CHAPTER SIX

A Great Man and a Little Child

One reason Ousamequin’s alliance with Plymouth gets such outsized attention in patriotic treatments of American history is that, on the surface, it was the peaceful exception to the violent rule of Indian-colonial relations. True enough, the Wampanoags and English did not war against each other between 1621 and 1675, which was a real accomplishment. They had even attempted to create a reciprocal friendship. This point was acknowledged by Ousamequin’s very son, Pumetacom (also known as Metacom and Philip), on the eve of the war that now bears his English name. In his own history, he recalled that “when the English first came, [Ousamequin] was as a great man and the English as a little child.” What Pumetacom meant by this was that though the Wampanoags were far stronger than the colonists initially, Ousamequin did not exploit this advantage. Instead, he “had been the first in doing good to the English,” as if he were their protective father. For instance, he “constrained other Indians from wronging the English, and gave them corn, and showed them how to plant, and was free to do them any good, and let them have a 100 times more land than now the king [or sachem, Pumetacom] had for his own people.” In exchange, Ousamequin received English military support and trade, which strengthened his authority among the Wampanoags and protected them against the Narragansetts. It was a bargain that, by and large, paid off for both parties up until Ousamequin’s death in 1660.1

Yet the mutual benefits of the alliance should not blind us to the very real costs for the Wampanoags. Nor should it obviate the recurrent Indian-English war scares that marked the 1620–75 era of peace and led to the brutal King Philip’s War. Even before Ousamequin’s passing, the “little child” of Plymouth, along with its neighboring English colonies, had begun acting ungratefully, setting the stage for Ousamequin’s actual sons, Wamsutta and Pumetacom, to begin organizing a resistance movement. Predictably, from a modern vantage, the main tensions involved English encroachment on Wampanoag land by means fair and foul. However, a deeper understanding of the Wampanoag side of things requires us to do more than tally how many acres the English gained at Wampanoag expense. For the period of Ousamequin’s life, it involves tracing how a mutually lucrative trade of European manufactured goods for Indian wampum and furs gradually gave way to an economic relationship centered on the English purchase of Wampanoag land. In turn, grasping why Native people sold territory when they did and to whom depends on an appreciation for the Indians’ cultivation of the English as friends amid the chronic danger of war. It also invites us to consider alternative views to the Western principle that the seller of land relinquishes all rights to the buyer, and to the popular assumption that when Europeans acquired land from Indians, they also gained full jurisdiction over that territory and the people on it. Wampanoags had no such conceptions of these bargains. Wampanoag resentment over colonial encroachment stemmed partly from the English using their strength to impose their interpretation of these transactions.

Wampanoag-English tensions also fed on the internal politics of the Wampanoag paramount sachemship, particularly the efforts of outlying Wampanoag communities to loosen Ousamequin’s authority over them. One of the remarkable ironies of this period is that the Wampanoags of Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket granted land to the English and hosted Christian missionaries as part of an effort to distance themselves from Pokanoket, based, in part, on earlier resentments over Ousamequin’s accord with the English. By the time of Ousamequin’s death, his sons and the people they represented had come to interpret English violations of Wampanoag land, sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and dignity not as peaceful coexistence, as the Thanksgiving myth would have it, but as hostility. Rejecting the old sachem’s legacy, they concluded that friendship with Plymouth was a mere pretense leading to landlessness and subordination, and thus no longer worth it.

ENRICHING EACH OTHER

Trade as well as mutual defense rested at the heart of the Wampanoags’ alliance with the English, which one might assume was a simple matter of both parties trying to enrich themselves. Yet these peoples had varying cultural notions of what enrichment meant. Those differences exposed the basic incompatibility of the two people’s social systems and contributed mightily to the deterioration of their relationship by the end of Ousamequin’s lifetime.

Among the Wampanoags, and Indian people in general, a great deal of the value of material wealth rested in the social relationships it fostered and the spiritual power it represented. One point of acquiring exotic goods was to give them away eventually. To be sure, that process could take some time. After all, Wampanoags were no different from any other people in their enjoyment of fine clothing, jewelry, and luxuries, which in the case of the European trade included shirts, coats, blankets, glass beads, rings, combs, and bracelets. They also appreciated the utility of the foreigners’ durable metal tools. Yet, after a period of using those items personally, they would pass them on to others because the circulation of material wealth was the essential social lubricant in Indian country. Proposing marriage, consoling a mourner, apologizing for an insult, compensating for a crime, and an infinite variety of other social interactions all involved giving or exchanging gifts. People even buried their dead with valuable goods so their souls could carry the spirits of the objects on the journey to the afterlife. Sometimes the gods received their share, too, as in the great Narragansett ritual dedicated to Cautantowwit (Kiehtan) in which the people cast their cherished objects into a roaring central fire. To refuse to participate in these customs was to mark oneself as selfish and jealous, the qualities of witches. To conform was to promote the endless series of mutual obligations and spirit of generosity essential to the success of small, intimate face-to-face societies like Wampanoag communities. To excel at giving was to magnify one’s influence.2

As such, sachems circulated European manufactured goods among their followers just as they did with exotic materials from the continental interior. Whether sachems did this in the course of their basic duties, like arbitrating disputes or overseeing justice, or mainly in ceremonial contexts is unknown. The only eyewitness account of sachems redistributing wealth is Roger Williams’s 1644 description of a Narragansett ritual called Nickòmmo, in which elites hosted “sometimes twenty, fifty, a hundred, yea … near a thousand persons” for a dance, feast, and giveaway of “all sort of their goods (according to and sometimes beyond their estate) in several small parcels of goods.” Each recipient would then go outside and give three shouts “for the health and prosperity of the party that gave it, the Mr. or Mistriss of the feast.” Williams might have been describing the same event when he wrote to the Massachusetts governor, John Winthrop, in August 1637 that the Narragansetts “were in a strange kind of solemnity, wherein the sachems eat nothing but at night, and all the natives about the country were feasted.” This ceremony appears to have been a way to symbolize that the people’s bounty was a gift from their leaders.3

The concentration of European goods at archaeological sites within Ousamequin’s sachemship of Pokanoket reflects that his core supporters enjoyed privileged access to colonial trade. Suddenly, living at Pokanoket, and probably at other Taunton River communities like Pocasset and Nemakset where Ousamequin had relatives, meant possessing wool cloth, brass and iron kettles, pewter and latten spoons, tin cups, glass bottles, iron hoes, iron axes, iron knives, iron fishhooks, iron scissors, brass arrowheads, and glass beads. Elites, such as the sachem’s kin and counselors, had even greater material wealth in the forms of European clothing, swords and guns, brass rings, gold ribbon, and wooden chests with locks and keys. Within just a matter of years, these goods had become so ubiquitous that many of the people used them in the full range of their daily activities, including clearing fields, weeding, cooking, sewing, hunting, butchering, building houses, cutting firewood, and even just getting dressed. The effects were so transformative that this moment might be called a consumer revolution. Yet one should not take the point too far. There is a tendency to assume that as soon as Indian peoples had access to European trade, they became dependent on it, as if they entirely quit their former technologies and forgot how to produce them. That was not true of the Wampanoags. Along with their new imports, they continued to craft and use their own containers of clay, wood, stone, and woven grass; tools and weapons of wood, stone, bone, and shell; leather and fur clothing; rope and thread from plant fibers and deer gut; and ornaments of shell, bone, antler, and teeth. As during the early contact period, they often disassembled European goods for raw material to use in their own tools, weapons, and ornaments. Some conservatives preferred to keep doing things as they always had and probably saw the rage for foreign goods as detrimental to the people’s autonomy and community values. Nevertheless, the alliance with the English, supplemented by periodic trade with the Dutch, had opened the Wampanoags to a new material world that most of them embraced to greater or lesser degree.4

These goods meant more than luxury or efficiency to the Wampanoags. They also represented power: diplomatic, military, and spiritual. When sachems enriched their communities, they secured a base of local political support from which to govern at home and negotiate with other Native leaders. Gift giving and trade also firmed up alliances with foreign peoples. In times of war, the sachem’s arsenal of iron tomahawks and knives, steel swords, brass-tipped arrows, and, of course, firearms made all the difference. In a more general way, Wampanoag wealth symbolized spiritual potency. Northeastern Indians widely associated glass beads with crystals thought to originate from lightning bolts shot from the eyes of the mythical Thunderbird. The beads’ lightness connoted positivity, life, knowledge, and well-being. Firearms, with their pyrotechnics and destructive force, also seemed to embody the power of the Thunderbird and give the bearer the shamanistic ability to implant harmful objects in an enemy. The reflective qualities of mirrors represented divination of the sort carried out by pawwaws and dream souls. In all these ways and more, European trade goods coursed with spiritual significance. Some scholars have gone so far as to contend that Indians were “trading in metaphors.” A society like the Wampanoags’, which associated well-being with spiritual favor, might even have interpreted the thriving trade as a sign that they were recovering from the plague of 1616–19.5

Whereas the Wampanoags wanted European goods but did not need them, Plymouth colony’s very survival rested on the Indian trade. The colonists could hardly feed themselves, never mind satisfy their financiers’ demand for furs, without the help of their Wampanoag neighbors. It took Indian corn obtained through gifts and trade for the English to cheat starvation during their second winter and spring. Even after the colonists became agriculturally self-sufficient in 1623, they probably still relied on the Wampanoags for a portion of their meat, as it would take years before they had imported and bred enough cows, sheep, pigs, and goats to answer their needs. By the mid-1620s, the English had become productive fishermen after initially lacking the equipment and expertise, but it is likely that they continued to trade for shellfish with Native women who gathered them in Plymouth Harbor. Colonists might also have turned to Indian wage labor when it came to getting land cleared, fences built, and houses erected, though such employment is underdocumented. “Frontier exchange economies” of this sort, involving Indians and Europeans bartering food and services, were basic to the survival of most early colonies. At first, Plymouth authorities discouraged their people’s casual interactions with the Wampanoags, for such familiarity had enabled the Powhatans to launch their surprise strike against Virginia in 1622. Yet the trade of “small things” was so ubiquitous and probably essential that in 1640 Plymouth’s General Court gave up trying to regulate it.6

The real problem for the English was that the market for Indian furs included European competitors with better-quality goods in larger amounts. The Dutch were their greatest rivals in this respect. The Dutch had been trading with the Indians of southern New England and Long Island since the early 1600s, and when they founded the colony of New Netherland in 1624, that traffic increased exponentially. Dutch mercantile vessels fanned out from the port of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island to scour the northeast coast for Indian customers. This activity included regular visits to the Wampanoags of Narragansett and Buzzards Bays. The Dutch also established short-lived trade houses at such places as “Dutch Island” in Narragansett Bay, Block Island, and the Connecticut River (at the site of modern Hartford). For Indians, Dutch trade was ideal. The Netherlands was at once the premier manufacturing and maritime trading nation of Europe during the early seventeenth century, making the Dutch the best source for cloth, clothing, armaments, metal tools, glass beads, and liquor. Better still, once the dealing was done, the Dutch typically sailed off, thereby giving New England Indians the best of both worlds: the benefit of Dutch goods without the complications of Dutch colonization. Plymouth also faced competition from English and French fishermen working the Maine coast and Massachusetts Bay. Like the Dutch, their commerce was brisk and relatively uncomplicated insofar as they dropped anchor, conducted the exchange, and then left without any expectation of further relations.7

Plymouth could not compete in any of these respects. The colony received no Indian trade goods between the arrival of the Fortune in 1621 and the summer of 1623, and those that arrived afterward were overpriced and of low quality, amounting to “only a few beads and knives, which were not there much esteemed.” Furthermore, unlike New Netherland, which teemed with seasoned merchants, only a few Plymouth colonists had previous business experience. Not least of all, Plymouth’s economic relations with nearby Indians, unlike those of its rivals, were inseparable from on-the-ground politics essential to the colony’s future.8

Geography also did not work in Plymouth’s favor. Neither Plymouth Harbor nor the nearby coast contained a major river providing access to the heavily forested, beaver-rich interior. (The Charles River of Massachusetts Bay hardly qualified.) In contrast, the Dutch post of Fort Orange on the upper Hudson River attracted Indians from a vast hinterland including what is now northern New England, the St. Lawrence River valley, upstate New York, and even the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, the Dutch traded from shipside at the mouths of the Connecticut and Blackstone Rivers, which ran north deep into the New England woods. Independent English traders in coastal Maine had similar advantages dealing with Wabanakis at the mouths of lengthy rivers like the Penobscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, and Saco. To the limited extent that Plymouth managed a successful trade during its early years, it came in 1625 when Edward Winslow took the colony’s surplus corn to exchange with Maine Indians, netting seven hundred pounds weight in beaver and some other furs. Yet, even then, the colony received no credit for this haul because French pirates captured the ship carrying it before it could reach the Adventurers back in England. If the Plymouth colonists had settled at their intended destination of the lower Hudson River, or at Massachusetts Bay (to which they briefly considered relocating), they would have been situated far better for the Indian trade.9

Despite these liabilities, Plymouth assumed a more active economic role in the region as its population and agriculture stabilized. In 1626 the colony put its finances on a surer footing by granting a group of its leading men, including Bradford, Winslow, and Standish, a monopoly on the fur trade in exchange for their assuming responsibility for the colony’s mounting debt. The following year, these so-called Undertakers administered the construction of a trading post at Aptucxet at the head of Buzzards Bay, accessible from Plymouth by six hours of canoe paddling and portages along Scusset Creek and the Manomet River, nowadays enveloped by the Cape Cod Canal. The station was modest, consisting of just “a house made of hewn oak planks … where they keep two men, winter and summer,” an attached storehouse, and a shallop to cruise local waters. Yet it finally gave Plymouth a base from which to reach the main body of Wampanoags south of the Cape and enter the lucrative trade of Narragansett Bay.10

Little did the English know that Apucxet would soon become a node in an extensive indigenous trade network linking coastal manufacturers and traffickers of shell beads (or wampum) with interior producers of beaver pelts. Wampum (also known as sewan and wampumpeag, or peag for short) referred to tubular white and purple beads measuring about an inch long and an eighth of an inch in diameter made from the inner column of the whelk and periwinkle (in the case of white wampum) and the outer rim of the quahog (in the case of purple). Before the Indians’ acquisition of iron drills, which bore holes through the shells more quickly and efficiently than stone, most shell beads were discoidal in shape (imagine a coin with a hole in the middle). The rarity of tubular beads made them a status symbol displayed by the elite in headbands, belts, necklaces, and earrings, and even as ornamentation for war clubs, pipes, and bowls. More generally, the circulation of discoidal and eventually tubular shell beads was part of regional politics and trade. Foreign diplomacy involved sachems exchanging fathom-long (six-foot) strings of shell beads to symbolize the depth of their domestic support (for, after all, the common people’s labor and wealth went into the gift) and the sincerity of their speech. Intertribal commerce and tribute obligations carried the beads from coastal sites of production hundreds of miles into the continent. The Five Nations Iroquois, for example, required enormous amounts of processed shell for their peacekeeping rituals and possessed the military might to extort the beads from shoreline communities. In turn, the strongest coastal groups pressured neighboring peoples to pay them tribute in wampum so they could ease Iroquois pressure on themselves.11

Aptucxet. Photography by Vejlenser.

Plymouth’s Aptucxet trading post, on the Manomet (or Monument) River at the head of Buzzards Bay, was a node in the regional trade of indigenously produced wampum beads and furs for European metal tools, cloth, clothing, weapons, and ornaments. Built in 1627, the post operated into the 1650s, when Plymouth appears to have abandoned it in response to a sharp decline in wampum’s value. The buildings shown here are a reconstruction of the post built atop its original foundation.

Once wampum manufacturing began on a larger scale with the introduction of metal drills, and particularly when Europeans got involved in the trade, the pace of this traffic quickened dramatically. The Narragansetts and Pequots on Long Island Sound, soon joined by Dutch and English middlemen, began supplying interior peoples at unprecedented rates: archaeologists estimate that the total number of beads reaching the Iroquois in the early to mid-seventeenth century might have run into the millions. Shoreline peoples received furs in exchange, which they then traded to Europeans. The political benefits of this commerce were nearly as great as the material ones, insofar as the Narragansetts’ and Pequots’ value as wampum producers spared them from the Five Nations’ wide-ranging raids for captives and plunder. Unfortunately, a lack of positive documentary and archaeological evidence makes it impossible to say definitively whether the Wampanoags also traded wampum, though it seems likely.12

It took only a few years before the Dutch discovered the profits they could reap trading with coastal Natives for wampum, then transporting the beads upriver to exchange with the Iroquois and Mohicans for beaver pelts destined for sale in Europe. Yet, rather than bet on the unlikelihood that the English would fail to make a similar discovery, in 1627 New Netherland’s governor, Isaack de Rasieres, decided to share the Dutch trade secret with Plymouth in exchange for an agreement to divvy up the northeast coast into separate national commercial zones. Plymouth would direct its fur trade north to Massachusetts Bay and Maine and away from the center of Dutch enterprise on Long Island Sound. Additionally, the Dutch would supply Plymouth with wampum and trade goods and buy the colony’s furs and Virginia tobacco (acquired from Virginia fishing vessels working the New England coast). It was an ambitious vision reflecting not only the multilateral state of European competition along the American coast but also the potential riches for colonies that tapped into long-distance intertribal economies, at once ancient and evolving.13

Wampum strings. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM #99-12-10/53011 and 99-12-10/53014.

Native people of the northeast coast made wampum shell beads from the quahog (in the case of purple beads) and whelk and periwinkle (in the case of white wampum). The exchange of strings of wampum, like the ones pictured here, were a common part of Indian diplomacy. The strings served simultaneously as mnemonic devices (or memory aids) for speeches and as gifts that demonstrated commitment to the spoken words. European colonists often adopted this protocol, too, when dealing with indigenous people, though there is no concrete evidence that Plymouth colonists did so.

The plan worked only partly as designed. Consistent with Dutch hopes, Plymouth initially concentrated its trade on the Penobscot and Kennebec River valleys, finding that though the Wabanakis were uninterested in wampum at first, fashion trends and competition for social status meant that shortly “they could scarce ever get enough for them.” Plymouth was the beneficiary, with its annual shipments of beaver pelts to England ranging in weight between one thousand and four thousand pounds from 1631 to 1636 to the value of ten thousand pounds. This commerce was but a fraction of New Netherland’s, yet it was a vast improvement over the thin years of the previous decade. Wampum even temporarily became legal tender in Plymouth and then the other New England colonies for payment of taxes and private debts, based on the premise that the beads could be traded for beaver, which, in turn, could be sold in Europe for hard coin. Yet Plymouth’s activity in Maine did not preclude it from trading south of the Cape. Though Plymouth reluctantly promised not to interfere with Dutch operations among the Wampanoags, it refused to cede its own right to trade with the tribe, “which is (as it were) at our doors,” as Bradford put it. In addition to Aptucxet, Plymouth opened a trade house at the head of the Mount Hope peninsula (called Montaup by the Wampanoags) in Pokanoket. In this respect, the Dutch promotion of wampum had not diverted the English from the Wampanoag trade but drawn them to it.14

Though scholars widely assume that the Narragansetts and Pequots not only dominated but practically monopolized the early wampum trade in New England, mainland Wampanoags also appear to have participated in this commerce. Quahog and whelk might have been more abundant in the territories of rival tribes, but it could still be found in significant amounts throughout Wampanoag country, particularly on the shores of the Narragansett Bay sachemships of Pokanoket, Pocasset, and Sakonnet, the Buzzards Bay communities of Acushnet and Apponagansett, and throughout Cape Cod and the islands. A walk today along the beaches of these sites will amply demonstrate the point. Documentary evidence also points to Wampanoag wampum manufacturing and trade. Bradford asserted that before the Dutch-English agreement of 1627 “the Indians of these parts and the Massachusetts had none or very little of it [wampum], but [except] the sachems and some special persons that wore a little of it for ornament.” Everything changed with the emergence of a European market for Indian-produced beads. “It [wampum] grew thus to become a commodity in these parts,” Bradford continued, “[and] these Indians [Wampanoags and Massachusetts] fell into it also, and to learn how to make it.” The Wampanoags began producing the beads with such zeal that Bradford likened the effect to that of an addictive “drug.” The presence of shell blanks (unfinished attempts to craft wampum beads) and clusters of whelk columns at Pokanoket archaeological sites testifies to the Wampanoags crafting wampum, just as English and Dutch trade at Mount Hope would suggest.15

Much to Plymouth’s frustration, it still could not control the Wampanoags’ commerce with other Europeans. They dealt not only with Plymouth but with Dutch shipboard merchants, English fishermen, and, eventually, English traders working out of neighboring Rhode Island. With no oversight and few scruples, rival traders liberally supplied the Wampanoags with arms and alcohol, ignoring Plymouth’s admonitions that such traffic was an affront to God and man alike. It took little time for the Natives surrounding Plymouth to grow “mad” after guns, leading Bradford to seethe that they became “ordinarily better fitted and furnished [with them] than the English themselves.” In 1628 such concerns spurred Plymouth to break up a rogue trading post known as Merrymount near the former site of Wessagusset, and to banish its leader, Thomas Morton, back to England. Yet the colony could do little about other dealers who came and went faster than anyone could respond. It was all to the mainland Wampanoags’ advantage.16

Indians found the wampum trade attractive, to be sure, but not irresistible. Strikingly, there is no archaeological or documentary evidence of wampum making on Cape Cod and the islands despite the presence of ancient coastal shell heaps filled with quahog remains. The only passing reference associating Natives from these areas with wampum comes from King Philip’s War, when the Nantucket Wampanoags sent a wampum belt to Governor Edmund Andros of New York as a gesture of peace. Certainly fresh proof could surface tomorrow with the next archaeological excavation or discovery of a long-lost letter, but there is one anecdote to suggest that the outer-coast Wampanoags made a conscious refusal to produce wampum despite market pressures and enticements. In 1671 the New York governor, Francis Lovelace, instructed the English proprietor of Martha’s Vineyard, Thomas Mayhew Sr., to encourage the island Wampanoags “to worke the Sewan [wampum] making.” In light of the negative archaeological evidence, the meaning of his request seems to have been for them to begin this activity anew.17

The decision of the Cape and island Wampanoags to stay out of the wampum trade was a new way to distance themselves from Pokanoket after having failed to break free in the early 1620s. They must have known that if they began manufacturing wampum, Ousamequin and his successors would siphon it off as tribute. Furthermore, to become wampum-paying tributaries to one paramount sachem was to invite raids from others seeking to claim these payments. Throughout the 1630s and 1640s, the Pequots and Narragansetts, and then the Mohegans and Narragansetts, competed violently for control of wampum tributaries on Long Island, which sometimes involved direct strikes against the subject communities themselves. But if the Wampanoags of the Cape and islands did not make wampum, mainlanders could not take it, though they could try to coerce production. It is probably no coincidence that in the mid-1640s these same communities would begin hosting English missionaries and adopting Christianity, which also insulated them from Pokanoket. Yet with the unexpected arrival of thousands more Englishmen in southern New England, and an associated raising of the stakes in inter- and intratribal politics, ultimately it was impossible for any Native community to escape the destructive forces of colonialism.

SWARMING

In terms of population, Plymouth alone represented little threat to Wampanoag interests. Hardly more than two hundred English families and unattached individuals migrated to the colony between 1620 and 1633, which, along with natural births, made for at most four hundred people in the mid-1630s. Plymouth was no larger than a local sachemship. However, the so-called Great Migration following the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 increased English numbers dramatically. Massachusetts received somewhere between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand arrivals in its first eleven years, most of them seeking to escape a crackdown on puritans in England by the Anglican archbishop William Laud. The influx finally halted in the early 1640s, as the beginning of the English Civil War mobilized puritans back home against Charles I’s (and Laud’s) rule and briefly put them in control of the government. Yet New England was already changed irrevocably. Almost overnight, Massachusetts had become as populated and powerful as any of the region’s tribes. Furthermore, there seemed to be no end to its expansion. The young ages and relatively balanced gender ratio of its colonists, combined with the good health they experienced in America, was a recipe for natural demographic growth. The Englishwomen of the Great Migration bore on average eight children over the course of their lives. Additionally, the first two generations of New England colonists enjoyed long lives even by modern standards, with adults routinely reaching their sixties, and a striking number even their seventies and eighties. Because of these trends, the English population of southern New England climbed to over thirty-three thousand people by 1660 and was on the verge of exceeding the total number of Indians.18

The impact of this growth on Native people would have been significant even if it had remained concentrated in the towns ringing Massachusetts Bay, but numerous colonists promptly left for other parts of New England in search of better agricultural land and freedom from puritan religious oppression. These places included territory in and around Wampanoag country. Secondary migration from Massachusetts was the main factor in the spike of Plymouth colony’s population to about two thousand people in 1643. Religious exiles from Massachusetts also relocated to the head of Narragansett Bay on the western edge of Wampanoag territory. There, under the leadership of Roger Williams, they founded the town of Providence in 1636, followed by Portsmouth and Newport on nearby Aquidneck Island, and eventually Warwick on the west side of the bay. In 1644 these towns incorporated as the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Farther west, Massachusetts out-migrants established the towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield on the Connecticut River, which became the colony of Connecticut, while others settled on the Quinnipiac River and founded New Haven, which became the mother town of the short-lived colony by the same name. Characterizing these developments merely as “hiving off,” as many historians do, minimizes what they represented to indigenous people. The English were no longer restricted to a tiny fortified post at Patuxet, or even just a cluster of towns around Boston. They had established beachheads on every major river and harbor in the region, creating not an Indian-colonial frontier but a patchwork of European settlements interspersed among Native communities. To the First People, this was nothing short of a swarming.19

Meanwhile, European diseases continued to take a staggering toll on the Native population. In 1633 smallpox broke out along the coast, knifing up the length of the Connecticut River valley and then northwest all the way into Mohawk country, the St. Lawrence River valley, and possibly southern Ontario. The Narragansetts lost some seven hundred people in this outbreak. In the lower Connecticut River valley, where both the Dutch and Plymouth had opened trade houses, Bradford reported that the Indians experienced “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 a burial.” The English established the first towns of the Connecticut colony on the sites of these disasters, just as the Mayflower passengers had done at Patuxet years earlier. The Massachusett Indians, survivors of the unnamed plagues of 1616–19 and 1622, also suffered mightily in 1633, which the Bay Colony governor, John Winthrop, interpreted as divine providence. He stood in awe that as “for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we now possess.” The extent of the Wampanoags’ hurt is unclear, but given that every surrounding Indian community had contracted the pox, and even twenty Plymouth colonists appear to have died from it, it is all but certain that they lost people, too, once again.20

The 1633 smallpox was the last large-scale epidemic on record among the Indians of southern New England, but localized eruptions continued, sometimes to devastating effect. Take, for example, the island of Martha’s Vineyard. In 1643, just one year after the English founded their first settlement there, a “strange disease” attacked the island Wampanoags. According to English accounts, the Natives began “to run up and down till they could run no longer” and “made their faces black as coal, snatched up any weapon, spoke great words, but did no hurt,” apparently as a ritual to ward off the contagion. In 1645 sickness returned. This time it was a “universal” “sore Distemper” that was “mortal to many of them.” The Vineyard case is rare only insofar as it was documented. Contemporaneous outbreaks in other parts of Wampanoag country, however lethal, went unrecorded by the English.21

If the swarming of English migrants and decimation of Indians by epidemics shifted the regional balance of power, so did the English use of terroristic military might in the Pequot War of 1636–37. The direct cause of the war was Massachusetts’s insistence that the Pequots extradite tribal members accused of murdering a troublemaking English merchant captain, John Stone, and his crew. Pequot sachems offered compensation for the dead in the form of gifts of land and furs, but they would not meet the English demand and probably could not without risking their own lives. For two years, tensions built, until the Manisses of Block Island murdered the sailors of another English vessel. Massachusetts, fearing that its failure to prosecute the Stone murder had emboldened Indians to take English lives whenever they pleased, sent out a rather ineffective punitive expedition against the Manisses and Pequots in August 1636. The Pequots responded forcefully with a surprise attack on the Connecticut town of Wethersfield in April 1637, in which they killed nine residents and captured two girls. Little did anyone know that this strike would be the Pequots’ last victory in this war.22

The Pequots found themselves increasingly hemmed in and friendless as Native nations began lining up with the English to address their own long-running intertribal rivalries. The Narragansetts saw an opportunity to seize the advantage in their contest for tributaries from Long Island and hunting grounds along the Pawcatuck River on the modern Rhode Island–Connecticut border. The Mohegans were even more supportive of the English, as their sachem, Uncas, had spent years trying to escape subordinate status to the Pequots after an unsuccessful bid to get himself named the Pequots’ paramount sachem. The Wampanoags sat out this conflict, as did nearly all other tribes in the region, but the English-Mohegan-Narragansett axis was more formidable than anything for which the Pequots had bargained.23

The next chapter of the war jolted Native people into the realization that the newly ascendant English were a dire threat. A month after the Pequot strike on Wethersfield, an army of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Narragansett, and Mohegan men made a surprise assault on a Pequot fort on the Mystic River filled with women, children, and the elderly; most of the Pequots’ matawaûog were concentrated at another fort a short distance to the west, expecting the attack to come from that direction. Breaching the fort’s palisade, English soldiers put the wetus inside to the torch, then placed gunmen in a cordon around the palisade outside to shoot down anyone who escaped the flames. An outer ring of mostly Mohegan bowmen (a number of Narragansetts had fled the scene in disgust at the indiscriminate killing) captured the fortunate few who made it that far. When it was all over, somewhere between four hundred and seven hundred Pequots lay dead. Captain John Mason reveled, “Then did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.” The Massachusetts Bay Colony memorialized the victory by declaring a public day of thanksgiving after its soldiers returned home safely.24

English mop-up operations after Mystic were nearly as destructive to the Pequots as the massacre itself, with the double effect of warning Indians far and wide of how murderous the English could be when provoked. Colonial and Mohegan forces systematically hunted down the survivors, killing most of the men and taking the women and children captive. English authorities sold a portion of their prisoners into lifetime slavery in the Caribbean and sentenced the remainder to toil in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Other Pequots became captives of the Mohegans or Narragansetts or fled to sanctuary among the Long Island Indians or tribes far to the west. (In the 1640s New Haven merchants found one Pequot band on the lower Delaware River.) In 1638’s Treaty of Hartford, which effectively marked the end of the war, Massachusetts and Connecticut declared the Pequots to be extinct as a nation, but that was not true. Over the next decade, Pequot survivors would regroup, with dozens of them escaping from English, Mohegan, and Narragansett captivity to form two new communities in their ancestral territory. Nevertheless, their status as a regional power was broken, and all the Natives in the region took heed, which was just as the English had designed it.25

Even the Wampanoags were unnerved. On April 21, 1638, Ousamequin personally visited Boston to present Governor Winthrop with eighteen beaver pelts on behalf of his people and the “Mohegans” (probably meaning the Mohicans of the Housatonic and Hudson Rivers, a separate group from Uncas’s tribe). The reason, he said, was that he heard the Massachusetts Bay Colony was mad at them and intended war. The Wampanoags might have been worried that Boston intended to punish them for offering refuge to Roger Williams and other religious exiles from Massachusetts, while the Mohicans possibly feared colonial vengeance for taking in Pequots. Winthrop reassured Ousamequin that the colony meant them no ill will, yet the sachem remained unconvinced. The following year he and his son Mooanum (later known as Wamsutta), paid a visit to Plymouth’s General Court seeking a renewal of their alliance. They got it, but on the condition that they would not sell land to any Englishmen (meaning other colonies) without the court’s approval, as Ousamequin had done previously with Rhode Island. The sachem readily agreed, and thus Plymouth once again pledged to defend him and his followers “against all such as shall unjustly rise up against them to wrong or oppress them unjustly.” The English do not seem to have grasped that Indians now saw them as the mostly likely source of that danger.26

Ousamequin was hardly alone in his concern. Tellingly, the Narragansetts shared it, too, even after serving alongside the English during the Pequot War. In the attack on Mystic Fort, Narragansetts had cried out, “ ‘Machit, machit’; that is, ‘It is naught, it is naught because it is too furious and slays too many men.’ ” The Narragansetts were particularly appalled at the English slaughter of Pequot women and children, for Indian warfare usually involved taking these populations captive for eventual adoption into the victors’ society. This goal would have been particularly urgent to the Narragansetts after their losses from the smallpox of 1633. The Narragansetts grew even more alienated from the English as they came to the realization that dispatching the Pequots had merely cleared the way for a new rival, the Mohegans under Uncas. Uncas used his kinship ties with the Pequots to claim spoils that the Narragansetts had expected to reap: not only did he take more than his agreed-on share of Pequot captives, but after strategically marrying three high-ranking Pequot women, he attracted other Pequot survivors who had remained on the loose. With more men at his command than ever, Uncas began intimidating the Pequots’ former tribute payers on Long Island to direct their wampum payments to him despite Narragansett expectations that they would fill this power vacuum. The Mohegans also clashed with Narragansetts over claims to Pequot hunting grounds. And if all this was not enough to make the Narragansetts question their role in the war, English support of Uncas certainly was. The puritan colonies saw Uncas as a wedge against the Narragansetts and, by extension, the dissenters’ colony of Rhode Island.27

In this context, Miantonomo came to a startling realization that Native people as a whole faced a common threat in the form of European colonists. It was an idea that, in later years, would spur Ousamequin’s sons to organize a multitribal, anticolonial resistance. Yet this revelation did not come easily. In the early stages of the Pequot War, the Pequots had appealed to the Narragansetts for help, arguing that the colonists “were strangers and began to overspread the country” and would eventually turn on their Native friends. Miantonomo had not believed it at first, but now he did. Thus in the early 1640s he began touring the Indian communities on both sides of Long Island Sound as far west as the Hudson River, according to Native informants, “soliciting them to a general war against both the English and the Dutch.” He urged that they needed to become “all Indians as the English are, and say brothers to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly.”28

If Ousamequin agreed with this assessment, he did not let the English know, but he certainly had no interest in joining a resistance campaign led by a sachem from his archrivals. Instead, he used the opportunity to distance himself even further from the Narragansetts and emphasize his friendship with the English, as on July 23, 1642, when he paid a courtesy call to Boston, “attended with many men and some other sagamores [sachems].” The following year, representatives from neighboring puritan colonies encouraged Plymouth to “labor by all due means to restore Woosamequin [Ousamequin] to his full liberties in respect of any encroachments by the Narragansetts or any other nations” as per “former terms and agreements between Plymouth and him.” Clearly the Wampanoags’ leader had convinced the English that he was no supporter of Miantonomo’s purported ambition to become “universal sagamore” of southern New England. His timing was apt, for shortly thereafter the Bay Colony jailed the Massachusetts sachem, Cutshamekin, and seized his arms on suspicion that he was conspiring with Miantonomo. The colony also hoped this measure would double “to strike some terror into the Indians.”29

Ousamequin’s effort to create daylight between his people and the Narragansetts might also have involved helping the Nipmucs of what is now central Massachusetts reach out to the English. Shortly after Ousamequin’s renewal of the Wampanoags’ English alliance, a group of Nipmuc sachems paid a diplomatic visit to Boston, probably at his urging. They offered their “submission” (what this term meant to the Nipmucs one can only guess), promised to “give speedy notice of any conspiracy, attempt, or evil intention,” and presented a gift of twenty-six fathoms of wampum. Now the Wampanoags were no longer alone in their approach to the English. As the Massachusetts minister William Hubbard later wrote, the Nipmucs, “some have said, were a kind of tributaries to Massasoit [Ousamequin].” They would also prove to be close allies of his son Pumetacom even after his relations with the English soured.30

The Wampanoags and Nipmucs had extensive company in their rejection of Miantonomo’s appeal for Indian unity. Not only did multiple Native sources inform the English about the plot, but it was none other than Uncas who brought it to an end. In 1643 the Mohegan sachem took Miantonomo captive in battle, after which he delivered his prisoner to the first meeting of the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England, an alliance of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth, and New Haven (heterodox Rhode Island was left out) to coordinate their Indian and military affairs. As if to affirm Miantonomo’s plea that Indians needed to band together to counter English solidarity, the commissioners released Miantonomo back to Uncas for execution in Indian territory, to which the Mohegan sachem readily obliged. Once again, Native New England took notice, including the Wampanoags, who must have been at once cheered by the weakening of the Narragansetts and worried by the uncertainty of how the English would display their ruthlessness next.31

Ousamequin continued to rebuff Narragansett entreaties from Canonicus after Miantonomo’s killing, and made sure the English knew about it. In the summer of 1644, the colonist John Brown, who had just recently built a house near Pokanoket, informed Boston that the Narragansetts had sent Ousamequin a Mohegan head and hand to solicit his support in their war against Uncas. According to Indian custom, if the sachem received these trophies, he accepted the accompanying message; but if he returned them, he spurned it. Ousamequin took the second option with a twist, delivering the body parts to Plymouth so it knew where he stood. Later that summer, Ousamequin visited William Coddington of Newport, Rhode Island, to declare “he is all one heart” with the English, evident in the fact “that Canonicus sent to him to borrow some pieces [muskets] … which he refused.” As Ousamequin would have expected, Coddington “told him he did well so to do.” The point of these gestures was to underscore the Wampanoags’ abiding friendship with the colonies even as the Narragansetts and English teetered on the brink of war throughout the 1640s and 1650s. In other words, in the face of other Native people’s resistance to English colonization, Ousamequin remained true to the spirit of 1621.32

DIRECTING COLONIAL EXPANSION IN WAMPANOAG COUNTRY

The Wampanoags might have been unable to do anything about the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay or the colonists’ aggression against the Pequots and Narragansetts, but they had significant influence over the spread of the English into their own territory, which they used to advance their own interests. This was particularly true in the case of the religious outcasts who founded Rhode Island. When Roger Williams fled Massachusetts in the winter of 1636, he first sought refuge with Ousamequin, who placed him at a site east of the Seekonk River at the head of Narragansett Bay. Williams had been cultivating this relationship for years as a fur trader and student of the Wampanoag language. As he later recalled, in the years before his exile, he had “spared no cost … in gifts to Ousamequin, yea and to all his [people] … and therefore when I came I was welcome to Ousmequin.” Yet Plymouth authorities warned Williams out of this territory, contending that Wampanoag country was part of their jurisdiction and they did not want to alienate the Bay Colony by harboring its dissidents. To avoid a confrontation, Williams relocated just a few miles west to an area at the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquetucket Rivers, the intermediate zone between the Wampanoags and Narragansetts. He called the place Providence.33

Both Ousamequin and the Narragansett sachem, Canonicus, supported this move for similar reasons. For one, an English settlement would serve as a buffer against the other’s raids. It would also provide them with readier access to English goods and services, including the use of Williams as a go-between and scribe in their relations with other tribes and colonies. As Williams told, the Wampanoags and Narragansetts used him as “their counselor and secretary … they had my person, my shallop and pinnace, and hired servant, etc., at command, on all occasions, transporting 50 at a time.” In other words, Williams, by virtue of living in their country, had become their resource.34

Over the next decade, Ousamequin granted Williams and other Rhode Island colonists the right to settle and use tracts all around the northern and eastern edges of Narragansett Bay and its islands within the Wampanoag-Narragansett no-man’s-land. The Narragansetts did the same, ceding land north of their core territory to which the Wampanoags also laid claim. To be sure, the English compensated the sachems for these grants—for instance, paying Ousamequin five fathoms of wampum for the right to graze livestock in what became the town of Portsmouth. However, Williams knew that these sums were merely one aspect of what the sachems expected in return. They were cultivating the English as friends to advise their people in politics, defend them in times of danger, and treat them with respect and hospitality. Williams explained that he secured the sachems’ consent to build at Providence “not by monies or payment … monies could not do it.” Rather, “what was paid was only a gratuity, though I choose, for better assurance and form, to call it a sale.” Such transactions were not one-for-one exchanges of land for goods but a mutual pledge to sustain “a loving and peaceable neighborhood.” Ousamequin captured this spirit in the deed for Portsmouth, stressing that he expected William Coddington and his associates to pursue a “loving and just carriage” toward the sachem, his followers, and their posterity—always.35

This is not to say the Ousamequin never drove a hard bargain. In 1646 Providence men met with the sachem at his house to secure grazing rights up the Blackstone River, even though they had already paid Miantonomo for his claim several years earlier. They offered Ousamequin fifteen fathoms of wampum, but he wanted European merchandise, so they settled on ten fathoms of white wampum, four coats, six of the “best” hoes, axes, and twelve knives. Insisting on immediate payment, Ousamequin sent the English in one of his mishoons with a Wampanoag guide to fetch the goods from Portsmouth. The English did as the sachem asked, only for him to reject half of the knives and a portion of the hoes as unsatisfactory. All the Rhode Islanders could do was promise “to procure the rest … to his liking.” With the hour getting late, the colonial delegates went to bed assuming the negotiations were done, but they were not. Ousamequin woke his guests from a deep sleep and “begged two coats of us, which we promised to give him.” In the morning, he also demanded musket balls, which the colonists refused, and another four coats, which they also denied because they had already gifted “a coat to his chancellor” and distributed several “small gifts” worth forty fathoms of wampum to other Wampanoags. With this, Ousamequin called off the talks, leading the colonists to return home and enter the deed into the official record without his mark of consent.36

Ousamequin’s grants permitted the Rhode Islanders to use the land in only narrowly specified ways that did not exclude the Wampanoags. For instance, the questionable Blackstone River cession stipulated that the English “could not put up houses without further agreement” and that nearby Indian planters would either fence in their fields or else depart. Likewise, though Ousamequin gave his permission for the English to settle on Aquidneck Island, he still retained the right to hunt deer there with ten of his men. Most land deeds did not record these understandings, but they were understandings just the same. As far as the Wampanoags were concerned, the terms were whatever had been negotiated in person regardless of what the English put down in their writings. It is telling of Indian power along Narragansett Bay, and of the colonists’ grasp of Indian principles of joint use of the land, that Rhode Islanders generally adhered to these agreements and satisfied Wampanoag and Narragansett complaints about violations, if out of self-preservation rather than moral principle. As Williams put it to the Massachusetts legislature in 1655, Rhode Island’s “dangers (being a frontier people to the Barbarians) are greater than those of other colonies.”37

Ousamequin also began selling colonists land within his core territory to promote a “loving and just carriage” with Plymouth at a time when war between the United Colonies and Narragansetts seemed certain. In 1640 and 1641 he ceded areas due north of Pokanoket that eventually became the Plymouth towns of Taunton and Rehoboth. A decade later, the sachem made another series of grants in quick succession: In 1649 he sold a tract along the upper Taunton River that became the town of Bridgewater; in 1652, it was Apponagansett on Buzzards Bay, which the English renamed Dartmouth; in 1653, he deeded Popanomscut and Chachacust Necks near Montaup and the site where his home village of Sowams had long been located. Before these cessions, a vast stretch of swampland and forest had separated the Wampanoags’ Taunton River villages and Plymouth town. Now they and the colonists were living in such close proximity that one of the sachem’s land deeds included his pledge “to remove all the Indians within a year from the date hereof that do live in the said tract” and to make sure “the English may not be annoyed by the hunting of the Indians in any sort of their cattle.” Nevertheless, Ousamequin had good reason to think that this familiarity would breed amity rather than contempt. The point of his bargains, after all, was to show goodwill that he expected the English to return in kind.38

Another reason Ousamequin sold land to Plymouth was to give the Wampanoags access to particular colonists with valuable services to offer, as had been the case with Williams. Take, for instance, John Brown and Thomas Willet, who negotiated a number of these transactions and oversaw several town foundings, including Swansea, the closest English settlement to Pokanoket. Brown was one of the point men in Plymouth’s relations with Ousamequin. When the sachem complained in 1653 that his people had “sustained great damage in their corn by the horses and other cattle” of Rehoboth, the colony sent Brown to investigate and reach a settlement. Five years later, when English authorities suspected that Ousamequin was harboring an Indian accused of murdering another Indian in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Brown was part of the committee to press the sachem for the suspect’s extradition (to which the sachem does not appear to have obliged). Brown also seems to have helped translate several land deals and diplomatic encounters between Ousamequin and Plymouth. In other words, he interacted so frequently with the Wampanoags that he had some facility in their language.39

When Brown’s daughter married Willet, the role of intermediary with the Wampanoags became something of a family enterprise. Willet was a seasoned merchant, having conducted business in the Netherlands before arriving in Plymouth to manage the colony’s Indian trade in Maine. These experiences coalesced in the next phase of his life, which involved trading with New Netherland for Dutch goods that he then sold to the Wampanoags and the merchants with whom they dealt. Considering this to be no mere economic relationship, Ousamequin and his sons turned to Willet repeatedly when they had disputes with their English neighbors. Pumetacom even called him “my loving friend.”40

Ousamequin’s land sales also brought to Wampanoag country colonists who ignored Plymouth law to sell the Natives munitions and alcohol. The first colonists to relocate to the new towns of Taunton, Rehoboth, and Swansea were often socially marginal characters willing to bear the uncertainty of living near the Wampanoags in exchange for escaping the oversight of puritan authorities near Boston and Plymouth town. Not only were many of them religious dissenters, such as Quakers and Baptists, but smugglers interested in pursuing the illegal and enormously profitable Indian trade in guns and liquor. We know about these shadowy Englishmen only through the rare occasions that the law caught up to them. For instance, Francis Doughty of Taunton was fined thirty shillings in 1641 for selling gunpowder to Indians, and in 1648 William Hedges of Taunton faced the charge of failing to inform on others who had illegally traded ammunition. Sometimes Ousamequin himself was involved in these cases. Nicholas Hide received a stiff penalty of twenty-five pounds in 1652 for outfitting Ousamequin with a gun, while William Cheesebrough of Seekonk spent two weeks in jail and forked over six pounds for “mending two locks for pieces [muskets]” belonging to the sachem. The reason Cheesebrough’s offenses came to light was that Ousamequin had complained about him causing some unspecified “affray.” The English in the Taunton River towns were even more brazen in their sale of liquor to Indians, as reflected in Plymouth’s repeated and apparently futile prohibitions against the traffic. It would appear that one of the Wampanoags’ purposes for selling land was to gain access to such contraband. This black market is about as contrary to the Thanksgiving myth as one can imagine.41

The mark of Ousamequin, 1649 land deed to Bridgewater. From the Collection of the Old Bridgewater Historical Society.

Written land deeds were the colonists’, not the Indians’, mechanism for recording land transfers. Indians relied on oral agreements and the memory thereof. Nevertheless, Ousamequin and the Wampanoags often managed to get their understandings of land deals recorded in these documents. Wampanoags not only assumed but often insisted that the colonists’ purchase of discreet “use rights” to the land (such as the right to plant crops, graze animals, and build houses) did not extinguish Indian use rights to hunt, gather, fish, and sometimes even plant and reside in the same territory. Recorded joint-use agreements reflect Wampanoag power during Ousamequin’s lifetime. The decline of these agreements as the English population grew introduced irreconcilable tension into Wampanoag-English relations and contributed mightily to the descent into war.

Of course, a final benefit of these sales was that they provided Ousamequin with a windfall in goods for the enrichment of his people and consolidation of his following. For instance, in the 1649 sale of forty-nine square miles that became Bridgewater, Ousamequin received seven coats, nine hatchets, eight hoes, twenty knives, four moose skins, and sixteen and a half yards of cotton. Three years later, the Apponagansett cession netted him an additional thirty yards of cloth, eight moose skins, fifteen axes, fifteen hoes, fifteen pairs of britches, eight pairs of stockings, eight pairs of shoes, one pot, and ten shillings’ worth of other goods. Ousamequin certainly did not intend to use all these items himself. The point was to distribute them among his supporters. The seeming inequity to modern eyes between the high long-term value of the land and low worth of the goods does not take into account how Wampanoags would have seen things. They did not know that soon after the tools had broken and the cloth had frayed, the English would use their superior numbers and military might to assert exclusive rights to the ceded territory. Nor could they predict that Miantonomo’s prescient warning would come true: “You know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes felled the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”42 More inconceivable still would have been the idea of future generations of Wampanoags relegated to tiny reservations on which it was impossible to make a living by the people’s traditional methods. There was no certainty about these outcomes in the 1640s and 1650s, even though farsighted leaders like Miantonomo predicted them.43

BREAKING AWAY

Whereas Ousamequin used land sales to enhance his authority in various ways, similar transactions by the Wampanoags of Cape Cod and the islands appear to have served partly as attempts to distance themselves from his demands. There is scant evidence of eastern Wampanoag sachems consulting with Ousamequin about these deals, never mind giving him a cut, in contrast to Ousamequin’s leading role in cessions throughout the greater Taunton River valley and adjacent coast. That the eastern Wampanoags meant to signal their independence is evident in the fact that their communities also began hosting Christian missionaries around the same time. Everyone understood that this decision involved closer relations with the English not only religiously and culturally but politically, to the detriment of Pokanoket.

English offers to buy eastern Wampanoag land began coming in fast and furious in the 1630s, followed by a spate of sales by local sachems. Plymouth colony approved the founding of the town of Sandwich (at the shoulder of the Cape) in 1638, followed quickly by Barnstable and Yarmouth on the middle Cape in 1639, and then Eastham on the outer Cape in the late 1640s and early 1650s, though sometimes the authorization to create these towns took place before the English had actually purchased the land for them. Meanwhile, island Wampanoags permitted the Watertown, Massachusetts, the merchant Thomas Mayhew Sr. and small group of his compatriots to settle on the Vineyard in 1642, and then a band of religious dissidents and aspiring fishermen to plant themselves on Nantucket, twenty-eight miles offshore, in the 1660s. Though the islands fell within Wampanoag country, they remained outside any colony’s jurisdiction until the crown annexed them to New York in 1671 and then Massachusetts in 1691. They were never a part of Plymouth colony. To the Wampanoags, the difference was negligible. On the Cape and islands alike, these colonists clustered near harbors, bays, inlets, coastal ponds, and river mouths, where there was good anchorage, easy access to fishing, and plenty of salt grass to feed livestock. These also happened to be the areas used most intensively by the Wampanoags.44

Like Ousamequin, the Cape sachems had their understandings about shared use of the land and multiple Wampanoag claimants written into the colonists’ land deeds. For instance, when the English tried to purchase Billingsgate in the sachemship of Nauset, they first cut a deal with the sachem Mattaquason, only to discover that they also had to pay another sachem named George (the successor of Aspinet) and then an additional claimant called Lieutenant. Yet, even after these three transactions, they still did not enjoy exclusive access to the land. The Nauset Wampanoags, “as natural inhabitants of the place,” reserved the rights to collect shellfish, carve up drift whales, and plant on Pochet Island. Initially, George’s followers also asserted their liberty to plant on another neck within the ceded area, which the English were responsible for fencing to keep out livestock. However, eventually the English, “finding it inconvenient for us to have Indians at both ends of the town,” paid a “valuable sum” to convince the Wampanoags to relocate and assume responsibility for their own enclosures. Clearly, the Natives had no intention of leaving the area just because the English had arrived. They planned for the two peoples to live side by side. Colonists grudgingly respected these terms for the meantime so as to “not cause or breed any disturbance amongst the Indians,” who, as yet, represented a legitimate military threat.45

Contrary to the assumption that land sales plunged Indians into colonial subjugation, some deeds required the English to pay tribute to the local sachem, as if they were joining Wampanoag society rather than buying the land from out of it, which is doubtlessly how the Wampanoags conceived of these arrangements. In Barnstable, the English were obligated to build sixty rods of fence “near unto a certain parcel of ground which the [sachem] Nepoyetum possesseth,” plow Nepoyetum’s land, and build him a house with floorboards, a chimney, and an oven. Nepoyetum reserved the right to gather wood and spend the winter wherever he pleased. Likewise, the sachem Seeknout of Chappaquiddick on the Vineyard permitted the English to graze cattle on his land between late fall and early spring, but in exchange he expected a piece of beef from every head of cattle they slaughtered, an agreement that colonists honored “all the sachem’s days.” The point of such terms was to make land sales to the English a means of long-term Wampanoag benefit.46

The Cape and island Wampanoags also profited from the English market for Indian labor and products, which gave them access to European manufactured goods independent of Ousamequin. One can see such arrangements in a 1646 complaint by the Mattakeesett (or Yarmouth) Wampanoags that a Mr. Offrey owed them six coats of trading cloth and a pair of small britches as compensation for their having gone sturgeon fishing for him, “and now not to pay them for their labor, they take it very ill.” During the same period, the Nauset Wampanoags reportedly maintained a fishing fleet of seven or eight boats, by which they had “taken abundance of sturgeon and cod and bass this spring,” apparently for sale to the English. This newfound opportunity to trade labor, fish, shellfish, venison, fowl, and feathers for European merchandise enabled the eastern Wampanoags to live richer material lives than ever before despite colonists encroaching on their territory. They even began acquiring horses in noticeable numbers, with ten different Nausets purchasing mounts from colonists in Eastham between 1670 and 1672. These Natives could not have conceived that within a generation they would have little land left on which to use the horses to ride or plow.47

THE EBB AND FLOW OF FAITH

If any of these developments gave Ousamequin pause, he did not mention it, but he certainly took issue with English missionary outreach to the eastern Wampanoags. The Reverend John Eliot, who evangelized Natives near Boston in places like Natick and Punkapoag, is often held up as the consummate puritan missionary, partly by virtue of the lengthy paper trail he left behind. Yet a host of lesser-known figures also pursued the work on the Cape and islands to equally remarkable effect. The Mayhews of the Vineyard were the first and most recognized of the lot, starting with Thomas Mayhew Jr. in the mid-1640s, then expanding in the late 1650s and 1660s to include Thomas Mayhew Sr. (Junior having disappeared at sea in 1657) and his grandsons, John and Matthew. William Leveridge, Richard Bourne, and Thomas Tupper (and Bourne’s and Tupper’s descendants) preached throughout the Cape, while Peter Folger (Benjamin Franklin’s grandfather) tended to the Nantucket Wampanoags after a brief stint on the Vineyard. John Cotton Jr. also began his missionary career on the Vineyard before relocating to Plymouth, from which he evangelized the nearby Wampanoag communities of Assawompset, Titicut, Herring Pond, and Manomet. All the while, Eliot was active among the Wampanoags’ kin around Massachusetts Bay, which meant that the geography of the missionary campaign formed a broad C shape from the tip of the Cape north through the eastern breadth of Wampanoag country, culminating just west of Boston. This was the same network of peoples Ousamequin had implicated in the plot against Wessagusset and Plymouth.48

New England did not host Spanish-style missions run out of Christian compounds by full-time priests backed by soldiers. All English missionaries had to balance family duties (as Protestant officiants were allowed to marry) and full-time jobs ministering to colonial congregations. Having little time to spare, the missionaries focused their attention on the Wampanoags living closest to their towns, with instruction taking place in Wampanoag communities in the Wampanoag language, with the assistance of Wampanoags themselves. Indeed, the spread of Christianity depended on an increasingly long roster of Wampanoag missionaries, which included Wuttananmatuk, Meeshawin, and Sakantuket (or Peter) on Cape Cod; Assassamough (or John Gibbs), Joseph, Samuel, and Caleb on Nantucket; and Hiacoomes, John Tackanash, John Nohnoso, and Joshua Mummeecheeg on the Vineyard. Such figures were indispensable at translating and transmitting the Christian message in ways that resonated with their own people, which was considerable work. It included not only preaching but slow, painstaking question-and-answer sessions that probed innumerable similarities and differences between Christianity and Wampanoag religious belief and practice. Through such exercises, the Wampanoags not only gained a thorough education in Christian doctrine but shaped it to fit their own traditions. Not least among those traditions was the centrality of local, face-to-face relationships given the key roles Wampanoags played as missionaries to their own people. In other words, though the missions certainly reflected English influence, they were not yet a sign of colonial dominance. For the meantime, even Christian Wampanoags remained in charge of their own destiny.49

It was no coincidence that the missionaries got their start in the 1640s when southern New England Indians were reeling from fresh bouts of disease, the shock of the bloody Pequot War, and the likelihood of a clash between the Narragansetts and the English. Christianity helped address all these emergencies and more. Some Native people gave Christianity a hearing because they suspected that the colonists’ good health and military success was a reflection of their spiritual power. As one Native Christian told the English, previously he had “low apprehensions of our God” as a “mosquito god,” but after the Pequot War he “was convinced and persuaded that our God was a most dreadful god” insofar as a single English gunner was able “to slay and put to flight a hundred Indians.” Indians routinely asked their missionaries to help heal the sick and inquired about Christianity’s power to ward off and cure disease. A Mashpee Wampanoag named Wuttananmatuk recounted in 1665 that after three of his children died in just one year, “I thought God was angry at me,” which led him to the church community. Another Mashpee named Waopam also recalled how “I thought of my father that his gods could not deliver him from death, but this God could.” Such ideas in the midst of a decades-long Wampanoag health crisis, combined with the widespread Native opinion that Christianity offered protection against the curses of pawwaws, provided ample motivation to explore the colonists’ religion.50

Christian Wampanoags were unequivocal that they considered the faith not as something brand-new but as a fresh source to rediscover ancient spiritual power and protection lost to them because of deaths of so many elders during the epidemics. One Cape Wampanoag asserted that “their forefathers did know God, but after this, they fell into a great sleep, and when they did awaken they quite forgot him,” an idea that was widespread among Native people. Others said that well before the colonial era they had experienced visions of the same teachings that the missionaries propagated, including one in which a man appareled like the English, carrying a thing like the Bible, told them “that God was moosquantum or angry with them, and that he would kill them for their sins.” As for why they had forgotten or misinterpreted these lessons, the Vineyard Wampanoag Tawanquatuck told Thomas Mayhew Jr. that “a long time ago, they had wise men, which in a grave manner taught the people knowledge, but they are dead and their wisdom is buried with them.” Native people turned the missionaries’ religion into a new way to express indigenous truths by melding Wampanoag religious concepts and spirits with their rough Christian equivalents. To no small degree, this process was a natural result of using Wampanoag-language terms to communicate analogous Christian principles. For instance, the Wampanoags referred to God as “Manitou,” making him the wellspring for the spiritual force, manit. Hell became the underwater lair of Cheepi, whom the Wampanoags conflated with the devil. In these ways and more, some Wampanoags found Christianity to be a means of reinvigorating old religious ideas to meet the stresses of a new era.51

The Wampanoags also hosted missionaries to defuse the colonists’ aggression when war loomed constantly. One of Eliot’s charges told him directly that he first came to Christianity because “sometimes I thought if we did not pray, the English might kill us.” Likewise, in 1654 the Narragansetts asked Roger Williams to petition “the high sachems of England that they might not be forced from their religion, and for not changing their religion be invaded by war. For they said they were daily visited by threatenings from Indians that came from about the Massachusetts, that if they would not pray they should be destroyed by war.” The English did not make such threats directly because there was no need. No one could mistake that colonists were more peaceful toward Christian Indians and hostile toward others. Indeed, funds for missionary work raised by the London-based charity, the New England Company, were disbursed by the United Colonies, a military alliance aimed at Indians.52

The missions came with numerous practical benefits for Indians that reinforced their political calculations. Initially, English missionaries were sources of manufactured goods among Cape and island Wampanoags less involved in the fur and wampum trades than Pokanoket and the other Taunton River communities. Eliot, and probably his counterparts on the Cape and islands, made it a point “never [to] go unto them empty, but carry somewhat to distribute among them,” which included “mattocks, shovels, and crows of iron, etc.” He also paid Indians for performing “civilized” work in their own towns such as building fences and square-framed houses and having men perform agricultural tasks. Wampanoags who served in the offices of preacher, church elder, or schoolteacher drew coveted salaries from the New England Company. Christian schools run initially by English missionaries but eventually by Native instructors taught literacy in the Wampanoag language to a wide range of children and adults. Boys who distinguished themselves in these lessons, particularly if they came from politically powerful Wampanoag families, might enroll in boarding school near Boston and perhaps even enter Harvard College, as did Joel Hiacoomes and Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck from the Vineyard during the 1660s. Attending these schools did more than expose the boys to eccentric English knowledge and manners, though it certainly did that. It also put them in a position to form interpersonal connections with elite colonists that they could apply to the benefit of their people.53

Eventually, literate Wampanoags, and those to whom they read aloud, had a collection of published works targeted toward them. Beginning in the 1650s, Eliot and his Indian partners, Cagenhew and James Printer (or Wawaus), began putting the Wampanoag language into print, culminating in the publication of an entire Wampanoag-language Bible in 1663, the first Bible ever published in North America. A string of other Wampanoag-language religious tracts and educational guides followed until such writings could be found in a sizable percentage of Christian Wampanoag homes. By 1674, roughly a third of Wampanoag Christians, mostly from Cape Cod and the islands, could read in their natal language, and some 16 percent could write in it. A slim minority were literate in English. These were remarkable accomplishments in light of the fact that alphabetic literacy was completely foreign to the Wampanoags when this educational campaign began. Though the primary point was to give the people direct access to the Bible, the worldly benefits were obvious given the centrality of written land deeds, court documents, account books, petitions, and letters to colonial society. The Wampanoags’ achievements in literacy were historic and critical to the future of their relations with the English, and all the participants knew it.54

Stephen Coit, portrait of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, 2010. Image used with permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, son of the sachem of Nobnocket on Martha’s Vineyard, became the first indigenous person to graduate from Harvard College. He died of consumption shortly after finishing his degree. Harvard College’s charter committed it to “provisions that may conduce to the education of English & Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness.” A handful of other young Wampanoag and Nipmuc men also attended Harvard during this period. They represented the intense religious, political, linguistic, and cultural exchange that characterized Christian missions and Christian schools in Wampanoag country and beyond.

Christianity also offered the Wampanoags the protection of some of their territory from the English, though missionaries who used their positions to speculate in Indian land were as much a part of the problem as the solution. Everyone could plainly see that the missions would fail if the English totally displaced Indians interested in Christianity. Unfortunately, Indians facing the threat of English encroachment made up a disproportionate number of the Christians. One answer was to create “praying towns,” communities in which colonial governments guaranteed the land to Christian Indians forever in order to promote the Natives’ churchgoing and other English-style reforms. In general, these praying towns were not new creations; instead, they usually involved an existing community declaring itself to be Christian, submitting itself to colonial authority, and, not least of all, agreeing to a land cession somewhere else. The best known of these praying towns were in Massachusetts near Boston and associated with the evangelical work of Eliot. They included Natick (founded in 1651), Punkapoag (1653, now Canton and Stoughton), Wamesit (1653, now Lowell), Hassanamesit (1654, now Grafton), Okommakamesit (1654, now Marlboro), and Nashobah (1654, now Littleton). Oft overlooked is that there were also two praying towns in Wampanoag country. The first was Mashpee on Cape Cod, created in 1665 when the sachems Wepquish and Tookenchosin granted the area around Mashpee Pond, the Santuit River, and Waquoit Bay to the local Indians “forever: and not to be sold or given away from them by anyone without all their consents.” The following year, the sachem Quatchatisset of Manomet confirmed this decision. The missionary Richard Bourne often receives credit for the creation of Mashpee praying town because he drew up the paperwork that gave it legal standing with Plymouth, but it should not be overlooked that his own land speculation had contributed to the emergency that made a reservation necessary in the first place.55

Title page of the Wampanoag Bible.

In 1663, the press at Harvard College began printing the first Bible ever produced in the Americas—in the Wampanoag language. It was the first of a long series of religious publications in Wampanoag designed to reach the growing Christian Indian population among the eastern Wampanoags, Massachusett Indians, and Nipmucs, who had been learning to read in their own languages in mission schools. The translation of the Bible into the Wampanoag tongue was a collaborative process involving not only the English missionary John Eliot (to whom most of the credit is typically given) but his Native colleagues Cagenhew, Wawaus (or James Printer), and doubtless a number of other Indian figures. Modern Wampanoags have drawn on these colonial-era texts as part of their revival of the Wampanoag language.

Another Wampanoag praying town formed on Martha’s Vineyard, where the land purchases of the missionary and proprietor Thomas Mayhew Sr. were driving Christian Wampanoags to distraction. The Vineyard Wampanoags asked their other missionary, John Cotton Jr., in 1666 “whether it be a righteous thing for Mr. M [Mayhew] to buy away so much of the Indians’ lands?” Finally, in 1669 they prevailed upon Mayhew and the Takemmy sachem, Keteanummin, to agree to the formation of the praying community of Christiantown (or Mannitootan) in modern Tisbury, consisting of a square mile of reserved land. Elsewhere on the island, in sachemships like Aquinnah, Sengekontacket, and Chappaquiddick, Christian Indians had to fend off English land encroachment without such safeguards.56

The praying towns’ obstruction of sachem land sales was but one of many ways that Christianity factored into politics between Native people. A number of local sachems supported the mission, because, regardless of their religious commitment, they could harness Christianity to their political ends by having themselves or their family members fill church and school offices. Furthermore, embracing Christianity would earn them English protection against outside aggressors, including the paramount sachems to whom they wished to cease paying tribute. By contrast, paramount sachems saw Christianity as a Trojan horse for the colonies to cleave off their tributaries despite the disclaimers of English missionaries that “if any of the praying Indians should be disobedient (in lawful things) and refuse to pay tribute unto their sachems, it is not their religion and praying to God that teaches them so to do, but their corruption.” Tribute-collecting sachems were not buying it. Eventually, Eliot was forced to admit that the paramount sachems, to a person, opposed Christianity because “they plainly see that religion will make a great change among them [their followers], and cut them [the sachems] off from their former tyranny … and as for tribute, some they are willing to pay, but not as formerly.” It should come as no surprise, then, that whereas local sachems like Papmunnuck of Mashpee, Mittark of Aquinnah, and Tawanquatuck of Nunnepog became stalwarts of their community churches, not a single paramount sachem in southern New England was willing to host a mission. Uncas of the Mohegans and Ninigret of the Narragansetts, for instance, drew Eliot’s denunciations as “open & professed enemies against praying to God,” to which he added that “whenever the Lord removes them, there will be a door open for the preaching of the Gospel in those parts.”57

Ousamequin, despite his engagement with the English, always rejected the mission and reportedly admonished Plymouth just before he died not to evangelize his people. Earlier in life, he had pressured the sachem Nohtouassuet (or Notooksact) of the Vineyard sachemship of Aquinnah to hold firm against the Mayhew mission even as Nohtouassuet’s son, Mittark, was in favor of Christianity. Eventually, Ousamequin took his intervention a step further, issuing death threats that required Mittark to spend three years in exile on the east end of the island. Ousamequin also appears to have taken his complaints directly to the Vineyard proprietor, Thomas Mayhew Sr. Thomas’s grandson, Matthew Mayhew, recalled that on some unspecified date around midcentury, an Indian “prince who ruled a large part of the mainland,” undoubtedly Ousamequin, came to the island with an entourage of eighty men, “well armed,” to meet with Thomas about “something wherein the English were concerned.” This conference, which ended with “Mr. Mayhew promising [the sachem] to effect what he desired,” was probably the impetus for Mayhew’s half-hearted insistence that Christian Indians were obligated to follow their sachems in civil matters. Additionally, it put the English on notice that Ousamequin was “a great enemy to our Reformation on the island,” and elsewhere, too.58

DARKENING SKIES

In his last years, and perhaps earlier, Ousamequin could tell that the experiment he had helped launch was not going to last. It had been premised on the English population remaining small and concentrated at depopulated Patuxet and the contested Wampanoag-Narragansett borderlands while providing the Wampanoags with military protection on demand and trade goods in abundance. For most of Ousamequin’s life, the English had served these purposes. But with every passing year the tensions inherent in this arrangement were rising to the surface. The English began swarming Indian country following the Great Migration, and, given the rate of the colonists’ natural growth, there was no end in sight. Nascent English settlements had a great deal to offer their Indian neighbors in terms of trade, services, and a market for wage work, and living alongside one another seemed possible as long as everyone abided by their joint-use agreements. However, as the English population and especially their livestock herds grew, invariably they trespassed on Wampanoag resources and colonists began claiming shared places as their sole possessions. The English also became increasingly assertive about the primacy of their jurisdiction despite the Wampanoags’ assumption that colonists had been buying their way into Native society to live as friends and allies. Mutually beneficial trade helped dampen these tensions, but that binding force was coming to an end during the 1650s and 1660s. The value of wampum plummeted during these years as a result of a decline of furs in the New England hinterland, a glut of furs in Europe, a glut of wampum in New Netherland, and a rise in other forms of currency as the colonies became more involved in Atlantic trade. In turn, New England governments gradually stopped accepting wampum for payment of taxes and then for private debts. This situation left land as the coastal tribes’ only vendable resource of significance. The missions also threatened, for they demonstrated that the colonists were not content merely to engross Indian resources but wanted the Natives to adopt their entire way of life. It did not give the English pause that the communities most interested in Christianity intended to use the missions to loosen the authority of Ousamequin, the very sachem who had welcomed the first colonists to Wampanoag country.59

Conditions were building toward the very kind of military conflict that Ousamequin had spent his entire career trying to avoid. Already the English had led a massacre of the Pequots, killing hundreds, enslaving and selling off dozens more, and shattering them as a regional power. War scares between the United Colonies and Narragansetts were nearly constant, with Uncas egging on the English against his intertribal enemy, the English eager to take the bait, and the Narragansetts raising their fears by seeking allies among the Mohawks, Pocumtucks, and Dutch. Indians throughout the region were building up arsenals of European weaponry, both to defend themselves against one another and to prepare for the eventuality of war with the English. The long list of English provocations prompted Canonicus to ask of his close ally, Roger Williams, “Did ever friends deal so with friends?” Of course, his were Narragansett sentiments, not Wampanoag, but the two rivals were developing like minds as colonial expansion increasingly placed them in the same predicament.60

Ousamequin must have been pained at the idea of the coming storm. Nevertheless, at the end of his life he handed over his office to his eldest son, Mooanum, despite the likelihood of him taking a more confrontational stance toward the English. Mooanum’s decision at this time to change his name to Wamsutta might have been designed to signal such a change in policy. It was common for Indian leaders to adopt new names when faced with a new challenge in life. Though becoming sachem would have been sufficient reason alone for Wamsutta, he seems to have been indicating something more, involving pushback against English expansion and even outreach to the Narragansetts. If so, he had the support of his brother, Pumetacom, and a critical mass of Wampanoag people, which probably factored into Ousamequin’s decision to step aside before his death. However, the old sachem was careful to instruct his sons that, whatever course they took, they should never harm the family of his old friend John Brown, who had come to symbolize the reciprocal Wampanoag-English world the old sachem had built. He also made one last demonstration of the value of his approach to colonial affairs, helping the Quabaug Nipmucs frame an appeal to Massachusetts for assistance in fending off attacks by Uncas and the Mohegans, who were trying to reduce them to tributary status. As in Ousamequin’s own diplomacy with Plymouth earlier in his career, the move paid off, with Massachusetts stationing an armed guard at Quabaug, issuing a warning to Uncas, and requiring the Mohegans to release Nipmuc captives they had taken in earlier raids. Yet this was a minor success in an otherwise sorrowful last stage of Ousamequin’s life as he witnessed his sons organizing a resistance movement around the rallying cry that the English had betrayed their father’s generous spirit.61