The Pequods Jealous

In the very morning of this colonial era of Connecticut, dark clouds gathered black and threatening, and for awhile a storm impended which seemed ready to sweep the little settlements from the face of the earth in a moment. The fiery Pequods had become jealous of the English because the latter appeared to be on friendly terms with the Mohegans on the west and the Narragansets on the east, the bitter enemies of this warlike tribe. Over the Pequods, a famous sachem and chief named Sassacus was ruler. He was cool, calculating, treacherous, haughty, fierce and malignant, and he was the terror of the neighboring tribes. He ruled over twenty-six sagamores or inferior princes, and his domain extended from Narraganset Bay to the Hudson River, and over Long Island. His bravery won the unbounded admiration of his warriors, of whom almost two thousand were always ready to follow him wheresoever he might lead. Seeing the power of the few English in garrison at Saybrook, and dreading the strength and influence of more who would undoubtedly join them, he resolved to exterminate the intruders. By every art of persuasion and menace, he tried to induce the Mohegans and Narragansets to become his allies. The united tribes could put four thousand men on the war-path at one time, while among all the English in the Connecticut Valley, there were not more than two hundred and fifty men capable of bearing arms. How easily might those fierce pagans have annihilated the pale-faced Christians!

The Pequods moved cautiously. At first they were sullen. Then they kidnapped children; and finally they murdered Englishmen found alone in the forests or on the waters, and destroyed or made captive families on the borders of the settlements. It was evident that they intended to exterminate the white people in detail, and terror prevailed throughout the valley. This was heightened by the capture of a Massachusetts trading vessel by the allies of the Pequods on Block Island, killing the commander and plundering the vessel.

The authorities at Boston determined to punish the Pequods and awe them into quietude. For this purpose they sent a small military force, in three vessels, into Long Island Sound. This force killed some Indians on Block Island, burnt their wigwams, broke their canoes in pieces, and cut down their growing corn. Then they went over to the Pequod country on the main, where they made demands which they could not enforce, burnt some wigwams, destroyed crops, and killed a few people. The expedition, weak in numbers and injudiciously conducted, was looked upon with contempt by the savages, and intensified their hatred of the white intruders. They sent ambassadors to the monarch of the Narragansets urging him to join them at once in a war of extermination, declaring, as a powerful plea, that the two races could not live together in the same land, and that the Indians, who would soon be the weaker party, would be scattered and destroyed like leaves in autumn.

At this critical juncture, a deliverer appeared in the person of Roger Williams, a Puritan minister, who had been driven out of Massachusetts by persecution and had taken refuge in the land of the Narragansets, who soon learned to love and respect him. He heard of the proposed alliance and perceived the danger. Unmindful of the cruel wrongs he had suffered at the hands of his Puritan brethren, he hastened in an open boat on a stormy day, across Narraganset Bay, to the dwelling of Miantonomoh near the site of Newport, on Rhode Island. He was the acting chief sachem of the Narragansets (for his uncle, Canonicus, the chief, was very old), and was revered by them all. There Williams found fierce ambassadors from Sassacus, urging their suit, and at the peril of his life he opposed them with arguments. "Three days and nights," Williams wrote to Major Mason, "my business forced me to lodge and mix with the bloody Pequod ambassadors, whose hands and arms, methought, reeked with the blood of my countrymen, murdered and massacred by them on Connecticut River, and from whom I could not but nightly look for their bloody knives at my own throat, also." Williams prevailed. He not only prevented the alliance, but induced Narraganset chiefs to go to Boston, where they concluded a treaty of peace and alliance with the colonists. So the Pequods were not only compelled to carry on their proposed war alone, but to fight the Narragansets.

This failure did not dishearten the Pequods. They kept the settlements on the Connecticut in a state of constant fear, all the autumn and winter. They plundered and murdered whenever opportunities offered. Barns were fired and cattle were killed by them; and the murders were sometimes accompanied by the most horrid atrocities. Finally, a band of a hundred Pequods attacked Wethersfield, killed seven men, a woman and a child, and carried away two girls. They had now slain more than thirty of the English, and the settlers were compelled to choose between flight and destruction, or war and possible salvation. They resolved to fight, having promise of aid from the eastern colonies.