The Pequot War: Mason and Pequots

Mason had approached within about a rod of the fort, when he heard a dog bark, and almost in a breath this alarm was followed up by the voice of an Indian, crying, "Owanux! Owanux!"--Englishmen! Englishmen! No time was to be lost. He called up his forces with all haste and fired upon the enemy through the palisades. The Pequots, who had spent the night in singing and dancing (under the belief that the English had retreated), were now in a deep sleep. The entrance, near which Mason stood, was blocked up with bushes about breast high. Over this frail obstruction he leaped, sword in hand, shouting to his men to follow him. But Seely, his lieutenant, found it more easy to remove the bushes than to force the men over them. When he had done so, he also entered, followed by sixteen soldiers. It had been determined to destroy the enemy with the sword, and thus save the corn and other valuables that were stored in the wigwams. With this view the captain, seeing no Indians, entered one of the wigwams. Here he found many warriors, who crowded hard upon him, and beset him with great violence; but they were so amazed at the strange apparition that had so suddenly thrust itself upon them, that they could make but a feeble resistance. Mason was soon joined by William. Hayden, who, as he entered the wigwam through the breach that had been made by his impetuous captain, stumbled against the dead body of a Pequot, whom Mason had slain, and fell. Some of the Indians now fled from the wigwam; others, still stupefied with sleep, crept under mats and skins to hide themselves.

The palisades embraced an area of about twenty acres,--a space sufficient to afford room for a large Indian village. There were more than seventy houses in this space, with lanes or streets passing between them. Mason, still intent on destroying the Pequots and at the same time saving their property, now left the wigwam, and passed down one of these streets, driving the crowd of Indians that thronged it before him from one end of it to the other. At the lower extremity of this lane stood a little company of Englishmen, who, having effected an entrance from the west, met the Indians as they fled from Mason, and killed about half a dozen of them. The captain now faced about, and went back the whole length of the lane, to the spot where he had entered the fort. He was exhausted, and quite out of breath, and had become satisfied that this was not the way to exterminate the Indians, who now swarmed from the wigwams like bees from a hive. Two of his soldiers stood near him, close to the palisades, with their useless swords pointed to the ground. "We shall never kill them in this way," said the captain; and then added, with the same laconic brevity, "We must burn them!" With these words the decree of the council of war to save the booty of the enemy was annulled; for, stepping into the wigwam where he had before forced an entrance, he snatched a firebrand in his hand, and, instantly returning, applied it to the light mats that formed the covering of their rude tenements. Almost in an instant the whole village was wrapped in flames, and the frightened Pequots fled in dismay from the roofs that had just before sheltered them. Such was their terror that many of them took refuge from the English in the flames, and perished there. Some climbed the palisades, where they formed but too fair a mark for the muskets of their enemies, who could see to take a dead aim in the light of the ghastly conflagration. Others fled from the beds of mats or skins where they had sought a temporary concealment, and were arrested by the hand of death in the midst of their flight. Others still, warping up to the windward, whence the fire sped with such fatal velocity, fell flat upon the ground and plied their destroyers with arrows. But their hands were so palsied with fear that the feathered messengers either flew wide of their aim or fell with spent force upon the ground. A few, of still stouter heart, rushed forth with the tomahawk, to engage the invaders of their homes in a hand-to-hand combat. But they were nearly all, to the number of about forty, cut in pieces by the sword. The vast volume of flame, the lurid light reflected on the dark background of the horizon, the crack of the muskets, the yells of the Indians who fought, and of those who sought vainly to fly, the wail of women and children as they writhed in the flames, and the exulting cries of the Narragansetts and Mohegans without the fort, formed a contrast, awful and sublime, with the quiet glories of the peaceful May morning, that was just then breaking over the woods and the ocean.

Seventy wigwams were burned to ashes, and probably not less than five hundred men, women, and children were destroyed. The property, too, shared the same fate. The long-cherished wampum-belt, with the beads of blue, purple, and white, the war-club, the eagle plume, the tufted scalps, trophies of many a victory, helped only to swell the blaze that consumed alike the young warrior and the superannuated counsellor, the squaw and the little child that clung helplessly to her bosom. Of all who were in the fort, only seven were taken captive, and about the same number escaped.