From Nonotuck to Northampton: Recovering Indigenous Histories
By Margaret M. Bruchac
Indigenous (Native American) (1) history in this region is deeply rooted, represented by more than 10,000 years of occupation over many, many generations. The present-day town of Northampton was settled within the Indigenous homeland called Nonotuck, situated along both sides of the Connecticut River, known to Native people as the Quinneticook or Kwinitekw (“long river”) (2). Nonotuck territory also includes parts of present-day Easthampton, Hatfield, Hadley, and Amherst in western Massachusetts. Native histories here, as elsewhere in northeastern North America, may seem difficult to understand, having long been filtered through (if not obscured by) the experiences of European colonial settlers. Yet, understandings of the past can be recovered by critically re-examining the colonial record, by tracking traces in the landscape, and by dismantling the romantic stereotypes that so often push Native people into the vanished past.
Although the lands and waterways have been reshaped, reminders of Nonotuck history can be seen in snapshots around the town, from the farm fields called “Bark Wigwam” to a street named “Fort Hill” to the shadows of the old corn-planting mounds at Capawonk beside the Pawaagonick (Mill River). But these snapshots do not tell the whole story. Here, I offer a few glimpses into Northampton’s Native past, while commenting on some of the sources that recorded local history from the 1600s through the 1800s, and reflecting on the lives of Native people who inhabited Nonotuck before and after this place became known as Northampton (3).
Ancient Traditions
The surviving archaeological evidence of Indigenous presence shows the region to have been inhabited for at least 10,000 years B.C.E., dating from the end of the Wisconsin glaciation (4). Indigenous lifeways here were inextricably entwined with technologically sophisticated and sustainable uses of local flora and fauna, including seasonal hunting and harvesting. Native people actively managed the landscape by periodically burning over the forest undergrowth to ease travel, improve visibility for hunting, and encourage the growth of berry bushes and young trees that attracted wildlife (5). Fishing areas were often shared by multiple Native communities. At some of the most widely used waterfalls, in places like Peskeompskut (now known as Turners’ Falls), thick soil deposits retain high levels of carbon, calcium, and other byproducts of fish bones discarded from shad and salmon fishing each spring; radiocarbon dates for these sites reach back as much as 8,600 years ago (6).
Similarly ancient evidence (dated to about 9,000 B.C.E.) comes from stone tools and other relics found on the hillside terraces that once formed the shores of the great glacial lake now called “Lake Hitchcock” (7). Native oral tradition attributes the lake’s creation to the actions of a giant beaver (a metaphorical form of the glacier) and the rupture of a great dam, creating flooding that permanently reshaped the valley (8). This Native story, which persisted in local memory, was recorded by observers such as Yale President Timothy Dwight, who wrote in 1821 of “an Indian tradition that the great valley north of these mountains was once a lake. The story is certainly not improbable” (9). In the late 1800s, Deerfield historian Phinheas Field recounted the same tradition, describing a giant named “Hobomock” who intervened by killing the beaver:
“The Great Beaver, whose pond flowed over the whole basin of Mt. Tom, made havoc among the fish. … A pow-wow was held and Hobomock raised, who came to their relief. With a great stake in hand, he waded the river until he found the beaver, and so hotly chased him that he sought to escape by digging into the ground. …The earth over the beaver’s head we call Sugarloaf, his body lies just to the north of it.” (Phinheas Field 1890) (10)
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This beaver story does more than simply point to a mountain that is coincidentally shaped like a beaver, metaphorically pitting humans against animals. The story offers a warning about the dangers that result when human or non-human agents indulge in extreme earth-shaping activities (11). It also serves as a sort of origin story for the lush ecosystem around the present-day Connecticut River, which flows through the channel left behind when the glacial waters receded.
Locating Nonotuck
The Native people living at Nonotuck were closely related through trade, diplomacy, and kinship to at least four other geographically distinct Native communities situated at ideal horticultural sites along the Kwinitekw and other regional rivers. These groups included: Agawam, indicating the marshy lands around present-day Springfield and Agawam; Woronoco, where the river winds around the land at Westfield; Pocumtuck, along the swift, sandy river at Deerfield and Greenfield; and Sokoki, at the southernmost extremity of the Abenaki homeland (12).
Culturally, the people in these Native communities are identified as “Algonkian,” and their language is identified as “Algonquian,” a broad linguistic group (with multiple tribal dialects) that diverged from the ancient Proto-Algonquian language (13). That group includes all of the Native peoples of present-day New England, along with parts of southern Quebec and the Great Lakes area (14).
Most of the tribal names in this region come from Indigenous terms that describe local topography (15). So, for example, the locative place name Nonotuck or Norwottuck, which points to territory situated along both sides of the river, appears to derive from noah-tuk, roughly signifying “in the midst of the river” or the “middle river” (16). This makes sense from a local geographic perspective. Another suggested translation is “far-away-place,” from nauwut in the Massachusetts dialect, reflecting the language and perspective of eastern Native nations. The variant spellings of this place name, as recorded by European colonists, reflect three different dialects of Algonquian speech: the n-dialect, r-dialect, and l-dialect (17). These names include: Nanatuke (1653) in the Agawam dialect, Norwottocke (1637) in the Nipmuc dialect, and Nalwotogg (1653) in the Wampanoag dialect (18).
The Nonotuck name for the Mill River appears to have been Pawaagonick, translated as “place of small long stones” (19). A relatively similar sounding term, Pauhunganuck, appears in a 1658 document referencing a “brooke” where a sawmill was constructed. This fits with the Algonquian word pawahagan, “an instrument to bruise or thrash,” which would accurately describe a mill (20). Since these terms pre-date the construction of colonial mills on the river, it seems likely that pawahagan originally referred to places with Native “mills” or stone mortars, designed to be worked with a stone pestle to grind corn into meal.
Another possible name for the Mill River is Cappawonganick, an extension of Cappawong or Capawonk, a term that refers to an “enclosed place; protected place, place of refuge, stopped-up by the bend in the river” (21). The sound of Capawong is also found in the variant spelling Kapahoweng, “where the stream is shut in” (22). This would accurately describe the Native planting lands situated along the Pawaagonick and the Kwinitekw, encompassed by oxbow formations. With this in mind, the name Cappawonganick (by whatever spelling) could describe both the land closed in by a bend in the river, and the river itself.
The process of accurately identifying a Native place name in colonial records is, however, complicated given the confusion introduced by European observers who were rarely fluent in Native languages. Each word must be situated in its appropriate historic, linguistic, and social context to be properly understood. There is no reason to suspect that Native informants were confused, since “every name described the locality to which it was affixed. The same name might be given to more than one place, but these were never so near together that a mistake in identity could be occasioned by the repetition” (23). Algonkian people from different tribal nations could readily interpret these place names, and readily understand one another, despite different dialects.
Algonkian Lifeways & Leadership
During the early 1600s, the English colonial settlers who founded Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony imagined all of the North American continent to be a “New World,” envisioning a mostly uninhabited wilderness, despite the obvious presence of Indigenous people. For Puritan colonists, lands that were neither plowed nor planted were imagined to be both “terra nulius” (land belonging to no one) and “vacuum domicilium” (empty home), empty places that could be claimed by Christian colonists as the rightful property of a European king (24). European settlers were keen to establish permanent dwellings with strict property rights and territorial boundaries, but northeastern Native peoples had entirely different conceptions of homesites, land use, and political relations.
In Algonkian territory, Indigenous families and tribal nations occupied broad shared homelands, utilizing long-standing fishing, hunting, ceremonial, and trading sites, while shifting planting fields and homesites as part of a regular seasonal round (25). Before European contact, clusters of Native homes, even when inhabited for a few seasons or a few years, were rarely fixed in place (in what we might consider today to be a “village”). Nancy Eldredge, a Wampanoag historian, summarizes it like this: “We were seasonal people living in the forest and valleys during winter. During the summer, spring, and fall, we moved to the rivers, ponds, and ocean to plant crops, fish, and gather foods from the forests” (26).
Small homes, called wigwams (homes made with saplings, bark, and woven rush mats), were typically private family dwellings, but larger homes and council houses were shared spaces. Since small dwellings were portable, families routinely moved in response to weather or other natural events. Colonial observers remarked on the speed of these community movements, noting:
“Sometimes they remove to hunting houses in the end of the year…but their great remove is from their Summer fields to warme and thicke woodie bottoms where they winter. They are quicke; in a halfe a day, yea, sometimes a few houres warning to be gone and the house up elsewhere…" (Roger Williams, 1643) (27) |
These seasonal relocations enabled people to tap into a wide variety of floral and faunal resources, maintaining environmental diversity while also sustaining fluid social and political relations.
Native population numbers fluctuated in times of disease and warfare, but we can estimate that, during the 1600s, each Native group in the middle Connecticut River Valley was organized into a village of at least 500 people. In the 1630s, for example, the Woronoco village had a population of 1,000 people (28). In 1663, about 100 fighting men were counted at Sokoki, which can be extrapolated to a village population of 500 by adding four family members (women, children, elderly) for every warrior (29). At best guess, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 Native people were distributed among the five communities at Agawam, Woronoco, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, and Sokoki (30).
Native population numbers fluctuated in times of disease and warfare, but we can estimate that, during the 1600s, each Native group in the middle Connecticut River Valley was organized into a village of at least 500 people. In the 1630s, for example, the Woronoco village had a population of 1,000 people (28). In 1663, about 100 fighting men were counted at Sokoki, which can be extrapolated to a village population of 500 by adding four family members (women, children, elderly) for every warrior (29). At best guess, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 Native people were distributed among the five communities at Agawam, Woronoco, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, and Sokoki (30).
Each tribal nation was led by individuals serving in the social and political roles of sachem or sagamore (male chief or kin leader), or sunksqua (female chief or kin leader) (31). The most visible of these were sometimes identified by the English as “kings” and “queens.” These individuals were heads of family bands who often developed broad-reaching kinship relations that extended their geographic influence (32). None of these, however, were the sole speakers for their nation; each nation had multiple sachems. The kinship ties, political alliances, and decision-making processes that shaped these leaders are key to understanding inter-tribal relations.
For example, in 1648, William Pynchon astutely summed up the fluidity of these relations, while referencing the Native leadership at nearby Quabaoag (in present-day Brookfield):
“…there are several Smale [small] Sachims of Quabaug, & in all neer places there are other smale Sachims no one Sachim doth Rule all: & one of these petti Sachims hath made friendship wth Cutshamoquin…but I believe they will stick no longer to him than the sunn shines uppon him.” (William Pynchon, July 5, 1648) (33) |
Despite this insight, it should be noted that colonial accounts often suffer from cultural bias and linguistic misinterpretation. As a case in point, although William Pynchon (1590–1662) and his son John Pynchon (1626–1703) recorded dozens of transactions with Nonotuck people during the 1600s, they never gained full fluency in any Native language. In 1648, while eavesdropping on a Nonotuck-Quaboag conversation, William confessed, “neither I nor my son, for want of language, could understand their discourse” (34). They did, however, record some attempts to learn.
Maize Horticulture
In his 1648–1650 Daybook, John Pynchon recorded a list that includes references to crops, fishing, and seasons of the year. His compilation of terms for each of the full moons of the year in the Agawam language (which is similar to the modern Abenaki language) reads as follows:
“Pap sap quoho, & Lowatanassick they say are both one: And then if they be reckoned both for one: they recken but 12 months to ye yeare as we doe. And they make ye yeare to begine in Squan nikesos (as far as I yet can understand ym) & so call ye first month. 1. Squannikesos—part of Aprill & pt of May when they set Indian corne 2. M[s]onesqua nimock kesos—part of May and part of June when ye women weed their corne 3. Tow wa kesos—part of June & pt of July when they hill Ind corne 4. matter la waw kesos—when squashes are ripe & Ind beans begin to be eatable 5. micheen nee kesos—when Ind corne is eatable 6. pe[k] qui taqunk kesos - ye middle between harvest & eating Ind corne 7. pepewarr—bec: of white frosts on ye grass & ground 8. qunnikesos 9. pap sap qhoho—about ye 6th day of January or Lowatannassick: so caled bec: they account it ye middle of winter 10. Squo chee kesos—bec ye sun hath strength to thaw, pt of February & pt of March 11. we picum milcom —bec ye ice on ye river is all gon 12. Namossack kesos —pt of March & pt of Aprill bec of catching fish” (John Pynchon, 1648) (35) |
In seventeenth-century European parlance, the term “corn” technically referred to any domesticated grain (oats, rye, wheat, barley, etc.). In America, however, the terms “corn” and “Indian corn” eventually came to refer exclusively to Native maize (Zea mays), which was grown separately from European grain crops (36). Some archaeologists and historians have interpreted Pynchon’s list as evidence of the centrality of maize, since seven names specifically refer to maize horticulture (37). Although maize was indeed a dietary staple in the 1600s, it was not central to Nonotuck sustenance. Maize was a relatively recent import into Algonkian territory, having been acquired through trade with other Native people about 1100 years B.C.E. (38).
The lush ecosystem of rich, alluvial soils deposited by the Kwinitekw and other rivers in the wake of the beaver’s dam and glacial drainage provided a perfect environment for maize (Zea mays, commonly called corn) horticulture. Native people planted several varieties in the fertile soils enriched by many layers of silt built up over centuries of seasonal riverine flooding. Maize was typically interplanted in hills with beans; the bean vines would “interlace with the corn, which reaches to a height of from five to six feet; and they keep the ground very free from weeds” (39). The ground between these hills was planted with several varieties of squash, including pumpkin, crookneck, and bush scallop. This maize, a hard-shelled flint corn, was ground using mortars made from hollowed-out wooden logs and carved-out stone (40).
These cultivated plants supplemented other Indigenous foods that grew wild in abundance. These included: nuts (acorns, walnuts, hickory nuts, chestnuts); berries (raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, etc.); root vegetables (groundnut, sunchokes, cattails, etc.); and numerous medicinal saps, leaves, flowers, roots, and barks. Wild game included fish (especially anadromous shad and salmon), deer, moose, bear, waterfowl, grouse, turtles, and many other Indigenous species (41).
Returning to Pynchon’s list of moons, Algonquian linguistics should be taken into consideration. We can benefit from looking at other regional languages, since the words in this list closely match the sounds of present-day Western Abenaki. Squannikesos aligns with the Abenaki sigwani gizos, meaning “spring moon,” and micheeneekesos with the Abenaki mitsini gizos, “eating's moon” (42). The morpheme kesos or gizos, however, does not identify the moon, per se, which is known in the Abenaki language as nanibôsad, or “night walker” (43). Keso or gizi is a term used for the sun, but it also indicates a full or ripened state; as such, it identifies anything that changes shape or color as it evolves into a full state of being. For example, ripened maize (skamon) is giziskamon (44). Thus, each term in this Agawam list signifies a time when specific flora, fauna, and other beings (including landscape features) are actively transitioning into a different, often more fruitful, state.
Pynchon’s list was created during a historical moment in time when the practice of maize horticulture was dramatically expanding and intensifying. His list could reflect the colonists’ need to understand the growing season for this new food, in order to more widely disseminate maize horticulture among the English plantations. It also may reflect the decision, by the Pocumtuck and other Native people, to begin cultivating and caching larger quantities of maize (45). This does not necessarily reflect desperation or dependence from the Indigenous perspective. Instead, the savvy manner in which the valley’s Native communities managed and manipulated their maize crops illustrates their sophisticated knowledge of local ecosystems, and the flexibility of Indigenous lifeways and marketing systems during the first few decades of European contact.
So, for example, the evidence of multiple storage pits at “Pine Hill” in Pocumtuck territory (present-day Deerfield) suggests that this was a seasonal site and storage location, but not a year-round horticultural village (46). The Pocumtuck, like the Nonotuck and other Native people in the region, kept small portable homes at multiple locations, while tapping into various food resources throughout the year. The shift to maize horticulture did not result in a transition to settled villages (as has long been theorized by archaeologists). Instead, maize horticulture overlapped and complemented long-standing patterns of dispersed settlement and seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering.
Among the English and Dutch colonial settlers, Indigenous foods, especially fish, wild game, and maize, quickly became staple foods. Maize, whether consumed locally or traded elsewhere, proved to be so crucial to the survival of the settlements that in 1637-38, the Hartford Court passed the following order, dictating that “Indian corne” could only be purchased by colony-appointed traders and representatives:
"Whereas vppon serious Consideraron wee conceiue that the plantacons in this River wil be in some want of Indian Corne, And on the same Consideraron wee conceiue if every man may be at liberty to trucke with the Indians vppon the River where the supply of Corne in all likeliwood is to bee had to furnish our necessities, the market of Corne among the Indians may be greatly advanced to the preiudice of these plantacons, wee therefore thinke meete and doe soe order that noe man in this River nor Agawam [Springfield] shall goe vpp River amonge the Indians or at home at theire houses to trade for Corne or make any Contract or bargaine amonge them." (Court at Hartford, February 9, 1637-38) (47)
"Whereas vppon serious Consideraron wee conceiue that the plantacons in this River wil be in some want of Indian Corne, And on the same Consideraron wee conceiue if every man may be at liberty to trucke with the Indians vppon the River where the supply of Corne in all likeliwood is to bee had to furnish our necessities, the market of Corne among the Indians may be greatly advanced to the preiudice of these plantacons, wee therefore thinke meete and doe soe order that noe man in this River nor Agawam [Springfield] shall goe vpp River amonge the Indians or at home at theire houses to trade for Corne or make any Contract or bargaine amonge them." (Court at Hartford, February 9, 1637-38) (47)
Interestingly, William Pynchon was one of the first colonial leaders to go against this order, in the wake of a devastating drought and crop failures in the Connecticut Colony. He sent negotiators upriver to Pocumtuck (present-day Deerfield), where he was able to purchase 500 bushels of corn at 5 shillings per bushel: “a fleet of fifty canoes, freighted with Indian corn, was on its way down the Connecticut, to relieve the impending famine in the [English] settlements below" (48)
In addition to maize horticulture, the settlers of Northampton adopted some of the Indigenous land-management practices that had created a very hospitable landscape.
"In Order to prevent the growth of underbrush, so that there might be no hindrance to the pursuit of game, the Indians were accustomed to burn the woods annually. It was done both in the spring and fall of the year.…So free were the forests of undergrowth during the sixty years following the first settlement of the town, that they were penetrable in every direction for horsemen. On this burned over land, the grass grew rapidly in the spring, where the trees were few, affording excellent pasturage." (James Russell Trumbull, 1898) (49) |
Colonists found these annual burns so useful that they not only embraced the custom, but also regulated it by scheduling the timing of these burns and forbidding indiscriminate burning of forested land.
Independent Free People
When reflecting back on colonial encounters, local historian Sylvester Judd suggested that, “the Indians upon the Connecticut River were very desirous that the English should settle among them,” (50) but this statement radically over-simplifies the situation. In 1631, the Podunk sachem Waghinnicut did, indeed, invite the English to set up a trading house 50 miles to the south of Nonotuck (below present-day Hartford, Connecticut) (51). The Agawam and other inland Native nations, who knew about Wampanoag encounters and alliances with English colonists in Plymouth Colony a decade earlier, felt it would be helpful to have small settlements of English as allies rather than potential enemies.
Native nations were interested in intercultural trade and diplomacy, but they also expressed a sense of independence and autonomy, and stood ready to resist colonial exertions of power as needed (52). The Nonotuck nation, in particular, was considered a force to be reckoned with. In 1648, William Pynchon cautioned John Winthrop:
"I grant they [the Indians] are all wthin ye line of yr pattent, but you cannot say that therefore they are yr subjects nor yet within yr jurisdiction untill they have fully subjected themselves to yr government (wch I know they have not) & untill you have bought their land: untill this be done they must be esteemed as an Independant free people, & so they of Naunotak do all account themselves, & doubtless wch ever goes with strength of men to disturb their peace at Naunotuk they will take it for no other than a hostile action…our place [Springfield] is more obnoxtious to their malice then the [Massachusetts] Bay [Boston] by farr…" (William Pynchon to John Winthrop, May 5, 1648) (53) |
The colonists were well aware of tensions between various Native nations that might interfere with the progress of colonial settlement. For example, during the 1650s, when hostilities between the Pocumtuck sachem Onapequin and the Mohegan sachem Uncas were threatening the safety of English colonists, the Massachusetts Bay and United Colonies Commissioners claimed a neutral stance, saying:
"We acknowledge the friendshipp of the Narragansitt, Pocunpticks, & Mowwakes [Mohawks] in many of the pticulars mentioned, which we haue ever answered wth like loue and friendhsipp, & haue never done them, or any of their people, any wrong or injury since or coming hither, & desire that loue [love] and peace may be contynued between vs & the succeeding generations." (Records of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, May 6, 1657) (54) |
Connecticut Captain John Mason, however, complained bitterly about Onapequin’s “shameful and intollerable abuse of our men at Pocomptuck, his barbarous plunderinge at Hockanoanco [Hoccanum], and his extreme pride and insolency at Tunxis” (55). Onapequin railed back about the unreliability of English envoys in a message to the United Colonies Commissioners
"…some of our men that are younge and follish [foolish] may haue done some pticulare wrong to the English; this should not breake the league betwixt vs and the English seeing wee doe not countenance our men for soe doeing…[but] it is usuall for the English to speake much to us that come though they understand little…wee desire that if any Messengers bee sent to us from the English they may bee such as are not lyares [liars] and tale carryers, but sober men, and such as we can understand." (Onapequin, September 14, 1659) (56) |
The documentation of this verbal tête-a-tête, and the means of delivery, suggest that Onapequin must have considered translator Thomas Stanton a rare example of a trustworthy Englishman when he asked him to send this message.
It should be noted that Native families and individuals were often quite well known to their colonial settler neighbors. Hundreds of local Native personal names were documented in the Massachusetts Bay, United Colonies, Connecticut Colony, and New York Colony papers. The sheer volume of personal names in these records proves that Native people in this region were not nameless and faceless “others.” For example, more than 300 Native names were recorded in account books, deeds, and court records from Northampton and Springfield. The Nonotuck names include the following:
Asselaquompas, Awanunsk, Chabatan, Chamcheak, Chickwalloppe (alias Wawhillowa), Kiunks, Lankameckew, Maqualos, Mahweness, Majesset, Mamaquep, Memewanks, Memewatts (alias Momehouse), Momonhewi, Mattabauge, Nattawa, Nassicohee, Neneessahalant, Nippunsuit, Nucowes, Paquahalant, Pocumohouse, Pemequansett (alias Umpanchela), Quequehat, Quonquont (alias Wompshaw), Secousk, Sopas, Squiskehegan, Squompe, Tackquelluwant, Umpanchela (alias Womscom), Umpatakesuk, Wampicoole, Wequagon (alias Wulletherna), Wenepuck, Wenawin, Wequamenko, Wequanock, Wettalosin, Woushshads, and Wuttawen. (57)
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Note that some Native names appear with “aliases.” Native individuals often acquired several different names over the course of their lifetime to reflect personal characteristics, kin relations, significant events, or political roles (58).
The names of prominent sachems and sunksquas tend to appear in colonial records more than other individuals, in part because they were solicited to enter into diplomatic negotiations, with or without the consent of their tribal communities. Tribal leaders were also expected to answer for trespasses of English laws, even those committed by strangers. For example, in 1667, Chickwalloppe was chosen as the lead sachem at Nonotuck, at the insistence of Northampton’s colonial leaders who dictated that:
“…some principal Indian be appointed and declared to be the Sachem of them, to whom the English can report when wrongs are done by Indians expecting from such chief the delivery into the hands of the English Justice the Indians that have injured the English; if the wrong is proved, & no reparation made nor Indian given up the sachem to be proceeded against in a court of law as being liable to answer for the injury.…In case the Indians do not agree…the court may appoint and declare some meet men to be their chief or Sachem.” (Records of the Hampshire County Court, October 1667) (59) |
Chickwalloppe was henceforth expected to monitor all Native people passing through the region; if they broke any English laws, he was expected to “produce the prty and delivr him or his goodes into the Custody of the English” (60). English magistrates interpreted this as license to arrest any Native person they could get their hands on, and to levy fines against local Native people that far exceeded the damages.
Colonial laws were routinely deployed to suit colonial needs, but in some cases, tribal leaders took their complaints to colonial courts. In one Agawam case, the General Court at Boston heard:
“…a Petition to consider of the complaynts of the Indians of Springfeild agt [against] Samll Marshfeild who hath gotten the lands of the Indians into his hands by virtue of a deed of mortgage from ye Indians whereby they are impovished [impoverished] haveing little or nothing left to plant but are constrayned to hire of ye English… (Springfield County Court, September 1665) (61). |
Samuel Marshfield was advised, by the Court, “to allow the said Indians some of the Land” in dispute, in an effort to restore peaceful relations and avoid further trouble over the matter
Trading in Furs
Colonial settlement and the acquisition of tribal land proceeded hand in hand with the fur trade. William Pynchon began by establishing truck houses (trading posts) that encouraged peaceful exchanges of goods between Native and English trading partners. In the 1650s, his son John Pynchon secured a license from Massachusetts Bay Colony to control all trade with Native people in Agawam and Nonotuck territory; he then licensed several sub-traders to work in Northampton and Hadley, including Joseph Parsons, Zachariah Field, Benjamin Waite, David Wilton, and John Westcarr (62).
Intercultural trade was not new; northeastern Native people had long been engaged in Indigenous exchange networks that accommodated influxes of new goods from a far distance, such as maize from the southwest and chert from the Hudson River Valley. From the 1630s to the 1650s, as shown in the surviving Pynchon account books, the trade relations were useful to all parties. Native people traded maize, furs, baskets, and wampum for cloth, ready-made clothes, iron tools, copper kettles, and other European goods. Copper kettles served more than just utilitarian purposes; they were also cut up to shape into jewelery, ornaments, and arrow points (63).
The most desirable trade item, in terms of sheer volume, was cloth. In 1656 alone, one of Pynchon’s sub-traders, Thomas Cooper of Springfield, purchased 1,717 yards of blue wool “trading cloth,” 744 yards of red wool cloth, and varying amounts of napped cotton, serge, kersey, and broadcloth in red, gray, white, and blue colors, all for resale to Native traders. Native people also traded furs for ready-made English-style shirts, coats, waistcoats, breeches, and stockings, in addition to knives, scissors, needles, pins, thread, and more (64).
Although colonists had been forbidden to sell firearms to Native people in the past, new colony regulations permitted their sale “to any Indians who were friendly to the English” (65). Some traders also provided alcohol, despite colonial prohibitions about supplying it to Native people. In 1671, for example, Samuel Fellows and Joseph Leonard were fined more than 100 pounds for “Selling of Strong liquors to the Indians and for buying Beaver of the Indians without license” (66).
The primary Native resource that fed the fur trade was beaver, in high demand in Europe. The most desirable pelts were those that had already been used for cloaks or bedding; once the long guard hairs were broken off, the leather was softer, and it was easier to process the fur into felt for hat-making. In 1632, English merchant Francis Kirby explained this to John Winthrop Jr. in Plymouth Colony:
“Note that there is great difference in beaver…for some is very thick of leather and thin of wool, which is best discerned by laying your fingers on the middle or back of the skin… Also note that the old [Indian] coats are better by a third than new skins are, partly for that they generally dress the best skins for that purpose, partly for that the leather is thinner and so consequently lighter by dressing, and partly for that the coarse hair is part worn off from the wool.” (Francis Kirby, 1632) (67) |
At the height of this trade, between 1653 and 1670, John Pynchon was exporting up to 3,700 pounds of beaver (approximately 2,600 pelts) per year. Two of his sub-traders, David Wilton and Joseph Parsons of Northampton, were particularly successful, securing over 2,000 pounds of furs each in their trading with Native hunters (68). Pynchon’s purchases, however, pale in comparison to the more than 40,900 beaver and otter pelts shipped by the Dutch from Fort Orange (now Albany, NY) to the Netherlands in 1657 (69).
The over-harvesting of beaver, along with the widespread introduction of European livestock and crops, had ecologic as well as economic consequences. As Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks notes:
“The loss of the local beaver populations resulted in the draining of ponds, which created more meadows for cattle but also resulted in a loss of medicinal and edible plants. Freely roaming cattle also posed a threat to the remaining Native planting fields, and the seeds cattle deposited transformed diverse wetlands to English-style meadows. Mills built on rivers, particularly at falls, affected the spring fish runs, making both access and subsistence fishing more challenging.” (Lisa Brooks, 2022) (70) |
During this era, marine resources were also being heavily tapped, not only through overfishing, but through the heavy use of wampum (marine shell beads) as a valuable trading commodity.
Trading with Wampum
The Algonquian term wampum, deriving from wampumpeag (meaning “white shell beads”) (71), is commonly used to describe shell beads used by Algonkian and Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian) people as both personal adornment and ritual objects. White beads were traditionally carved from the central spiral columns of young whelk (Busycon canaliculatum and Busycon carica); purple beads were carved from the hinges of mature hard-shell clams or quahogs (Mercenaria mercenaria or Venus mercenaria). These mollusks, which require both fresh and salt water to thrive, once grew in abundance at the mouths of tidal rivers along Long Island Sound. Shell middens with dense evidence of wampum-making can be found in Mohegan, Pequot, Montauk, Niantic, Narragansett, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag territories in southern New England (72).
Long before European contact, Native artisans perfected the art of drilling shell beads using bow drills with stone bits; during the 1500s, they adapted iron from European trade goods (awls and nails) to make sharper and narrower drill bits (73). This resulted in more uniformly shaped cylindrical beads, which were then woven into collars and belts to be utilized for negotiating, recording, and enacting specific inter-tribal alliances. Wampum belts functioned as ritual partners by preserving memories of crucial relations and agreements (74). The political practice of wampum ceremonialism was so effective that, by the late 1600s, it was adopted by Native and European nations alike for inter-cultural diplomacy (75). But during the early 1600s, wampum’s primary value to colonial settlers and traders was monetary.
In 1640, Massachusetts Bay Colony had established the use of wampum beads as legal tender, due in part to a shortage of English coin (76). The values of furs and other commodities were calculated in fathoms (six-foot-long strands, roughly 240 beads, worth about 5 shillings) and hands (four-inch strings, roughly 24 beads, worth about 6 pence), rather than in pounds, shillings, and pence. John Pynchon purchased wampum beads in bulk from coastal Native nations and hired Northampton settlers—including Henry Burt, Benejah Smith, Joseph Stebbins, and Josias—to string loose beads into fathoms and strands. Between 1646 and 1649, these men “strung 1,755 fathoms of wampum…At 240 beads per fathom, this translates to 421,200 beads of wampum…roughly equivalent to £88.12.00.” (77)
The notion of monetary debt was unfamiliar to Native people; things were routinely traded, but were not “bought” and “sold,” per se. Material goods and gifts circulated in varying quantities with varying values in reciprocal exchanges that were marked and reinforced by kinship relations. Some of the Native people who traded with the Pynchons readily pawned guns, baskets, and other personal possessions in exchange for trade goods or wampum, with the understanding that these objects would be reclaimed after furs were provided. Good exchanges ensured good relations. Yet, when the beaver population in the Northeast plummeted from over-hunting in all directions, Native hunters found themselves unable to pay their trading debts. Pynchon and his sub-traders, who had convinced many Native hunters to take goods on credit, calculated that ensnaring Native people in debt could serve as a means to acquire lan
Territorial Transactions
Over the course of several decades, the Pynchons and their agents negotiated a series of strategic deed transactions. The 1636 Agawam deed, the earliest land transaction in the Valley, was arranged by William Pynchon and signed by 13 Native people, including Commucke and Matanchan, “ancient Indians of Agaam,” and Cuttonas, “in the Name of his mother Kewenusk the Tamasham or wife of Wenawis, & Niarum the wife of Coa” (78). The Native signatories received 18 fathoms of wampum, 18 coats, 18 hatchets, 18 hoes, and 18 knives (79). This document explicitly reserved traditional hunting, harvesting, and planting rights, noting that Native people retained “liberty to take Fish & Deer, ground nuts, walnuts akornes & sasachiminesh or a kind of pease,” and also indicated that damages would be due if English hogs or cattle disturbed Native crops (80). In a later transaction, the English also agreed to construct a palisaded fort on the site for Native residents (81).
When these and other “Indian deeds” were transacted, Native leaders clearly attempted to preserve, in written words, Indigenous cartographies while outlining the complex kin relations that preserved hereditary rights. Since Native women often assumed responsibility for planting fields, they were listed on many Indian deeds either in their own right (Awanunsk on the 1653 Northampton deed), or in absentia (Cuttonas in the name of his mother Kewenusk on the 1636 Agawam deed). These documents, which were negotiated in person and confirmed by the mutual exchange of gifts, often explicitly reserved Native rights to hunt, fish, plant corn, set up wigwams, etc. on land that was supposedly “sold.
The textual evidence suggests that these documents should more appropriately be read from an Indigenous perspective as joint-use agreements rather than quit-claims, given longstanding Native traditions of “usufruct rights to shared resources” (82). Native leaders likely assumed that English plantations would be limited to small locations beside the rivers, avoiding interference with broader homelands. The large quantities of wampum and sundry items involved may well have been understood by Native leaders to constitute tributary gifts, rather than monetary payments
That being said, one cannot assume that these documents were accurately written, or that each place name in a colonial document reflects a single tribal group, or even that the Native signatories held any inherent right to alienate the lands circumscribed in the deed. Since the Pynchons were not fully fluent in any Algonquian language, they used interpreters when they negotiated deeds, but it’s unclear who these interpreters were beholden to. Some witnesses held proprietary interests in the lands sold, but others were translators from elsewhere, invited in to assist in interpreting agreements and recording topography.
In 1652, the General Court of Massachusetts had ruled that Native people held inalienable rights to any lands they had improved through planting, and that the English courts would protect those rights:
“And further, itt is ordered by the Courte, that if any plantation or person of the English shall offer injuriously to put any of the Indeans from theire planting grounds or fishing places, uppon their complaint and proofe thereof, they shall have releife in any of the Courts of justice among the English, as the English have.” (Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England 1652) (83) |
Yet, in practice, English colonists were keen to reduce the boundaries of Native occupation from free-ranging movements across vast homelands down to small, fixed village sites.
In Northampton, as in other Northeastern locales, the English proprietors claimed Native lands as part of a patent granted by the English king even before any deeds were negotiated. In May of 1653, John Pynchon, in company with Eleazar Holyoke and Samuel Chapin, “craved liberty & authority to erect a new plantation and township at Norwottuck,” which they also called “Naotucke Plantation”:
“To the honorable General Court of the Massachusetts; Wee whose names are underwritten being appointed to divide the lands at Naotucke into two plantations…viz, from the little meadow above their plantation, which meadow is called called Capawonke or Mattaomett downe to the head of the Falls which are below them, reserving the land on the east side of the said river for another Plantation, when God by his Providence shall so dispose thereof, and still remayne.” (Records of the Hampshire County Court, October 1667) (84) |
Four months later, the first deed for Northampton was negotiated on September 24, 1653, with a group of seven Nonotuck signatories, including Chickwalloppe, Neneessahalant, Nassicohee, Kiunks, Paquahalant, Assellaquompas, and Awonunsk. They agreed to accept 100 fathoms of wampum and 10 wool coats in exchange for English use of a parcel of land on the west side of the Kwinitekw (here spelled Quinnetticot) extending nine miles to the west:
“…on the west side of the Quinnetticot River at Nanotuck…from ye small river below Minhan called Saukwonk…to ye little meddow called Capawonk…to ye little brook called Masquomp & all the grounds lying Westward…for nine miles out into the woods…Provided the said Pynchon shall plow up or cause to be plowed up for the Indians Sixteene acres of land on ye East side of Quinotticott River.” (Hampden County Records Liber A; Folio 15) (85) |
This particular deed was also signed by two Native people from downriver: “Wutshamin a chiefe man of Nammeleck [near Hartford, Connecticut] who helped make the bargayne” and “Skittomp alias Unkquask of Chicuppe” [Chicopee] (86). This deed controlled some of the key access points to the Kwinitekw, which may explain why sachems from two key down-river locales—the falls at Chicopee and the trading post at Hartford—would have an interest.
It was difficult, however, “to reconcile the reality of collective ownership” by the entire Native community “with the need to create a legal fiction of individual ownership” (87). English land brokers routinely finessed that issue by recording Native signatories as “owners” of tribal land, and by interpreting shared use agreements as legal “quit-claims.”
In 1660, the Nonotuck sachem Umpanchela was compelled to part with two tracts of river land at Nattacous and Wequittayyag [in present-day Hatfield] (88) in order to pay off a debt to John Pynchon that included a fine of two fathoms of wampum for being drunk. Pynchon was well aware of the fact that the beaver had been depleted, and had noted in his account book just before Umpanchela left on a hunting trip, after three months of purchasing coats, cloth, knives, wampum, and a gun on credit:
“Decembr 17, 1660. Umpancheel desired to be trusted as followeeth for wch he Pawns all his land in Wequittayagg all ye corne fields & what ever he reserved is now mortgaged for…If I am not p[ai]d in Bever when he comes from Heakeg [Squakheag, Sokoki hunting territory] all his land is to be mine.” (John Pynchon Daybook, 1660 (89) |
Even after this sale, however, Umpanchela and his kin continued living in a section called “Indian Hollow,” asserting their rights under Colony laws that dictated “that the English shall keep their cattle from destroying the Indian’s corn in any ground where they have right to plant.” The town of Hadley also agreed to fence and plow this plot of land, and ensured that if any damage was done to Native crops, “the town shall make satisfaction” (90)
In another case, the Pocumtuck sunksqua Mashalisk was forced to sign away two parcels to pay off debts incurred by herself and her son Wuttawoluncksin, who had incurred a fine of 24 fathoms of wampum for “breaking the glass windows of Capt. Pynchon farmehouse” (91). The deed noted:
“…ye Southerly side of Pacomtuck River & so lying all along by Quinetticot River side downe to ye Lower Pointe of ye Hill called Wequomps…ffor & in Consideration of a debt of ten large Bevers & other debts of Wuttawoluncksin her son wch shee acknowledges her self engaged for ye Payment off to John Pynchon aforesd: for the said Just and due Debts & moreover for & in consideration of sixty fada of wampum. 2. cotes some cotton & Severall other small things all wch ye sd Mashalisk acknowledge to have Recd…” (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Collections) (92) |
In 1663, Chickwallope, Umpanchela, and Quonquont signed for lands encompassing present-day Hadley and parts of Amherst, Belchertown, Pelham, and Shutesbury, and extending nine miles to the east, in exchange for 220 fathoms of wampum (93). This deed explicitly reserved use rights for the lands sold, and suggested the hope of neighborly relations:
“…ye Indians aforenamed & in Particular Quonquont Doth reserve & keep one corne field…And alsoe they reserve libertie to Hunt Deare, fowle &tc And to take fish, Beaver or Otter &tc…The Indians desired they might set their Wiggwoms at sometimes wth in ye tract of ground they sold withoute offence & that the English would be kinde & neighborlie to ym in not Prohibiting ym firewood out of ye Woods &c which was promised ym.” (Hampden County Records Liber A; Folio 11) (94) |
For a few decades, these deeds functioned as social contacts that ensured peaceful coexistence. Yet, it’s doubtful whether Native and English signatories fully grasped each others’ expectations. Territorial markers and boundaries had been carefully denoted and new “owners” assigned, but the language of these deeds preserved agreements that appeared to support continued Indigenous presence. The Nonotuck likely interpreted English agreements (in some deeds) to plow land for Native cornfields as a natural part of a joint-use agreement, since they never intended to actually vacate the premises.
It is important to note that, although Native lands near the rivers appear to have been “sold” in many Valley deeds, these documents were somewhat sketchy about other boundaries, which seemed to extend no more than nine miles east or west of the Connecticut River. The best salmon and shad fishing falls at Holyoke, Peskeompskut (Turners Falls), and Shelburne Falls, which were considered to be shared Native fishing sites, were never circumscribed by any deed (95).
Fort Hills
As English settlements expanded, Native people began constructing fortified locales for caching supplies and conducting diplomacy. In 1634, William Bradford reported on a Woronoco fort (in present-day Westfield) where “About a thousand of them had enclosed themselves in a fort which they had strongly palisadoed about” (96). Native forts were also constructed by the Agawam, Nonotuck, Quaboag, Pocumtuck, and Sokoki communities. These forts were not “villages,” per se; they were smallish sites surrounded by wooden palisades, typically situated atop an elevated bluff, near a water source, in the midst of a landscape that included numerous homesites outside of the fort (97). The movements of Native families among and between these forts caused considerable confusion among colonial observers (and later historians) who expected Native peoples to remain in relatively fixed locations.
The Nonotuck constructed several elevated forts during the mid-1600s: at Fort Plain on a high bank above the Manhan River in present-day Easthampton; at another site also named Fort Plain on a high bank of the Connecticut River above Northampton, opposite the northwest corner of Hadley Great Meadow, near Half-way Brook; and on the west side of Lawrence’s Plain atop a steep bank at the east boundary of Fort Meadows Skirts and Fort River Valley (98).
In 1664, the Nonotuck community petitioned the town meeting of Northampton for permission to build a fort close by the fledgling town. This fortified site was constructed within the town boundaries, across the Mill River from the center of town, near the street now named “Fort Hill” just off South Street. The Nonotuck people residing at the fort were, however, compelled to comply with a list of conditions imposed by the town that included the following restrictions:
“1. ffirst they shall not break the Saboath by workeing or gameing or caring [carrying] burdens or ye like. 2. They shall not pawway [powwow] on that place or any wher els amogst [amongst] us. 3. They shall not gett liquoer or Sider [hard cider] and drinke themselues drunk and soe kill one an other as they haue donn [have done]. 4. They shall not take in other Indians of other places to seat amogst them, wee alow only Nowutague Indians yt were the Inhabytants of the place 5. They shall not breake downe or fences and let in Cattle and Swine but shall goe over a stile at one place. 6. The Murd’ers Callawane and Wurtowhan and Pacquallunt shall not seate Amongst them. 7. They shall not hunt nor kill or [our] Cattle or Sheepe or Swine wth ther doggs if they doe they shall pay for them.” (Town of Northampton Records, 1664) (99) |
These restrictions, in effect, made it impossible for Native people to play games, host relatives, conduct diplomatic councils, or gather for religious ceremonies. Chickwalloppe, who was appointed as the chief sachem in dealing with both the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies in 1667, nonetheless tried to make diplomatic accommodations. These accomodations were short-lived; by 1670, the town Selectmen were demanding that Nonotuck people vacate the fort (100).
Native people were often held to a much higher standard of conduct than their English neighbors, and English “justice” was unpredictable. Those Native people who lived close by English settlements were routinely hauled into colonial courts to answer for charges of theft, trespass, property destruction, assault, damages, and other crimes, whether or not they were guilty. Native defendants who lost their cases were often forced into debt or involuntary servitude (101).
Natives were also routinely fined for being drunk, even though colonial prohibitions forbade selling them alcohol. In several notable cases, Nonotuck people brought their complaints to the colonial court. In 1669, Wequanunco testified in the Northampton court against trader Benjamin Waite of Hatfield, who was on trial for selling liquor to Native people in violation of colony laws. When Waite denied the charges, Wequanunco said, “Why should I an old man lie? That [which] I say is true, and says my wife knows it.” His wife agreed, and acknowledged that she had also purchased several quarts of liquor from Waite (102).
In July 1670, Wequanunco was also among a group of Nonotuck men who reported on the wrongdoings of Dr. John Westcarr of Hadley. During Westcarr’s trial in Springfield, Nuxco testified: “I fetched liquors from John Westcarr when the Indians were drunken, and my wigwam was broken and spoiled by the drunken Indians this summer. I was before the Northampton Commissioners about it.” He also testified that the cost of liquor was two fathoms of wampum per quart. Tackquellawant stated that he bought four quarts of liquor from Westcarr, paying with a beaver skin. Chabattan backed up Tackquellawant’s claim, testifying “I was with him and saw it, and saw him pay a beaver skin for it.” Mattawan testified that Westcarr stole his gun as retribution for informing the Northampton Commissioners. Mattawan’s father, Squiskhegan, said that Westcarr had lied to colonial authorities. Wamequam backed up the statements made by others. Westcarr was tried, not only for selling liquor, but also for threatening the Native people who informed on him; he was found guilty of selling at least 10 quarts, and fined £40 (103).
In 1672, relations with Chickwalloppe and the rest of the Nonotuck community broke down entirely when John Pynchon interceded in a case that involved the sachem’s only son, who had been captured by Captain Salisbury in Albany, and charged with murder. In a letter to John Winthrop Jr., Pynchon noted that “Our Indians much desire the younger fellow…may be spared; one being enough to die for one,” but he nonethess believed that both men should be executed (104). He insisted that any “murder done by the Indians on English or Dutch might not escape unpunished, whereby they might be hardened in such villainy,” and sent money to Albany to fund the subsequent prosecution and hanging (105).
In the spring of 1674, John Pynchon reported that Native people had started leaving the Valley en masse, writing: “Our Indians at Woronoco and Pojassick are generally all of them removed to Albany; what the matter is they make so universal and general a move I know not” (106). This move was provoked, in part, by English settlers from Connecticut who were then forcing their way into Woronoco territory. During the following spring, rumors of war started to circulate (107).
King Philip’s War
By 1675, relations between Native nations and colonial settlers in the New England colonies had become increasingly strained. The Wampanoag sachem Metacom (son of the sachem Massasoit, who had allied with Plymouth Colony in the 1620s), known to the English as “King Philip,” complained that Native people, having given the colonists corn and land enough to live on, “had been the first in doing good to the English, and the English the first in doing wrong” (108). Shortly after Metacom’s brother died mysteriously, three Wampanoag men were hung by the English for the murder of John Sassamon. These tipping points led to a rebellion that quickly spread across the region. Metacom blamed the English for provoking this war by pressuring Native people to sell land, cheating them in bargains, crowding them out of their traditional territories, failing to honor agreements, and tricking them into drunkenness (109). Pynchon endeavored to secure neutrality from local Indians, but he and his sub-traders also bore some responsibility for this chaos, given their duplicity in land deals and meddling in the increasing inter-tribal and inter-cultural tensions.
In July and August, several Nonotuck men joined Metacom’s company in attacking the towns of Mendon, Brookfield, and Quaboag, but some Valley Natives tried to remain neutral. Agawam men promised to inform Pynchon if Metacom’s forces approached the region. One unnamed Nonotuck woman warned the Wright family that an attack on Hadley was imminent (110). In late August, Captain Lathrop decided to disarm the Nonotuck people living at Fort Plain, but they found the fort abandoned. On September 18, 1675, the Pocumtuck sachem Sancumachu headed up a 700-man-strong war party (Pocumtuck, Nonotuck, Woronoco, and others) in the ambush of Captain Thomas Lathrop’s Deerfield militia and teamsters at what came to be called “Bloody Brook” in Deerfield (111). Soon, Northfield, Springfield, Hatfield, and dozens of other towns across the colonies were also under attack.
This conflict was complicated by the presence of Native warriors on both sides. During the winter of 1675, Metacom brought his company to the Hoosic River to construct a winter camp, but they were driven out by Kanienkehake Mohawk, who took a number of prisoners (112). John Pynchon later praised the neutrality of the Hudson River Mohican, who refused to engage in the fighting (113). At another turn, Major John Talcott’s company of 250 English was assisted by 200 Mohegan allies in routing 500 Native warriors gathered at Pocumtuck (114).
As the fighting intensified in southern New England, Native noncombatants from Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett communities sought places of refuge. In February 1676, a group led by the Pocasset Wampanoag Sunksqua Weetamoo and her husband Quinnapin carried English captives with them as they traveled from Menimessit to Sokwakik to meet up with Metacom’s company. Mary Rowlandson, one of the captives, reported seeing an encampment of more than 3,000 Native people, “a great Indian town…the Indians were as thick as trees” (115). Later that spring, many Native people moved to Peskeompskut, an ancient fishing site on the Kwinitekw, to partake of the annual shad and salmon migrations. This place of refuge became a site of tragedy on May 19, when roughly 300 Native women, children, and elderly people were surprised and slaughtered by Captain William Turner’s company of volunteers from the town of Northampton at the “Falls Fight.” Roughly 40 of the English force, including Turner, were killed during the retreat (116).
In mid August of 1676, Menowniett (Mohegan/Narragansett), who was captured at Farmington, Connecticut, reported to John Allyn that he had participated in a number of battles during King Philip’s War—at Pocumtuck, at Northampton, and at the Falls Fight. He reported on the subsequent whereabouts of Agawam, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuck refugees:
“He sayeth that the Norwottach, Springfield Indians, and others are gon to a place about Hudson’s River called Paquayag…He was askt where they had ye ammunition to carry on the war; he said the Powquiag Indians bought it of ye Dutch and sold it ym. He was askt how many of the North Indians [Sokoki] went that way. He sayth, ‘About 90 men of them and Sucquance [Soquans] is wth them…He sayth ye Indians hid a great many gunns about Pacompuck [Pocumtuck].” (Menowniett, August 1676) (117) |
Pynchon immediately relayed this information to Governor John Leverett, noting, “we know not on what design the Indians are drawn off thither; we have no security that it is to withdraw from further persecution of the war (118).
Over the course of the war, the bloodiest conflict per capita in American history, 52 English towns in Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut colonies were attacked. More than 2,500 colonists were killed, roughly 30% of the population. Native casualties, including many noncombatants, numbered at least 5,000 (119). These hostilities resulted in the temporary abandonment of both Native and English communities across central and southern New England.
In August of 1676, Metacom’s death in Rhode Island effectively ended the war. In the war’s aftermath (as had happened after the Pequot War), several hundred Native captives taken by the English (both warriors and noncombatants) were sold into slavery (120). Large numbers of Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag people returned to their original homelands in eastern and southern New England, but most of the Native families in the Connecticut River Valley chose to relocate elsewhere.
The extant colonial records between the 1670s and the 1760s reflect considerable confusion about tribal alliances, movements, and identities, given the European predilection for attempting to equate Native tribal identity with a specific fixed place of residence. There were far fewer mentions of Native individuals and families by name, in part because regional historians focused so intently on recounting battles, marking sites of conflict, and listing English conquests and casualties.
Schaghticoke
In 1676, Governor Andros of New York invited Connecticut River Indians to settle at a new refugee settlement named Scaticook or Schaghticoke, near the Hoosic and Hudson Rivers, roughly 20 miles northeast of Albany. Some historians have confused this location with the Schaghticoke tribal nation on the lower Housatonic River, but these were separate villages with separate identities and populations. They share the place-name Schaghticoke, which derives from the Algonquian locative word pishgachtigok, indicating a site at the confluence of two rivers, or a place where a single river divides (121). Andros announced that “all Indyans, who will come in & submitt, shall be received to live under the protection of the Government” and “without Molestation”; this offer was both humanitarian and strategic, since Andros hoped to create a buffer against Abenaki attacks from the north (122). In the suceeding decades, a number of Pocumtuck, Nonotuck, Woronoco, Sokoki, and others moved back and forth between the Connecticut River, Schaghticoke, and New France/Canada (123).
English colonists in the Valley became increasingly suspicious of Native people in the years after King Philip’s War. During the 1690s, Pynchon began arguing that all Indians living north of Springfield, Massachusetts, should be considered hostiles. When requesting military assistance from London, he portrayed the valley’s Native communities as “thieves and murderers,” claiming:
“If at any time they have given assistance to us, and been instrumental to destroy our enemies, it had not been out of any principle of friendship or obedience, for at other times they have been ready to assist our adversaries and destroy us…sometimes they dwell at Stratburk [Schaghticoke], sometimes at the eastward and make marriages with the Eastern Indians [Nipmuc, Pennacook, etc.], and sometimes at Canada [Saint Francis Abenaki, Kahnawake Mohawk, etc.], and live like beasts and birds of prey upon the destruction of others.” (John Pynchon, July 6, 1698) (124) |
Native movements and motivations were rarely as sinister as Pynchon suggests, but diplomatic relations with English colonists had clearly broken down. From the Nonotuck perspective, inter-tribal and inter-cultural strategies and alliances had been in a state of constant renegotiation since the colonists arrived. Despite entreaties of peace, productive trade, and agreements to share territory, the English colonists had proved to be duplicitous neighbors. Pynchon had signed numerous deeds that explicitly promised continued subsistence and settlement rights for Native people, but it was clear that they could exercise those rights only at their peril.
In 1691, Pynchon seemed to have been caught by surprise by the return of a large group of Pocumtuck people carrying passes of safe conduct from the Mayor of Albany. Samuel Partridge reported:
“…the Indians that are come down are about 150 of them, men, women, and children, and are settled at Deerfield under the side of the mountain southerly from the town, living in the woods about a mile out of the town, the men plying hunting and leaving their women and children at home.” (Samuel Partridge, December 2, 1691) (125) |
Pynchon wrote a set of directions for Partridge to deliver to the Pocumtuck, including the following:
“Although you ought to have made applications to us to have had liberty to sit down in our town, yet having passes from the Mayor of Albany for hunting, etc., we shall for the present overlook your seeming intruding upon us, and allow your abiding where you are this winter time, you behaving yourselves peaceably and orderly and carrying it well to all our people…We do particularly caution you to beware of strong drink…We let you know that we are now apprehensive of some approach of the French and Indian enemy and therefore intend to keep out scouts, and to have more strict watch, and shortly to settle some more soldiers at Deerfield, wherefore none of you (who account yourselves our friends…are to go or wander from your present stations without order in writing from some one of the captains…and not above five in a company when you go out a-hunting…” (John Pynchon, January 16, 1691) (126) |
The Pocumtuck, who apparently hoped for a more welcoming response, replied to Captain Partridge that, “They intend no ill to the English but to carry it peaceably,” and further asked Pynchon to ensure that their women and children would be safe under English protection while the men were away hunting. They also promised to warn the colonists of “any approaching enemy” (127). Yet, by spring, this Pocumtuck group returned to Albany, realizing it was unsafe to stay.
Violent Encounters and Harsh “Justice”
For Native people who remained in the Valley, when conflicts erupted, English “justice” was harsh. As a case in point, in October of 1696, four Nonotuck men—Pemaquansett (a relative of the Nonotuck sachem Umpanchela), Wenepuck, Mahqualos, and Mahweness, who were then living in Hatfield—were out hunting near Mount Warner when, according to colonial reports, they discovered Richard Church of Hadley, hunting in what they still considered Indian land. An altercation ensued, and Church was killed, with a gunshot to the head and an arrow to the body (128). Forty colonists from Northampton and Hadley, accompanied by nine Nipmuc men, searched and found Church’s body, and then followed tracks until they came across the four Native men, walking through the woods near Mount Toby, nine miles north of Hadley. The search party took Pemequansett captive, and shot and wounded Mahweness, who escaped with Wenepuck and Mahqualos. When the three came into Hatfield on their own, they were arrested.
All four Native men denied their guilt during initial questioning. The youngest, 18-year-old Pemequansett, was ordered to go with several English men to the place where Church’s body was found. According to the court records, he confessed that he and Wenepuck saw Mahweness and Mahqualos shoot the man. Mahqualos and Wenepuck were then taken to the same place, where they identified the same trees and blamed Mahweness. Mahweness, in his turn, blamed Mahqualos (129).
On October 21, 1696, a special court session of Oyer and Terminer was held in Northampton. The members of the Native community living near Hatfield (about 50 men, women, and children) were disarmed and brought to Northampton, where they were required to attend the proceedings. Mahqualos and Mahweness were tried by four magistrates, two ministers, and a jury of 12 English men, found guilty, and publicly executed by gunshot on October 23, 1696 (130). They were the first people executed by an English court in western Massachusetts. Pemequansett and Wenepuck were tried separately as accessories. Since Partridge testified —“They had no hand in the murder—were in no plot to murder & knew not till it was done”—they were turned over to the Sheriff and jailed (131).
In the wake of these executions, the Native refugees living in Schaghticoke, New York, protested. The sachem Soquons wrote to New York Governor Benjamin Fletcher, stating that all four men were innocent (132). Fletcher was told that the English search party had lost track of the actual culprits, misidentified the suspects, and then tortured and whipped the men to extract confessions from them (133). In an April 5, 1697, letter to Massachusetts Lieutenant-Colonel Governor William Stoughton, Fletcher further stated that another Native man had tracked and killed the murderer. He wrote that:
“English & Indians followed the track, found the buttons by way of the coat of the murdered man [Church]; & overtook an Onogungo [Abenaki] (134) Indian who confessed the murder, & that the Indian before him had the [Abenaki] man’s clothes, gun, & scalp, which Indian the party knocked on the head.” (Benjamin Fletcher, April 5, 1697) (135) |
Stoughton was skeptical; he suggested that perhaps the Nipmuc scouts in the search party were making excuses for their Nonotuck friends. Fletcher insisted that he had eyewitness testimony, which “proves the innocence of the executed Indians.” He pressed for the release of Pemaquansett and Wenepeck, since they, and the entire community, “have promised to be quiet & do no wrong” (136).
After the trials and executions, Church’s murder was used as an excuse to push for the removal of the Hatfield Nonotuck community. Governor Stoughton wrote, on May 17, 1697, that he “Thinks the River Indians ought not to complain any longer about execution of the two—says many of these Indians are our former enemies and owe us a grudge” (137). Shortly thereafter, Samuel Partridge proposed that the Hatfield Natives be “removed, to Albany or elsewhere.” He also reported that one of the Nipmuc Indians, Peter Aspinal, had recovered the community’s firearms from the Sheriff’s possession and, while he was at it, helped Pemaquansett and Wenepeck escape, and led them to safety at Schaghticoke (138).
These events only led to more distrust. Making matters worse, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a declaration offering bounties to white soldiers and volunteers “for every Indian, great or small [man, woman, or child], which they shall kill, or take and bring in prisoner, the sum of fifty pounds per head; and shall likewise have and keep to their own use all plunder” (139). The scalp bounties were periodically renewed, and by 1704, had been adjusted to 100 pounds for Native “men or youths capable of bearing arms,” and ten pounds for a woman or child above ten years of age; there was no payment for children under ten years old—they could be claimed as prisoners to keep, sell, or transport (140). The high bounties being paid for Native scalps provided a strong incentive for English colonists to hunt down Native families. As just one of many examples, Caleb Lyman of Northampton, Massachusetts, inspired by the scalp bounties, joined in an ambush and scalped seven members of an Abenaki family in their wigwam at Coos on the Connecticut River (141).
Historical Relocations: A Matter of Life or Death
In effect, any Native person living within five miles east or west of the Connecticut River could be considered a hostile enemy combatant (142). And so, as a life-or-death choice, Native inhabitants were forced to leave. Some went northward to Sokoki and Pennacook territory in present-day Vermont and New Hampshire, or farther north to the Saint Francis Abenaki village of Odanak near the Saint Lawrence, to live under the protection of New France. Many went west, and over time, the refugee settlement at Schaghticoke absorbed more than 2,000 Native people from the Connecticut River Valley. Schaghticoke became, not just a place of refuge, but an important center of resistance, where displaced Native peoples could find mutual support and build new kinship relations.
The Albany Commissioners tried to convince more Native people to move to Schaghticoke, in hopes of securing a tighter alliance with the Kanienkehaka Mohawk and Mohican, while breaking the deepening alliance between northern Native peoples and the French. In 1685, the Quaboag sachem Sadochques was invited to leave Saint Francis to live at Schaghticoke. During a meeting at the Albany Court House, many beaver skins and wampum were exchanged, indicating the seriousness of these negotiations. Sadochques recognized both the fragility and possibility of peace with the Kanienkehaka, noting his gratitude that “ye Christians & ye maquase [Mohawk] are in a good union & Covenant chaen [chain]” (143). Albany’s Secretary for Indian Affairs, Robert Livingston, assured him:
“Wee are very glad to see you here & that you have so Readily obeyd the governours Commands and therefore in his Behalf wee doe bidd you hertily wellkom to this Place and the govr haveing orderd Scachkook for ye Place of your abode among the Rest of your nation you may freely goe and live there and your Children after you: in Peace and quietnesse…you need not to doubt but a firm and Strong Covenant chain Shall be kept unviolable on our Parts between us and all oyr [others] of your nation that shall come & live under this government.” (Robert Livingston, July 1, 1685) (144) |
Yet, even as they were encouraging more Native refugees to locate there, English colonists were maneuvering to take away Schaghticoke lands. Livingston maneuvered a purchase of 2,000 acres of Mohican lands that would soon be converted into the 160,000-acre Manor of Livingston to the south. The Hoosic patent to the east was sold to the Van Rensselaer family, and the Kanienkehaka sold the Saratoga patent to the north. More deeds for Schaghticoke land would follow (145).
During a 1714 conference, the Schaghticoke complained of these losses, saying that Mohican had “sold part of the land to the Christians to wit all the land on one side of the Scackhook Creeks…but the Christians would now have it on both sides the Creek & Dispossess us of the Lands we formerly Planted” (146). In response, the New York Governor promised (but failed) to secure additional land for the Schaghticoke community. In 1722, the the Mohican sachem Aupaumut described one of the methods by which the English were duping Native people out of their land: the English would simply ask for the names of the places where the Natives lived, and then transcribe those names into a deed:
“We have no more Land the Christians when they buy a small spot of land of us, ask us if we have no more land & when we say yes they enquire the name of the Land & take in a greater Bounds than was intended to be sold them & the Indians not understanding what is writ in the Deed or Bill of Sale sign it and are so deprived of Part of their Lands.” (Hendrick Aupaumut, August 31, 1722) (147) |
In 1724, the governor sent messengers north to ask for a cessation of hostilities, and to invite the entire Abenaki community at Saint Francis to move to Schaghticoke. The offer was refused. The sachems explained their reasons for continually attacking English colonists:
“We are so inveterate against those people of N England because they have taken away our Land and kept our People prisoner, but let them restore our Land and relieve our People and we will lay down the Hatchett and be at Peace.” (St. Francis Abenaki sachems, September 14, 1724) (148) |
A few days later, at a meeting in Albany, New York Governor Burnet asked the Schaghticoke sachems why “your people are so fond of going to Canada?” The sachems responded that the metaphorical “Tree” that they were “recommended to live & shelter under” was no longer sufficient: “that Tree begins to decay and the leaves to wither, having but a small plot of Land to Plant on” (149).
When increasing numbers of English settlers moved in, Native families feared being forced out. The entire refugee village of Schaghticoke was abandoned on August 28, 1754, when a party of Abenaki from Odanak (Saint Francis) and Wolinak (Becancoeur) in Canada burned the houses and barns, and “carried off with them the few remaining Indians,” numbering about 60 men, women, and children (150). The population of Native communities north of the Saint Lawrence was then in constant flux over time, as Native families from Pocumtuck, Sokoki, Missisquoi, Pennacook, Pequawket, and elsewhere came to stay, some for only a few years, others for several generations (151).
Historical Persistence: Hiding in Plain Sight
During the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s, most of the Valley’s Native families relocated to refugee villages like Schaghticoke in New York, Abenaki communities in present-day Vermont and New Hampshire, or Native Catholic mission villages in New France. These movements might be mistaken for random flights, were it not for the extensive social relations and strategic movements within these familiar homelands that pre-existed and persisted after European contact and conflict. Algonkian people had long utilized seasonal travels, fluid kinship networks, and flexible alliances that confused and transgressed colonial social and political boundaries. The absorption of Valley Natives into other Native populations was not a mysterious diaspora to a foreign country; people simply followed familiar paths to live among their cousins and allies. The same Indigenous strategies that had enabled survival under the pressure of early colonial settlement persisted, often in full view of Euro-American observers.
Historical Persistence: Hiding in Plain Sight
During the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s, most of the Valley’s Native families relocated to refugee villages like Schaghticoke in New York, Abenaki communities in present-day Vermont and New Hampshire, or Native Catholic mission villages in New France. These movements might be mistaken for random flights, were it not for the extensive social relations and strategic movements within these familiar homelands that pre-existed and persisted after European contact and conflict. Algonkian people had long utilized seasonal travels, fluid kinship networks, and flexible alliances that confused and transgressed colonial social and political boundaries. The absorption of Valley Natives into other Native populations was not a mysterious diaspora to a foreign country; people simply followed familiar paths to live among their cousins and allies. The same Indigenous strategies that had enabled survival under the pressure of early colonial settlement persisted, often in full view of Euro-American observers.
As geographic and social distance increased, Native people increasingly came to be identified by their current locale rather than their tribal ancestry. Native people from the middle Connecticut River Valley were variously identified as “North Indians,” “River Indians,” “Schaghticoke Indians,” “St. Francis Indians” etc., depending on wherever they happened to be living at any particular moment in time. Adding to the confusion, Native people living in these refugee communities routinely allied with other Native nations in the subsequent imperial conflicts between England and France for control of the American colonies. These wars were dubbed King William’s War (1689–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–1748), and the French and Indian War (1754–1763) (152).
During these wars, hundreds of white captives were taken from Valley towns, and many of these were incorporated, even if temporarily, into Native kin networks. For example, Titus King, a Northampton soldier serving in Col. Israel Williams’ regiment, was taken captive, along with young Asa Rice, from Charlemont on June 11, 1755. They were carried by an Abenaki war party northward to the Catholic mission village of Saint Francis in Canada. King recalled his adoption ceremony:
“…the Famely that I was adopted into gave my Indian master that took me a Sute of Cloths came & took me by the hand Lead me away to his house now I was in New Famlly & in a nere Relation to them: became brother to the old Indian & Squaw being in the Place of an indian that was Killd the Last War I being in the Same Relation as he was to them I became a Grandfather they Said there grandfather was come to Life again.” (Titus King, 1755) (153) |
This adoption gave him rights in the community, where, although no longer a prisoner, he was discouraged from leaving. He was told “that the wigwam I was in was my house,” and he became rather fond of his new family. When more English captives were brought to the village, he took particular pains to teach the children so they would not be overly influenced by the Catholic priest (154). After two years, when King was allowed to leave, he made his way back to Northampton, where he became a popular teacher in the town’s only public school, located in Schoolhouse Square. He served for 28 years, “noted for his peculiarities and eccentricities,” and enjoyed by his students for his “many droll ways” (155).
Native families who had left the Valley retained more than just ancient memories of long-past homelands; they visited and revisited those homelands over the generations. During the mid-1800s, some endeavored to restore social relations with their former white neighbors—and even former captives—in Valley towns. Mary Sheldon—who been taken captive in the 1704 raid on Deerfield and kept at Kahnawake for three years—hosted her former Mohawk mother as a repeat visitor at her home in Northampton, where she had moved after marrying Samuel Clapp. She recalled:
“In after years these Indians came to visit her at Northampton. They always came when Clapp’s corn was green, and would devour it in large quantities, roasting the ears at a fire under an apple tree. On one occasion she received a visit from two [unfamiliar] squaws. Leaving their papooses in the bushes on Pancake Plain, they came into the street, and found the house [on South Street] where Mrs. Clapp lived, by means of the step stones which had been described to them.” (James Russell Trumbull, 1898) (156) |
By the mid 1800s, many Native people in New England had adopted relatively sedentary agricultural practices on settled homesteads or in fixed village sites, but many others chose to circulate through familiar homelands, where they could still access freely available natural resources and maintain contact with kin, tracing and reinforcing old inter-tribal connections and kinship networks.
Native families were not invisible; they lived in and passed through all of the New England towns, sometimes incorporating elements of white culture—clothing, language, housing, etc.—that rendered them less culturally distinct from the rapidly increasing white population. Not surprisingly, Native movements outside the limited boundaries of these towns were poorly documented (157).
From the mid to late 1800s, town histories and popular media often depicted Native people as exotic outsiders, dubbing those who still lingered around Yankee villages as “the last of their kind.” Ironically, many of the “last Indian” obituaries published in New England papers of the time listed survivors: siblings, children, extended family, etc. (158). The disconnection that was implied—between the “savage” Indians of the colonial past and living Native people in the present—became part of what contemporary historians have termed the “discourse of disappearance” (159). Native people also found common cause and kin among other People of Color, causing further confusion to white observers. Despite emerging white American constructions of the notion of racial and tribal purity, Native people routinely crossed tribal and ethnic lines, feeling free to marry whomever they wished (160).
In Northampton, the largest concentration of Native people in the 1800s lived alongside the Mill River, near Pancake Plain and Hospital Hill. A writer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette described the area:
“Hospital Hill…became the end of the trail for the last Native Americans…even as late as the 1830s only seven or eight houses were located there, devoid of elegance or comfort, and occupied by person noticeable for the peculiarities, habits, and dress which makes them known as characters…‘Ratty Clark’ and family…made a somewhat precarious living as potters…But the most colorful inhabitant of the plain perhaps, was ‘Aunt Nab’ whom a contemporary once described as a ‘maker and vendor of cornhusk mats’ and as having a ‘cracked voice and garrulous manner’…” (Charles Dean, 1958) (161) |
The regional Native population was small, but individuals who marketed their crafts, hired out as day labor, and dispensed traditional Native medicines to their white neighbors were highly visible. Rev. Sylvester Judd, who personally interviewed Native families in Hadley, recalled that they made their living by making baskets and brooms and hunting: “Joseph Sampson had a hut near Smiths mills…He was an excellent marksman, and could shoot a swallow flying.” Mrs. Newton of Hadley told Judd in 1859 that only Native people “peddled brooms and baskets in Hadley when she was young and after. She does not recollect that white people made or peddled brooms” (162)
During the 1860s, Massachusetts Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Milton Earle attempted a survey of Native people in the Commonwealth. His work has often been misconstrued as a “census,” but his records were woefully incomplete, listing only 1,241 members of “Plantation Tribes,” and 1,610 “Scattered” Native persons. He admitted his limitations
“The imperfection of the records of towns where there were Indian settlements has been a source of much embarrassment, and has caused no little extra labor. Enough was often found to encourage further research and inquiry, which, too frequently, ended in leaving the subject in a state of as much perplexity as when first commenced.” (John Milton Earle, 1861) (163) |
Earle focused most intensely on Native people living in central and eastern Massachusetts, especially those located in a traditional locale (e.g. Chaubunagungamaug), an ethnically separate community (e.g. Punkapoag), or near a Christian-style Indian church (e.g. Mashpee Wampanoag). Inspired by white presumptions of supposed racial purity, he also sought to discern traces of “unmixed Indian blood” (164). In western Massachusetts, Earle recorded only a few Indigenous families. Josiah Bakeman, a porter, lived in Northampton with his wife Helen and son Charles; they were identified as Dudley Nipmuc. William J. Brown, a barber, and his wife Patience Fidelia, identified as Hassanamisco Nipmuc, lived in Shelburne Falls. Laborer Charles Gigger and his wife were living in Greenfield. Vianna and Fidelia Burr, Oneida Indians, were living in Springfield (165).
Other Native individuals and families frequently traveled through the town and the region, often practicing seasonal itinerant occupations: particularly basket-making, chair-seat-weaving, crafting splint brooms, and hiring out as farm laborers. Native people also worked in unexpected occupations, as doctors, preachers, theatrical entertainers, soldiers, and mariners (166).
Indian Doctors and Doctresses
During the 1800s, Native people were most notable when they appeared in an unexpected place, doing something unusual. One such example was documented in Deerfield in August of 1837, when a reporter for the Greenfield Gazette and Mercury newspaper announced the arrival of a group of 25 Abenaki Indians in town. These Native people were well-received and recognized by members of the Williams family as kin, because the eldest among them—a woman in her 80s known to her family as “Eunice of Williamsecook”—traced an ancestral connection to Eunice Williams (1696–1785), who had been taken captive and adopted by the Mohawk in 1704 (167).
The family group included a well-known “Indian Doctor” named Louis Watso (c. 1778–1885), who generously shared medicinal information with Dr. Stephen West Williams of Deerfield. Watso relied heavily on Indigenous medicinal plants like wild ginger, “useful in the low stages of fevers, in nervous affections, palpitations, and similar complaints” (168). Dr. Williams embraced the usefulness of Native medicine, but he also complained that “hundreds of my fellow citizens” visited Indian Doctors who “pretended to be able to cure all diseases by their simple remedies and the people believe them” (169). Williams compiled an herbarium, now in the collections of Memorial Libraries, that contains 556 dried specimens, 411 of which are indigenous plants (Joe Pye weed, slippery elm, ginseng, cohosh, goldthread, Indian hemp, sassafras, etc.) found growing wild around Deerfield (170).
The same Abenaki family that was so warmly welcomed in Deerfield found an entirely different reception when they visited Northampton in 1838. A reporter for the Northampton Courier disparaged them as having “adopted the vices of the whites without seeming to emulate any of their virtues”:
“The lofty bearing and noble demeanor of the primitive Indians are gone, and nothing is left but the abject and debased exterior of the red man…Their habitations are miserable tents, and their clothing the fragments of the cast-off wardrobes of white men…Altogether considered, they are merely a wretched remnant of a race of noble and proud Red men, who once tenanted this fair valley, and whose stealthy tread and uplifted tomohawk, carried death to hearts terrified by their appalling war-cry.” (Northampton Courier, June 6, 1838) |
A reporter for the Hampshire Gazette newspaper similarly made it clear to his readers that he took great offense at the popularity of these Native people who had “attracted much attention” (171). The mere presence of these Native visitors appears to have been an unwanted reminder of the stubborn persistence of Native people who had simply refused to fade into the sunset (172).
Folks in Northampton were far more welcoming to another Native medicinal practitioner who regularly passed through town—Rhoda Rhoades (c. 1751–1841), a Mohican Indian Doctress from Indian Hollow, in present-day Huntington. Rhoda and her brother, Zebulon Fuller, traveled a regular circuit by horse to Westfield, Springfield, and Northampton. She also doctored people at her home, using special diets and traditional medicines made with a wide variety of Indigenous plants (173). For example, in 1836, Brookfield printer Homer Merriam sought Rhoda’s services to cure his chronic dyspepsia. He lodged for a month at her home, praising her as having: “a good knowledge of roots and herbs and their medicinal properties, and a good degree of skill in the use of them” (174).
Huntington Town Historian Myron Munson described Rhoda’s materia medica as follows:
“As an apothecary, she gave prominence, let us say, pre-eminence, to plants, flowers and roots, as remedies. She searched the meadows, swamps and woodlands for medicinal vegetation that was growing wild…But her pharmacopia was by no means limited to such…every kind of flower that I ever saw grew in her garden…And they grew most luxuriantly.” (Myron Munson, c. 1880) (175) |
The Rhoades family managed a maple grove, as did many Native people, who considered these groves to be hereditary property (176). Maple sugar was used as the primary seasoning for roasted corn, game, or fish, and traveling bags were often filled with chunks of maple sugar, parched corn, jerked venison, and dried berries, collectively called pemmican (177). Rhoda always carried extra maple sugar in her saddlebags, giving it out to children when travelling. In 1871, an elderly man recalled visiting with Rhoda whenever she passed through Northampton:
“She was very kind to children, and her sugar box was emptied oftener by the lumps she gave us, than in any other manner…[she] dealt in “roots and yarbs,” and understood what she was dealing in, much better than many of our modern doctors…she cured permanently many cases that were given up as hopeless by eminent physicians…” (anonymous, 1871) (178) |
Rhoda was so well loved by her neighbors that when the rest of the Stockbridge Mohican Indians left western Massachusetts to relocate westward in the 1790s, she stayed behind (179). When she passed away in 1841, she was buried in Indian Hollow.
The Maminash Family
One of the most visible Native families in nineteenth-century Northampton was named Maminash (alternately spelled Mammanash, Mammanache, etc.). These folks were quite well-known to their white neighbors, and yet there was no mention of them whatsoever in John Milton Earle’s census.
Joseph Maminash (1727–1767) and his wife Elizabeth Occom (c.1720–c.1783) moved to Northampton from Connecticut sometime in the early 1750s. Joseph—who was variously identified as Mohegan, Podunk, or Nonotuck—had served in the American military during the French and Indian War, joining Nathan Whiting’s 11th company at the 1745 siege of Louisbourg, Canada, alongside Mohegan men from the Uncas, Dick, Nanapau, Quaquequid, and Wetowomp families (180).
The family had kinship ties across multiple Native nations. Joseph’s mother, Betty Mammanash (1696–1786), was a member of the Wangunk nation in southern Connecticut (181). His sister Hannah (1716–1801) married Rev. Samuel Ashbow (1719–1795), from the Mohegan nation in southeastern Connecticut (182). Joseph’s wife Elizabeth was the sister of the Mohegan Rev. Samson Occum (1723–1792). Joseph and Elizabeth Maminash had three children, all born in Northampton: Joseph Jr. (c.1753–1778), Sally (1765–1853), and George (1767–1783).
Joseph Maminash Jr. also served in the American military, mustering in from the town of Hadley with the 4th Hampshire regiment, and joining Captain Daniel Shays’ company during the American Revolution. His military record, in Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, reads as follows:
“Mamanash, Joseph, Hadley. List of men raised to serve in the Continental Army from the 4th Hampshire regiment as returned by Capt. Samuel Cook; residence, Hadley; engaged for town of Hadley; joined Capt. Shay’s co., Col. Putnam’s regt; term 3 years; also, Private, Capt. Daniel Shays co., Col. Rufus Putnam’s (5th) regt.; Continental Pay accounts for service from Jan. 15, 1777 to Aug, 31, 1778; reported died Aug. 31, 1778; also, same co. and regt.; return dated Albany, Feb. 9, 1778; mustered by Col. Woodbridge” (183). |
When Joseph Maminash Sr. died in 1767, he was buried “in a field near the pine grove, a little south of the hospital” on the site that is now called “Hospital Hill,” above Pancake Plain (184). His grave was marked with a brown stone bearing the mark of the turtle, the clan totem of the family (185). Joseph Jr. died in 1778. George died in 1783 from tuberculosis (186). In that same year, his mother, Elizabeth Occom Maminash, met a tragic end, said to have been “stoned to death” by a gang of Northampton boys (187).
Sally, the last surviving member of her family, took up the occupation of an itinerant weaver, working for various families in town. It was not uncommon, during this era, for skilled weavers to work in other people’s homes at spinning, carding, and weaving. Although milled textiles were available, “homespun cloth” was still produced for individual family use, mostly in the form of coverlets and blankets (188).
At an unknown date, when still a young woman, Sally was invited to live in the household of Sophia and Warham Clapp, in their home on South Street (189). Sophia’s grandson, Sidney E. Bridgman, later recalled that Sally “never attended school, but grew up with native wit and sharpness, and when taken into our family was a wild, passionate, willful, yet a kindly, loving Indian girl.” In 1816, Sally Maminash joined First Church along with 76 other people, including several other Natives and African Americans. After her conversion, according to one account, she miraculously gained literacy:
“Some time before, a friend had given her a Bible. She had never learned to read, but had kept the book carefully locked in her trunk. One Sunday after her conversion, she thought within herself everything was so changed and seemed so different to her since her conversion, she would look up her Bible and see if that had changed with the rest. She found it and commenced to read it, though she did not know a letter, and could not read a line before. From that time to her dying day, she could read her Bible; and when people doubted and intimated that she was only reading what she had been taught, or had committed to memory, they found she was able to read other books as well as the Bible.” (The Brethren Evangelist, 1886) (190) |
When Sally passed away, seven years after Sophia and a few months after Warham, she was buried in Northampton’s Bridge Street Cemetery, in the Clapp family plot beside Sophia and Warham. Decades after her death, in Solomon Clark’s Historical Catalogue, she was described as “the memorable Sally Maminash, the last of the Indian race in Northampton,” echoing the phrase carved on her tombstone (191).
Sally’s Bible, which was kept by the family in her memory, is now housed at Forbes Library, and her favorite chair, a low ladder back with its original ash-splint seat, was donated to the collections of Historic Northampton (192). Although the Clapps clearly considered her a close family friend, later writers suggested she was a servant, or embellished the accounts to make Sally appear more simple, more destitute, and more alone than she was in real life.
Historical Erasure: Scripting Colonial Histories
Since the English settlers who founded colonial towns intended, from the outset, to physically displace the region’s Native inhabitants, it should be no surprise that their descendants would choose to ideologically displace Native histories. During the 1800s, a series of historical myths, created and embellished by regional historians, narratively disconnected Native people from their past. Those myths took four basic forms, which reflected popular interpretations of pre-contact Native history: 1) Before colonial settlement, this area was a wilderness; 2) All non-farming Native sites were temporary, nomadic camps; 3) Algonkian peoples were developmentally inferior to, and less industrious than, Iroquoian peoples; and 4) Local Indians had abandoned these lands and/or vanished altogether, thereby justifying colonial occupation (193).
These myths infused virtually all of the town histories composed between 1824 and 1922 for the Valley towns: Greenfield (Hoyt 1824, Thompson 1904); Northfield (Temple and Sheldon 1875); Brookfield (Temple 1887); Springfield (Green 1888); Deerfield (Sheldon 1895, 1896); Northampton (Trumbull 1898); Whately (Crafts 1899); Hadley (Judd 1905); Hatfield (Wells and Wells 1910); and Westfield (Lockwood 1922). The narrative templates of these texts followed a dramatic trajectory that went something like this: European colonizers discover a wilderness, found a settlement, trade with friendly Indians, fight with savage Indians, and establish civilization. In the process, Native people either die off or move away, except for a few who stay around long enough to sign a few deeds. Most of these books also contain bloody accounts of colonial Indian wars
There was little consideration for Native perspectives in narratives that celebrated the success of the colonial settler population while simultaneously lamenting (or celebrating) the disappearance of the Native population (194). Some texts appear to have been pre-digested to put white readers at ease about past injustices. For example, James Trumbull, author of the History of Northampton, romantically imagined the first glimpse of the Nonotuck Indians:
There was little consideration for Native perspectives in narratives that celebrated the success of the colonial settler population while simultaneously lamenting (or celebrating) the disappearance of the Native population (194). Some texts appear to have been pre-digested to put white readers at ease about past injustices. For example, James Trumbull, author of the History of Northampton, romantically imagined the first glimpse of the Nonotuck Indians:
“Dimly through the forest rises the smoke of the Indian wigwams, and possibly through the trees are seen glimpses of their dusky owners, watching the new comers with eager interest…In fact the establishment of the new settlement at Northampton did not dispossess the Indians of any thing held sacred by them. None of their cherished landmarks were removed, nor were they deprived of anything which they especially valued. No Indian village then existed…” (James Russell Trumbull, 1898) (195) |
A few authors made mention of the rights that Native descendants might lawfully choose to exercise:
“Upon these deeds from the Indians rest the titles of all later possessors and the reservations made by the red man of the hunting and fishing privileges, the use of wood and timber, and the liberty to pitch wigwams are in operation at the present day if their descendants should wish to take advantage of them.” (Daniel Wells and Reuben Wells, 1910) (196) |
Yet, it’s doubtful that Native people would actually be welcomed if they tried to act on these rights.
The vanishing Indian paradigm was oddly reassuring when it enabled white Euro-Americans to imagine themselves as true “natives,” (197) and position Indians as foreign “others.” New England’s white citizens thus began embracing speeches, statuary, and commemorative events that, in essence, served as public performances of white ownership of history. In an 1820 address to the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester historian Isaac Goodwin articulated this sense of entitlement:
“We tread [upon] their common graves without emotion. With unconcern we build our streets and erect our edifices upon their sacred enclosures. With sacrilegious hands we scatter to the winds alike the bones…The land they once defended is ours…these hills, are all our own.” (Isaac Goodwin, 1820) (198) |
Similarly, in 1888, while delivering a speech in Whately, George Sheldon conjured an “interminable wilderness” that Native people had roved through like wild beasts, with “no towns or cities to conquer or occupy.” He characterized Indians as duplicitous predators who could never be trusted, and painted a gruesome picture of fear on the frontier (199). Other colonial descendants found common cause with Sheldon, including politicians, ministers, and educators who allowed their own perceptions of race, class, and cultural differences to prevent any meaningful interactions with living Native people.
The “wilderness” ideology was a key part of Northampton’s 1904 Quarter-Millennial Commemoration, when Smith College President L. Clarke Seeyle intoned:
“How different the scenes which greet us from those which greeted her [Northampton’s] infancy! Above are the same heavens; the same majestic river flows through the meadows; our horizon is bounded by the same picturesque mountain ranges; but how changed the inhabitants and their environment! No longer unbroken forests stretch as far as the eye can reach, concealing in their unexplored recesses wild beasts and savages; no longer men fear lest a sudden Indian raid may massacre the few inhabitants…In place of a rude and contracted society, we behold a prosperous and highly civilized community.” (L. Clark Seelye 1904) (200) |
Local historians built on these ideas as they fashioned town histories that recounted the details of Indian warfare and raids, with the prevailing assumption that the Indian was doomed to disappear in the face of expanding civilization. In museums like Deerfield’s Memorial Hall, established in 1870, curators highlighted “such memorials, books, papers and relics as would illustrate and perpetuate the history of the early settlers, and of the race which vanished before them” (201).
During the same era when the Valley’s town histories began to be published, Native historical sites in the Valley were being disturbed by both professional and amateur archaeologists. Hundreds of Native homesites and gravesites were excavated, and thousand of materials from the distant past were collected. The isolated bones, pipes, pots, beads, pottery shards, lithics, trade goods, bullets, and other items that came out of the ground were then circulated and displayed by collectors, students, scientists, and others who imprinted their own idiosyncratic meanings onto these Native materials. Museum curators and educators collaborated in producing exhibitions that utilized Native bodies and materials to “speak” about the past. Little attention was given to living Native people. Instead, skeletal Native remains were shellacked, plastered, wired, mixed, matched, and otherwise creatively reconstructed to make up study collections and displays, posed in positions that ranged from physically awkward to culturally humiliating. White audiences were trained, both overtly and covertly, to view Native peoples not as living communities, but as dead study collections (202).
Recovering the Past
Today, the traces of Native history that remain, no matter how intact or fragmented, offer illuminating glimpses into the past. Most of the pre-colonial (c. 4000 B.C.E. to c. 1600) Woodlands-era site features that persisted into the early 1900s—including foot trails, storage pits, post holes, gravesites, and corn-planting mounds—have been destroyed by housing, highways, and industrial building. Yet, some ancient Indigenous sites still remain. Up into the 1920s, a large cluster of several thousand corn-hills, planting mounds used by the Nonotuck, were still visible in a sunken meadow between Earle and South Streets in Northampton, near the old canal bed and railroad embankment (203). In some places, the landscape itself remembers, especially in protected forestlands, meadows, and swamps, places with rich resources that once sustained so many Native communities.
Historical research has improved dramatically over the past half-century, generating a number of sources that better articulate the movements and social networks of Native people before, during, and after the colonial era (204). The local college exhibits that once displayed Native bodies have been dismantled, and the colleges themselves are still coming to terms with their own legacy vis-a-vis Native peoples by developing new inter-tribal and inter-institutional partnerships, while reassessing both older collections and newly discovered sites. Regional cooperation among museums, collectors (both professional and amateur), and Native American tribal nations (both federally recognized and non-federally recognized) is essential, because so many parties hold different pieces of the puzzle of the past.
As Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks reminds us, in her work The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, we need to consider Native perspectives not as marginal, but as central to local history-telling, viewing colonial events “through the networks of waterways and kinship in the northeast, with Europe and its colonies on the periphery of Native territory” (205). With this in mind, we might better understand that the Indigenous Algonkian peoples of New England survived, not just through relocation but also through complex strategies of accommodation and resistance throughout their traditional homelands. Algonkian histories persisted, in place names, oral traditions, and family stories, even when they weren’t recorded in Eurocentric history books. Although Northampton’s Native history is not well known to the general public today, it is inextricably linked with other memories of oral traditions, sacred sites, and intricate networks of inter-tribal relationships across New England.
And so, in closing, let me offer condolences for the Nonotuck people who were forced to leave their homeland, while also offering gratitude for the Native communities that took them in. Any attempt to reckon with the past requires an assessment of the impact of colonial settlement on obscuring Native presence, but it also marks an opportunity to do justice to all of our interwoven histories, by finding ways to recover Native histories that have not vanished, and memories that are still close at hand.
Endnotes
(1) This essay uses several generic terms to refer to the Indigenous peoples of the North American continent: Indian, Native American, Indigenous (with a capital I), and Native (with a capital N). No pejorative insult is implied by the occasional use of the antiquated term “Indian” in explanatory text or historical citations. Return to essay.
(2) Variant spellings—all of which are phonetic attempts to replicate Algonquian speech—include Kwiniteguh and Quinnehtukqut; see John C. Huden, Indian Place Names of New England (New York, NY: Museum of the American Indian 1962), 85, 208. Return to essay.
(3) This essay expands upon an earlier article by Margaret M. Bruchac, “Native Presence in Nonotuck and Northampton,” in Kerry Buckley, ed., A Place Called Paradise: Culture and Community in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1654–2004 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 18–38. It also includes excerpts from Margaret M. Bruchac, “Revisiting Pocumtuck History in Deerfield: George Sheldon’s Vanishing Indian Act,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 75th Commemorative Issue 39 (1/2) (2011): 30–77. Return to essay.
(4) B.C.E. indicates “Before Common Era.” This term serves as an alternative to the custom of dating using a Christian religious reference (B.C. indicating “Before Christ”) that has no logical connection to Indigenous time. So, rather than marking the present era as A.D. (“Anno Domini”), one can use C.E. (“Common Era,” dating from the year 1 A.D. to now). An alternative is to use the terms B.P. (indicating “Before Present”) and P.E. (“Present Era,” as in now). Return to essay.
(5) See Gordon Day, “The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeast Forest,” Ecology 32 (1954): 329–346. Return to essay.
(6) See Peter A. Thomas, “The Riverside District, the WMECO Site, and Suggestions for Archaeological Modeling,” in Early and Middle Archaic Cultures in the Northeast, edited by David Starbuck and Charles E. Bolian, Occasional Publications in Northeastern Anthropology, No. 7 (Rindge, NH: Franklin Pierce College 1980), 73–95. Return to essay.
(7) The long-vanished glacial lake was named to honor Edward Hitchcock Sr., the Amherst College Professor of Geology and Natural Theology who first described this chain of events in scientific jargon. See Edward Hitchcock Sr., “Remarks on the Geology and Mineralogy of a Section of MA on the CT River, with a Part of NH and VT,” American Journal of Science 1st Series V(1–2) (1818): 105–116. Return to essay.
(8) This is not an uncommon story across North America. For other examples of giant beaver tales, see Jane C. Beck, “The Giant Beaver: A Prehistoric Memory?” Ethnohistory 19 (2) (1972): 109–122. Return to essay.
(9) Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, edited by Barbara Miller Solomon, Volume I (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 1969), 237. Return to essay.
(10) Phinehas Field, “Stories, Anecdotes, and Legends, Collected and Written Down by Deacon Phinehas Field,” History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association 1870–1879, Volume I (Deerfield, MA: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association 1890), 63. Return to essay.
(11) For a fuller discussion of this tradition, see Margaret M. Bruchac, “Earthshapers and Placemakers: Algonkian Indian Stories and the Landscape,” in H. Martin Wobst and Claire Smith, eds., Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice (London: Routledge Press 2005), 56–80. Return to essay.
(12) Josiah H. Temple, History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts (Boston, MA: Town of North Brookfield, 1887), 21. Also see William R. Young, “A Survey of the Available Knowledge on the Middle Connecticut Valley Indians—Prehistoric and Historic,” The Connecticut Valley Indian: An Introduction to Their Archaeology and History, 33–61, New Series, 1:1 (Springfield, MA: Museum of Science 1981). Return to essay.
(13) For thorough discussion of the different dialects that emerged from the shared Proto-Algonquian language, see Hamill Kenny, “Place-Names and Dialects: Algonquian,” Names 24 (2) (1976), 86–100. Return to essay.
(14) An alternative spelling of Algonkian is Algonquin. See Gordon M. Day, “The Name Algonquin,” International Journal of American Linguistics 38 (4) (1972): 226–228. Return to essay.
(15) Sokoki is the exception, since this tribal name identifies the actions of a group rather than a specific geographical location. The name can be traced to the Abenaki morpheme sohkw, “break apart,” as in sohkwahkiak, “the people who separated, broke apart.” See Gordon M. Day, “The Identity of the Sokokis,” Ethnohistory 12 (3) (Summer 1965), 240. Return to essay.
(16) See James Hammond Trumbull, Natick Dictionary, Bulletin 25, Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1903), 315. Return to essay.
(17) Kenny, “Place-Names and Dialects: Algonquian,” 86. Return to essay.
(18) See Harry Andrew Wright, “Some Vagaries in Connecticut Valley Indian Place-Names,” The New England Quarterly 12 (3) (September 1939): 535–544. Some writers suggest that the l-dialect version (Nolwatog) was the locally preferred term. See, for example, Alice Nash, “Quanquan’s Mortgage of 1663,” in Cultivating a Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, edited by Marla Miller, 25–42 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 2004). Return to essay.
(19) See Huden, Indian Place Names of New England, 185. The name Pawaagonick also appears in the 1657 deed for part of present-day Hatfield; see Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 32. For a dense history of the Mill River, see John Sinton, Devil’s Den to Lickingwater: The Mill River Through Landscape and History (Amherst, MA: Levellers Press 2018). Return to essay.
(20) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 64. Return to essay.
(22) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 30. Return to essay.
(22) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 30. Return to essay.
(23) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 8–9. Return to essay.
(24) For discussions of English strategies of dispossession, see James Warren Springer, “American Indians and the Law of Real Property in Colonial New England,” The American Journal of Legal History 30 (1) (January 1986): 25–58. Also see Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press 2005). Return to essay.
(25) Elizabeth Chilton, “Mobile Farmers of Pre-Contact Southern New England: the Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Evidence,” Current Northeast Paleoethnobotany, edited by John P. Hart (Albany, NY: University of the State of New York State Education Department 1999), 163. Return to essay.
(26) Nancy Eldredge, “Who are the Wampanoag,” Plimoth Patuxet Museums [no date]. On-line at: https://plimoth.org/for-students/homework-help/who-are-the-wampanoag Return to essay.
(27) Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York, NY: Russell and Russell) I: 135. Return to essay.
(28) William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation 1620–1647 (New York, NY: Random House [c.1650] 1981), 301–302. Return to essay.
(29) Peter A. Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change: The Indian Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut River Valley, 1635-1665 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1990), 53–55. Return to essay.
(30) All of these numbers are highly speculative, since no formal census was ever conducted. Return to essay.
(31) The title sunksqua combines the Algonquian morphemes sunk- or sohnk- (great) and -squa or -skwa (woman). See Trumbull, Natick Dictionary, 144, 154-55. Return to essay.
(32) These relations could include multiple marriages and adoptions across tribal communities. See, for example, Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2019). Return to essay.
(33) Pynchon’s letter is reprinted in Temple, History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, 37. Return to essay.
(34) William Pynchon is quoted in Temple, History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, 37. John Pynchon's spelling was notoriously inconsistent; as just one example, he called “Housatonic” by many variant spellings, including Ausatinnoag, Aussatinnewag, and Wissatinnewag. See Margaret M. Bruchac and Peter A. Thomas, “Locating Wissatinnewag in John Pynchon’s Letter of 1663,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 34 (1) (2006): 56-82. Return to essay.
(35) Transcribed from the original by Peter A. Thomas in 2019. The book was originally catalogued by Forbes Library as “Pynchon, William, 1590-1662. Record of accounts with early settlers and Indians. Carried forward from previous book around Sept. 1645 and to a new book around Mar. 1650. In handwriting of John Pynchon, his son.” The binder is mis-identified as Judd Manuscript: Accounts, Springfield, Mass.” Gordon M. Day provides a brief analysis of these terms in “An Agawam Fragment,” International Journal of American Linguistics 33 (3) (1967): 244-247. Return to essay.
(36) See Mitford M. Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, Volume 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1951), 395. Return to essay.
(37) Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change, 97-102. Return to essay.
(38) Elizabeth S. Chilton, “Towns They Have None: Diverse Subsistence and Settlement Strategies in Native New England,” Northeast Subsistence-Settlement Change: A.D. 700–A.D. 1300, edited by John P. Hart and C. Reith (Albany, NY: New York State Museum 2002), 289. Return to essay.
(39) Samuel de Champlain [1604], Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 16041618, edited by W. L. Grant (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons 1907), 62, 101-102. Return to essay.
(40) Small versions of these mortars were used by individual households. Large mortars, often carved into boulders situated beside trails and cornfields, were intended to be used communally. The locations of these were sometimes marked on colonial maps. Return to essay.
(41) See summaries of foodways in Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change, 102-108. Return to essay.
(42) Day, “An Agawam Fragment,” 245. Return to essay.
(43) Gordon M. Day, “A St. Francis Abenaki Vocabulary,” International Journal of American Linguistics 30 (4) (October 1964), 385. Return to essay.
(44) Day, “A St. Francis Abenaki Vocabulary,” 387. Return to essay.
(45) Chilton, “Towns They Have None,” 293. Return to essay.
(46) Elizabeth S. Chilton, Elizabeth S., Tonya B. Largy, and Kathryn Curran, “Evidence for Prehistoric Maize Horticulture at the Pine Hill Site, Deerfield, Massachusetts,” Northeast Anthropology 59 (2000): 23-46. Return to essay.
(47) From “Letters of William Pynchon,” in Charles Eliot Norton, ed., Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings October 1914-June 1915 (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society 1915), 51-52. Return to essay.
(48) See George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, Volume I (Deerfield, MA: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association), 113. Return to essay.
(49) Trumbull, History of Northampton, 165-166. Return to essay.
(50) Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley: including the early history of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts. (Springfield, MA: H.R. Hunting & Co. 1905), 104. Return to essay.
(51) John W. De Forest, History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, CT: Wm. Jas. Hamersley 1852), 55. Return to essay.
(52) See Eric Johnson, Some by Flatteries and Others by Threatenings: Political Strategies Among Native Americans of Seventeenth-century New England (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 1993). Also see Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change. Return to essay.
(53) Temple, History of North Brookfield, 3738. Return to essay.
(54) See Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., The Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, MA: William White 1854), V: 436. Return to essay.
(55) Letter from John Mason to the Governor, Deputy-Governor, and General Court of Connecticut, August 22, 1659, in “The Winthrop Papers,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume VII. Fourth Series (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society 1852), 423. Return to essay.
(56) Onapequin’s speech is transcribed in David Pulsifer, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, Volume II Acts of the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England (Boston, MA: William White 1859), 236-237. Return to essay.
(57) This is by no means a complete list. These names appear in William Pynchon’s account book (1645-1650), John Pynchon’s account book (1652–1701), local deeds, and the Sylvester Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series (Forbes Library, Northampton, Massachusetts c. 1850s). Return to essay.
(58) During the colonial era, Native people also utilized European names and nicknames. On naming practices, see Frank Exner and Little Bear, “North American Indians: Personal Names With Semantic Meaning,” Names 55 (1) (2007), 5. Return to essay.
(59) From the Records of the Hampshire County Court, October 1667, in Sylvester Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I: 20. Return to essay.
(60) James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton (Northampton, MA: Gazette Printing Company 1898), Volume I, 319. Return to essay.
(61) Mason A. Green, Springfield, 1636-1886: history of town and city (Springfield, MA: C. A. Nichols and Company 1888), 153. Return to essay.
(62) See Ruth McIntyre, “John Pynchon and the New England Fur Trade, 1652-1676,” in Carl Bridenbaugh and Juliette Tomlinson, eds., The Pynchon Papers, Volume II, Selections from the Account Books of John Pynchon, 1651-1697 (Boston, MA: Colonial Society of Massachusetts 1988), 11-14. Return to essay.
(63) Copper ornaments and arrowheads have been found at multiple archaeological sites in the region. See, for example, Eric S. Johnson and James W. Bradley, “The Bark Wigwams Site: An Early Seventeenth-Century Component in Central Massachusetts,” Man in the Northeast 33 (1987), 1-26. For more discussion of the repurposing of trade goods, see Alexandra van Dongen, “The Inexhaustible Kettle: The Metamorphosis of a European Utensil in the World of the North American Indians,” in One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure, Alexandra van Dongen, ed. (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen 1996), 115-178. Return to essay.
(64) McIntyre, “John Pynchon and the New England Fur Trade,” 26-28. Return to essay.
(65) McIntyre, “John Pynchon and the New England Fur Trade,” 11. Return to essay.
(66) See Joseph H. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1639-1702): The Pynchon Court Record: An Original Judge’s Diary of the Administration of Justice in the Springfield Courts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1961), 271. Return to essay.
(67) McIntyre, “John Pynchon and the New England Fur Trade,” 33. Return to essay.
(68) See Pynchon’s Account Books from 1652-1701, Volume 1: 31823, and Volume 2: 36771, which are also summarized in Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change, 148. Return to essay.
(69) On the trade at Fort Orange, see Berthold Fernow, ed., “Documents Relative to the History and Settlements of the Towns along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers,” in Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York Volume XIII (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company 1881), 27. Return to essay.
(70) Lisa Brooks, “Whose Native Place? The Dickinsons and the Colonization of the Connecticut River Valley,” in The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, edited by Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Cristanne Miler (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 2022), 23. Return to essay.
(71) Trumbull 1903, 340-41. Return to essay.
(72) James D. Burggraf, “Some Notes on the Manufacture of Wampum Prior to 1654,” American Antiquity 4 (1) (July 1938), 53-58. Return to essay.
(73) Burggraff, “Some Notes on the Manufacture of Wampum Prior to 1654,” 56. Return to essay.
(74) Joseph-François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, Volume 2, edited by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (Toronto: Champlain Society [1724] 1974), 211. Return to essay.
(75) William M. Beauchamp, “Wampum and Shell Articles Used by the New York Indians,” New York State Museum Bulletin 41 (1901): 321–480. Also see Frank G. Speck, “The Functions of Wampum among the Eastern Algonkian,” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 6 (1919): 3–71. Return to essay.
(76) See Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, Volume I, 302, 329. Return to essay.
(77) See Peter Thomas’s 2019 notes in his transcription of John Pynchon’s Day Book & Accounts (1648-1650), Springfield, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Manuscript in Special Collections, Forbes Library. Josias was apparently a servant of Rev. George Moxon. Return to essay.
(78) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 11-13. Return to essay.
(79) Cutting and sewing tools were listed in several deed transactions. The 1641 deed for Chicopee, for example, included a “payment” of “seven knives, seven awls and seven pairs of scissors,” one for each Native signatory. See Wright, The Story of Western Massachusetts, 19. Return to essay.
(80) See transcription in Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 12. Return to essay.
(81) Wright, The Story of Western Massachusetts, 279. Return to essay.
(82) Peter Thomas, “The Fur Trade and the Need to Define Adequate ‘Environmental Parameters’,” Ethnohistory 24 (4) (Fall 1981): 359-379. Return to essay.
(83) Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England, Volume IV, 102-103. Return to essay.
(84) Sylvester Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I, 3. Return to essay.
(85) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 27. Return to essay.
(86) See Hampden County Records Liber A; Folio 15, in Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 27. Nammeleck and Namelake are l-dialect variant spellings of Namareck or Nameroke, “fishing place,” the Podunk Indian community at present-day “Warehouse Point,” in Hartford County, Connecticut (Huden, Indian Place Names of New England, 133. Return to essay.
(87) Nash, “Quanquan’s Mortgage of 1663,” 31-32. Return to essay.
(88) The precise location of these places is unclear; Nattacous is the name of a brook (perhaps Broad Brook), and Wequittayyag translates as “place at the end of the stream.” See Huden, Indian Place Names of New England, 283. Return to essay.
(89) Bridenbaugh and Tomlinson, The Pynchon Papers, Volume II, 288. Return to essay.
(90) See Harry Andrew Wright, ed., The Story of Western Massachusetts (New York, NY: Lewis Historical Publishing Co. 1949), 260. Return to essay.
(91) In the Court Record in Springfield March 4, 1664/5, before Mr. Holyoke and John Pynchon, he is identified as “Watsaw Luncksin.” See Smith, Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1639-1702), 269. Return to essay.
(92) The original document is housed at Memorial Libraries, in Deerfield, MA; see transcription in Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 74-75. Return to essay.
(93) Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 33-36. Return to essay.
(94) In Wright, Indian Deeds of Hampden County, 34. For more detailed discussion of this exchange, see Nash, “Quanquan’s Mortgage of 1663.” Return to essay.
(95) Thomas, “Bridging the Cultural Gap: Indian/White Relations,” 16. Return to essay.
(96) See Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation 1620-1647, 301-302. Return to essay.
(97) See discussions and diagrams in Judd, History of Hadley, 118-119. Return to essay.
(98) Judd, History of Hadley, 118. Return to essay.
(99) In Trumbull, History of Northampton, Volume I, 176-177. Return to essay.
(100) Trumbull, History of Northampton, Volume I, 77. Return to essay.
(101) Margaret Ellen Newell, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670–1720,” in Decolonizing New England Indian History, edited by Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston, MA: Colonial Society of Massachusetts 2003), 119. Return to essay.
(102) McIntyre, “John Pynchon and the New England Fur Trade, 1652-1676,” 18. Return to essay.
(103) Judd, History of Hadley, 64. Return to essay.
(104) Letter from John Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jr., February 10, 1672/3, in Carl Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, Volume I, Letters of John Pynchon, 1654-1700 (Boston, MA: Colonial Society of Masachusetts 1982), 113. Return to essay.
(105) Letter from John Pynchon to Gerit Van Slichetenhorst, December 12, 1673, in Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 118-119. Return to essay.
(106) Letter from John Pynchon to John Winthrop, Jr., April 9, 1674, in Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 124. Return to essay.
(107) James Spady, In the Midst of the River: Leadership, Trade and Politics among the Native Peoples of the Connecticut River Valley: 1635-1700 (Senior thesis, Amherst College, 1994), 63. Return to essay.
(108) John Easton, A narrative of the causes which led to Philip’s Indian war, of 1675 and 1676, edited by Franklin B. Hough (Albany, NY: J. Munsell 1858), 12. Return to essay.
(109) See John Easton, A Relation of the Indian War, By Mr. Easton of Rhode Island 1675, excerpted in Neal Salisbury, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press 1997), 115-118. Return to essay.
(110) Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York, NY: Macmillan 1958), 53-54, 66. Also see Spady, In the Midst of the River, 86. Return to essay.
(111) Richard I. Melvoin, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (New York, NY: W. W. Norton 1989), 105. Return to essay.
(112) The Kanienkehaka Mohawk who attacked Metacom’s allies were supplied with guns and ammunition by New York Governor Edmund Andros. See “A New and Further Narrative of the State of New England, by N. S.” in Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1913), 97. Return to essay.
(113) Lawrence H. Leder, ed., The Livngston Indian Records 1666-1723 (Gettysburg, PA: Pennsylvania Historical Association 1956), 39. Return to essay.
(114) Judd, History of Hadley, 169-170. Return to essay.
(115) Mary Rowlandson, 1676, in Neal Salisbury, ed. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God [1682] (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 80. For detailed discussion of this journey, see Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 253-98. Return to essay.
(116) Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk, 200-203. Return to essay.
(117) James H. Trumbull, ed. Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut 1636-1776. Hartford, CT: F. A. Brown Co. 1850) Volume 2, 471-472. The place names Powquiag and Paquayag are variant spellings of Paquoag, meaning “flat, cleared ground.” See Huden, Indian Place Names of New England, 167. Return to essay.
(118) Letter from John Pynchon to Governor John Leverett, August 26, 1676, in Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 170. Return to essay.
(119) Robert E. Cray, Jr. “Weltering in Their Own Blood: Puritan Casualties in King Philip’s War,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 37 (2) (Fall 2009): 107, 110. Return to essay.
(120) Newell, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670–1720,” 107. Return to essay.
(121) Huden, Indian Place Names of New England, 186, 221. Return to essay.
(122) New York Council on Indian Affairs report for May 29-30, 1767, in Fernow, “Documents Relative to the History and Settlements of the Towns along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers,” 497. Return to essay.
(123) James Spady, “As If In a Great Darkness: Native American Refugees of the Middle Connecticut River Valley in the Aftermath of King Philip’s War,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 23 (2) (1995): 183-197. Also see See Margaret M. Bruchac, “Schaghticoke and Points North: Wôbanaki Resistance and Persistence” in Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704 (Deerfield, MA: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association 2005). Return to essay.
(124) Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 305-307. Return to essay.
(125) Partridge is quoted by Pynchon in a letter to Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet, December 2, 1691, in Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 236-245. Return to essay.
(126) Directions for Captain Samuel Partridge, in Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 244. Return to essay.
(127) Letter from Pynchon to Bradstreet, in Bridenbaugh, The Pynchon Papers, 250. Return to essay.
(128) A heavily biased account of this incident can be found in Trumbull, History of Northampton, Volume I, 441-443. Return to essay.
(129) Records of the Hampshire County Court, County Oyer and Terminer held in Northampton, Massachusetts, October 21, 1696, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I, 348-349. Return to essay.
(130) Ibid., 349-351. Return to essay.
(131) “5 Reasons of Samuel Patrigg, why the 2 Indians convicted as accessories in the murder of Richard Church should be reprieved or released.” Note appended to the Records of the Hampshire County Court, October 1696, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I, 356. Return to essay.
(132) Spady, “As If In a Great Darkness,” 135. Return to essay.
(133) March 4, 1697 report from John Pynchon et al. Note appended to the Records of the Hampshire County Court, October 1696-1697, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I, 352. Return to essay.
(134) Onogungo is one of many terms used in the 1690s to 1740s to refer to Abenaki Indians. Variant spellings include Onogungos used by the Governor of Canada in 1695, Onogonguas used by Captain Stoddart in 1753, and Onogongoes used by Col. Schuyler in 1724. For multiple other examples, see Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology 1912), 5. Return to essay.
(135) April 12, 1697, letter from Massachusetts Lieutenant-Colonel Governor Stoughton, recounting information in an April 5, 1697, letter from New York Governor Fletcher, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I: 357. Return to essay.
(136) April 23, 1697 letter from Fletcher to Stoughton, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I: 358. Return to essay.
(137) May 17, 1697 letter from Stoughton to Fletcher, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I: 358. Return to essay.
(138) Undated (c. May 1697) letter from Samuel Partrigg [Partridge] to Stoughton, in Judd Manuscript, Massachusetts Series, Volume I: 358. Return to essay.
(139) Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay [1692-1714] (Boston, MA: Wright & Potter 1869), Volume I: 176. Return to essay.
(140) Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, Volume I, 558, 594-595. By 1757, the bounty in present-day Maine (then part of Massachusetts) was raised to 300 pounds per scalp; see James Phinney Baxter, ed. The Documentary History of the State of Maine (Portland: LeFavor-Tower, 1916), Volume 24, 83. Return to essay.
(141) Francis Jennings, “Francis Parkman Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables,” The William and Mary Quarterly 42 (3) (July 1985), 314-315. For a full recounting of the evolution and volume of colonial-era scalp bounties, see Margaret Haig Roosevelt Sewall Ball, Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-Taking in the Early American Northeast (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Colorado 2013). Return to essay.
(142) On Pynchon’s interpretation of this, see Sheldon, History of Deerfield, 253. Return to essay.
(143) In Lawrence H. Leder, The Livingston Indian Records 1666-1723 (Gettysburg, PA, Pennsylvania Historical Association 1956), 77-79. Return to essay.
(144) Leder, The Livingston Indian Records, 79. Return to essay.
(145) For a full discussion of the sale of Mohican and Schaghticoke lands in the Hudson River valley, see Shirley Dunn, The Mohicans and Their Land (Fleishmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press 1994). Return to essay.
(146) Meeting with the “Mahikanders and Scackhook commonly called the River Indians” with Governor Burnet in Albany, September 27, 1714, in Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Volume V (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Co. 1853), 388. Return to essay.
(147) Hendrick Aupaumut (identified in this document as Apamit), speaking at a meeting with Governor Burnet in Albany, August 31, 1722, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York Volume V, 663. Return to essay.
(148) “Records of a Private Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians” in Albany, September 14, 1724, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York Volume V, 713. Return to essay.
(149) Propositions from Governor Burnet to the “Sachims of the Schaakook Indians” in Albany, September 14, 1724, in O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York Volume V, 721-2. Return to essay.
(150) Lieutenant-Governor James De Lancey, reporting to the Lords of Trade in New York, October 8, 1754, in Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Volume VI (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Co. 1853), 909. Return to essay.
(151) For an analysis of the movements of various Native families into and out of Saint Francis over time, see Gordon M. Day, The Identity of the Saint Francis Indians, National Museum of Man, Mercury Series Paper No. 71 (Ottawa, Canada: National Museums of Canada 1981). Return to essay.
(152) For discussion of how these conflicts entangled multiple European and Native communities, see Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 2003). Return to essay.
(153) Titus King, Narrative of Titus King of Northampton, Mass.: a prisoner of the Indians in Canada, 1755-1758. (Hartford, CT: Connecticut Historical Society [1758] 1938), 13-14. Return to essay.
(154) King, Narrative of Titus King, 15, 17. Return to essay.
(155) Rev. Solomon Clark, Historical Catalogue of the Northampton First Church 1661-1891 (Northampton, MA: Gazette Printing Company 1891), 78. Also see Trumbull, History of Northampton, Volume I, 250. Return to essay.
(156) Trumbull, History of Northampton, Volume I, 485. Return to essay.
(157) For comparative examples in central Massachusetts, see Donna Baron, J. Edward Hood, and Holly V. Izard, “They Were Here All Along: The Native American Presence in Lower-Central New England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1996) 53: 561-586. Return to essay.
(158) For fuller discussion of the mechanism of historical erasure in regional town histories, see Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2010). Return to essay.
(159) See Thomas Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts Who Had Vanished,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, edited by Colin G. Calloway, 207-30 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1997). Return to essay.
(160) Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880,” Journal of American History 85 (2) (1998): 466-501. Return to essay.
(161) Charles J. Dean, “Hospital Hill and its Riddles of Yesterday,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA, November 15, 1958. Return to essay.
(162) Gregory H. Nobles, and Herbert L. Zarov, eds., Selected Papers from the Sylvester Judd Manuscript (Northampton, MA: Forbes Library 1976), 141, 159. Return to essay.
(163) John Milton Earle, Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth (Boston, MA: Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1861), 8. Return to essay.
(164) Earle’s journals have multiple omissions, in part because no interviews appear to have been conducted in western Massachusetts. For further discussion of the distortions in Earle’s reporting, see Christopher J. Thee, “Massachusetts Nipmucs and the Long Shadow of John Milton Earle,” The New England Quarterly 79 (4) (December 2006): 636-654. Return to essay.
(165) Earle, Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth, liii, lv, lxxv, lxxvii. Return to essay.
(166) For further analysis and discussion of central Massachusetts Native communities and occupations, see Doughton, “Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts Who Had Vanished.” Return to essay.
(167) Margaret M. Bruchac, “Abenaki Connections to 1704: The Sadoques Family and Deerfield, 2004,” in Captive Histories: Captivity Narratives, French Relations and Native Stories of the 1704 Deerfield Raid, edited by Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, 262-278 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press 2006). Return to essay.
(168) Stephen West Williams, “Report on the Indigenous Medical Botany of Massachusetts,” American Medical Association Transactions (Philadelphia, PA: American Medical Association, 1849), 863-927. Return to essay.
(169) Librarian David Bosse discovered this undated complaint in the Stephen West Williams Papers, Box 15, Folder 1, Memorial Libraries, Deerfield, MA. Return to essay.
(170) Karen B. Searcy, “The Steven West Williams Herbarium: An Early 19th Century Plant Collection From Deerfield, Massachusetts,” Rhodora 119 (978) (June 2017), 132-162. Return to essay.
(171) Hampshire Gazette, June 6, 1838. Return to essay.
(172) Jean O’Brien, “‘Vanishing’ Indians in Nineteenth-Century New England: Local Historians’ Erasure of Still-Present Indian Peoples,” in New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, edited by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, 414-432 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2006). Return to essay.
(173) Margaret M. Bruchac, “In Search of the Indian Doctress,” Old Sturbridge Visitor 39 (1) (1999): 6-7. Return to essay.
(174) Homer Merriam, “Annals of the Merriam Family, Gathered by Homer Merriam, Commenced in 1862.” Manuscript in the Merriam-Webster Collection at Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Return to essay.
(175) Myron Munson, unpublished notes, 1880s, from collection of Huntington Historical Society, Huntington, MA. Return to essay.
(176) Samuel Hopkins, Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatonic Indians (Boston, MA: Kneeland Press 1753), 38. Return to essay.
(177) Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, Volume II, 1219. Return to essay.
(178) Anonymous, “The Old Town of Norwich” [Indian Hollow, MA], Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA February 7, 1871. Return to essay.
(179) For more information on the historic relocations of the Mohican, see Dunn, The Mohicans and Their Land. Return to essay.
(180) Nathan Whiting [1745], “List of Soldiers,” in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford, CT: Connecticut Historical Society 1905), Volume XIII, 76-80. Return to essay.
(181) A reference to Betty Mammanash living with state support in Windsor can be found in Henry Reed Stiles, The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut, 1635-1891 (Hartford, CT: Press of the Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1891), Volume I. The name of Betty’s husband is unknown. Return to essay.
(182) Native Northeast Research Collaborative, “Ashbow, Samuel, Sr., 1719-1795” (Native Northeast Portal 2019). Return to essay.
(183) Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, a Compilation from the Archives (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth 1902), 161. Return to essay.
(184) Clark, Antiquities, Historicals and Graduates of Northampton, 127. Return to essay.
(185) The gravestone was later stolen and has never been found. See anonymous, “The Maminash Gravestone Stolen From Pancake Plain,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA, August 12, 1884. Return to essay.
(186) George Maminash’s death from tuberculosis was noted in an unnamed entry in the First Church of Christ records as follows: “An indian man of about 16 died July 19th 1783.” See First Church Records, Book 1 and 2 [c. 1750-1850]. First Churches Archives. First Churches, Northampton, MA. Return to essay.
(187) Sidney E. Bridgman, “Sally Mammanash is Recalled Here: Daughter of Indian Woman Who Was Stoned to Death Lived With the Bridgmans,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, August 25, 1936. Some sources suggest that Elizabeth Maminash died around 1779, but she is likely the subject of an unnamed entry for July 19, 1783 in the First Church of Christ records, listing a Native woman who was “lying in liquor lay in the sun till she died,” suggesting that she died from exposure or heat stroke. See First Church Records, Book 1 and 2 [c. 1750-1850]. Return to essay.
(188) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, NY: Vintage Books 2001). Return to essay.
(189) Margaret M. Bruchac, “Sally Maminash: Last of the Indians Here,” Historic Highlights (Northampton, MA: Historic Northampton 2018). Return to essay.
(190) H. [name unknown], The Brethren Evangelist, Volume VIII, No. 25, June 23, 1886. Return to essay.
(191) Rev. Solomon Clark, Historical Catalogue of the Northampton First Church 1661-1891, (Northampton, MA: Gazette Printing Company 1891), 121. Return to essay.
(192) Sophia Clapp’s grandaughter, Mrs. Strong, “retained vivid pictures of the old Indian woman usually sitting in the chair with the cherished Bible in her hands.” Mary Brewster. “The Last Indian of Northampton,” in The Story of Western Massachusetts, Harry Andrew Wright, ed. (New York, NY: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1949), 817. Return to essay.
(193) For a nuanced discussion of the impact of these myths, see Russell Handsman and Trudy Lamb Richmond, “Confronting Colonialism: The Mahican and Schaghticoke Peoples and Us,” in Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings, edited by Peter R. Schmidt and Thomas C. Patterson, 87-117 (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press 1996). Return to essay.
(194) Christine DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2018). Return to essay.
(195) Trumbull, History of Northampton, Volume I, 9. Return to essay.
(196) Daniel White Wells and Reuben Field Wells, A History of Hatfield, Massachusetts (Springfield, MA: F.C.H. Gibbons 1910), 28. Return to essay.
(197) The term “Native American,” which first entered American colloquial speech during the 1800s, was a nativist self-appellation for White Protestant Americans; it did not, until the 1970s, actually designate Indigenous people. See Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, Volume I, 1113. Return to essay.
(198) Isaac Goodwin [1820], “Address to the American Antiquarian Society,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 1812-1849 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society 1941), 161. Return to essay.
(199) George Sheldon [1888], “The Pocumtuck Confederacy,” History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association 1880-1889 (Deerfield, MA: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1898), 390-408. Return to essay.
(200) L. Clark Seeleye, “President Seeleye’s Address,” The Meadow City’s Quarter-Millennial Book (Northampton, MA: City of Northampton 1904), 155. Return to essay.
(201) George Sheldon, A Guide to the Museum of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (Deerfield, MA: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association 1908), 8. Return to essay.
(202) For fuller discussion of these processes and collections, see Margaret M. Bruchac, “Lost and Found: NAGPRA, Scattered Relics, and Restorative Methodologies,” Museum Anthropology 33 (2) (2010): 137-156. Return to essay.
(203) E. B. Delabarre and Harris H. Wilder, “Indian Corn Hills in Massachusetts,” American Anthropologist 22 (3) (1920): 203-255. Return to essay.
(204) For example, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association dramatically improved our understandings of the 1704 Deerfield attack with their website--Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704--providing English, French, Abenaki, Mohawk, and Huron perspectives on this event. Return to essay.
(205) Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2008), xxxv. Return to essay.
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