rifootprints

A Brief  Inquiry of  the Crookfall Brook and Woonsocket Reservoir Watershed.

 

Part I.

 

At a talk I gave recently at the Audubon Society in Bristol on “Rediscovering Places of Native American Memory”, I was approached by Tim Wynne, who enthusiastically told me of an interesting site along the Crookfall brook watershed in Lincoln, an area that is now part of the protected Woonsocket watershed. Knowing little about the area, I undertook some research before what Tim and I hoped, would be a chance to visit the watershed and locate the site he remembered. What follows is a synopsis of what I discovered to be chronicled of these lands and tributaries.

Crookfall Brook was originally named Wessukottomsuk Spring, and the surrounding area has a long history,  including signs of paleo-indian activity from as far back as 10,000 years ago.

Traditionally, these were Nipmuc lands, later controlled and sold in the colonial period (1660) by the Wampanoag as part of what became known as the Inman Purchase. To obtain a perspective on the area itself, we can look to a couple of archeological studies conducted on sites nearby.

William S. Fowler, an amateur archeologist whose work was largely published in Massachusetts Archeological Society Bulletins, excavated three locations in the “Twin River Basin” between 1950 and 1952. His findings were published in the Society’s Bulletin of October 1952.

In this study, the Wenscott reservoir/West river area was identified by Fowler as a hunting site. Numerous spearheads and stone tools were found along the banks of the river and in an area close to the reservoir.  There were also four stone hearths unearthed in this area. The archeologist’s determination was that he had found evidence of man’s imprint on the land as far back as 6,500 years ago at these locations.

The spearheads found were those of Paleo-Amerindians who navigated the west river in search of game. These spears were their chief weapon, and other evidence of their activity were also found in the crude rock tools used to skin and clean the hides of animals. Other stone implements and the remains of “prickly clubs” were also found.

By the Early Archaic period, hunters from the north had found the area, and it is their stone hearths-large and fitted with great flat hearthstones that were found three feet beneath the surface soil. Later hearths were also found in this location, identified by Fowler as having been built in the “stone bowl age” , and used for production of pottery.

In another survey conducted by Ingrid Gearloff Nebiker for her thesis “European Man’s Imprint on the Landscape of Rhode Island” (1975), we find another overview of the area:

“…a second watershed is Crookfall Brook, draining the Island woods along Rocky Hill road and including Woonsocket reservoir number 3. Before this stream which marks the eastern boundary of North Smithfield enters the Blackstone at Manville, it forms two other reservoirs for the city of Woonsocket, and is joined by Spring Brook which rises between Whartlebury(?) and Sayles Hills.”

This relatively remote area came to be regarded by neighboring Indians as a place of refuge as English settlers extended their frontiers inland. As tribal powers fluctuated,  this area became an active site of inter-tribal movement, and contact, both social and commercial became significant. Louisquisset was such an area, as its name literally means in the Nipmuc language,  “at the place of meeting”.

Nebiker writes that  “The location of the Inman-Mowry lands deeded in 1666 from “Loquiset northward”, suggests that the Indian plantation of Louisquisset was located near the present southern boundary of North Smithfield, perhaps in the Island woods.”

By tradition, the first purchase of these lands was made, as mentioned by Edward Inman about 1660. Around the same time, Roger Williams was granted use of a riverside by the Wampanoag sachem Alexander, running some four to five miles beginning “at the old field of Wasquadomsuk”. Inman’s purchase of “a thousand acres” is recorded in numerous references. A later deed suggests that this land adjoined the northeast portion of “wansockut hill”.

The location of this land, according to Nebiker, was “undoubtedly south of the first Indian purchase, but quite possibly along the Crookfall…”

The deed of 1672 to Edward Inman and John Mawry, and submitted by Wampanoag William Minion, contains a colorful description of the landscape:

“I William Minion have set the bounds of their Land, lyinge from loquiset northward. The first bound is a chesnutt on the south marked on fower sides at the first Indian ffield on Wessukkuttomsuk hill runninge a mile due North and then upon a line to vmmohtukkonit takeinge in  all the medow, and soe to run to Nipshacuck , and soe to the Indians growned, and soe to a champ of pines called the Key, and soe to the springe called wessukkuttomsuk (Crookfall brook), to the chesnut tree above mentioned.  And soe to patuket river (the Blackstone) Northward and on the end of the mill north to patukit river.”

Although the deed from Minion only acknowledges  Inman and Mawry, others as Mawry’s brother  Nathaniel, and their associates John Steere and Thomas Walling were also given a share, and thus some use of the land.

As Nebiker wrote in 1975,

“ Locating these features on the present landscape with any certainty is virtually impossible, however, the first Indian field on Wessukkottomsuk hill is probably the same as the old field of Wasquadomsuk, and suggests a new field somewhere near the hill. The first (old field) might have been on the level land atop the hill where clear land prevails now, and where the early homes, by tradition, were built. The spring might be the one near the Arnold house, but more likely might be the Crookfall brook, in the area later flooded by Woonsocket reservoir number 3.”

The hiostorian concludes that

“settlement atop Wesquadomset suggests that a source of potable water was close by…of the original saw mills and grist mills almost nothing is known. But from the Mowry and Inman dwellings near Wesquadomset, there were several possible mill sites on the Crookfall brook within a mile, while a stream known as the Spring brook provided another source of power about one-half mile away.”

In a recent walkthrough of the area, I was guided by Tim ,who as a local resident had spent considerable time in these woods as a young man. Tim had introduced himself to me at a talk given to the Audubon Society, and had told me of a significant site he remembered from the area. The land is now more formally restricted by the Woonsocket Water Authority, and we were given access by the Authority to explore the area.

We walked along the bank of Crookfall brook, the area dry underfoot due to a shortage of snow and rain during the winter. Despite this, the brook had a decent current running towards the lower reservoir whose dam was built in 1883, the water rushing now between the narrow, man made channel of stone.  Just beyond the dam in the woods above the river we found the site that Tim remembered. They were two stone walls, approximately eight feet high built into the hillside, with short end walls extending out from the hill.

The intact walls were approximately thirty feet apart, and it was difficult to discern whether a wall along the hill connected the remaining structure. There were several large boulders at the base of the hill, and other evidence might lead to that conclusion if an historical archeological study was conducted.

Just a ways down from these walls we found a more formal foundation of the same height open to the river. The walls were well formed with fieldstone and in some areas packed with smaller stone or grouted, indicative of 18^th and 19^th century yeoman masonry.

We walked uphill and backtracked toward the reservoir, in the narrow corridor of woods between Crookfall brook and Interstate 99, finding two more well preserved foundations in close proximity to each other. These contained central chimneys and are indicative of dwellings constructed in the 18^th to early 19^th century.

Again, a formal study might find that these dwellings were in use at least part of the year alongside the brook, and further lead to speculation that the nearby structures, including the older, of which the two walls remain, might have been a stable of sorts for the horses that brought people out from the nearby farms.

Close to these foundations were found two circular, ground level mounds approximately twenty feet apart in a straight westerly line. Given the proximity of the foundations, these are likely the remains of wells.

Tim and I were also given access to an area alongside Reservoir number 3 by John Beauchemin, the Water Supply Inspector for the town of Woonsocket who with other Water Authority employees, had an avid interest in a structure found in the area. John showed Tim and I a video from his cellphone of a long wall that extended parallel to the reservoir for a long distance. John also told us of a set of foundations we would find close to the end of the wall.

He guided us out along the an access road and when we stopped in an area below a recent housing development, he instructed us to climb over a stone wall and head through the woods toward the southern bank of the reservoir. Tim and I headed in, and soon enough found the wall, a good four feet high, lain with uniform stone walls on either side and approximately five to six feet wide, extending  to the east and west as far as the eye could see.

It was apparent to me that this was an elevated roadway, built no doubt, to traverse goods and materials to and from the sites we would find near the south western side of the reservoir. We took a moment to study its straight path through the trees, a few blow-downs crisscrossing the road, and young pines now two to three feet high, emerging from the topsoil beneath the stones lain for the surface.

 

 

We headed back to the road to find the path Rob told us would lead to the foundations, and in a short time were heading down the well-worn ATV route that wove through the woods toward the reservoir. The first foundation was some distance from the water, with the remains of a sluice built with fieldstone still intact that extended underground towards the reservoir.

There were also, two granite columns nearby, standing four feet apart in front of other remaining walls as though this might have been a formal gateway. Nearby, somewhat closer to the water were the remains of two other foundations. One included a large wall built into the hillside, and the other a small structure with two sluices leading to the foundation.

In the historical survey conducted for the National Register of Historic Places we find that in this region of Rhode Island,

“Agriculture was the backbone of the economy throughout  the 17^th and 18^th centuries with saw, grist, and fuller mills and scythe stone operations developing along streams such as the Branch river and Crookfall brook in the latter 1700’s.”

Never having heard of a “Fulling Mill” before, I ventured on some research and found this amusing description from a like enterprise in Randolph County, Virginia:

“At a fulling mill, woolen cloth was washed in a nasty-smelling combination of boiling urine and fuller’s earth, to remove the natural grease from the wool; then the cloth was beaten in troughs by wooden hammers lifted and dropped by a water wheel.”

Judging by a reading of the present landscape and the likely connectivity of the elevated roadway constructed nearby, it seems that these are likely the remains of a saw mill that was active well into the 19^th century, transporting lumber from the mill to the nearby farms and perhaps a market beyond. It is also possible that these separate foundations mark a gathering of separate enterprises within a compound, though an historical archeological study would have to be conducted to confirm this speculation.

More historical research will have to be conducted as well as to who owned this land among the families and associates nearby, and when, to determine when the roadway and mills might have been in use. The walk itself, gave us a fascinating glimpse into the use of land and enterprise of these early farmers and manufacturers.  Deeds, letters, obituaries and other ephemera, if it can be found, will help us to place the people on the land, and in the mills, and on the roadway; these last reminders of their lives of perseverance and hard labor.

 

Robert A. Geake

March-April 2012

Known Land, Foreign Tongue: Early European Attempts to Navigate the Algonquian Language.

by Robert A. Geake

For those who ventured out on the sailing voyage to America in the early to mid-  seventeenth century, there was a sense of a continent somewhat known, a familiarity with  a landscape they had not yet laid eyes upon. For those more learned among them, there were images and textual descriptions printed for a hundred years in Europe. By mid-century, these would have had widespread distribution from the fleets of Dutch, French, and finally, English vessels that plied the trade from North America.

Of course, the gap between what was “known”, and what was to be found on the Continent, was often very wide, and none more so than how to approach and engage Native American tribes. Trade conducted with the Aboriginal people of the eastern seaboard included complex agreements sealed and augmented with ritual and ceremony, a complexity completely lost on most Europeans. As historian G. Edward White explains,

“European visitors to the North Americas…were immediately confounded by their ignorance of Amerindian Languages and Amerindians inability to ‘read or write’. For much of the sixteenth century, as European contacts in North America remained limited to commercial adventurers and the occasional voyage of exploration and discovery, Europeans sought to solve the language barrier in two ways. One was to develop ‘pidgin’ languages, blends of some Amerindian and some European words, in order to facilitate some commercial exchange”.[1]

One of the earliest serious attempts to understand the native language came from the pen of Thomas Harriot, an English astronomer and mathematician who visited Roanoke Island with an expedition in 1585-1586. Harriot learned some Algonquian from two native Americans who had been brought to London in 1584 and returned with him on his voyage to Virginia.

Thomas Harriot published an account of his travels in 1588 which shows to modern scholars “a deep understanding and respect for the cultural practices of the people he encountered in Virginia”. More ambitiously, Harriot drafted a phonetic alphabet of the Algonquian he learned, and,  as Richard W. Bailey noted, “a lexicon consisting mostly of nouns but there were many of them”.

Among these was the word “Werowance”, which the Englishman translated as “chief Lorde”. This title stayed in use with writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries as the various “indian histories” were published. Harriot was also the first English writer to make mention of the “Herbe…called by inhabitants Uppowoc…The Spaniardes generally call it Tobacco”.

By mid 17^th century, when Roger Williams was penning his “A Key Into The Language of America” after living for over a decade among the Narragansett people, there was more than commerce on the mind of these early interpreters of the language, there was conversion as well. In looking at this period closely, we come to see a true attempt  in published works, to better understand the language and thus improve communication between Europeans and Native Americans.[2]  This improved communication it was hoped, would lead to education for their young, and ultimately to conversion in the protestant faith.

                                        19th century drawing of Roger Williams circa 1636

But within the scope of that design there had to be an understanding of a people and their culture, in effect an acceptance of that culture on a respective level before one could convert them to the English faith.  Williams wrote in his introduction that his book hoped to “unlocke some Rarities concerning the Natives  themselves, not yet discovered”.  His “observations” on Narragansett life, is an almanac of the rites and rituals of seasons, as well as the most extensive vocabulary  then written of a Native American language.

Williams would write of the Narragansett that

“their language is exceedingly copious, and they have five or six words sometimes for one thing”.[3]

Minister John Eliot began his missionary work in 1646 to convert the remnants of those tribes whose people were largely lost to epidemics before he met their descendants, and found  some success both in interpreting their language and in “Christianizing” a fair number of the “Massachusetts people”. These followers began the first “praying town” in Natick. Eliot wrote of the “Massachusetts” language as well that

“the manner of formation of the nouns and verbs have such a latitude of use, that there needeth little other syntaxis in the language”.

Eliot immersed himself in Native dialect to bring the Gospel to the Massachusetts people, first, in the form of religious pamphlets, and then in 1663,  an “Indian Bible” written in the local Natick dialect was published. His teacher (and servant) for more than thirty years was a Native American named Job Nesutan. It was from this “pregnant-witted” Indian, that Eliot learned the language, and several others of the Massachusett, including the later murdered John Sassamon, would contribute to the writing and publication of Eliot’s Bible.

Despite the difficulty in grappling with the language, it is important to remember that these early efforts of understanding the Algonquian language have remained the most reliable for modern scholars. Yet in the main, we find these ministers mocked in modern historic literature and equated, as Biblical fathers to the sins of those mislead and vengeance-minded offspring.

For instance, the student looking for sources available for this period might easily turn to the Routeledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies where we find

“…the first American translators (of Native language) included Puritan ministers who learned Indian languages to convert the natives…Conversion went hand in hand with conquest, so that translation facilitated the expropriation of Indian lands. Here, translators and interpreters mediated between significant cultural differences that were inscribed in the translating language”.

The author refers to the distinct difference in appreciation, and the naming of property. Algonquian place names most often referred to use or an ancient legend in their culture. Use of land was granted to neighboring tribes provided they pay tribute to the tribe within those boundaries, a tacit agreement that appeared among native Americans long before the European arrival.

The English of course, placed property in private hands through written agreements, with carefully drawn out plots and boundaries and signed by both parties and witnesses.  As such, private property was not be violated or trespassed upon by any person. Such fencing off parcels of land belonging to a whole was an unsettling and alien practice to the Native American. The Encyclopedia continues:

“The colonists recognized such differences from the start. Yet driven by an imperialist impulse, they rendered Indian language and culture into characteristically English terms-legal, commercial, political. This is even apparent in A Key to the Language of America (1643)”.

Surely this weighty judgment of imperialist intent, cannot be invoked upon Winslow,  Williams, Eliot,, or a handful of other early secular interpreters.  It is a mistake also, I think, to group these individuals under the mere and malodorous label of “Puritan ministers”, as each, in their unique observances of native life exhibit a humanistic engagement that enabled them to obtain a cache of early American customs and daily living that is still relevant today in the work of students and scholars alike.

As William S. Simmons notes, “…persons who were alienated from the dominant orthodoxy of Puritan society tended to view Indians in a more positive light and identified with them to a greater extent.”[4]

These ministers who took themselves as missionaries to native populations, were not promoting the tenets of imperialism, indeed they, as other early white settlers were seeking escape from those very vices imperialism brings. In their own “conversion” from the Anglican hierarchal faith to the belief in saving the individual soul, as Cohn wrote, was an act of “turning back from sin to embrace God, reversing one’s earlier path”.

This would have certainly applied to Roger Williams who is first mentioned anonymously in William Wood’s “New England Prospects” (1634). Wood wrote:

“One of the English preachers, in a special good intent of doing good to their soules, hath spent much time in attaining to their language, wherein he is so good a proficient, and he can spake to their understanding, and they to his; much loving and respecting him for his love and counsel.”

           19th century painting depicting Williams in the “smokey hovels” of the Narragansett.

Robert Baillie, one of William’s staunchest opponents of soul-liberty, thought the preacher practically alone in his “longing for the Indian’s soules”. In his own treatise, written in 1645, Baillie acknowledged that

“Only Williams in the time of his banishment from among them did assay what could be done with these desolate souls, and by a little experience did find a wonderful great facility to gain thousands of them.”[5]

In order to acquire as much knowledge of the language, as well as the Native “Customes, Manners, and Worship”, Williams adapted, more than any other translator, to native ritual and practices, and learned

“through varieties of intercourses with them Day and Night, Summer and Winter, by Land and Sea”.

While Roger Williams found that the Narragansett and neighboring tribes were often open to hearing about the white man’s God, it did not diminish their respect and loyalty to the deities that intertwined their lives and culture with the cycle of the world around them. The failure to convert many would not initially trouble Williams as it did later Puritan ministers. Williams wrote that

“I was persuaded, and am, that God’s way is first to turne from it’s idolls, both of heart, worship, and conversation, before it is capable of worship, to the true and living God.” The lack of true repentance among the Native Americans was also “the bane of million(s) of soules in England, and all other nations professing to be Christian nations..”

In this respect, Williams refused to view the Native Americans as mere heathens.

He wrote in his “Key into the Language” that

“Nature knows no difference between European and Americans in blood, birth, bodies &c. God having of one blood made all mankind, Acts 17. And all by nature being children of wrath, Eph. 2.”

Still, the Algonquian tongue, though some biographers have made use of his proficiency in old world languages to assert that William’s in effect, learned easily; but in his own writings, it was at first, a source of bafflement and wonder.

“There is a mixture of this Language North and South, from the place of my abode, about six hundred miles; yet within the two hundred miles…their Dialects do exceedingly differ; yet not so, but (within that compasse) a man may, by this helpe, converse with thousands of Natives all over the Countrey…”.

Daniel Gookin would write a generation later that “The Indians of the parts of New England, especially upon the sea coasts, used the same sort of speech and language, only with some difference in the expressions, as they differ in other counties in England, yet so as they can well understand each other”, but those who encountered with the Algonquian dialects in the 1630’s, he were very much in uncharted territory.

Williams recognized that sometimes one “expression” of a word differed from another within the meaning of the same word. He wrote in his Directions for the Use of the Language that

Title page of “A Key Into the Language of America” Courtesy of the Brown     University Library Special Collections.

“Because the Life of all Language is in the Pronunciation, I have been at the Paines and Charged to cause the Accents, Tones, or sounds to be affixed”

These differing dialects however, seem to have been a continuous source of frustration for the English minister. There are several episodes recorded in “A Key”, that illustrate this problem in perceiving the language as a whole. On one occasion,

Williams traveled with the Narragansett to a neighboring town and preached to a Native American audience. They had some difficulty in understanding, but through the old drawback of mixed words and gestures, William’s message was received.

On another occasion, William’s writes:

“I once travailed to an Island in the wildest of our parts, where in the night an Indian (as he said) had a vision or dream of the Sun (whom they worship for a God) darting a Beame into his Breast which he conceived to be the Messenger of his Death”.

The man gathered his friends from near and far and fasted for ten days awaiting death. Williams was stranded on the Island during this ordeal, (having travailed from my Barke, the wind being contrary) and as is evident, frustrated at his inability to minister to the stricken family:

“…little could I speake to them to their understandings especially because of the change of their Dialect, or manner of speech from our neighbors”.

Williams recorded that “…the varietie of their Dialects and proper speech within thirtie or fortie miles each of other, is very great…”  Despite these difficulties, Williams was able to discern some differences and recorded these. One example for his readers was the different pronunciations of the word for “dog”:

                           Anum,  The Cowweset

                           Ayim    The Narriganset

                           Arum    The Qunnippiuck

                           Alum     The Neepmuck

 

      In his biographical introduction to The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, Reuben Aldridge Guild points out that Williams “ had acquired his knowledge of the language from intercourse with at least three independent tribes…and it is certain that, in some instances, he has admitted words which are not in Narragansett dialect”.

The very name “Narragansett”, containing the letter “r” was first printed in “A Key…” though the letter “r” was not pronounced in the language. The misspelling as it occurred, became part of the English lexicon, though in William’s own “letter” of introduction, he used, and spelled the proper name of Nanhiganeuk. Guild also posed three examples of Nipmuck words that made their way into Williams’ unwieldy grammar-Guild clearly prefers Eliot’s more “civilized” method; but acknowledged that

“On the whole, the language of the Key does not differ more widely from that of Eliot’s Bible, than does the latter from the Massachusetts Psalter and translations of John’s Gospel, printed for the use of the Indians of Massachusetts in 1709”.

                                    Eliot’s “Indian Bible” Courtesy of Non Solus/Wordpress

This debate continues into modern times. In a paper presented before the thirty eighth Algonquian conference, David J. Costa continues the estimations of Ives Goddard, Kathleen Bragdon, and others that much of William’s vocabulary and phrases in “A Key…” are composed in the “Coweset” dialect, rather than what he terms the “Southern Narragansett”, and indicates the presence as well of Massachusetts and Connecticut dialect detected from alternative inflectional endings. [6]

Eliot’s Bible also had an unintended effect upon the different dialects spoken among the Algonquian in southeastern Massachusetts. Writing from Martha’s Vineyard in 1722, Experience Mayhew noted the change, subtle as it was, between the language spoken on the island, and the origin of Eliot’s Bible and Grammar among the Indians of Natick.

“Indeed, the difference was something greater than now it is, before our Indians had use of the Bible and other books translated by Mr. Eliot; but since that, most of the little differences betwixt them have been happily lost.”

By 1769 when Ezra Stiles of Newport composed a 45 word vocabulary of the “Narragansett” , the language had changed significantly from a century before, and the dialect spoken by the Indians of southern Rhode Island had shifted to Eastern-Niantic.

Still, it is generally concurred that Roger Williams and John Eliot succeeded more than any other early interpreters, and their work has been used by Frank Waabu O’Brien and the Aquidneck Indian Council to reconstruct the language. But neither Williams, nor later translators, appear to have recognized that gesture and performance of a story, or descriptive answers to questions, also played a role in their meaning and significance.

While gesture was often noted by the early translators, most famously by Cotton Mather who later coined these rituals as “joining signs with words”, the English clearly were at a loss in translating such gestures or their implicit meanings.

Furthermore, as historian Laura T. Murray points out,

“Euro-American observers were often not aware of the possibility that in their presence Indians may have modified their gestural vocabularies”.[7]

The Algonquian Language itself was deeply rooted in the Native American belief that the world around them was a source of wonder. Early observers often wrote of the Indians placing spiritual qualities on the creatures around them-all had come from  the hand of Caukkawonit , all held meaning, and were paid tribute in pottery, painting, and stone.

When John Eliot visited the Massachusetts people, he was asked many questions concerning the biblical writings he quoted to them. They had a particular curiosity of those of the natural world:

“Why must we be like Salt? …What meaneth that, Let the trees of the Wood rejoice?”

Eliot’s answer that

“God gave us two books, and that in the book of the creature, every creature was a word or sentence& c.”  gave the Native American an interpretation that “the wonder of the world, not the power of the book, was viewed as foundational. By “reading” the natural world , the Indians seemed to have understood Eliot to be saying, one can understand God and be saved by him.”[8]

The telling of a story in metaphor was a common trait among the Algonquian whose long standing practice of oral history bred many great and famous story-tellers. This love of story and metaphor among the people was a god-send for the ministers in relaying Biblical tales to Native Americans. It was less useful however, in translating Native American memory and meaning into the English language.

The acting out of a story or “performance” by Native Americans meant that to Europeans no one story was told the same, but with different gestures, emphasis, and expressions from each speaker. Dennis Tedlock has written of such oral performances that “These are not fixed texts. The stresses, pitches, pauses, and also the sheer words are different from one (performer) to the next., and even from one occasion to the next, according to place and time, according to who is in the audience, according to what they do and do not know, according to what questions they may have been asked”.[9]

In writing of an early encounter with Native Americans on Cape Cod, Thomas Shepard, who accompanied Eliot to many villages, wrote of a Native American’s statement that their forefathers once knew God, but had long fallen into a “great sleep” , that

“with such metaphoricall language they usually express what eminent things they meane”

Edward Winslow had observed in a note appended in his The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New England  that  ”The better sort of them are full of such like expressions, affecting to speak in Parables”[10]

In composing his Tears of Repentance, Eliot opined that while he had “been true & faithful unto their souls, and in writing and reading their Confessions, I have not knowingly or willingly made them better, than the Lord helped themselves to make them, but am verily persuaded that I have rather rendered them weaker (for the most part) than they delivered them; partly by missing some words of weight in some Sentences, partly by my short and curt touches of what they more fully spake, and partly by reason of the different Idioms of their Language and ours”.

We see in the writings of these missionaries that,

“the conversations of prostelytes and preachers involved not only disagreements over how to interpret metaphor but even how to recognize it and how to imagine its opposite, the ever-elusive literal truth”.[11]

Algonquian language was embedded as well and extended upon the body, garments, and everyday items and utensils, as well as the landscape.

“Of Bookes and Letters they have none…” Willaiams had written, yet

“They paint their garments & c. The men paint their faces in Warre. Both men and women for pride & c.”  In one of his “Observations”, Williams notes that “Wannum, their red painting which they most delight in, and is  both the bark of the pine, as also a red earth”.

The Narragansett women who sculpted soapstone bowls, the basket-weavers who wove traditional patterns and motifs throughout generations, were expanding the language into a further realm of Native American understanding. This connectedness to the earth extended to sites within the natural landscape of ceremonial places, burial grounds, and stories pecked on boulders along the shoreline.

As the anthropologist Edward J. Lenick writes,

“Algonquian peoples lived in a physical world that was often harsh and mysterious. Over their long history, they developed a deep spiritual connection with manitous who inhabited special places on the landscape. The people developed rites, rituals, ceremonies, and traditions in dealing with the vast mystery of existence. Some of their visions and dreams were rendered in stone, and specially chosen physical settings became part of a sacred landscape”.[12]

In considering one aspect of the argument in its simplest form, we might say that comparing the painting on canvas to painting on the garment, or the body, is an expansion of the respective languages into the visual, and thus, has an associated vocabulary to express the form, or “story” of the painting into language. If we accept this, we see that native Americans must also have held a representative vocabulary. In the Englishman’s observation that Indians only painted their garments or faces, rather than on wood or canvas, meant that they failed to conceptualize their meaning, and so these expressions were minimized.

Williams records but a handful of colors in his vocabulary, and notes

“It hath been the foolish Custome of all barbarous Nations to paint and figure their Faces and Bodies…” He also observed that,  “they commonly paint these moose and deer-skins for summer wearing, with varieties of forms and colours”

A hint of the ministers’ own disdain for this form of expression can be found in another passage from ”A Key…” when he ponders why a Native American would possess a looking glass:

“They…having no beautie but a swarfish colour, and no dressing but nakedness; but pride appears in any color, and the meanest dress; and besides generally the women paint their faces with all sorts of colours”.

Roger Williams clearly had nothing but contempt for such display, and never thought to observe the practice as anything but vanity. This is seen in the brief dialogue he includes in “A Key…”, which rapidly degenerates into an English scolding of the native American ritual:

Anakesu  /  He is painted

                               Aunakeuck / They are painted

                               Tawhitch auna  / Why doe you paint

Kean ?                     your self   

                               Cheskhosh  /  Wipe off

                               Cummachiteouwu-  /  You spoile your Face.

nash kuskeesuckquash

Mat pitch cowahick  /  The God that made you

manit keesiteonckqus          will not know you.

 

At first reading, it might be surprising that the English minister makes no mention of the sites of worship around him or the “inscribed” or “written” rocks that so fascinated Ezra Stiles more than a century after Williams’ wanderings in Rhode Island.  Indeed, Eliot makes no mention of them either, though from their own writings it appears that their puritan sensibilities were offended by the rituals and practices of the Native Americans they encountered.  English ministers consistently wrote with reproach of the powwows “antics” and “animal like” noises performed during adulations for the sick.  Williams wrote of Narragansett religious rituals and powwows or “priests”[13]

                                              Early 2oth century powwow, Narragansett

“These do begin and order their service, and Invocation of their Gods, and all the people follow, and join interchangeably in a laborious bodily service, unto sweating, especially of the Priest, who spends himself in strange Antick Gestures, and Actions even unto fainting”.

The minister then clarifies for his readers that

“I confesse to have most of these their customes by their owne Relation, for after once being in their Houses and beholding what their Worship was, I durst never bee an eye witnesse, Spectatour, or looker on, least I should have been partaker of Sathans Inventions and Worships, contrary to Ephes. 5. 14”

This then appears to explain Williams’, and other early interpreters lack of knowledge or at least, any mention of “sacred sites” and inscribed rocks in the area these Native Americans inhabited. As Lenick explains,

“Spirits and places of spiritual power were associated with special topographical features such as unusual boulders, rock formations, mountaintops, waterfalls, lakes, rivers/streams, and islands.”[14]

Individuals, especially powwows, endeavored to make contact with the spirits or Manitou inhabiting these places through isolation and intricate ceremony. By fasting, praying, and partaking of medicinal plants; these spirits could enter the individual and give them, and conversely the people, the guidance and direction they sought. Lenik writes of these “inscribed rocks” that

“Rock art, petroglyphs and pictographs, was often made by individuals who were successful in achieving contact with the spirits and receiving powerful medicine.

Shamans entered the rock haunts of the spirits, the abodes of the manitous, in a quest for spiritual power, and they illustrated the stories of their journeys on rocks as a record of their success”.[15]

                                           Late Algonquian Shaman art, circa 1852

It is my contention therefore that Williams and other early Puritan ministers were most likely unaware of these sacred sites, that the Native Americans “held back” knowledge of the inscribed rocks, sacred sites and their meanings. Only after a century of near decimation from disease and war, would Ezra Stiles be led to these sites, and by that  time there would be few Native Americans remaining to convey their origin and true meaning. In this act of self-exclusion, Williams and other early interpreters missed an integral thread of Native American language associated with spiritual belief and ritual.

A later generation of ministers whose pastoral missions would be torn asunder in the maelstrom of the years between King Philip’s War and the Salem witch trials,would with great effort excoriate the language even further from its origin, and in print, become intolerant of those Native Americans who clung to their beliefs.

Today, the effort to reconstruct the Algonquian tongue are mostly rooted in the vocabularies that Williams and Eliot compiled. A considerable “dictionary” is posted online for students to peruse and get a glimpse of the eloquence that European readers found so compelling. But today, the language is mostly silent, spoken only formally, by elders in ceremony and prayers.

“I don’t speak the language” a Narragansett man recently told me. Not that he didn’t appreciate his native tongue, but for reasons tied more to the spiritual; that to misspeak the language would be a graver insult to his ancestors than not to know the language at all.

 

A talk given at the Audubon Society on February 26, 2012

In the closing years of the nineteenth century a tide of nostalgia seemed to sweep the nation. In American historiography, this was the second such wave that swept the public when books recounting the founding of our country and local histories were published at a prodigious rate, and while these histories retold stories that were familiar to many Americans with like patriotic fervor, a subtle change had also occurred; and that was to view those Native Americans who defended their lands in a more heroic light.

One result of this “new view” of Native Americans, at least during the Colonial period, was the effect these popular and academic histories had upon state and community societies dedicated to preserving the local history. In Rhode Island, a number of monuments were erected in what some historians see today as an effort to  place a physical stamp on what were perceived in the histories as a “people of the past”, when in fact the descendents of the Narragansett heroes memorialized on these sites were struggling to maintain their culture in the wake of detribalization.

The first such monument was in fact erected to commemorate the tribal council’s decision to become citizens of the state. On August 30, 1883 Over a hundred delegates from the state including Rhode Island’s Governor, the Mayor of Charleston, the town council and other invited guests, stood with a handful of Narragansett and dedicated the site at Fort Ninigret. The remains of the 17^th century balustrades  were outlined neatly with steel posts and rails; and a massive boulder now lay at it’s center which proclaimed the Narragansett and Niantic peoples as the “unwavering Friends and Allies of our Fathers”.

Two weeks later, in an elaborate ceremony, the Rhode Island Historical Society dedicated, a tall, rough hewn boulder on the site of the newly renovated North Burial Ground dedicated to the Sachem Canonicus. The Narragansett leader’s name was carved in English across the stone, and a mark in imitation of the crude bow anarrow that the Sachem had used as a mark to sign the deed to Providence Plantations  was carved into the rock as well. This was, in effect, the first memorialto a Narragansett sachem in Rhode Island, though the town of Norwich, Connecticut had placed a tombstone to the Sachem Miantonomo in 1842, to replace a large cairn of stones that had lain there for generations. The city had also erected an obelisk to the Mohegan leader Uncas that same year.

In 1906, the Societies of Colonial Wars in Rhode Island and Massachusetts erected the massive, rough-hewn granite column on the site of Great Swamp, where

one of the most infamous battles of King Philip’s War had taken place. The Great Swamp monument, as it came to be called, was dedicated to the comparatively few white fatalities from the battle-only two were from Rhode Island, but at the dedication, nearly all present acknowledged, in the Chaplin’s words,  “the noble but now almost vanished Narragansett Tribe”

In the coming years, the memorializing continued. In 1907, a plaque was placed in

the heart of Central Falls to commemorate the place where Captain John Pierce and his small militia encountered and began battle with a group of Wampanoag from a nearby encampment in the swamplands above the Blackstone River. Nine members of the militia including Pierce were captured and put to death at the edge of what was known as “Camp Swamp” . Ten years after the plaque was dedicated in Central Falls where the fight began, the Rhode Island Historical society rebuilt the cairn beneath which the men were buried, and set a formal plaque of dedication at the site of what has long been called “Nine Men’s Misery”.

But as we have seen, these sites, though associated with Narragansett and Native American events, were memorials to our white colonial past, and only a small part of the historiography of Rhode Island, and New England as a whole. As such, those places of Native American memory are all around us, even in the present day.

Some are sites that our descendants knew well, from the efforts of Samuel Drake, John Truslow Adams, and other historians who detailed Native American life in the colonial era, and those local historians like Howard Chapin and Sidney S. Rider who speculated on artifacts found during the early twentieth century in Rhode Island

Neutaconkanut Hill, just east of Hipses Rock, the border of Narragansett land deeded to Roger Williams in 1637, was long the site of a soapstone quarry whose yield allowed large Narragansett production of smoking pipes, bowls of all kinds, and other implements primarily for trade with Dutch and English merchants, but also with neighboring tribes.

This was likely the site of production of a unique soapstone bowl whose underside is carved with a human face, that was found by a Brown University student at Fields Point in Providence, in the 1920’s.

As early as 1834, artifacts of Native American life in Rhode Island had been unearthed along the banks of the Sakonnet River, and in the years 1835-1836 numerous artifacts were found by workers constructing the Providence to Westerly Railroad.  Many of these artifacts were given to the Rhode Island Historical Society, allowing Chapin especially, to keep an interest in Narragansett culture alive in the pages of the Society’s bulletin.

There were also the infamous and illegal robbing of the Narragansett Burial Ground by Dr. Usher Parson’s of Brown, among others in 1860, and the decimation of the remaining “Royals” conducted by the Anthropologist Harris Hawthorne Wilder in the 1920’s, both of which are presented in detail in “Keepers of the Bay”, and whose artifacts were also written about and speculated on by local historians, none of whom seemed least fazed by so callous an encroachment of an aboriginal site.

The finding of artifacts in such a wide area of the state, affirms what we already know of the Narragansett as a dominant tribe in the region who inhabited the lands of much of Rhode Island. But what of their, and other Native American places of memory ? What sites were of importance to their history, and an understanding of their people’s story ?

A few glimpses of the places of Native American memory come to us from those early chroniclers and their observations of Native life in Rhode Island.  Among these was Newport minister Ezra Stiles whose diary revealed several written accounts of excursions into Native American territory, observations upon their lifestyle and mode of worship,  even drawings of mysterious places and “inscribed rocks” that he was led to in his travels as far north as Brattleboro, and Bellows Falls Vermont, and Deer Island in Maine.

One of these drawings of Stiles’ is the first known modern sketch of Dighton Rock.

Since its discovery by Europeans, – the first mention of it in print is a description from John Danforth of Dorchester in 1680, the flat surfaced rock inscribed with petroglyphs and peckings from several generations of people was originally located on the east bank of the Taunton River in Berkley, Massachusetts. From the time of Stiles’ sketches on through the twentieth century, the meanings of its many intricate carvings have been the subject of hundreds of articles, books and presentations like the one here today.

While early scholars attributed these markings to Native Americans, in the sometimes political subtext of written histories, speculation of the “writing” on the rock turned to early Norse or Viking visitors, or the more exotic theories of glyphs of Phonician or Egyptian  origin.

Of these scholars who studied the Rock in the twentieth century, the most prominent and outspoken was likely Edmund Delabarre, of Brown University. The professor undertook extensive archeological excavations on “Grassy Island” just 900 feet upriver from where Dighton Rock lay, and discovered stone tools, as well as a burial site among what had been a large encampment. Delabarre was convinced that the “enigmatic carvings” were of Native American origin, and of historical significance to the region.

Writing in the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Magazine in January of 1925, Delabarre wrote that the Rock had

“probably received more attention and aroused more controversy than any other similar monument anywhere … more than twenty attempts have been made to depict its inscriptions in drawings…and at least a dozen more in photographs…We can say with complete confidence that not one of these drawings or photographs, or chalked lines is at all reliable, and that all of the theories are mistaken, except in part the one which attributes the mark to the Indians…”

We now know through later anthropological interpretation of some symbols, namely those by William Simmons, and more recent research by Archaeologist Edward J. Lenik, and, most significantly, those who have relayed Wampanoag oral tradition, that the symbols represent the coming of the Europeans, as carved by Weetucks, who was visited by spirit messengers, and led to incise the original markings on the southern face of the rock. [1] This same Native American is mentioned in Roger William’s A Key into the Language of  America where we find:

“They have many strange Relations of one W’etucks, a man that wrought great Miracles amongst them, and walking upon the waters,, &c. with some kind of broken Resemblance to the Sonne of God.

We see then, that this area near the rock, has long been a sacred site to the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes.

Delabarre knew, that while all of this research had been centered on what Edward Lenik called “a natural billboard located on a major inland waterway”, there were other inscribed rocks in the region, particularly around his home shore of Narragansett Bay.

In articles published in the Rhode Island Historical Society’s magazine from 1921- 1925, Delabarre chronicled 18 sites of “inscribed rocks” from the coastal tip of Westerly as far inland as Assonet Neck, where Dighton Rock lay.  After investigating such sites along the shores of Narragansett Bay

Delabarre concluded like many anthropologists of his time that while the markings on certain sites were of Native American inscription, these were most certainly made after the European introduction of writing and symbols. This of course, goes against tribal oral histories and modern anthropological findings. Mark Rock in Warwick, in particular of these, has undergone much scrutiny by local scholars.

Delabarre had drawn and photographed twelve different locations on the rock that held petroglyphs.

A sad fate of nature is that the hurricanes of 1938 and 1954 changed the landscape of Occupawtuxet cove where the rock lies, and it was later concluded that up to 60 % of Mark Rock had been covered by sand. Despite this, later research and subsequent photographs by Charles Devine and Edward Lenik  further illustrated Lenik’s conclusion published in his book “Picture Rocks” in 2002, that the oldest glyphs on the rock pre-date the coming of the Europeans. He notes that

“These glyphs are older than the others…They have been pecked into the rock, most likely with sharp pointed stone picks; the lines vary in width and have a crude appearance. Furthermore, these glyphs occur on lower elevations on the rock surfaces, which suggests that such areas were first exposed for carving.”

Lenik likewise concluded that others of the “inscribed rocks” that Delabarre had

chronicled were of Native American origin. The inscribed rock in Tiverton, for

example, which Ezra Stiles speculated was of a Phonecian hand and thus, three

thousand years old, were found by Lenik to date from the middle to late woodland period.

Lenik is also the first I believe to associate one of the more prominent markings on Mount Hope rock, or “Leif’s Rock” as it was called among those Norsemen enthusiasts, contained a remarkable similarity to the boat carved upon Mark Rock, and wonders, as William Simmons proposed of Dighton rock, if this craft carved onto the flat surfaced, rectangular sandstone pointing out toward the water is an historical record of European arrival in the bay.

We know that the Narragansett and other tribes traveled to encampments throughout the region, spending the warm summers close to the bay, and retreating inland during the winter. So what of these inland sites, besides the Great Swamp, that haunted, desolate place? The aforementioned Camp Swamp into which Captain Pierce stumbled, was long a shared Wampanoag and Narragansett territory for its proximity to the Blackstone and Seekonk tributaries.

In the late nineteenth century, a part of this area was purchased by the Cistercian Order who in 1902 proceeded to build a massive-English style monastery on the grounds.  The Brothers spent nearly fifty years tilling the grounds, building roads through the swamps, and struggling to reach a sustainable living off the difficult property. In  1950, a fire destroyed the monastery and the Brothers moved to another property owned by the order in Massachusetts.

When the town acquired the property, they set out to develop a fitness path called Monument Loop that would circle part of the property adjacent to the monastery. Construction was stopped however, by an appeal from the American Heritage Society. As the report later issued read,

“Construction of the trail was inadvertently started prior to any archeological survey, disturbing portions of at least two buried pre-historic sites. AHS completed emergency archeological surveys, resulting in the identification of seven pre-historic sites ranging in age from the middle archaic to the late woodlands period-and a small 17^th century site associated with the on site deaths of nine colonial militia during King Philip’s War (1675).

Throughout this region, if one looks carefully, are reminders of the Native American past. Much has been lost, and much has been forgotten of the stories of these places, so when we find these traces we should respect their meaning, even if it is unknown to us, and leave such places undisturbed as much as possible.

In 1934, the Narragansett tribe began a newspaper called the “Narragansett Dawn”, an effort not only to keep the tribe informed in a modern way, of news and gatherings, but even history, a component that had a long tradition of only being spoken. For the first time for many in the tribe, the Narragansett Dawn let them tell their history in its pages. In one of those early editions, a Narragansett historian wrote of her grandmother telling her of  “old Indian graves tucked away off on the hillsides”, places only reachable on foot in the dense forest.

The discovery of stone cairns , long held to be sites of burials or  ceremony have come to the forefront of late in the wake of proposed development projects and the efforts of the Narragansett and the Rhode island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission as well as the National Park Service to identify and preserve these sites.

In some areas such as Coventry, these sites have long been protected under the Audubon auspices, and while I am not aware of any official study of the cairns in this location, evidence shows that the area was long used by the Narragansett and Nipmuc people up to the period preceding the Revolutionary War. Cairns of differing age and condition lie throughout the region, the most famous and most photographed being one section of neatly constructed rock piles that are likely the most recent in the area, perhaps dating from that period of the 18^th century.

I would suggest that those of you with an interest in Native American places of

memory, of ceremony, look into a blog called “rockpiles”, a site founded by Peter Waksman, and with contributors Tim McSweeney, photographer Larry Harrop, who has chronicled a considerable number of these places, and taken and taken some fine pictures of the sites in Coventry, as well as photographer Norman Muller and researcher Jim Porter. This site is very informative and covers an extensive area of New England and beyond where some of these ceremonial and sacred sites can be found.

In Smithfield Rhode Island, the more recent-re-discovery of cairns in the Nipsachuck Hill area, long known to be the site of two battles during King Philip’s war, prompted the Narragansett Tribal Historic Preservation office to fight land developers intent on building a 122 lot sub-division on the site, and to file suit to have Nipsachuck named an historical burial ground.

The descendents of indigenous people have long maintained that Nipsachuck is also an ancient ceremonial place that pre-dates the arrival of the Europeans by centuries. The ceremonial landscape is marked by many stone features that are unrecognizable to most contemporary non-indian residents. Archeologist Frank Meli, was among the first to document these sites and told the Providence Journal in 2007, “ whether they are burial or ceremonial, I think they go back a couple of thousands of years”.

The tribe worked with the Town of Smithfield, and their efforts culminated in an award from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection program to

“examine documentary records and archeological collections, collect tribal and Yankee oral histories and use military terrain analysis to identify likely places…where the battles took place.

These efforts, which ultimately brought together the resources and cooperative

research among the National Park Service, The Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission, The Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office, as well as the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, the Mohegan tribe, and the Nipmuc Tribe; is a unique occurrence, and what I hope will be a model for future identification and preservation of  sacred sites.

In the final technical report issued in August of 2011, the researchers write that

“working collaboratively, we accomplished much. We identified likely areas where the battles took place and we developed a research design for ground-truthing these likely areas with archaeological identification and documentation. We also gained a deeper appreciation and understanding for the conflicts that came from the English settlement of Indian country in northern Rhode Island, for the complexity and fluidness of indigenous society, for the battles themselves, and for the legacy of the war among today’s Indian and non-Indian people…

One of the notable outcomes of this collaborative project has been to suggest a further examination of the relationship between Nipsachuck, as a ceremonial place of tribal importance, and the Nipsachuk battle fields themselves.”

This continued work with Tribal leaders and archeological investigations will continue through at least this year, but it is hopeful that a long term effort to protect the battlefields and the sacred areas around them will result in a nationally recognized historic area.

Other long-term efforts have also taken up much of the Narragansett resources and time, most notably those sites discovered along the shores of Point Judith pond.

In an early map published in the Rhode Island Historical Society’s magazine in 1923 identified eight known sites around the pond.

In the fall of 1986, just east of Point Judith Pond, researchers from Rhode Island College made a cursory investigation for artifacts in an area purchase by a developer for a seventy nine unit housing complex. Workers found evidence almost immediately, and these first finds ultimately led to the discovery of a twenty five acre settlement that included the remains of Narragansett dwellings and circular storage pits for corn and other staples.

The discovery of this site in fact, proved to be one of the most extensive ancient seaside settlements found on the eastern coast of the United States. A similar site found in Virginia, had long been under state protection, even though it remained privately owned. In Rhode Island however, a long and protracted legal battle has taken place between the developer and the state.

Initially, the developers project was stalled by state demands that developers had to meet in searching for artifacts before proceeding. These searches led to more discoveries, including an Indian burial ground. Excavations in 2006, when developers planned to lay a road into the property, yielded evidence of twenty two dwellings. This led the State Historic Preservation Commission to request that the permit issued to the developer be withdrawn, arguing that the area was “a site of great importance that would be studied by several generations of scholars”.  The developers responded by filing suit, asking that the court end the state’s interference and asking for “substantial damages” in light of the long delay.

While not taking a direct role in the lawsuit, John Brown, the Narragansett Tribe’s preservation officer told the Providence Journal that “The protection of the property is for everybody…we sympathize with the plight of the owners, but you can’t trade history for a house or three houses…it would be like going in and building on Arlington National Cemetery.”

Since the writing of my book “Keepers of the Bay”, the State and the developers have been slowly inching toward a settlement, not an easy task in financially troubled times.  And it’s in times like these that such places are often most at risk.

As people who appreciate, and have respect for the land and the long history of the indigenous people of Rhode Island, it is imperative that we preserve, as much as we can, those places that hold such history.

And so we come full circle as we see the old monuments from the past are fading now from view and we look to the future and a way to preserve these sites. In October of 2009, Narragansett Preservation Officer John Brown received the Frederick C. Williamson Leadership award from the State’s Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission. Brown was praised by the Director in an interview with the Journal for his role in preserving the traditions and cultural values of the Narragansett as well as for his careful consultation with Lloyd Wilcox, Medicine Man, Ella Sekatau, tribal etho-historian and medicine woman, and other tribal leaders.

In presenting the award, Edward Sanderson told those assembled that “…at a time when Native Americans were routinely left out of historic preservation, John made sure that a Narragansett voice was heard”.

While state officials and the Narragansett do not always see eye to eye, Paul Robinson told the Journal that  Brown has accomplished much in educating state officials about historic sites.

“I think he’s shown us that sometimes we walk a fine line between preservation and excavation, and sometimes its better to wait and preserve, than to excavate.”

“Devils…Among Us”: The Portrayal of Native Americans in White Folklore.

by Robert A. Geake

From the beginnings of the settlement of New England, an uneasy and sometimes disquieting shared existence occurred, often determined by the personalities of leaders involved in both white settlements and Native encampments. Cotton Mather wrote in his Magnalia Christi Americana, that the colony of Hartford was by 1698,  “improved with many wealthy husbandmen, and is become no small part of the best granary for all New England. And the same good Providence has all along so preserved them from annoyance by the Indians, that although at their first setting down there were few towns but what wisely perswaded a body of Indians to dwell near them: whereby such kindnesses passed between them that they always dwelt peaceably together; nevertheless there are few of those towns but what have seen their body of Indians utterly expirtated by nothing but mortality wasting them”.

Of course, mortality had long come to the Native Americans by way of disease, poverty, and English weapons by the time of Mather’s writing, and these bodies of Indians living near white settlements were but remnants of once thriving tribes who were now mostly reduced to trading or working with the Europeans for a livelihood, once the natural resources of land and game were diminished.

Early white historians after Mather, largely portrayed the Native Americans as “noble savages” often highlighting their deep respect for man and nature, a tenderness toward their wives and children, and a moral code in life and tribal governance that was to promote the same ideals in white leaders, though they rarely acknowledged the influence.

These ideals were bolstered by the popularity of Indian treaties published in Great Britain and America, and often sold in coffeehouses. The novelty of these treaties, showcasing for the first time, the eloquence of Native American leaders were to have a tremendous impact on some of the men who would later become known among the founders of the United States. But in the years that followed, as the long brokered treaties broke down, and the tribes involved were defeated, removed, and reduced to a small number of survivors on reservations, a shift became perceptible in the writing of both scholarly and popular historians.

By the middle of the 19^th century, as local state and municipal histories began to be written of the American republic,  this vision of Native Americans was clarified both in academic and popular histories, with the long defeated indigenous leaders eulogized as heroic defenders of their land, and the descendants of their people who remained vilified for their ongoing struggle with the white borne disease of alcoholism,  poverty and poor education, and most of all for their dependency, as many now saw it,  upon white society.

As early as 1859, Henry David Thoreau wrote in a passage that recalled his Father’s and other settlers relations with Native Americans, that

“Some have spoken slightingly of the Indians, as a race possessing so little skill and wit, so low in the scale of humanity, and so brutish that they hardly deserve to be remembered,-using only the terms “miserable”, “wretched”, “pitiful” and the like. In writing their histories of this country they have so hastily disposed of  this refuse of humanity (as they might have called it) which littered and defiled the shore and the interior….If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us, we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions. They paddled over these waters, they wandered in these woods, they had their fancies or beliefs connected with the sea and the forest…..It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man or gold digger, who shoots one as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle.”[1]

In the popular histories of New England especially, which seemed to be published amidst waves of nostalgic Americana that washed through every second or third generation, these “Indian tales” collected from various communities and all seeming to hold an underlying moral invective, reflected the vices and shiftiness now associated with Native Americans and underscore the prejudice that white Americans displayed towards their race. These tales of wandering Indians, itinerant and lazy, sure to be drunk at any given time of day- reflected the stature that white citizens placed on Native Americans Those who attempted integration were viewed with suspicion, and so given the basest tasks of manual labor and the lowest of wages. The Native American then, is almost always portrayed in these tales as a hapless, overindulgent, and essentially lost individual; a comic figure of what had once been a proud race.

One of the earliest stories from Rhode Island is a compelling example. The tale involves the ghost of an indigent Indian who haunted a room of the old Black Horse Tavern in North Scituate. The tavern had been in operation on the turnpike road to Providence for several generations by the time that Rueben Jencks owned the place and the haunting began. It seems that guests who slept in the room would be awakened by a fearfully dressed Indian, who grabbed hold of their hair and lifted their heads from the pillow while wielding a tomahawk, as though to scalp his terrified victim. This occurred so often that eventually, no one would sleep in what was now called the “Indian chamber”, even when Jenks lowered the rate.

Neighbors told him that the Indian ghost was one who had frequented the Pine Tree tavern just up the road, and was doubtless determined to scare off his customers. But when Mrs. Jenks took the room for her own, the haunting took a decidedly different turn. With the first visitation, the Indian had grabbed her hair, but then led her outside and pointed repeatedly to the base of a large cedar by the front gate, “muttering in broken English of his need to avenge some insult to his race”.

When Mrs. Jenks told her husband of her experience, he determined that the Indian was pointing to what must undoubtably be treasure buried on the property, and promptly dug furiously around the roots of the tree. The Indian continued his visits, taking Mrs Jenks outside to other trees, including their precious orchard, which Mr. Jenks nearly destroyed in hunting for treasure before he gave up, and determined like his friends, that the Indian was merely bent on ruining his livelihood.

One night the Indian visited the Jenks eleven year old daughter and led her outside to the old carriage house, now packed with decades of discarded furniture, tools and trunks left moldering for longer than anyone remembered. The Indian pointed to one such trunk in the loft, and left the girl to tell the others. Though Mr. Jenks now had reputedly little interest in following the ghost’s signs and directions, his wife was determined to resolve the cause of the haunting. She unpacked the loft and brought the box out with the help of some frightened household help, and they opened the lid to find an ancient wig-makers kit and mannequin. It seems that Jenks grandfather had manufactured wigs on the side to sell to his guests and that the humiliation spoken of by the Indian had occurred during this time, when he was supposed to have attempted to scalp one of these guests and walked away with a bloodless wig in his hand.

This oft –told tale was repeated with some variation in Edward Field’s “Colonial Taverns” and more fully in Alice Morse Earle’s “Stage Coach and Tavern Days”, both published at the end of the 19^th century. Ms. Earle reveals that the source for her version came from the pen of one Parson Pillsbury, who had been present during Reuben Jenks hunt for treasure, and recorded the “Indian speak” as the daughter told it to him. One can presume then that the pious minister would want the tale, however the incidents at its roots occurred, to have a moral, much like the biblical fables he drew from for his sermons.

But the Parson was not alone in this respect. Tales from travelers and old settlers often reflected those fears they faced,  the temptations of wealth and licentiousness, the alcohol that brought ruin to both natives and newcomers. There were many tales about greed and the ills brought on by the pursuit of riches. The Native American, to Mrs. Earle,  “simply belonged to a class of ghosts…that…have a passion for pointing out places and saying treasure or skeletons are buried therein; whereas it always proves that nothing of the sort is ever found.”

Indeed, tales of this sort were abundant in white folklore. The spirits deceiving gullible  people like Jenks, were not tethered to this earth of their own free will, and so were often associated with the Devil.  Sometimes the places of Native American history became the havens of these spirits.

In Charlestown, Rhode Island, the Coronation Rock of the Narragansett people where the Sachems were once received, became a lonely and desolate place with the tribe’s reduced numbers, and the state and town taking their lands. In this period, the place became woven into New England folklore with the story of one Tom Rogers, most recently retold by Edward R. Snow.

Rogers was originally from Nantucket, and perhaps that upheaval, with the wilderness suddenly just outside his door, gave him the certainty that the region he lived in was haunted, that there were spirits in those unfamiliar woods, and that they gathered about the Coronation Rock. One night after drinking a good quantity of spirits to fortify his own, he set off to walk right past the site of the Rock on his way home. And sure enough,

“ as he approached  the rock he saw a glow through the trees and heard the sound of a fiddle playing like mad, and when he reached the rock he saw that a wild dance was in progress. Finding a mischievous looking maid alone on a mossy hummock, Tom quickly took her by the waist and took her to the clearing –as they danced, he had the sensation of soaring above the clearing and noticed that the crowd were now seated watching them dance. As they separated and came back again, Tom noticed his partner’s features were changing from the rosy-cheeked girl he first noticed to that of a lank and withered hag whose eyes now glowed green with evil, and whose sharp teeth now projected from the once delicate mouth.  He flung off his coat and hat, vest, and then fled for his life, tumbling once in the woods and hearing growling, hissing, and a strange language about him. He had the sensation of a hideous form hovering over him.”

When Rogers woke in the woods the next morning he noticed that his jackknife bore two portrait of the witch he’d met the night before. When he reached home he fell ill for a time but recovered, and thereafter eschewed alcohol, got married, became a member of the church and eventually, a deacon in good standing.

The lesson in Christian morality is abundantly clear in this tale, and likely originated with the backlash against alcohol and the frivolity that had become prevalent in the taverns by the turn of the 18^th century. These religion-based morals however, were also placed within those  “Indian tales”  of Native Americans.

Another Indian place of memory, which entered into the canon of White folklore is the “Devil’s Rock” in North Kingston, which before the European arrivals, had long been a gathering place of the Narragansett tribe.

By 1671, the rock had become a boundary marker for the initial “Fones purchase”, and thus out of Narragansett hands. Situated just north of Wickford, in the town of North Kingston, The Devil’s Rock is part of a long, granite ledge that had once been hidden deep in the woods, and then exposed, as a railway, and then a road were built in the twentieth century. The Rock is the site of a legend borne from Colonial times into the present and the world of technology aided exploration of the paranormal and haunted places.

The tale has a few variations, but by and large has remained intact into modern folklore.  The legend of Devil’s Rock is an intermingling of Native American and White belief, an acknowledgement of a shared uncertainty about the afterlife, which takes the form of each culture’s entity.  The story’s first appearance in print seems to be a version published in 1850, but by then, the tale was generations old:

An Indian woman had murdered a white man (either in Boston, or Wickford, (depending upon the version). She had made her way to the ledge and there knelt and prayed to Hobomoken, the Native god who was both a benevolent and cruel deity, often called upon when a Native American faced an insurmountable uncertainty over an event or the fate of a loved one. [2]

As she prayed, a stern faced Englishman appeared beside her. Believing herself to be discovered by the white authorities, she attempted briefly to escape, but was seized by the arm. The Indian woman called out again to Hobomoken to save her. The black frocked Englishman told her “I’m Hobbomoken”, and grabbing her by the waist, stomped his feet on the rock and took her in flight to Purgatory Chasm from which he threw her to the turbulent waters below.[3]

In his version, Edward R. Fields concludes the tale by telling readers that

“to this day may be seen near Wickford the footprints of Satan on surface of the ledge near the road. One has the form of a cloven hoof, and the other has the shape and size of a human foot, even to the mark of the great toe.”

In other versions of the story, the last mark of the devil can be found on a ledge on Block Island, said to be where Satan landed before diving into Block Island Sound. Other tales from the East Coast concern similar impressions that have been interpreted in folklore as “the Devil’s footprints”.  In Monteville, Connecticut, an impression on the rocky ledges of Shelter Island is the stepping off point for the legend that

“when the Evil Spirit left the Island he took three long strides, the first on Shelter Island, the second on Orient Point, and the third on Montauk, whence he plunged into the sea.”[4]

The Rhode Island tale however, is more firmly rooted in a moral tradition, as is the Narragansett fable. In the popular version that appeared in white folklore, the Indian woman, fleeing from her crime, is brought to justice by the Devil, the very god she prayed to for mercy.

The Native American interpretation of the stern Englishman as the “devil’s disguise” has precedent in earlier Native evocations of Hobomoken, also called Cheepie in other Algonkian tribes. The missionary Daniel Gookin in his Two Voyages to New England (1673), recounts the experience of being woken by two Natives and told that they had fled from a vision of Hobomoken:

“Two Indians and an Indess came running into our house, crying they should all die. Cheepie was gone over the field gliding in the air with a long rope hanging from one of his legs: we asked what he was like, and they said all wone Englishman, clothed with a hat and coat, shoos and stockings…”[5]

        Another site of Native American memory that became integrated into White folklore is that of Bish-Bash Falls- a natural formation whose flow of water assumes from its heights the form of a standing female figure. Native American oral history recounts the story of the Mohican woman named Bish-Bash who despite her protestations of innocence, was found guilty of adultery by the tribal council, and condemned to death. Her sentence was to be carried out, as the story goes, by strapping Bish-Bash with leather thongs to a canoe secured upstream from the falls. As Mary Bolte writes in her modern retelling:

“Bish-Bash was to be bound to the vessel, which was then to be released and drawn by the current over the fateful cataract.”

      On the appointed day of execution, the Indians gathered on the ledge above the waterfall. Included in the group was Bish-Bash’s infant daughter, White Swan, an innocent bystander to the punishment about to be inflicted on her Mother. As the sentence neared, a fine mist enveloped the people, and at the same time a ring of butterflies materialized and circled around the condemned woman’s head. At the last moment, Bish-Bash managed to break away, and quickly flung herself over the falls, a trail of butterflies following her to the basin below.

Her people were saddened by the whole affair but most felt that Bish-Bash’s avoidance of her punishment proved that she must be in league with evil spirits, and that she might also have been a witch.

Her daughter was brought up, as is tribal tradition, within the various families among the Mohican, and grew to be as lovely as her Mother was said to have been. She married the son of a Chief, but then when she could not bear him children, he found another, which filled White Swan with remorse.

In her dreams she began to hear Bish-Bash beckoning her to the pool at the bottom of the Falls. In time she went and sat forlornly on a crag overlooking the waterfall. One day as her husband came from the woods with the gift of a white butterfly, White Swan suddenly leapt up and plunged from the rock to the water cascading below. Her husband’s hands opened in horror, releasing the butterfly, which he could only watch follow his wife’s descent. He too, dove after to save her somehow, but all that remained of his effort was his broken body, found by the tribe’s people who came searching for the couple. White Swan’s body, like her Mother’s for whom the Falls are named, was never found.

Mary Bolte, in her retelling, evokes the mysterious spirit of this place:

“… the cascading water sometimes assumes the unmistaken form of a woman and on moonlit nights a smiling female face can be seen beneath the surface of the pool below.”

White folklore adapted this Native American mythology behind a place name to evoke another moral fable into the lexicon. Bish-Bash’s reckless behavior not only in the commitment of adultery, but avoidance of the proscribed punishment was a grievance so great that the shadow of her sin passed with sorrow to White Swan, whose only release was to join her Mother in death.

Within these moral tales, Native American women occupied a fearsome and forceful personality in folklore. Cast as witches, wenches, or simply willful figures in a narrative, the long tradition of the natural beauty, woodland wiles, and dedicated labor of a native wife were cast by the wayside for portraits of loathsome or pitiful creatures.

One such caricature that has evolved into the folklore of modern times is the portrait of Tuggie  Bannocks, who according to Alice Morse Earle in her books “Old Narragansett “ and “Stage Coach and Tavern Days”, “was as much negroe as Indian” and known to be a witch. As well as her “dusky” complexion, Tuggie bore a “full set of double teeth” . Her very appearance was witchlike, for she was “tall and gaunt, with long bony arms and skinny claws of hands, with a wrinkled, malicious, yet half frightened countenance, surrounded by little pigtails of gray wool that stuck out from under her scarlet turban.”

It was said by townspeople, that she never sat on a chair, sofa, or stool, but would perch on a table, pull out a drawer from a high chest and recline on its edge, squat on the floor if need be, or perch on a churn. In her own tumble down house that had once been a tavern, she was believed to hang from her heels on the oaken chair rail that circled the old taproom. Tuggie told townspeople that could “raise every one who had ever stopped at that house as a guest, and often did so for company.”

Her reputation as a witch helped her eek out an existence in Narragansett. She told the occasional fortune, and concocted mostly ineffective spells for the hopeful who came and laid out a few coins on her table. Tuggie Bannocks cast spells of her own volition as well, when her venomous temper got the better of her judgment.

She once cast a spell on a sheep farmer and his wife when she felt they had insulted her and her powers. For some time, every roast that was cooked for dinner burned, no matter how careful it was watched. Cakes too, suffered the same end. The chimney spewed soot into the house, and the couple told neighbors that on stormy nights, they could hear Tuggie dancing on the roof, and hollering into the chimney as the wind rattled the window panes of their house.[6]

A tale retold in M.E. Reilly-McGreen’s recent “Witches, Wenches, & Wild Women of Rhode Island” is that of Tuggies vengeance on a local tinker by the name of Bosum Sidet. The tinker had broken her favorite copper teakettle, and Tuggie determined to conjure a charm that would exact revenge. This was no simple matter, but required weeks of gathering and preparation. Included in the ingredients of her “noxious brew”, were twigs from the victim’s bushes, a few hairs from his cow’s tale, a scrap of red flannel, the tail of a smoked herring, a few rusty nails, and  a handful of “grave dirt” that she had taken from one of the Narragansett graveyards, and “last of all, that chief ingredient in all charms, a rabbits foot…were thrown into a pot of water that was hung upon the crane over a roaring fire.”

Her plans were foiled however, when she was suddenly felled by an unseen force. Believing that she had accidentally invoked a moonack, or evil spirit, Tuggie knew she would die if she glanced at the creature, and so closed her eyes fiercely, and vowed to mend her ways if she survived.

She heard the creature scrape over her floor and drag itself to her door, and shuddered in relief when the moment had passed, never noticing the boys scampering up the hill in the snow from her tumble down house, with the bobsled that had knocked her to the floor.

Such comic endings are typical to the Tuggie Bannocks’ stories, as they are to others of the genre-if the “witch” does not end up dead with a glint of silver in her forehead.  The latest chronicler feels that Tuggie Bannocks might be in fact, a fictional character entirely, though a recent academic work mentions her with others in another light.

Women like Tuggie Bannocks were not uncommon in Colonial New England. In the soul-shifting, uncertainty of life in the wilderness, religious and secular beliefs were often intermingled so that prayer, home remedies and even witchcraft were all employed in time of crisis. Almost every town in early New England held a “healer”, usually a woman of Native American or African descent who knew the plants to gather and the potions to procure for ailments and other common afflictions. As a matter of choice, these women usually lived on the outskirts of a village or in the woods, thus enhancing the mystery of their activities away from villagers eyes, and the suspicions that were raised when potions failed, or misfortune befell some person or the whole community.

Other Native American women, if not portrayed as witches were certainly cast as willful and often miscreant matrons. One such person was Sarah Boston, described by Alice Morse Earle as “ a most Godless old heathen” despite being brought up in one of the first “praying villages” of Native Americans in Massachusetts. Sarah lived on Keith’s Hill in Grafton, Massachusetts in a house described as

“low and little, black and old and faced Kittville. The East door above at the end of front.In the middle of the room on the opposite side as one entered was the big chimney with all the things around it, no cupboard, cooking utensils, stools, no chairs. Small loft accessible by ladder. Indians just slept around. Set the table in the middle. Windows faced out toward the valley and were little. When the door was shut it was quite dark.”[7]

Sarah Boston was said to weigh over three hundred pounds and was renowned for her strength. Earle writes that she “ dressed in short skirts, a mans boots and hat, a heavy spencer,…and like a true Indian always wore a blanket over her shoulders in winter. She was mahogany-red of color, with coarse black hair, high cheek bones, and all the characteristic features of her race.”

Sarah peddled the Indian baskets she made, and told the occasional fortune, but it was her “great strength and endurance that made her the most desired farm-hand in the township to be employed in haying time, in wall-building, or any heavy farm work. Her fill of cider was often her only pay for some powerful feat of strength, such as stone lifting or stump-pulling.”

Sarah’s consumption of cider, was in fact, also of legendary proportions. She often “freely entered every home, and sat smoking and glowering for hours in the chimney corner of the tavern.”

One tale of Sarah’s in white folklore is of a gang of “young blades” who after drinking at the tavern, stop by the wooden gate to the cemetery and call out to the silent graves: “arise ye dead, the judgment day is come” only to be struck by the looming form of Sarah Boston who called back to their horror “yes Lord, I am coming”.[8]

As with the tales of Native American men, those of women were often associated with liquor, and thus the recklessness and ruin it brought. A tale recounted by Samuel Drake in his “Indians of North America” from an early history of Connecticut, concerns a legendary stretch of the Connecticut River about two hundred miles from Long Island, where the passage narrows to about five yards, “formed by two shelving mountains of solid rock…a frightful passage of about 400 yards in length…No boat, or living creature, was ever known to pass through this narrow, except an Indian woman.”

This unnamed Native American woman had attempted to cross the river above the passage, but her canoe had been caught in the current and swept downstream. While carried on her way to certain destruction she seized her bottle of rum and did not let it fall from her mouth until every drop was quaffed. When she was found, several miles below the channel, and quite drunk in her canoe, she was asked “how she dared to drink so much rum with certain death before her, she answers that she knew it was too much for one time, but she was unwilling that any of it should be lost”.

Drake also recounts the tale of an Indian widow’s brief bereavement, also associated with the ruinous behavior of drinking:

“A young widow, whose husband had been dead about eight days, was hastening to finish her grief, in order that she might be married to a young warrior: she was determined therefore, to grieve much in a short time; to this end she tore her hair, drank spirits, and beat her breast to make the tears flow abundantly, by which means, on the evening of the eighth day, she was ready again to marry, having grieved sufficiently.”[9]

In New England folklore, Native American women also appear as forlorn spirits, much like Bish-Bash’s daughter – at the edge of ponds, or brook side, even on the roads that wind through Narragansett country and other regions along the shore. In Rhode Island, these sightings are most often associated with the area now known as “Crying Rocks”, a traditional Narragansett place of euthanizing babies who were born sickly or deformed[10]. This site was first recorded by the minister Ezra Stiles, who wandered through New England in the 1760’s, transcribing legends and customs of the remnants of the tribes he encountered. A Narragansett named John Paul told Stiles that long before the white man came, Narragansett women had retired to the woods to give birth to illegitimate children, and pointed out the site “where they killed so many infants, & their bones lay about so thick that they go by the name of Bastard Rocks to this day”

In modern retellings, both the cries of women and their babies can be heard throughout the woods of the surrounding area at night. The sad tale of Crying Rocks was most recently placed in a modern fictional setting by the author Janet Taylor Lisle, whose story of a pair of teenagers discovering the site and learning a little of the tribal history, is also one of a young girl searching for her own troubled origins.

Another similar tale is that of the “Ghost of Crying Bog” in Narragansett. The story is of an Indian woman who lived near the bog and was, depending on the version read, is deceived by a white man whom she had borne two children, or driven mad by her Native American husband. The story tells of her taking her two small children into the bog and murdering them, leaving their bodies forever hidden in the underbrush of the swamp. The act so bereaved her, that she refused to leave the site, and was often seen pacing the area frantically, and weeping  area for many years after. As written in Thomas R. Hazard’s “Recollection of Olden Times”, the troubled woman found no peace even after death. For years after, people traveling the road past the bog witnessed “an old Indian squaw sitting on the ground…rocking herself backward and forward, and moaning and weeping most dolefully.” The woman would often disappear as people came near, but that horses would often stand firm and refused to pass the place by the roadside. Hazard writes that

“It was said that after passing most of the night in woeful lamentations the ghost of the wretched murderess used to leave towards morning in the direction of a little wooded island that stands in the south-western part of Kit’s Pond, apparently keeping her rapid course close to the surface of the water, and screaming as she went until the horrifying sounds reached the island, when all was again still.”

Other versions of the story tell that the old squaw was finally driven mad by the cries of her children and fled to the ocean where the pounding of the waves drowned out the calls for their mother. This version was also written into a poem by Caroline Hazard and published in the Century Magazine in 1889,  a portion of which reads:

“On, on she speeds, oe’r bog and field

with giant bowlders thickly set,

She slips and falls, but will not yield,

She hastens on, in fog and wet;

The baby’s cry is in her ears,

It fills her with a thousand fears.

At last she wins the ocean’s shore-

A great expanse of dusky gray

In motion with a moaning roar

And dashing on the rocks its spray.

Oh ! welcome sound, its sobbing moan

Drowns out the baby’s piercing tone.”

Many of these tales survive in print and on web sites today as anecdotal expressions of another age that pre-date our own urban legends and paranormal explorations taped for cable television. It is ultimately, our own ongoing fascination with folklore that continues to bring these tales into print, and though as noted, we read them now as charming, often amusing stories from a nearly forgotten era; we should not forget the influence such tales had upon generations of readers-citizens whose view of local Native Americans were clouded by a national conception portrayed in the published popular histories and folktales.

With the advent of research by social anthropologist Frank Speck in the 1920’s, the brief, but treasure trove of stories published in “Narragansett Dawn” in the 1930’s by the Narragansett Indian tribe, and most recently, in the renewed interest, like that of Thoreau “to know what manner of men they were…their fancies and superstitions…” that has led scholarly researchers, as William Simmons, to learn the lore of the local tribes, and record those oral histories given to them.

Oct.-Nov. 2011

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Uncas, Miantonomo,  and Historical Memory

by Robert A. Geake

The name of Uncas in the Narragansett language holds the meanings of “circler” and “fox”, and certainly a more appropriate name could not have been given to the crafty and cunning Mohegan Sachem.

Within the histories written in the centuries following his extraordinary life, the person behind the posturing of haughty warrior, self-promoter, manipulator of English concerns, and protector of his people; has remained as elusive as ever.

As with other Native American Sachems of Southern New England who came of age and responsibility during the early Colonial period, Uncas would witness the lives of his people become changed forever with the influx of Europeans and all that came with them. Practical goods seem to have held the most interest for these Native Americans. The New England Algonkians quickly adapted kettles, pots and pans to their everyday existence, as well as exchanging their skins and fur pelts for English style clothing.

Historian Michael Leroy Oberg writes that

“the technology and trade goods that the Europeans carried with them suggested to Indians that the newcomers were a powerful people, perhaps even otherworldly or magical.” The increase in trade also increased the distribution of wampum as an important commodity, and sudden competition among neighboring tribes.

“Strange it was, ”William Bradford of Plymouth would note  “to see the great alteration it made in a few years among the Indians themselves…it makes the Indians of these parts rich and powerful and also proud thereby…”

Uncas’ Father, the Sachem Owaneco, worked early with European traders to ensure a share of the growing trade for the Mohegan. A Dutch map from 1614 shows the tribes engaged with trade along the Thames River, including the “Mahican”. “Maximanes”, “Morhegans”, “Pequats”, and “Wamanoos”. Within a decade of this map being produced, the fur trade in the region was exporting and estimated 10,000 beaver skins each year.

With the advent of this economy and the resultant pressure upon tribes, relations became strained among the tribes of Southern New England. The Pequots and the Narragansett had it seemed, an inherited animosity toward each other. A tentative peace with the Wampanoag was also broken by Massasoit-Oussamequin’s alliance with the English settlement in Plymouth. This was the world into which Uncas grew as a young man.

Coming of age in the village of Monotesuck, near the banks of the Thames, he became conversant in the languages of the English and Dutch. Uncas was to claim lineage from the Pequot, Mohegan, and Narragansett Tribes. Although these claims have been challenged, such allegiances were long a part of his family history. Owaneco arranged a marriage for his son with the daughter of the Pequot sachem Tatobem, in order to secure an alliance between the tribes. The daughter named Momoho, was first promised to an older brother, but when he died before the marriage could take place, she was promised to Uncas.

When his Father died shortly after this marriage, Uncas inherited the role of Sachem but had to submit Mohegan authority to Tatobem, an episode that like Massasoit-Oussamequin with the Narragansett; was held in bitter distaste by these younger Sachems.

In the summer of 1633, a Dutch trader named Jacob Van Curler set up a trading post on the Connecticut River on land purchased from Tatobem. This had previously been a place where “all tribes might trade freely without any fear or danger”, yet the Dutchman set up two cannon and fortified his post which he named “Fort Good Hope”. This act stirred anger among some of those whom had traded and skirmishes broke out between these Indians and the Pequot at the fort. In retaliation, the Dutch killed Tatobem and 33 of his followers. Upon the Sachem’s death, his son Sassacus became his successor.

While his Father-in-law had been Sachem, Uncas had not challenged Peqout authority, but after his death, he “ removed to the interior and placed himself at the head of the Mohegan clans who occupied lands east of the Connecticut river, and west of the great Pequot River now known as the Thames. While Sassacus traded with the Dutch, Uncas developed alliances with the English.”[1]

      Uncas believed he held legitimate claim to the title of Sachem of the Pequot nation. To this end, he challenged Sassacus’ authority time and again. Historian William L. Stone would write that “Uncas raised the standard of revolt; but his power and influence, not being great at first, his rebellion was crushed, and he was ignominiously expelled his country by the haughty victor.” The defeated Uncas fled to Narragansett country in exile with his followers. Roger Williams wrote to John Winthrop  “This man is but a little Sachim, and hath not abou 40 or 50 Mohiganeucks…”.

Oberg writes that “The life of an exile among the Narragansetts suited Uncas poorly. He always returned to his homelands and ritually humiliated himself before Sassacus.”[2] The Mohegan were further weakened by the ravages of small pox in 1633/34 which killed many of Uncas’s followers, who were by this time, banished to the small village and fort his Father had established at Shantok.

The historian suggests that the Sachems tolerance of Uncas subordination may have been because he lacked the support among the Pequots to punish him severely, but there may have been other motives as well.  The Narragansett Sachem Miantonomo, told Williams that “Okace and his men had a hand in the death of all the English and fought against the Rivers mouth (at Qunnihticut) , and that when the Narragansett had allied with the Dutch against the Pequots, the Mohegans had “joined against us.”

Miantonomo claimed that Uncas had sheltered Pequot women and children while their men fought Captain Endicott’s English raiders, and confided that in one incident, the Mohegan Sachem had brought gifts to Canonicus and himself, “yet at the same time killed 2 of his women treacherously.”[3]

These early incidents, as recorded by Williams seem to be at the root of the Narragansett Sachem’s distrust and genuine dislike of the Mohegan that would culminate in their confrontation on the Great Plains.

Uncas’s relationship with the English was complex and based upon the political realities as the Mohegan saw them. Oberg explains that “With the Pequots under attack by the Narragansett  and the Dutch, and ensnared in an increasingly tangled web of controversy with the English, Uncas saw alliance with the newcomers as a means to increase both his own power and that of the Mohegans.”[4]

                                       Statue of John Mason from Connecticut History website

The English Captain John Mason, a veteran of British war with the Netherlands, and a man as  haughty and larger than life as Uncas, arrived in 1635 to build a settlement at what is now Dorchester. Mason had landed in New England five years before. In that time he had gained some military stature, having captured a pirate off the Massachusetts coast in 1632, and helping to redesign fortifications at Boston harbor.

The Mohegan sachem soon “fell into an intimate acquaintance”  with the Englishman that was to last for thirty five years. Uncas also met John Brewster, son of the Plymouth founder, who had long meandered upriver to trade with the Indians and seek out prospects for the Colony. In June of 1636, Brewster sent a Native American interpreter to Shantok to interview Uncas concerning “the proceedings of the Pequots, as also there present abode”.

Brewster’s courier returned with startling news. Uncas had informed him that Sassacus and a confederation of other Sachems were actively plotting against the English.

A plan to destroy Plymouth’s trading ship had only been foiled when the ship had fled the advancing canoes “under sayle with a fayre wind”. The Sachem had also told the courier that Sassacus with his brother and others, had been responsible for the death of the Englishman Stone, two years before, and that since then, the Pequots had heard rumors that the English would “shortly come against them”, and predicted that “out of desperate madnesse”, the Pequots would “shortly…sett both upon Indians, and English, jointly.”[5]

The news that Uncas sent to Brewster had the desired effect. Brewster believed the Mohegan to be “faithful to the English” and quickly passed the dire warning along to John Winthrop Jr. who had settled Saybrook. While the message generated talk up and down the river, it was not until the news reached Boston, that a definitive response was formed, and a summons was immediately dispatched to Sassacus. When the Pequot delegation arrived, they found themselves confronted by Winthrop, and the issue of justice for the murder of Stone, was raised again. Winslow told them that

“if they shall not give…satisfaction…or shall be found guilty of any of the sayd murders, and will not deliver the actours in them”, the Bay Colony had no choice but to determine itself “free from any league or peace with them, and shall revenge the blood of our countrimen as occasion shall serve”.

In the months that followed, Uncas took every opportunity to urge war upon the Pequot nation. As Native American tribes grew disenchanted with the European idea of settlement, so these tensions erupted in sporadic episodes of violence. The murders of John Stone, and the John Oldham, Brewster’s brother in law, were examples of these.

While the Pequot had been widely implicated in Stone’s death two years earlier, they were not the perpetrators of this crime. According to John Winthrop’s account,

“all the sachems of the Narragansett, except Canonicus and Miantunnomoh, were the contrivers of Mr. Oldham’s death”

This act was apparently committed to avenge Oldham’s trading with the Pequot. The Narragansett took responsibility for the crime, with Miantonomo reportedly ordering the execution of Anduah, the Block Island sachem for his role in planning the murder.

Oberg writes that by the time of that summer of 1636, tensions were such that

“Oldham’s death showed how quickly disputes between Indians could involve Englishmen, and his death complicated an already tense situation along the southern New England frontier.”[6]

Despite Miantonomo’s measure of justice, and a substantial amount of wampum sent to Governor John Winthrop, in August, the Massachusetts Bay Authority sent a force of one hundred soldiers under Captain John Endicott to “put to death the men of Block Island”. The Native American woman and children were to be spared harm, but collected and ferried from their homes.

When the Massachusetts force landed on the Island, they found the inhabitants had fled and satisfied themselves with burning the wigwams, killing the few dogs left wandering the encampment, and ruining the storage of corn the Islanders had prepared for winter. The militia next moved on to Saybrook where they were confronted by Lyon Gardner, the commander of the settlement’s fort, who made it clear that Endicott’s men were not welcome to come and stir up trouble then “take wing and flee away.”

                                           Early map from Connecticut History website

Undaunted, the men sailed East along the coast and soon found themselves taunted by the Pequots from shore. Negotiations were brief and to Endicott, unsatisfactory. On these breaking down, the English “gave fire to as many “ as they could, but the Pequots escaped, and they once again destroyed the wigwams and storages of corn.

As Commander Gardner had intoned, the surrounding settlements were not please with the actions of the Bay Colony. Neither Saybrook, or Connecticut, or Plymouth authorities wished to become embroiled in a war with Native American nations. Indeed, the Pequots took advantage of Endicott’s invasion too attempt to enlist the Narragansett, but Miantonomo’s message to John Winthrop, delivered in Boston that his people “had always loved the English and desired firm peace”, was a clear rebuke to the tribe’s old adversary. The caution the colonies showed soon proved to be warranted, as the Pequots retaliated with a siege of Saybrook that was to last into the new year.

Throughout this long “siege” and the subsequent attack on Wethersfield, Uncas urged the Colonial authorities to act against the Pequot nation. During the long winter, the Connecticut authorities had wavered, much to the Sachem’s displeasure. He had effectively isolated the Pequot nation from other Native American nations in the region. Even Miantonomo had presented a plan of attack on the Pequots to pass along to the Bay authorities, and a Massachusetts sachem named Cutshamakin had sailed along the coast with Endicott, and taken a Pequot scalp in the fight at the harbor. The Mohegan sachem vented his frustration on the minister Thomas Hooker who wrote with trepidation to John Winthrop that

“How the Pequoyts have made an inrode by a suddayne surprisall upon some of our bretheren at Watertowne, slaying weomen and children who were sent out carelessly without watch and guard, this bearer will tell you: Though we feel nether the tyme nor our strength fitt for such service, yet the Indians here our friends were so importunate with us to make warr presently that unless we had attempted some thing we had delivered our persons unto contrmpt of base feare and cowardice, and caused them to turne enemyes against us: Agaynst our mynds, being constrained by necessity, we have sent out a company, taking some Indian guides with us…”[7]

But after the attack on Wethersfield, Uncas was not the only one urging war. Another letter to Winthrop from John Higginson of Salem implored the Governor to put all other matters aside:

“In all these respects and many more I desire it may be considered whither the serious and speedie prosecution of this warre be not the greatest business New England hath.”

He warned Winthrop that

“Let not Boston Roxburie etc. thinke warre is far enough from them, for this seems to be an universal deluge creeping and encroaching on all the English in the land: The Multitudes of our enemies daily encrease, by the falling of Mohigoners,  Nepmets, (who live not many miles from the bay) Niantucuts at Narrohiganset and their malice is not to be questioned, their cruelty divers of ours have felt.”

Higginson reminded the Masachusetts Governor that

“…the eyes of all the Indians in the countrey are upon the English, to see what they will doe…”[8]

In this way, writes Oberg,

“Uncas pulled the English into his battle with Sassacus. He demanded that they act against his enemy. or face the consequence: a larger and more dangerous Indian opponent that did not fear the Puritans”.[9]

When the English did act, it was Captain Mason, the Mohegan sachem’s friend who devised the plan they would undertake. Advised by Uncas and Underhill, who contributed nineteen men to the force of ninety that Mason had mustered, the militia sailed from Saybrook with seventy Mohegans on May 19^th,  past the entrance of the Thames River to Narragansett Bay, where they set anchor. Bad weather prevented their landing at Miantonomo’s village for several days, and when they did meet with the sachem, he was noncommittal about joining an assault, warning that the Pequot had “very great Captains and Men skilful in War”, but permitted the Englishman to lead his force through Narragansett Country toward the Pequot encampment.

On May 24^th however, a number of Narragansett men came to Mason and joined his force. The warriors professed to the English Captain “how galliantly they would demean themselves, and how many men they would kill,”

Once they were at the Pawcatuck River, some Narragansett refused to cross into Pequot territory. Those who stayed, continued the march through the “extreme heat” with little provisions to aussage their exhaustion. Uncas and Endicott parleyed with Mason and determined to attack a closer Pequot settlement near Mystic where there were far more women and children than the warriors at Weinshauks.

Uncas had told Mason that he could not trust the Narragansett warriors to stand and fight, telling the Captain “they will all leave you…but as for myself,…I will never leave you”. The Mohegan led the militia through the darkness to the sleeping encampment. Mason handed out yellow headbands to the Mohegan warriors so the English could identify them in battle. He had none for the remaining  Narragansett who fell to the rear as the English surrounded the palisade fort.

                                                 Early print of the battle at Mistik

In the ensuing assault, Mason and Underhill set fire to the wigwams, fearing that Pequot reinforcements would arrive before they finished the battle. In the process they slaughtered many of the women and children who became entrapped in the flaming fortress. The Narragansett called out to Underhill as the attack continued, crying that it was too much, that too many were being killed. Those who escaped the fire were

“slaine with the sword, some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatche, and very few escaped. While Mason and the Mohegans rejoiced at their swift victory, the Narragansett returned to Miantonomo, some of them wounded by the English who mistook them for Pequots in the melee, and told the sachem of the brutality of the English way of war.

Native warfare had long held a tradition of limited engagement for a specific purpose – to avenge a death or wrong committed by one tribe against another. The avenging action was swift and inflicted minor casualties. Women and children were spared from the conflict, villages left unrazed. For these reasons, Underhill and others thought that

“Indian warfare hardly deserved the name of fighting”.

Uncas had led the English to the scene of battle, and now he led them through the wilderness back to the safety of their boats, his warriors skirmishing with bands of re-grouped Pequots who shadowed them to the harbor. Once the wounded were placed on boats, the Mohegan led Mason another twenty miles through the Niantic country to Saybrook.

After the massacre at Mistick, the Pequots became, in Roger Williams words, “a prey to all Indians.”  The Montauks from Long Island agreed to aid Lyon Gardner in gathering any fugitives in exchange for trade in Saybrook, and Sequassen, a sachem from the Connecticut River valley sent his warriors almost daily to Hartford and Windsor to “bring in [Pequot] heads to the English.”

Nearly a month after the assault, the Massachusetts Bay Authorities sent another force to Saybrook, where it met with Uncas and a sizeable body of Mohegans. They chased the remaining bands of Pequots westward, killing those who fell behind, or who were found digging for clams in hunger along the shore. The eighty or so remaining warriors made a stand in a swamp outside of Quinninpiac. A first attack by the English was beaten back.

Commander Israel Stoughton ordered the swamp to be surrounded, and sent in a Native American messenger with an offer to spare those Pequots that surrendered. As night fell, women and children emerged from the thickets, leaving their men to fight one last battle.

Through the night, gunfire was exchanged. At dawn, a handful of Pequot warriors attempted to escape and were beaten back, then the English marched headlong into the swamp firing their muskets “loaded with Ten or Twelve Pistol bullets at a time, within a few yards of them” The resultant slaughter left the dead warriors “in heaps“ among the victorious English and Mohegan allies.

The effective annihilation of the Pequot nation propelled Uncas to a prestige among both English and Native American leaders that he may have desired, but whose extent he could never have anticipated. In the aftermath of the war, the Connecticut authorities sent a small force to align with Uncas  “to maynteine our right that God by Conquest hath given to us”[10] . The Massachusetts Bay Colony took the view that the settlers at Saybrook had “rushed them selves into a warr with the heathen”, and would have lost everything

“had not we [the Massachusetts Authority] reskued them at so many hundred charges” .

The Colonies and Native Americans were also divided on what to do with the remaining Pequots who had been captured, the women and children who had been gathered or surrendered at Quinnipiac.

The Narragansett had expressed to John Winthrop through Roger Williams that the Governor should look “toward mercy and to give them their lives”, that they “be used kindly, have houses and goods and fields given them.”  Uncas told Richard Davenport that he wished “to make women of all the Pecotts, except the sachems and captains and murtherers”[11] He pledged to kill anyone found who had fought the English or his own people. Many of these remaining Pequots  were adopted into newly formed Mohegan

communities. As Oberg writes:

“Uncas created a powerful chiefdom that included the surviving Pequots and their former tributaries, Indian villagers in southern and eastern Connecticut, in the Connecticut River Valley, and on Long Island.”

In the year that followed the war, the Mohegan sachem would cement his claims to tributaries and lands by marrying a widow of the sachem Tatobem,  and at least six other prominent women among the people now subject to his authority.  In a show of his new power, Uncas even offered the Pequot women who were captives of John Winthrop Sr. protection if they would escape the Bay Colony and come to Shantock.

Winthrop would eventually exert his authority upon the Mohegan, and Uncas would learn to compromise with English authority, but he maintained Mohegan interests throughout, and displayed a cunningness whose reputation would only add to the myth of the man, in the later remembrances, and biographies of his life.

One of the most prominent stories that has survived into present time concerns the battle at the Great Plains between Uncas and Miantonomo that resulted in the latter’s capture and death. As might be expected, Mohegan lore, and Narragansett oral history differ in the events leading up to the battle and after. The English versions of events differ also, and in curious and unusual ways. These provide us an opportunity to examine the life of an historical story, and how it is perceived in memory by succeeding generations of both historians, and the public.

Events leading up to this confrontation are indisputable. Though the Mohegan and Narragansett had signed a treaty at the behest of Massachusetts Authorities to keep peaceful relations, disagreements concerning prisoners and land use rights continued to simmer. It may be remembered that the Narragansett had plead for those innocent captives of the Pequot nation to be treated fairly. The fate of those who did not assimilate into Mohegan or other tribes was decidedly unfair. William L. Stone noted that of those who surrendered at the swamp near Quinnipiac, “the female prisoners and children were divided among the soldiers, and numbers of them were sent to the West Indies and sold as slaves.[12]

Tensions between the English and Narragansett over the treatment of the surviving Pequots, exacerbated other disputes as well. The Narragansett felt that they were denied use of land promised to them by Colonial authorities after the war, and in addition, were forced to pay tribute for the Pequots they had taken as slaves into the tribe. Until the Mohegans attack on Sequassen’s village, Roger Williams had tempered the Sachems impatience, with missives to Winthrop and assurances that the English would seriously weigh their concerns.

John Winthrop’s account of the confrontation on the Great Plains comes from his

Journal, in which he wrote on August 6, 1643:

“We received news of a great defeat given the Narragansetts by Onkas…”

Winthrop recounts the attack by Uncas upon Sequasson that “slew divers of his men,and burnt his wigwams” that provoked the Narragansett, and how in answer,

“Miantunnomoh, being his kinsman, took offence against Onkus, and went with near 1000 men and set upon Onkas before he could provide for defence…But it pleased God to give Onkus the victory, after he had killed about 30 Narragansett and wounded many more, and among these two of Canonicus’ sons and a brother of Miantunnomoh”

Winthrop also mentions in the Journal  that  Miantonomo fled, wearing a coat of mail, and that

“he was easily overtaken, which two of his captains perceiving, they laid hold on him and carried him to Uncas, hoping thereby to procure their own pardon.” These two Narragansett who had betrayed their Sachem were immediately slain by Uncas, and Miantonomo was taken prisoner. Winthrop then recounts the imprisonment of the Narragansett sachem,

“they kept him under guard, but used him very courteously” and a troublesome letter from Samuel Gorton, demanding the release of his friend and threatening English intervention, the response by Uncas to take the matter to Hartford, and then Boston where the Commissioners of the United Colonies found themselves in a quagmire:

“that it would not be safe to set him at liberty, neither had we sufficient ground for us to put him to death. In this difficulty we called in five of the most judicious elders (it being the time of the general assembly of elders,) and proposing the case to them, they all agreed that he ought to be put to death” (Winthrop’s Journal Vol. II p134-136)

Another early mention of the conflict by William Bradford, demonstrates the extent to which the loyalty and words of Uncas were regarded by the English after the Peqout uprising:

“The Narragansetts, after the subduing of the Pequots, thought to have ruled over all the Indians about them. But the English, especially those of Connecticut, holding correspondency and friendship with Uncas…were engaged to support him in his just liberties and were contented that such of the surviving Pequots as had submitted to him should remain with him and quietly under his protection. This did much increase his power and augment his greatness, which the Narragansetts could not endure to see.”[13]

Bradford repeats some of the falsities that Uncas was spreading between the Bay Colony and Connecticut at the time, mainly that Miantonomo was behind a plot to assassinate the Mohegan, through various means: poisoning, or “to knock him on the head in his house or secretly shoot him…”

Uncas had complained to Connecticut Authorities that his entourage of canoes had come under arrow fire more than once in his travels. He had taken an arrow in the arm at Shantok, in an attempted assassination; and the Pequot suspected had fled to the Narragansett and received protection.

The Plymouth Governor wrote in his secondhand account that

“none of these taking effect, he [Miantonomo] made open war upon him [Uncas] (though it was against the covenants both between the English and them, as also between themselves and a plain breech of the same}. He came suddenly upon him with 900 or 1000 men, never denouncing any war before. The other’s power at the present was not above half so many, but it pleased God to give Uncas the victory and he slew many of his men and wounded many more, but the chief of all was, he took Miantonomo prisoner.”[14]

William Bradford’s account was written, like many memoirs of those days, years after the described events took place. Still, this is one of the earliest written accounts of this event which would grow in historical memory . Bradford’s telling is also tempered by his careful noting of the proceedings of perceived justice that followed the sachem’s capture:

“The Commissioners weighed the cause and passages as they were clearly represented and sufficiently evidenced betwixt Uncas and Miantonomo, and the things being duly considered, the Commissioners apparently saw that Uncas could not be safe while Miantonomo lived…Wheras they thought he [Uncas] might justly put such a false and bloodthirsty enemy to death; but in his own jurisdiction, not in the English plantations.”

Indeed, in his summation, Bradford seems unaware of the marriages made by Uncas that contributed greatly to his esteem through land holdings in the eyes  (especially), of the Connecticut authorities. He is also unaware of the prodigious correspondence of Roger Williams during this period, promoting the peaceful intentions of his friend, the Narragansett sachem, and of his reluctance to draw the English into what Miantonomo saw as an “Indian affaire”.

“…if I mistake not I observe in Miantunnomu some sparkes of true Friendshipp. could it be deeply imprinted into him that the English never intended to despoile him of the Countrey I probably conjecture his friendship would appeare in attending of us with 500 men (in case) nagainst any forreigne Enemie.”[15]

Williams also told the Bay Colony Governor that ”concerning Miantunnumu I have not heard as yet of ant unfaithfulness toward us…”

Despite Uncas’ rise in power, the Narragansett exhibited assured self-confidence  in the greatness of the Narragansett nation compared to Uncas’ Mohegan confederacy. Miantonomo told Williams that Uncas and his followers were

“but … a twig….while we are as a great tree.”

If Williams’ letters made any impact on John Winthrop, he did not share this with Bradford, indeed, he had written to the Plymouth leader that

“we conceive that you looke at the pequents, and all other Indeans as a commonnenimie…”

Bradford also makes no mention of the provocative attacks by Uncas and the English on encampments along the Pawcatuck River in the summer of 1639 that were filled with Pequot refugees who had long been tributaries of the Niantic sachem, Ninigret. This attack, stirred the embers of the long simmering hatred for the Mohegan once again, and enflamed the Niantic and Narragansett, along with other tribes who were becoming wary of Uncas’ influence on the English.

Roger Williams wrote to Winthrop during these unsettling times:

“ I have dealt with Caunounicus and Miantunnomu to desert the Nayantaquits in this business. They answer they would if they had shed the bloud of the English, but as they are bretheren so they never hurt the English…Instead they say that the English partialitie to all the Pequots at Monhiggan is so great and the Consequences so grevious upon the abuse of the English love, that all their arguments returne back (which they use to the Nayantaquit Sachems) as arrows from a stone wall…”[16]

In these early accounts and letters, only John Winthrop Sr., seems,with these epistles from Williams, to have acknowledged the haughtiness of Uncas in a continued pattern of harassing and provoking the Narragansett which ultimately led to the conflict.

The first “full” account of the battle on Great Plains would come in the pages of the Rev. Benjamin Trumbull’s History of Connecticut (1797). Rev. Trumbull penned many sermons and lectures, and by 1767, he had also completed a manuscript entitled A Compendium of the Indian Wars in New England, more particularly, the Colony of Connecticut have been Concerned and Active in.”

While this work remains in his papers, it was never published, and his efforts went into the larger work, which was enhanced by correspondence with many of the State’s local historians. In his account, Benjamin Trumbull uses all sources known to him and weaves them into the fabric of his narrative; creating an interesting tableau of the accumulated historical record to date.

                                    topographical map of Norwich and the “Sachem’s Plain”

Trumbull repeats Bradford’s assertion that Miantonomo marched upon Uncas without provocation, or informing the English. The Mohegan spies sent word back to Uncas at Shantok, that Narragansetts had entered Mohegan territory, and he set out to meet the Narragansett sachem.

This account presents for the first time, mention of a strategy of Uncas’ making: to offer a friendly parley with Miantonomo, and challenge him to fight man to man, and settle their long dispute. While most historians have framed the outrage of the Narragansett sachem to the power that the English enabled the Mohegan to gather, Uncas knew more than anyone that Miantonomo valued the pride of his people more than his own. He would not leave warriors to stand and deprive them of the pride they garnered from battle with such an enemy.

That certainty gave Uncas the element of surprise, for his ruse worked, and the Narragansett sachem came to meet him, and as expected, refused the Mohegan’s offer:

“…upon which Uncas falling instantly to the ground his men discharged a shower of arrows upon the Narragansetts, and without a moment’s interval, rushed upon them in the most furious manner, with a hideous yell, put them to flight.”

The Mohegan warriors chased the Narragansett “like a doe by the huntsman”, and

“-among others Miantonom was exceedingly pressed. Some of the most forward of Uncas’ bravest men, who were most light of foot, coming up with him, twitched him back, impeding his flight, and passed him, that Uncas might take him Uncas was a stout man, and rushing forward, like a lion greedy of his prey, seized him by his shoulder.”

In this account, the battle on the Great Plains was hardly a battle, but an embarrassing rout of the Narragansett.  In the matter of Miantonomo’s death, Trumball details the captured sachem being taken to Shantok, and then to Hartford to await the word of the Commission of the United Colonies, where

“The whole affair of Uncas and Miantonimoh was laid before the Commissioners, and the facts already related, were, in their opinion, fully proved…” Those facts, of course were Uncas’ long standing allegations that could hardly be proven, given the Mohegan’s many adversaries. The Commission declared that the Mohegan sachem “could not be safe, while Miantonomoh lived, …his life would be continually in danger”, and that Uncas  “might justly put such a false and blood-thirsty enemy to death.”

Uncas received his prisoner, and “marched with him to the spot where he had been taken. At the instant they arrived on the ground, one of Uncas’ men, who marched behind Miantonomoh, split his head with a hatchet, killing him with a single stroke”.

The murder of Miantonomo. From Cassell’s History of the United States.

The Reverend concludes this episode with a grisly and spectacular scene certain to send a chill into the reader:

“Uncas cut out a large piece of his shoulder which he devoured in savage triumph! He said  “it was the sweetest meat he ever ate; it made his heart strong!”[17]

This description of the battle is reprinted nearly verbatim by Henry Trumball in his ambitious History of the Discovery of America… (1814), as well as in a later edition of 1832, and then again in the 1846 edition of Trumbull’s History of the Indian Wars.  But the publisher adds a curious addition to the tale, that as the Narragansett  fled,

“many of them to escape…plunged into a river from rocks of near sixty feet in height”.

Henry Trumball was a Providence printer and publisher. Like many ambitious publishers, he borrowed heavily from others books and accounts to publish his own works, even if some accounts were embellished for dramatic effect, or as some suspect, created by the publisher himself. A modern assessment of Trumbull tells us that

“Trumbull’s many works touched every part of the scale from wartime adventure to shipwrecks and castaway cannibalism, never content with the everyday”[18]

Aside from his popular Indian Wars, Trumball penned and published The Life of Israel Potter, and Robert the Hermit among other titles, and gained a reputation as a “talented and thorough going rogue”.

In this instance, it is likely that Trumball had simply added another bit of local lore, which, as we shall see, continues to survive in present day historical memory.

This story of the battle at Great Plains was then rewritten, in a more delicate tone by Miss Frances M. Caulkins in her History of Norwich, and she references the source of the tale, for the first time, as being from a letter written by the Rev. Richard Hyde of Norwich to the Rev. Trumbull in October of 1769.

The Reverend Hyde was well known for his discourse among the Mohegans, and it is clear that he was by then, one hundred and twenty six years after the event, passing along what had become a legend in the tribe’s oral history.[19] Similar accounts of battles related through oral history were recorded by Frank Speck at the turn of the twentieth century, and by William Simmons among the Narragansett late in that century.

Hyde was sixty two when he wrote the Mohegan account to Trumbull, and he gave no indication of when he had heard the tale, only that it was “communicated to me from some of the ancient Fathers of this town, who were Contemporaries of Uncas…”

The letter itself was printed in Daniel Coit Gilman’s A Historical Discourse (1859) along with a letter from Miss Caulkin, concerning the long dispute over the location of “Sachem Plains” and Miantonomo’s burial there.

The story comes to its most detailed and elaborate telling in the pages of John S. De Forest’s  History of the Indians of Connecticut (1851) . The account in these pages provides greater detail to the aftermath of Miantonono’s capture, including the giving of wampum to Uncas, which the Narragansett had long claimed was ransom for their sachem’s life.

“It would appear…that a truce was opened between the tribes, which continued as long as the fate of Miantonomo remained in suspense. The Narragansetts sent their sachem several packages of wampum during his captivity, which he gave away, some to Uncas, some to Uncas’ wife, and some to his principal councilors. He made these presents…partly by way of thanks for his courteous treatment, and partly to persuade Uncas to put him into the hands of the English and refer his fate to their decision.”[20]

The historian further asserts that when Miantonomo was brought to Hartford, he  “begged earnestly that he might be kept there in the custody of the English magistrates. He doubtless expected that the English would preserve his life…”

More recently, the historians Neal Salisbury and Michael Leroy Oberg have speculated that the Narragansett sachem attempted  to broker a deal with the Mohegan. Miantonomo told Uncas of the recent Musee mischief against the Dutch, and hinted that it was but a part of a larger uprising. Uncas and the Mohegans could join the insurgency, and to cement the alliance,

“Miantonomo would marry one of Uncas’ daughters…Meanwhile, Miantonomo’s younger brother, Pessicus, would marry the daughter of the powerful Pakonoket sachem Massasoit. If consummated, the alliance would have brought together Indians from the Hudson River eastward to the Massachusetts Bay in a powerful union against the English and the Dutch.”

A first hand account written by John Haynes to John Winthrop however, places the issue of ransom, and the courage of the Narragansett sachem in a different light:

“That the express, that Onkas should take wampham of the Narragansetts for Myantonimo’s ransom (which I have understood also from Mr. Eaton,) I cannot but concur with you, if it really appears so, equity and justice call for no less; but this I must needs say, that this very thing was cast abroad by some Indians of the Narragansett party…both myself and Captain Mason strictly examined Onkus concerning the matter, acquainting him with what we had heard. He utterly denied, that he had taken any wampham or any other thing upon any such terms. He confessed, indeed, he had wampham and other things given him and his brother freely; and he as freely promised to bring him to the English…and this I also know…that the same day that Myantonimo was delivered into our hands and imprisoned…Onkas desired him to speak before us all; and this Myantonimo did utter and confess that the Mohegan sachems had dealt nobly with him in sparing his life, when they took him, and performing their promise in bringing him to the English, (a thing the like he never heard of, that so great a sachem should be so dealt with) although he himself pressed it upon them, again and again, (as they all could witness) to slay him…”[21]

Clearly Miantonomo had expected to die within the tenants of “Indian Justice”, as he and Uncas understood those inherent laws. There is no mention of him begging for his life, only a grudging answer that the Mohegans had treated him well during this humiliation.

William Cullen Bryant would write that being taken prisoner

“no doubt overwhelmed him, for he begged his enemies repeatedly to take his life, taunting them, perhaps, after the Indian fashion, with his own deeds of prowess in the past…”[22]

It is also improbable, given this testimony from Hartford and the apparent demeanor of Miantonomo at these proceedings that any such union was discussed, or that either Sachem, given their history, would have been open to such a proposal. Indeed, the sources used that mention a speculative “deal” discussed, clearly express what the English feared might happen, should Miantonomo be allowed to live.

Uncas apparently had no regrets of taking “gifts” from the Narragansett during their sachem’s imprisonment, as in his mind, he had not expressed any promises in return. He likely expected the Hartford authorities to wash their hands of the matter. In fact, he had made an agreement with authorities in 1638 to seek “advice from the English” should he capture the sachemand place him on trial for “sundry treacherous attempts on his life.”

Surely compliance with that treaty made it easier for the Massachusetts Authorities to place Miantonomo back in Mohegan hands.

Salisbury indicates in the final pages of his work, that the English, more than Uncas, had reason to see that the :”great sachem” was executed, and thus made sure that

“…several Englishmen would accompany the party to see that the execution was actually carried out. No Indian, not even Uncas, could be trusted alone with the remarkable leader who was urging Indians tp bury their present differences in order to recover the autonomy, unity,  and abundance of the pre-European past.”

          Miantonomo’s grave, Norwich, Conn. Photo by author.

John Winthrop was to write after the death of Miantonomo that Uncas had “slew an enemy, but not the enmity against him”

Indeed, as Oberg observes in his biography,

“Uncas’ close alliance with Connecticut and the Commissioners of the United Colonies allowed him to survive the Narragansett raids of 1644 and 1645” when the tribe’s effort to exact revenge was at its most fervent.

The enmity, over this affair,  would also flow from the pens of later historians of the Colonial period.

Daniel Gookin, the missionary who had written admiring words about the Narragansett, claimed that Uncas was “ a wicked, willful man, a drunkard and otherwise very vitious.”

De Forest, who had provided the most extent account of the battle and its aftermath, echoed the missionary’s missive, and more:

“His nature was selfish, jealous, and tyrannical; his ambition was grasping, and unrelieved by a single trait of magnanimity.”

But the Mohegan sachem also had his defenders. The lore of Uncas as “the great Indian benefactor” became strongest in the 19^th century, beginning with the dedication of the Uncas Memorial, and with less fanfare, a modest monument to Miantonomo, that was placed upon the remains of a once great heap of stones.

In the address given at the Memorial’s dedication, William L. Stone praised Uncas as

“brave and fearless, the white man’s friend.” Indeed, the Sachem had sold the land on

which Norwich was raised in 1659 and two hundred some odd years later, the town’s pre-eminent historian, acknowledged that despite his faults, Uncas was to be admired for his “persevering activity in securing the independence of his tribe.”

This tale from history, of the mythical struggle between Uncas and Miantonomo faded in historical  texts as the narrative expanded and later events acquired more prominence in the evolving American story.

James Truslow Adams in his three volume History of New England (1927), makes scarce mention of the battle, except that it was sanctioned by Massachusetts Authorities, and that “Miantonomo was taken prisoner through treachery”. [23]

Adams infers that the animosity of the Puritan judges in determining the sachem’s fate, may have been driven more by Miantonomo’s friendships with Samuel Gorton and Roger Williams, than his rivalry with Uncas, though these ”most judicious elders” had found the Narragansett to be “of a turbulent and proud spirit”.

The historian also decries the English failure to enact real justice according to their own written treaties.

“There had been no pretence of trial, and neither the accused nor any witnesses had been summoned. Nor did the English execute the sentence which duty was entrusted to Uncas”, and leaves no doubt as to the outcome of the assassination.

“Aside from the injustice of the course pursued, it is difficult to think of one more certain to turn the “proud and turbulent” spirits of the slain man’s thousand followers permanently against the English settlers.”[24]

In the years after Miantonomo’s death, these feelings simmered and occasionally flared with the stirrings of one dispute or another. On the verge of Metacom’s War, with the English desperate to dissuade  Narragansett involvement, the issue of punishment of Uncas, now an elderly man, for his role in the death of Miantonomo, was still being raised as a pretence to any negotiation with the English.

During this conflict, which the Narragansett had been dragged into by the English declaration of war upon them, the death of their great sachem reverberated once more, with the capture and death of Nannuntennew, the son of Miantonomo, more commonly called Canonchet, in April of 1676. A contemporary account, included by Samuel Drake in his Old Indian Chronicles (1867) tells us that the younger Sachem’s “Carriage was strangely proud and lofty after he was taken.” The English brought their prisoner to New London where he was interrogated as to

“…why he did foment that War, which would certainly be the Destruction of him and all the Heathen Indians in the Country &c.? He would make no other Reply…but this;- That he was born a Prince, and if Princes came to speak with him he would answer, but none present being such, he thought himself obliged in Honor to hold his Tongue, and not hold Discourse with such persons, below his Birth and Quality.”[25]

Like his Father, Canonchet desired that he be put to death rather than confined, and in a further recall of his Father’s demise, requested that the act “might be done by young Unkus, (Oneco) that aided us; acknowledging him his fellow Prince…”

Canonchet promised the English captains that he had 2,000 men who would avenge his death. They placed the Narragansett under heavy guard and marched him to Stonington where most of the English soldiers, as well as the Mohegans, the Pequots, and the Niantics who had led Denison’s force out of New London, expressed growing their growing unease with holding such a valued prisoner for any length of time. There were fears also, that the English authorities, perhaps not wishing to commit the same desecration of justice again, might release Canonchet, and thus his vengeance upon the neighboring tribes friendly to the English.

Before any trial could be conducted, the sachem was murdered by his Native American enemies, no doubt releasing some drawn out vengeance upon the Narragansett; desecrating his body, and bringing the head triumphantly to Hartford.

Uncas would, in the end, outlive all his enemies. Thus by longevity alone, and his familiarity with the English Colonial governments, would a kind of mythical status already be given the sachem. His name would be immortalized by the popular author James Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans, though the “noble savage” the novelist portrayed had little of the characteristics his name sake thrived in holding.

In the recent historical texts, one writer has acknowledged, “Uncas is viewed widely as a self –serving collaborator,” citing Francis Jennings and John Sainsbury among others who have continued the thread of enmity toward Uncas in their own narratives. In his essay Uncas and Political Contact, Eric S. Johnson makes the point that

“To the Mohegans, Uncas is a hero. Their view is best understood in the light of Native political organization. Uncas, like all sachems, was a servant of his people. He cooperated with the English for the most part on his own terms, in the interests of the Mohegan community, and with its consent and support. With Uncas’ guidance, the Mohegan went from a small, subordinate community to a dominant regional power within a span of twenty years.”[26]

Unsurprisingly, Oberg in his biography takes a similarly pragmatic view of the Native American leader:

“Uncas constructed the Mohegans out of the wreckage spawned by epidemic disease and warfare against the Pequots, He assembled a powerful Native American chiefdom that remained a significant power in southern New England for much of the seventeenth century. He lived a long life as Mohegan Sachem, dying a peaceful death without converting to Christianity and abandoning his people’s customary beliefs. “ Though he shared the landscape of New England with powerful figures such as the Winthrops, and Bradford, among others, “He played as large a role in the history of this part of Anglo-America, a region shaped by its English settlers and Indian natives, as any other individual.”[27]

That the Mohegan community remains, and is thriving today due to lucrative casino profits and land holdings, may largely be responsible for keeping the story of Uncas alive in written and oral history.

But let us return to this mythical battle, and its present place in historical memory.

The site of Miantonomo’s grave on a small, rocky hillside is a desolate place, even today, surrounded by aging ranch houses. and a block away from a busy route. The remains of sachem plain are a bare field stretching out from the hillside to housing on one side and a stretch of brambles before the Yantic River.

The Yantic is a fast moving tributary, known for its rapids and quick water passages. In local lore, as first reported by Henry Trumball, it was across this river that the Narragansetts tried to escape the battle. Therein however, lies the uncertainty of the tale and the location of the Great Plains.

Local myth has placed the site of “Indian Leap” and those “rocks near sixty feat in height” as that of Yantic Falls, some two miles upriver from the hillside bearing Miantonomo’s grave, historically, the place where he was captured, and then returned to be put to death.

                                   “Indian Leap” at Yantic Falls. Photo by CLK Hatcher

With modern websites the story is repeated of the great battle and the sachem’s capture. On the town of Bolton Historical Society webpage, we find the following account of the scene on the Great Plains:

“It required a large open field east of what is now Norwich, where Uncas would let the great Narragansett sachem proudly array his overwhelming army of warriors. As it happens, it was also a place where the Mohegan bow and arrow would be effective on a very large scale. Miantinomo typically attacked with upward of 700 warriors. While Uncas sometimes maintained as many as 500 warriors, they were primarily defensive and spread thinly through Moheganeak. Uncas usually led between 100 and 200 elite warriors into battle. The Mohegan warriors were the best and brightest warriors from all the other nations because Uncas welcomed all nations, offered the greatest freedom, and upheld the Native American traditions and virtues.

The Mohegans were greatly outnumbered by the Narragansett but Uncas had a plan. Uncas would ask Miantonomo to fight him single handed in mortal combat in the open field. He told his warriors that when Miantonomo refused to fight him, Uncas would drop to the ground and that would be the signal for the Mohegan warriors to fire all their arrows at the Narragansett warriors.When Uncas fell to the ground as though he were dead, the Narragansett were startled and confused. Volleys of arrows struck the Narragansett but carefully missed the area where Uncas and Miantinomo were. The plan worked and most of the Narragansett warriors were finished off within a minute.

Then the Mohegans attacked in hand-to-hand combat. Miantonomo ran for his life but was run down by the Mohegan warrior Tantaquidgeon and brought back to Uncas. Then the mighty Mohegan sachem Uncas, with a great number of his bravest warriors and wisest and most trusted advisors (sagamores), brought Miantonomo through Bolton to the colonial commissioners in the Hartford colony.”[28]

                                Sign at “Indian Leap” retelling local lore. Photo by CLK Hatcher

Another website from an area historian, brings the lore of “Indian Leap” into the twenty first century:

“Rather than surrender, Miantonomo leapt across the gorge and managed to land on the other side, injuring his leg in the process. Others of his tribe attempted to leap the chasm but were unsuccessful and plunged to their death onto the rocks in the abyss below while others simply surrendered and became prisoners of the Mohegans.

When the pursuing Uncas arrived at the top of the gorge and saw his enemy hobbling away on the other side, he took a running start, flew over the rapids, and landed safely on the other side. It was an astounding leap that gave the area above the falls its future name and allowed Uncas to catch up to the injured Miantonomo who was then easily overcome and taken as prisoner.”[29]

Thus we see how local lore, over time and with propogation, becomes historical memory.

Joseph Campbell once famously said that “myth is a public dream”. and this has been borne out by the evolution of the story of the battle on the Great Plains. We will never know the actual acts and course of events that occurred on that day. We know only the outcome, and the effect it was to have on the later history.

Critics may argue that with the onset of modern websites and social media, it becomes easier to perpetuate public myths, but the truth is that local lore is woven into the fabric of American communities, and remains a strong thread among those libraries, societies, and individual citizens keeping historical interest alive whether in print, online, or in public commemorations. Local legend and lore contribute to the dialogue, and the ongoing debate over historical events. It is, as it has always been, how we define ourselves, as a community, a state, and a country.

Perhaps as historians, the best we may do is to include the lore in our narratives so as to explain how events may become embellished to embolden the acts of a person, or a people, especially those within the community itself.

May-June 2011