We are all the sachems from east to west: A new look at Miantonomi's campaign of resistance

New England Quarterly-A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters

Volumn 77, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 478-499

  Oberg, Michael Leroy ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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EID: 61249709759     PISSN: 00284866     EISSN: 19372213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Lion Gardiner, "Lieft Lion Gardiner His Relation of the Pequot Warres," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 3 (Boston, 1833), pp. 152-54.
2. On the motives of Wyandaneh and his relationship to the Narragansetts, see John A. Strongs "Wyandanch: Sachem of the Montauks," in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816, ed. Robert Steven Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). pp. 48-49.
3. Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), p. 166;
4. Paul Alden Robinson, "Lost Opportunities: Miantonomi and the English in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country," in Northeastern Indian Lives, p. 14.
5. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 232.
6. See also John A. Sainsburys "Miantonomos Death and New England Politics, 1630-1645," Rhode Island History 30 (November 1971): 120.
7. Eric Spencer Johnson, "Uncas and the Politics of Contact," in Northeastern Indian Lives, p. 37.
8. John Mason, "A Brief History of the Pequot War," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser., vol. 8 (Boston, 1826), pp. 122-23.
9. Paul Alden Robinson, "The Struggle Within: The Indian Debate in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country" (Ph.D. diss., SUNY-Binghamton, 1990), p. 271,
10. and Robinson, "Lost Opportunities," p. 18.
11. On virgin-soil epidemics, see Alfred Crosbys "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (1976): 300;
12. Sherburne F. Cooks 'The Significance of Disease in the Extinction of the New England Indians," Human Biology 45 (1973): 499;
13. and Arthur E. Speiss and Bruce D. Weisss "New England Pandemic of 1616-1622: Cause and Archaeological Implication," Man in the Northeast 34 (1987): 71-72.
14. For the "wampum revolution" that developed in southern New England, see Salisburys Manitou and Providence, pp. 147-52;
15. his "Toward the Covenant Chain: Iroquois and Southern New England Algonquians, 1637-1684," in Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800, ed. James H. Merrell and Daniel K. Richter (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 65;
16. and also his "The Colonizing of Indian New England," Massachusetts Review 26 (1985): 456.
17. William Wood, New Englands Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), p. 81;
18. Elizabeth Shapiro Pena, "Wampum Production in New Netherland and Colonial New York: The Historical and Archaeological Context" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1990), p. 61;
19. Kevin A. McBride, 'The Source and Mother of the Fur Trade: Native-Dutch Relations in Eastern New Netherland," Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, ed. Laurie Weinstein (West-port, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), p. 33;
20. Robinson, "The Struggle Within," p. 83.
21. The story of the origins of the Pequot War has been retold many times. For the most recent accounts, see my Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), chap. 2;
22. my Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 3;
23. and Alfred F. Caves The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
24. The number and types of Pequots inside the Mystic fortress has proven a source of controversy. Francis Jennings, in The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonists, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 220-22, argued that the English attacked the Mystic post because fewer Pequot warriors were there than at another Pequot fortification, and the Mystic warriors were not as well armed. Jenningss claim remains unsubstantiated.
25. The surviving evidence does not allow us to reconstruct the composition of Pequot forces inside Mystic with any accuracy, and all the English accounts agree that the Mystic fortress, a well-constructed defensive position, was guarded by at least enough armed Pequots to cause the English to find the fighting difficult. See Cave, The Pequot War, pp. 209-10.
26. John Underbill, "Newes from America," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d ser., vol. 6 (Boston, 1837), p. 27.
27. On the brutality of the war and its impact on the subsequent development of Indian-white relations in southern New England, see Patrick M. Malones The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 102-5;
28. Adam J. Hirschs "The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England," Journal of American History 74 (1988): 1187-212;
29. Ronald Dale Karrs "'Why Should You Be So Furious?' The Violence of the Pequot War," Journal of American History 85 (1998): 876-909;
30. and Harold E. Seleskys War and Society in Colonial Connecticut (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 9.
31. and Michael F. Fickess " 'They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637," New England Quarterly 73 (2000): 58-81.
32. For first-hand accounts of the 1633-34 smallpox epidemic, see William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), pp. 270-71.
33. See also Brenda J. Bakers "Pilgrims Progress and Praying Indians: The Biological Consequences of Contact in Southern New England," in In the Wake of Contact: Biological Responses to Conquest, ed. Clark Spencer Larsen and George R. Milner (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1994), p. 36.
34. For the best discussion of the Mourning War complex, see Daniel K. Richters "War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 40 (1983): 528-59.
35. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649 ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 257-58, 260;
36. Glenn W. La Fantasie, "Murder of an Indian, 1638," Rhode Island History 38 (1979): 67-77.
37. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, pp. 228-29.
38. Winthrop, Journal, p. 258.
39. Jennings, Invasion of America, pp. 258-59.
40. "The Hartford Treat with the Narragansetts and the Femvick Letters," New England Historical and Genealogical Register 46 (1982): 355-56.
41. "The Hartford Treaty," pp. 355-56.
42. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, p. 338;
43. Eric Spencer Johnson, "some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings': Political Strategies among Native Americans in Seventeenth-Century New England" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1993). 206.
44. For a useful discussion of this dynamic in early America, which can place Miantonomis predicament in a broader context, see James H. Merrells "The Customes of Our Countrey': Indians and Colonists in Early America," in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard W. Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991),
45. and Richard Whites The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 2.
46. Johnson, "some by Flatteries,'" pp. 111-12.
47. Francis Higginson, "New Englands Plantation," in Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, from 1623 to 1636, ed. Alexander Young (Boston, 1846), p. 257;
48. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. John Teunissen and Evelyn Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), pp. 164, 86, 199, 191.
49. Peter A. Thomas, "Contrastive Subsistence Strategies and Land Use as Factors for Understanding Indian-White Relations in New England," Ethnohistory 23 (1976): 4-14.
50. For the archaeology of Narragansett contact with Europeans, see Patricia E. Rubertones Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001);
51. William Scranton Simmonss Cautantouwwits House: An Indian Burial Ground on the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970);
52. E. Pierre Morenon et al.s Archaeological Sites at an Ecotone: Route 4 Extension, East Greemcich and North Kingstown, Rhode Island, 6 vols. (Providence: Public Archaeology Program, Rhode Island College, 1986);
53. "Journal of New Netherland," in Narratives of New Netherland, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1909), p. 273;
54. Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 62.
55. Resolution to Extract a Tribute from the Indians, 15 September 1639, New York Colonial Documents, 13:6;
56. David DeVries, Notes, Narratives of New Netherland, p. 209.
57. Paul Andrew Otto, "New Netherland Frontier: Europeans and Native Americans along the Lower Hudson River, 1524-1664" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1995), pp. 178-79;
58. Trelease, Indian Affairs, pp. 65-66;
59. Council Minute, 16 July 1640, New York Colonial Documents, 12:7.
60. For a slightly different translation of the same document, see New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, vol. 4, Council Minutes, 1638-1649, ed. Arnold J. F. Van Laer (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1974), p. 87.
61. Ted J. Brasser, "Mahican," Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), p. 203;
62. "Resolution and Order to Attack the Indians," 25 February 1643, New York Colonial Documents, 13:10;
63. Otto, "New Netherland Frontier," p. 191.
64. This problem certainly was not unique to Indian peoples in New England and New Netherland. For discussions of similar reactions to the newcomers along the Carolina Outer Banks in the sixteenth century, see my "Gods and Men: The Meeting of Indian and White Worlds on the Carolina Outer Banks, 1584-1586," North Carolina Historical Review 76 (October 1999): 367-90.
65. For the Delawares, Shawnees, Creeks, and Cherokees, see Gregory Evans Dowds A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
66. and my Dominion and Civility, p. 119.
67. Henry A. Baker, History of Montville, Connecticut, formerly the North Parish of New London, from 1640-1896 (Hartford, 1896), p. 17;
68. Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, 2 vols. (New London, 1898), 1:102-3;
69. Howard M. Chapin, Sachems of the Narragansetts (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1931), p. 47.
70. See also my Uncas, pp. 103-4;
71. See my Uncos, pp. 107-9,
72. and Robinsons The Struggle Within," pp. 141-42.