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The Pequot War was an armed conflict in 1634-1638 between an alliance of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, with Native American allies (the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes), against the Pequot tribe. This war saw the elimination of the Pequot as a viable polity in what is present-day Southern New England.

Many Pequot people were killed by the colonists and their allies; more were captured and sold into slavery in Bermuda, and some ran away from home.^[1] Those who managed to evade death or capture and enslavement dispersed. It would take the Pequot more than three and a half centuries to regain their former political and economic power in their traditional homeland region along the Pequot (present-day Thames) and Mystic Rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut.^[2]

The name Pequot is an Algonquian term, the meaning of which is in dispute among Algonquian specialists. Most recent sources claim that "Pequot" comes from "Paquatauoq," "the destroyers," thereby relying on the speculations of an early twentieth century authority on Algonquian languages. However, Frank Speck, a leading specialist of Pequot-Mohegan, had doubts, believing that another term the translation of which referred to the shallowness of a body of water seems much more plausible.^[3]

According to a surviving member of the Pequot tribe, the word Pequot means "warlike."

The Pequot and their traditional enemies, the Mohegan, were at one time a single socio-political entity. Anthropologists and historians contend that sometime before contact with the Puritan English, the Pequot were split into the two warring groups.^[4] The earliest historians of the Pequot War have also speculated that the Pequot migrated from the upper Hudson River Valley toward central and eastern Connecticut sometime around 1500, but these claims are disputed by modern anthropology.^[5]

In the 1630s, the Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil. The Pequot aggressively worked to extend their area of control, at the expense of the Wampanoag to the north, the Narragansett to the east, the Connecticut River Valley Algonquians and Mohegan to the west, and the Algonquian peoples of present-day Long Island to the south. All of these contended with one another for dominance and control of the European trade. A series of smallpox epidemics over the course of the previous three decades had severely reduced the Indian populations^[6], leaving a power vacuum.

The Dutch and the English were also striving to extend the reach of their trade into the interior in order to achieve dominance in the lush, fertile region. By 1636, the Dutch had fortified their trading post, and the English had built a trading fort at Saybrook. English Puritans from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies had settled at the newly established river towns of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield.

• Pequot: Sachem Sassacus
• Eastern Niantic
• Western Niantic: Sachem Sassious
• Mohigg: Sachem Uncas
• Narragansett: Sachem Miantonomo
• Metoac (also Montauk or Montaukett).
• Massachusetts Bay Colony: Governors Henry Vane and John Winthrop, Captains John Underhill and John Endecott
• Plymouth Colony: Governors Edward Winslow and William Bradford, and Captain Myles Standish
• Connecticut Colony, Thomas Hooker, Captain John Mason, Robert Seeley, Lion Gardiner

Before the war's inception, efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of escalating incidents and attacks that increased tensions on both sides. Political divisions between the Pequot and Mohegan widened as they aligned with different trade sources-- the Mohegan with the Puritan English, and the Pequot with the Dutch. The Pequot attacked a group of Mattabesic Indians who had attempted to trade at Hartford. Tension also increased as Massachusetts Bay Colony began to manufacture wampum, the supply of which the Pequot had controlled up until 1633.

In 1634, John Stone, a smuggler, privateer, and slaver, and seven of his crewmen were killed by the Western Niantic, tributary clients of the Pequot, in retaliation for atrocities committed by the Dutch, and more recently, by Stone.^[7] A principal Pequot Sachem, Tatobem, had boarded a Dutch vessel to trade. Instead of conducting trade, the Dutch seized the Sachem and demanded a substantial ransom for his safe return. The Pequot quickly sent a bushel of wampum, and received Tatobem's corpse in return.

Stone, the privateer, was actually from the West Indies and had been banished from Boston for malfeasance. Setting sail from Boston, Stone had met his end near the mouth of the Connecticut River while kidnapping Western Niantic women and children to sell as slaves in Virginia Colony.^[8] Colonial officials in Boston protested the killing. The Pequot Sachem, Sassacus, refused the colonials' demands that the Western Niantic responsible for Stone's death be turned over to them.

Then on July 20, 1636, a respected trader named John Oldham was attacked on a trading voyage to Block Island. He and several of his crew were killed and his ship looted by Narragansett-allied Indians who sought to discourage English settlers from trading with their Pequot rivals. In the weeks that followed, colonial officials from Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, assumed the Narragansett were the likely culprits. Knowing that the Indians of Block Island were allies of the Eastern Niantic, who in turn were allied with the Narragansett, Puritan officials became equally suspicious of the Narragansett.^[9] Even so, the colonial English response to Oldham's death, the last in a series of escalating incidents, has traditionally been viewed as the beginning of the Pequot War.

News of Oldham's death became the subject of sermons in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In August, Governor Vane sent John Endecott to exact revenge on the Indians of Block Island. Endecott's party of roughly 90 men sailed to Block Island and attacked a Niantic village there. Most of the Niantic escaped, but 14 were killed, while two of Endecott's men were injured. The Puritan militia burned their village to the ground. Whatever crops the Niantic had managed to store for the winter which the English could not carry away with them were burned as well. Endecott then went on to Fort Saybrook.

The Puritans at Saybrook were not happy about the raid, but agreed that some of them would accompany Endecott as guides. Endecott sailed along the coast to a Pequot village, where he repeated the previous year's demand of payment for the death of Stone and more for Oldham. After some discussion, Endecott concluded that the Pequot were stalling and attacked. The Pequot ruse had worked however, and the Pequot were able to escape into the woods. The former Puritan Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony once again had to content himself with burning an Indian village and crops before sailing home.

John Endecott's Massachusetts Bay Colony forces had gone home, but Connecticut Colony Puritans were left to deal with the anger of the Pequot. The Pequot attempted to enjoin their allies, some 36 tributary villages, to their cause but were only partly effective. The Western Niantic joined them but the Eastern Niantic remained neutral. The traditional enemies of the Pequot, the Mohegan and the Narragansett, openly sided with the Puritan English. The Narragansett had warred with and lost territory to the Pequot in 1622. Now their friend Roger Williams urged them to side with the English.

Through the fall and winter, Fort Saybrook was effectively besieged. Any who ventured outside were killed. As spring arrived in 1637, the Pequot stepped up their raids on Connecticut Colony towns. On April 23, Wongunk chief Sequin attacked Wethersfield with Pequot help, killing six men and three women, a number of cattle and horses, and taking captive two young girls (the daughters of Abraham Swain, later ransomed by Dutch traders)^[10]. In all, the towns lost about 30 settlers.

In May, leaders of Connecticut Colony's river towns met in Hartford, raised a militia, and placed John Mason in command. Mason set out with 90 militia and 70 Mohegan warriors under Uncas to repay the Pequot. At Fort Saybrook, Mason was joined by John Underhill and another 20 men. Underhill and Mason proceeded to the principal Pequot village, near present-day Groton, but the Pequot chose to defend their fortified village. Ill-equipped to take it, Mason sailed east, and stopped at the village of Misistuck (Mystic).

Believing that the English had returned to Boston, Massachusetts, the Pequot sachem Sassacus took several hundred of his warriors to make another raid on Hartford. But John Mason had only gone to visit the Narragansett, who joined him with several hundred warriors. Several allied Niantic warriors also joined Mason's group. On May 26, 1637, with a force up to about 400 fighting men, Mason attacked Misistuck by surprise. He estimated that "six or seven Hundred" Pequot were there when his forces assaulted the palisade. Some 150 warriors had accompanied Sassacus, so that Mystic's inhabitants were largely Pequot women and children. Surrounding the palisade, Mason ordered that the enclosure be set on fire. Justifying his conduct later, Mason declared that the holocaust against the Pequot was also the act of a God who "laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven . . . Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies." ^[11] Mason also insisted that should any Pequot attempt to escape the flames, that they too should be killed. Of the 600 to 700 Pequot at Mystic that day, only seven were taken prisoner while another seven made it into the woods to escape.

The Narragansett and Mohegan warriors who had fought alongside John Mason and John Underhill's colonial militia were horrified by the actions and "manner of the Englishmen's fight . . . because it is too furious, and slays too many men."^[12] Repulsed by the "total war" tactics of the Puritan English, and the horrors that they had witnessed, the Narragansett returned home.

Believing the mission accomplished, John Mason also set out for home. The militia became temporarily lost, but in doing so Mason narrowly missed returning Pequot Indians who, seeing what had occurred, gave chase to the Puritan forces to little avail.

The slaughter at Mystic broke the Pequot, and deprived them of their allies. Forced to abandon their villages, the Pequot fled -- mostly in small bands-- to seek refuge with other southern Algonquian peoples. Many were hunted down by the Mohegan and Narragansett warriors. The largest group, led by Sassacus, was denied aid by the Metoac (Montauk, or Montaukett) from present-day Long Island. Sassacus led roughly 400 warriors west along the coast towards the Dutch at New Amsterdam and their Native allies. When they crossed the Connecticut River, the Pequot killed three men that they had encountered near Fort Saybrook.

In mid-June, John Mason set out from Saybrook with 160 men and 40 Mohegan scouts under Uncas. They caught up with the refugees at Sasqua, a Mattabesic village near present-day Fairfield, Connecticut. Surrounded in a nearby swamp, the Pequot refused to surrender. Several hundred, mostly women and children, were allowed to leave with the Mattabesic. In the ensuing battle, Sassacus was able to break free with perhaps 80 warriors, but 180 of the Pequot were killed or captured. The colonists memorialized this event as the "Great Swamp Fight".

Sassacus and his followers had hoped to gain refuge among the Mohawk in present-day New York. However, the Mohawk had seen the display of English power and chose instead to kill Sassacus and his warriors, sending Sassacus' scalp to Hartford, as a symbolic offering of Mohawk friendship with Connecticut Colony. Puritan colonial officials continued to call for the merciless hunting down of what remained of the Pequot months after war's end.

In September, the victorious Mohegan and Narragansett met at the General Court of Connecticut and agreed on the disposition of the Pequot and their lands. The agreement, known as the first Treaty of Hartford, was signed on September 21, 1638. About 200 Pequot "old men, women, and children" survived the war and massacre at Mystic. Unable to find refuge with a neighboring tribe, they finally gave up and offered themselves as slaves in exchange for life:^{[13]: 18 [14]}

There were then given to ONKOS, Sachem of MONHEAG, Eighty; to MYAN TONIMO, Sachem of NARRAGANSETT, Eighty; and to NYNIGRETT, Twenty, when he should satisfy for a Mare of Edward Pomroye’s killed by his Men. The Pequots were then bound by COVENANT, That none should inhabit their native Country, nor should any of them be called PEQUOTS any more, but MOHEAGS and NARRAGANSETTS for ever.^[13]: 18

Others were enslaved and shipped to Bermuda or the West Indies, or were forced to become household servants in Puritan households in Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay.^[15] Moreover, colonists appropriated Pequot lands under claims of a "just war", and attempted to legally extirpate the Pequot by effectively declaring them extinct and making it a crime to speak the name Pequot. Those few Pequot who managed to evade death or slavery were later recovered from captivity from the Mohegan and assigned reservations in Connecticut Colony.

The colonists attributed the success of the massacre and extermination of the Pequot tribe to an act of God.

Let the whole Earth be filled with his Glory! Thus the LORD was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their Land for an Inheritance.^[13]: 20

This was the first instance wherein Algonquian peoples of what is now southern New England encountered European-style warfare. The idea and reality of total war was essentially new to them. After the Pequot War, the uneasily allied colonies represented such a power that no Native alliance could stand against them for a generation. In 1675, a fairly long period of peace came to an end with King Philip's War.

English observations of the land surrounding the Great Swamp Fight was a factor in their settlement of the town of Fairfield in 1639.

The earliest accounts of the Pequot War were penned by the victors within one year of the war. Later histories, with few exceptions, remained more or less the same, restating arguments first used by the war's military leaders such as John Underhill and John Mason, as well the Puritan divines Increase Mather, and his son, Cotton Mather.^[16]

There are disputes about these histories. In 2004, an artist and archaeologist teamed up to speculate over the sequence of events in the Pequot War, and even whether the accounts of John Mason and John Underhill were actually authored by them.^[17] While most modern historians such as Alfred Cave do not quibble over questions of veracity or chronology, they do contend that Mason and Underhill's eyewitness accounts, as well as the contemporaneous histories of Mather and Hubbard, were more "polemical than substantive."^[18] The cause of the outbreak of hostilities, the reasons for the Puritan's hatred of the Pequot, and the ways in which Puritans chose to deal with and shortly thereafter write about the Pequot, have begun to be re-explored.

Revisionist historians have rooted the history of the Pequot War within the larger context of European colonization and the geopolitical ambitions of contending Native peoples during the first half of the seventeenth century. These historians have doubts about the traditional histories as hegemonic narratives that valorize Puritans at the expense of a demonized Native population. Alden T. Vaughan, at first a critic of the Pequots, later wrote that the Pequot were not "solely or even primarily responsible" for the war and, further, that "The Bay colony's gross escalation of violence ... made all-out war unavoidable; until then, negotiation was at least conceivable."^[19]

The Mystic Massacre was featured in the History Channel series 10 Days that Unexpectedly Changed America.

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• _______. "Who Killed John Stone? A Note on the Origins of the Pequot War," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 49, no. 3. (Jul., 1992), pp. 509–521.
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Dempsey, Jack, and David R. Wagner, MYSTIC FIASCO: How the Indians Won The Pequot War. 249pp., 50 illustrations/photos, Annotated Chronology, Index. Scituate MA: Digital Scanning Inc. 2004. See also "Mystic Massacre"

• Drinnon, Richard, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
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• ______. "Pequots and the Question of Genocide: A Reply to Michael Freeman," New England Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 4. (Dec., 1995), pp. 641–649.
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• Vaughan, Alden T. "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Ser., Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr., 1964), pp. 256–269; also republished in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
• ______. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620-1675 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995, Reprint).
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• History of Connecticut
• Philip Vincent

• For a completely different understanding of The Pequot War---based on actually walking the CT landscape, and on the fact that the Puritans had no idea where they were going, how to identify the "enemy" and more---see http://ancientgreece-earlyamerica.com, "MYSTIC FIASCO: How the Indians Won The Pequot War," by Jack Dempsey and David R. Wagner
• 1736 version of John Mason's account
• Pequot War timeline from Columbia University
• A summary of the Pequots and their history
• A brief history of the Pequot War
• Society of Colonial War's account
• Cape Cod Online: Worlds Rejoined.
• The Royal Gazette: Bermudians (Mohegans) and Pequots Reconnect
• P. Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell fought in New England online edition
• John Underhill, Newes from America online edition
• Lion Gardener, Relation of the Pequot Warres online edition
• John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War online edition