garrison.
July 13, 1763		Responding to an earlier letter to General Amherst, Colonel Henry Bouquet states in a postscript that he looks for ways to spread smallpox among the Indians besieging Fort Pitt by giving them infected blankets. Smallpox will later break out among the Native Americans in the vicinity of Fort Pitt. Historians debate whether or not the English caused it, since the outbreak occurred before Bouquet’s arrival.
July 31, 1763		Captain James Dalyell leads a force of 247 men on a night-time raid of Pontiac’s encampment. The battle of Bloody Run is a disaster for the British as they suffer casualties of 35 wounded, 20 killed (including Dalyell), and about 100 captured.
August 5, 1763		Troops led by Henry Bouquet defeat Native warriors at the battle of Bushy Run, leading to the relief of Fort Pitt.
September 14, 1763		Seneca warriors attack a 25-wagon convoy at the portage near Fort Niagara. Two companies of troops sally out of Fort Niagara in an effort to assist the 31 men guarding the convoy, but they fall victim to a second ambush. About 80 British troops are killed in what comes to be known as the “Battle of Devil’s Hole.”
September 27, 1763		A delegation of French officials informs Pontiac that Great Britain and France are at peace. Realizing that the French will not provide assistance, and knowing that his warriors must go on their winter hunt, Pontiac looks for ways to end the siege.
October 7, 1763		The crown issues the Proclamation of 1763, which forbids English settlement west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains.
October 15, 1763		Pontiac abandons the siege of Detroit, effectively ending his rebellion.
November 10, 1763		General Jeffrey Amherst is relived as the commander of the British army in North America.
December 14, 1763		The “Paxton Boys,” a contingent of approximately 50 frontiersmen from Paxton in western Pennsylvania, attack a Conestoga village, killing 20 Native Americans. The surviving Conestoga flee to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In an effort to protect them, the local authorities place them in jail. The Paxton Boys, however, break into the jail and massacre the surviving Conestoga.
February 13, 1764		The Paxton Boys agree not to march on Philadelphia, in exchange for de facto amnesty.
July 23, 1766		Pontiac meets with British Indian Superintendent Sir William Johnson and agrees to a peace with the British. Pontiac is afterward rumored to be in the pay of the British.
April 20, 1769		Pontiac is murdered by a Peoria Indian in Cahokia (present-day southern Illinois).

Pontiac’s Rebellion and Indian Warfare

A revolt of a loose alliance of Native American tribes against the British immediately after the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s Rebellion led to the Proclamation of 1763, which set aside an “Indian Reserve” west of the Appalachians. The proclamation is still important today, forming the basis for First Nations land claims in Canada. While the Native Americans did not defeat the British, it is difficult to say that the British won.

The French surrendered their North American possessions when they signed the Peace of Paris in 1763. The end of the war saw the British expand their territory in North America. Needing to police the region west of the Appalachians, and garrison the former French forts, England had to maintain a least one regiment in North America. All of these factors meant that occupying the region would be expensive, and Great Britain was now in the midst of a finial crisis. To offset its budgetary difficulties, the government ordered colonial administrators to economize.

Chief Pontiac was an Ottawa chief who became known for his role in Pontiac’s War (1763–1766), a united intertribal conflict fought against the British occupation of the Great Lakes region. (Library of Congress)

Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of British troops in North America, implemented this policy with a vengeance, forbidding the giving of gifts to Native Americans. The French commonly gave Native Peoples blankets, powder, and shot. Native Peoples regarded gifts as a mark of respect and as a form of rent that the French paid for the land under their forts. Amherst opposed the gifts because of the expense and because he considered them bribes for good behavior. Sir William Johnson, the Northern Superintendent of Indian Affairs, argued that the gifts were necessary in order to maintain peace. Amherst, however, eschewed Johnson’s advice. Amherst restricted trade, making it difficult for Native Americans to acquire ammunition that they had become dependent upon for hunting. Many Native Americans believed he wanted to starve them or render them defenseless.

The restricting of trade goods occurred at a time when many Native People of the Ohio country and the Great Lakes region began heeding the teachings of Neolin (the Delaware Prophet). Neolin claimed to have met the Master of Life. Neolin emphasized that the Master of Life was upset with Native Americans, because He had made their land for them and not Europeans. Neolin encouraged his followers to avoid Europeans and not to use their goods. Neolin claimed that if Native People were to reject Europeans, the Master of Life would return that world to what it had been before the arrival of Europeans.

One of Neolin’s key followers was the Ottawa chief Pontiac. While Pontiac seems to have agreed with the Delaware Prophet’s notions of eschewing contact with Europeans, he adjusted his message a bit. Whereas Neolin wanted to return to a pre-contact world, Pontiac actually wanted the restoration of trade with the French. Pontiac also made it seem as if the French were somehow different from other Europeans, a point that Neolin probably would not have agreed with. It appears that Pontiac utilized Neolin’s religious message as a sort of glue to hold Native People together in their antipathy toward the British. In short, Pontiac used Neolin’s spiritual message for secular ends.

Pontiac attempted to begin the war against the British on May 7, 1763, but things did not go as planned. Using the information his warriors had gathered about Fort Detroit, Pontiac intended to meet with Major Gladwin, the post commander. Pontiac informed his warriors that he would give a speech, in the course of which he would hold up a wampum belt. If he held the belt in such a way that the green side faced his warriors, that would be the signal to launch the attack. If, however, he held the side of the belt decorated with white wampum toward them, they would know the attack had been called off. Confident that his warriors would easily overpower the surprised British garrison, Pontiac’s confidence must have sunk after entering the fort, because it became readily apparent that the British had somehow learned of his plans. Major Gladwin had doubled the fort’s guard detail, and the entire garrison had turned out on the parade ground, armed, and at the ready. Pontiac protested to Gladwin that his warriors had come in friendship, and demanded to know why the major had put on a hostile display. Gladwin replied that his troops were merely conducting normal military exercises.

Thwarted by Gladwin, Pontiac initiated the attack on Detroit the next day (May 8), falling first upon British colonists and traders outside the post. Pontiac had the advantage in numbers, having about 460 warriors to Gladwin’s 125 redcoats. In the first week of fighting, the Indians killed 20 of Gladwin’s soldiers while capturing 15 others. Pontiac’s warriors attempted to control the narrow span of the Detroit River to prevent the British from sending reinforcements. Most of the British posts west of the Appalachians had had fewer than 20 troops on hand. The Indians quickly overpowered most of these forts. A number of the local commanders wisely chose the better part of valor, abandoning smaller, indefensible posts and marching their troops to one of the larger, more secure British forts in the region.

Sidebar 1: Taking a British Heart: The Battle of Bloody Run

At the end of July 1763, Captain James Dalyell, the son of a baronet and General Amherst’s aide-de-camp, arrived at Detroit with approximately 250 men. Although Major Gladwin outranked Dalyell, his position status as one of Amherst’s favorites may have inhibited him. Amherst expressed to Dalyell his desire that the Natives be “chastised.” Gladwin wanted to use the newly arrived troops to augment the fort’s defenses, but Dalyell decided to conduct a nighttime raid against Pontiac’s camp in the hope of breaking the siege. Unbeknownst to both Gladwin and Dalyell, the plan had already been compromised.

Two hundred forty-seven men followed Dalyell out of the fort at about two o’clock in the morning. The captain pointed them in the direction of Pontiac’s camp, about two and a half miles north of Detroit. A full moon made navigation easy, but it also made it easy for two large parties of warriors that lay in ambush to watch British. Once Pontiac’s warriors launched their attack, the British found themselves trapped between the two ambushing parties and unable to retreat. Finally, led by Dalyell, the British broke out of the trap and began a steady retreat that dissolved into rout as order broke down in their ranks, and most of the men fled for their lives. The survivors reached Detroit at about dawn, still pursued by Pontiac’s men. Only then could the British pause and make an assessment as to how badly Dalyell’s attempted raid had fared. Over half the men who had set out just a few hours earlier had become either casualties or captives of the Indians. At least 20 soldiers who had set out on the mission, including Dalyell, lay dead, 35 of them were wounded, and approximately 100 had been captured. Pontiac’s warriors cut out Dalyell’s heart and cut off his head, displaying both body parts on a post in their camp. The battle became known as Bloody Run, since a stream on the battlefield was said to have turned red from the amount of British blood that flowed into it. As for the surviving men who made it back to Detroit, they now joined the besieged garrison.

In New York City, General Amherst received reports of Indian attacks on British garrisons, and he did not believe them at first, or thought they had been grossly exaggerated. He seemed to have the impression that he need send only a few troops needed to be sent west to quell the uprising. Amherst did not lack intelligence about events in the west. Sir William Johnson had his own sources of information, and he shared what he had learned with Amherst; Johnson, however, could not always get Amherst to listen.

Sidebar 2: The Massacre at a Lacrosse Game: Fort Michilimackinac

The French established Fort Michilimackinac on Mackinaw Island In the early eighteenth century to control the narrow strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan. The British took control of Michilimackinac, and thereby effective control of the upper Great Lakes, in 1761.

While Pontiac kept Detroit under siege, British vessels could not traverse the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, which connected Lakes Erie and Huron—the route that communications and supplies to Michilimackinac and other posts on the upper Great Lakes north of Detroit had to follow. This is why the garrison at Fort Michilimackinac had no idea that an Indian war had broken out and that other British posts were under siege, when a contingent of Ojibwas arrived at the post.

Where Pontiac failed to take Detroit by trickery, the Ojibwas at Fort Michilimackinac succeeded. On June 2, the Ojibwa men began a lacrosse game, and the 40-man English garrison relaxed outside the post with the gates wide open. Despite the warmth of the day, the Ojibwa women had blankets draped about them as they gathered near the fort’s open gates and seemingly watched the game. Suddenly, one of the players knocked the ball over the wall of the fort. The garrison looked on while the players charged through the gates after the ball. As the warriors passed the women, the women handed them hatchets and short spears from underneath their blankets. The Ojibwas quickly took the fort, killing most of the British troops and traders, while reserving a few as prisoners.

Since the British could not traverse the narrow passage formed by the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, which connected Lakes Erie and Huron, the garrison at Fort Michilimackinac on Mackinaw Island had no idea that an Indian war had broken out and that troops at other British posts were fighting for their lives. Soon, events did not go well at Mackinaw Island.

Elsewhere, the Indians captured nearly all of the British posts west of the Appalachians. They did not, however, take the three most important installations: Forts Pitt, Niagara, and, of course, Detroit. These three posts sat athwart important supply and communication routes. As long as they still held them, the British still had a chance to regain control of the situation. Located in western Pennsylvania, Fort Pitt, the largest of the three posts, controlled the Forks of the Ohio River. Fort Niagara guarded the portage around the falls that bore the same name. The British desperately needed to hang on to this post in order to reinforce and resupply Detroit. Detroit, the westernmost of the three, became the focal point of Pontiac’s Rebellion. The installation controlled the Detroit River and would have allowed the British to supply garrisons in the western and northern Great Lakes.

Lacking artillery and mortars that European armies used in sieges, Pontiac and his followers could not hope to simply knock down the walls of Fort Detroit. Nor were they going to conduct a frontal assault; that would have been foolhardy. Native American warriors, and the societies they came from, saw no sense in taking excessive casualties. In fact, losing too many warriors in a clash often resulted in a war chief being removed from his position.

Early in the siege, Pontiac seems to have hoped that he could negotiate the surrender of the fort. He convinced some French habitants in the vicinity to approach Major Gladwin about the possibility of negotiating Detroit’s surrender. Gladwin reluctantly agreed to an exchange of hostages, sending two of his officers with the habitants in exchange for two Potawatomi. Rather than negotiating, Pontiac, with the apparent cooperation of some of the habitants, seized the two British officers as prisoners. When Gladwin learned what Pontiac had done, he angrily demanded—but did not receive—the return of his officers.

With the negotiation gambit having failed, Pontiac hoped to starve Detroit into submission. Not knowing when or whether he could be reinforced and resupplied, Gladwin placed his men on half rations. Native warriors settled into long, drawn-out sieges of the three major posts still in British hands.

After the siege of Detroit had gone on for nearly three months, the first notable clash between British troops and Pontiac’s followers occurred when Captain James Dalyell, an aide to General Amherst, arrived at the post with approximately 250 men near the end of July. Although Major Gladwin outranked Dalyell, the junior officer had the ear of Amherst, and the general expressed his desire that the Natives be “chastised.” Briefed by Gladwin regarding Fort Detroit’s situation, Dalyell, rather than having his men augment the post’s defenses, decided to conduct a nighttime raid against Pontiac’s camp in the hope of breaking the siege. Unbeknownst to both Gladwin and Dalyell, Pontiac was ready for them.

Dalyell led his men out of the fort at about two o’clock in the morning toward Pontiac’s camp, about two and a half miles north of Detroit. A full moon allowed the troops to navigate the unfamiliar landscape, but it also made it easier for the two large parties of warriors that lay in ambush to watch them. Once Pontiac’s warriors launched their attack, the British found themselves trapped between the two ambushing parties and unable to retreat. Finally, led by Dalyell, the British broke out of the trap and began a steady retreat that dissolved into rout. Half of Dalyell’s men were killed, wounded or captured. Dalyell had been killed, and Pontiac’s warriors cut out his heart and cut off his head, displaying both body parts on a post in their camp. The battle became known as Bloody Run, since a stream on the battlefield was said to have turned red from the amount of blood that flowed into it.

At Fort Niagara, the local Seneca Indians saw the road linking the fort to the falls as a weak spot. In order to ferry supplies, the troops had to leave the protection of the fort. In September 1763, 31 British soldiers guarding carts were attacked by hundreds of Seneca warriors. Two companies of redcoats raced to the rescue, only to be severely repulsed by the Seneca, who inflicted more than 70 casualties on the would-be rescuers. The Seneca scalped the dead and hurled their corpses into a nearby gorge, which the British named “the Devil’s Hole.” Throughout the remainder of 1763, and into the next year, the Seneca periodically attacked the portage, forcing the Niagara garrison to commit large numbers of troops to guarding it while transporting supplies.

In late July, a relief expedition made its way from Fort Bedford in eastern Pennsylvania to Fort Pitt under the command of Colonel Henry Bouquet. Twenty-five miles from Fort Pitt, Bouquet’s men came under attack by a large force of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, and Miami warriors at a spot known as Bushy Run. After a day-long battle that took a heavy toll on both sides, Bouquet laid plans for the next day. When the Indians resumed their attack the next morning, Bouquet’s troops, following a prearranged signal, feigned a withdrawal. Thinking that the British had been broken and would begin to flee at any moment, the Indians rushed after them, not realizing that Bouquet positioned one of his companies on their flank. The sudden volley of musket fire, followed by a bayonet charge, shattered the Indian attack. Bouquet and his men made their way to Fort Pitt, but they had taken heavy casualties and had to abandon most of the supplies intended for the post on the battlefield. Nevertheless, from the British perspective, it was one of the few successes they had enjoyed that summer.

Bouquet is somewhat notorious in Native American history in that he engaged in correspondence with Amherst discussing the possibility of purposely infecting the Indian population with smallpox. As it turned out, an officer at Fort Pitt had already had the same idea, giving handkerchiefs and blankets from a smallpox hospital to Native visitors. Shortly thereafter, smallpox did break out among the Natives besieging Fort Pitt.

At Detroit, as the summer yielded to autumn, it became more difficult for Pontiac to maintain the siege. His warriors’ supplies of powder and shot began to run low, and many of them had to leave to begin their winter hunts in order to feed their families. At the end of October, Pontiac received unwanted news. A French officer arrived at Detroit and informed him that the French would not be returning, nor would they supply his efforts against the English. Realizing he could not win the war, Pontiac dictated a note to Major Gladwin, informing him that he would end the siege.

At almost the same time that Pontiac gave up the siege of Detroit, the British government instituted a major change in its Indian policy. Still coping with the enormous debt from the war, the government decided that it did not need the additional costs associated with fighting Pontiac and his warriors. The government in London also planned to regulate the westward expansion of its North American colonies itself rather than leaving the matter to the individual provincial governments. In early October, King George III signed the Proclamation of 1763. In an effort to keep the Indians and the colonists away from each other—and avoid another war—the proclamation drew a line along the crest of the Appalachians from Georgia all the way north to Lake Ontario. With the exception of British officials, soldiers, and licensed traders, all Englishmen were to remain east of the Proclamation Line, while the Indians were to stay west of it. Those colonists who crossed into Indian territory in an attempt to settle there would be escorted out by the army. One portion of the proclamation created an Indian reserve to the west. In practical terms, however, the British army could not keep colonists out of the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Proclamation Line stretched for thousands of miles, and there were simply not enough troops in North America to police it. The creation of the Proclamation Line angered a number of colonists, including notable individuals such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who had invested in western land companies but now could not expect to sell their lands to would-be settlers, since it would be illegal for them to travel there. The British never intended for the Proclamation of 1763 to be a permanent solution, nor did they intend for Native People to have lands in the West reserved for them forever. However, the crown never rescinded the proclamation, and it remains the basis of most Indian land claims in Canada to this day.

Pontiac’s Rebellion had repercussions for Native Peoples not involved in the conflict. In December 1763, a band of frontiersmen from Paxton, Pennsylvania, marched on the Native community of Conestoga—people who had never been at war with the English—and slaughtered most of the inhabitants. Fourteen Conestogas eluded the Paxton Boys (as the called themselves) and fled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the authorities attempted to protect them by placing them in the town’s jail. The Paxton Boys broke into the jail and murdered the surviving Conestogas. Two months later, the Paxton Boys, claiming that the colony’s governor had done little to protect them from Indian attacks, marched on Philadelphia. The city called out a militia—a very surprising development for the Quaker-dominated government—and the Paxton boys dispersed. None of them was ever prosecuted.

Late in 1763, General Amherst returned to England. His replacement, General Thomas Gage, heeded the advice of Sir William Johnson. The next summer, Johnson and Gage met with Native warriors from different Ojibwa bands from the Great Lakes region and accepted their claims that they had not followed Pontiac in his rebellion. In July of 1766, Johnson and Pontiac finally met face to face at the British post of Oswego, located in New York on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Pontiac, in a sort of roundabout way, claimed that he would be loyal to the English. Within two years of this meeting, Pontiac would be dead, murdered by a Peoria warrior while visiting the trading post at Cahokia.

At first glance, it seems that Pontiac lost his war. The French did not return, and the British remained. Often forgotten in the summaries of Pontiac’s Rebellion is the religious movement led by Neolin. It does appear to have simply evaporated, and often bears little mention. However, a message that mirrored Neolin’s would reappear four decades later, in a message preached by Tenskwatawa (also known as the Shawnee Prophet). So, in some ways, Pontiac’s Rebellion did establish something of a precedent for future Native resistance movements, particularly those that had a spiritual component. Pontiac did succeed in some ways. Trade was restored, albeit with the British, and not the French as he would have preferred. The British also enacted the Proclamation of 1763, which, while it could not be effectively enforced, did signal a recognition of Native American land claims.

Biographies

Pontiac (1720? –1769)

Little is known, and there is much conjecture, about Pontiac’s life before he stepped into history in 1763. Several sources claim that he was part Ojibwa and part Ottawa, and it is apparent he identified as an Ottawa. Some sources have claimed, but cannot prove, that he fought on the side of the French during King George’s War (1744–48) and during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). He is thought by some to have participated in the defeat of British forces at Braddock’s defeat in 1755. Major Robert Rogers claims to have met Pontiac in 1760, when the French surrendered Fort Detroit to the English, but given the timing, and Rogers’s penchant for self-promotion, most historians doubt such a meeting took place. Rogers did author a play about Pontiac, Ponteach: or the Savages of America, which was a fictionalized account of Pontiac’s Rebellion. The play did not succeed on the London stage.

Apparently a follower of the Delaware Prophet, Pontiac took Neolin’s spiritual message and modified it. Whereas Neolin forbade contact with Europeans and the use of European goods, Pontiac carved out an exception of French. Indeed, Pontiac hoped that his rebellion would allow for the return of the French. The key difference between Neolin and Pontiac was that Neolin wanted a return to an idyllic pre-contact past. Pontiac, by contrast, wanted to return to a more immediate past that included the French and their trade goods. In that sense, Pontiac’s Rebellion succeeded. When rebellion ended, trade was restored. However, it was with the British, not the French, as Pontiac had hoped.

DOCUMENT EXCERPT

Pontiac’s Speech to His Followers (1763)

This is the speech Pontiac gave to his followers on May 5, 1763, as he outlined the reasons for a war against the English:

It is important for us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation which seeks only to destroy us. You see as well as I that we can no longer supply our needs, as we have done, from our brothers, the French.

The English sell us goods twice as dear as the French do, and their goods do not last. Scarcely have we bought a blanket or something else to cover ourselves with before we must think of getting another; and when we wish to set out for our winter camps they do not want to give us any credit as our brothers, the French, do. When I go to see the English commander and say to him that some of our comrades are dead, instead of bewailing their death, as our French brothers do, he laughs at me and at you … Therefore, my brothers, we must all swear their destruction and wait no longer. Nothing prevents us; they are few in numbers, and we can accomplish it. All the nations who are our brothers attack them,—why should we not attack? Are we not men like them?

Source: Burton, Clarence Monroe. Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy 1763. Detroit: Michigan Society of Colonial Wars, 1912, 39–40.

The Proclamation of 1763

This proclamation drew a line along the Appalachians from Georgia up to Lake Ontario. With the exception of British officials, soldiers, and licensed traders, all Englishmen were to remain east of the line of proclamation, while the Indians were to stay west of it. One portion of the proclamation created an Indian reserve to the west. In practical terms, however, the British army could not keep colonists out of the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Proclamation of 1763 angered a number of colonists, including notable individuals such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who had invested in western land companies, but now could not expect to sell their lands to would-be settlers, since it would be illegal for them to travel there. The British never intended for the Proclamation of 1763 to be a permanent solution, nor did they intend for Native People to have lands in the West reserved for them forever. However, the crown never rescinded the proclamation, and it remains the basis of most Indian land claims in Canada to this day.

Whereas we have taken into our royal consideration the extensive and valuable acquisitions in America secured to our Crown by the late definitive treaty of peace concluded at Paris on the 10th day of February last; and being desirous that all our loving subjects, as well of our kingdom as of our colonies in America, may avail themselves, with all convenient speed, of the great benefits and advantages which must accrue therefrom to their commerce, manufactures, and navigation; we have thought fit, with the advice of our Privy Council, to issue this our Royal Proclamation, hereby to publish and declare to all our loving subjects that we have, with the advice of our said Privy Council, granted our letters patent under our Great Seal of Great Britain, to erect within the countries and islands ceded and confirmed to us by said treaty, four distinct and separate governments, styled and called by the names of Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada, and limited and bounded as follows, viz.:

First, the Government of Quebec, bounded on the Labrador coast by the river St. John, and from thence by a line drawn from the head of that river, through the lake St. John, to the south end of the lake Nipissim; from whence the said line, crossing the river St. Lawrence and the lake Champlain in 45 degrees of north latitude, passes along the high lands which divide the rivers that empty themselves into the said river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea;…

Secondly, the Government of East Florida, bounded to the westward by the Gulf of Mexico and the Apalachicola River; to the northward, by a line drawn from that part of the said river where the Chatahoochee and Flint Rivers meet, to the source of the St. Mary’s river, and by the course of the said river to the Atlantic Ocean;…

Thirdly, the Government of West Florida, bounded to the … westward, by the Lake Pontchartrain, the lake Maurepas, and the river Mississippi; to the northward, by a line drawn due east from that part of the river Mississippi which lies in 31 degrees north latitude, to the river Apalachicola or Chatahoochee; and to the eastward, by the said river.…

We have also, with the advice of our Privy Council aforesaid, annexed to our Province of Georgia all the lands lying between the rivers Altamaha and St. Mary’s.

And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our interest and the security of our colonies, that the several nations or tribes of Indians with whom we are connected, and who live under our protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the possession of such parts of our dominions and territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their hunting-grounds; we do therefore, with the advice of our Privy Council, declare it to be our royal will and pleasure, that no Governor or commander in chief, in any of our colonies of Quebec, East Florida, or West Florida, do presume, upon any pretence whatever, to grant warrants of survey, or pass any patents for lands beyond the bounds of their respective governments, as described in their commissions; as also that no Governor or commander in chief of our other colonies or plantations in America do presume for the present, and until our further pleasure be known, to grant warrants of survey or pass patents for any lands beyond the heads or sources of any of the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or northwest; or upon any lands whatever, which, not having been ceded to or purchased by us, as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.

And we do further declare it to be our royal will and pleasure, for the present as aforesaid, to reserve under our sovereignty, protection, and dominion, for the use of the said Indians, all the land and territories not included within the limits of our said three new governments, or within the limits of the territory granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company; as also all the land and territories lying to the westward of the sources of the rivers which fall into the sea from the west and northwest as aforesaid; and we do hereby strictly forbid, on pain of our displeasure, all our loving subjects from making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of any of the lands above reserved, without our special leave and license for that purpose first obtained.

And we do further strictly enjoin and require all persons whatever, who have either willfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any lands within the countries above described, or upon any other lands which, not having been ceded to or purchased by us, are still reserved to the said Indians as aforesaid, forthwith to remove themselves from such settlements.

And whereas great frauds and abuses have been committed in the purchasing lands of the Indians, to the great prejudice of our interests, and to the great dissatisfaction of the said Indians; in order, therefore, to prevent such irregularities for the future, and to the end that the Indians may be convinced of our justice and determined resolution to remove all reasonable cause of discontent, we do, with the advice of our Privy Council, strictly enjoin and require, that no private person do presume to make any purchase from the said Indians of any lands reserved to the said Indians within those parts of our colonies where we have thought proper to allow settlement; but that if at any time any of the said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said lands, the same shall be purchased only for us, in our name, at some public meeting or assembly of the said Indians, to be held for that purpose by the Governor or commander in chief of our colony respectively within which they shall lie: and in case they shall lie within the limits of any proprietary government, they shall be purchased only for the use and in the name of such proprietaries, conformable to such directions and instructions as we or they shall think proper to give for that purpose. And we do, by the advice of our Privy Council, declare and enjoin, that the trade with the said Indians shall be free and open to all our subjects whatever, provided that every person who may incline to trade with the said Indians do take out a license for carrying on such trade, from the Governor or commander in chief of any of our colonies respectively where such person shall reside, and also give security to observe such regulations as we shall at any time think fit, by ourselves or commissaries to be appointed for this purpose, to direct and appoint for the benefit of the said trade. And we do hereby authorize, enjoin, and require the Governors and commanders in chief of all our colonies respectively, as well those under our immediate government as those under the government and direction of proprietaries, to grant such licenses without fee or reward, taking especial care to insert therein a condition that such license shall be void, and the security forfeited, in case the person to whom the same is granted shall refuse or neglect to observe such regulations as we shall think proper to prescribe as aforesaid.

And we do further expressly enjoin and require all officers whatever, as well military as those employed in the management and direction of Indian affairs within the territories reserved as aforesaid, for the use of the said Indians, to seize and apprehend all persons whatever who, standing charged with treasons, misprisions of treason, murders, or other felonies or misdemeanors, shall fly from justice and take refuge in the said territory, and to send them under a proper guard to the colony where the crime was committed of which they shall stand accused, in order to take their trial for the same.

Given at our Court at St. James’s, the 7th day of October 1763, in the third year of our reign.

Source: “Royal Proclamation concerning America, Oct. 7, 1763,” in Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606–1898, edited by William MacDonald, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1913.

Further Reading

Grant, Charles S. 1953. “Pontiac’s Rebellion and the British Troop Moves of 1763.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40(1). [Organization of American Historians, Oxford University Press]: 75–88. doi:10.2307/1897544.

Jennings, F. Pontiac, Rebellion of. In R. Cowley & G. Parker (eds.), The Reader’s Companion to Military History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Parker, G. The Lane That Had No Turning: And Other Associated Tales Concerning the People of Pontiac; Together with Certain “Parables of Provinces.” London: Heinemann, 1900.

Pontiac. In L.C. Hillstrom, L.W. Baker, & K. Hillstrom (eds.), French and Indian War (Vol. 1, pp. 169–176). Detroit: UXL, 2003.

Pontiac, Letter addressed to the Commander of Detroit, October 30, 1763. In S.C. Tucker, J. Arnold, & R. Wiener (eds.), The Encyclopedia of North American Colonial Conflicts to 1775 (Vol. 3, p. 1149). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008.

Tucker, Spencer. Encyclopedia of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A New Era of Modern Warfare. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.

Twatio, B. 1763 tribal uprising … Pontiac’s rebellion; abandoned by their French allies, defeated and despised, the Native tribes of the northwest rally around an obscure Ottawa war chief. Esprit de Corps, 12(8), 24 et seq. (2005, August).