by Sarah Vowell
“I then inquired of Uncas,” he writes, asking “what he thought the Indians would do?” Uncas predicts, “The Narragansetts would all leave us.” As for the Mohegan, Uncas reassures Mason that “he would never leave us: and so it proved: For which expressions and some other speeches of his, I shall never forget him. Indeed he was a great friend, and did great service.”
At night, recalls Mason, “the rocks were our pillows; yet rest was pleasant.”
The next morning, Mason asks Uncas and his comrade, Wequash—the same Wequash whose deathbed lamentations Roger Williams recounts in A Key—where the fort is. They tell him it’s on top of a nearby hill. Looking around, Mason wonders where the hell the Narragansett have disappeared to. They are nowhere to be seen. Uncas replies that they’re hanging back, “exceedingly afraid.” Mason tells Uncas and Wequash not to leave but to stand back and wait to see “whether Englishmen would now fight or not.”
Then Underhill joins in the huddle and he and Mason begin “commending ourselves to God.” They divide their men in half, “there being two entrances to the fort.”
The Pequot fort is encircled within a palisade—a wall made of thick tree trunks standing up and fastened together. Around seven hundred men, women, and children are asleep in wigwams inside.
Mason writes that they “heard a dog bark.” Their sneak attack is foiled. The Pequot Paul Revere alerts the town. Mason says they heard “an Indian crying Owanux! Owanux! Which is Englishmen! Englishmen!”
Mason: “We called up our forces with all expedition, gave fire upon them through the palisade, the Indians being in a dead—indeed their last—sleep.”
Mason commands the Narragansett and Mohegan to surround the palisade in what Underhill describes as a “ring battalia, giving a volley of shot upon the fort.” Hearing gunfire, the awakened Pequot, writes Underhill, “brake forth into the most doleful cry.”
The Pequot screams are so doleful Underhill says the English almost sympathize with their prey—almost. Until the English manage to remember why they are there in the first place (to avenge the murder of various Englishmen, from a drunken, wife-stealing pirate to the settlers on the Connecticut frontier when those girls were kidnapped). Thus Underhill reports, “Every man being bereaved of pity fell upon the work without compassion, considering the blood [the Pequot] had shed of our native countrymen.”
Then the English enter the fort, carrying, per Underhill, “our swords in our right hand, our carbines or muskets in our left hand.” Mason and Underhill start knocking heads inside the wigwams. Various Pequot come at them. “Most courageously these Pequot behaved themselves,” Underhill will praise them later on.
Combat in the cozy little bark houses is chaos—too dangerous and unpredictable. Mason is hit with arrows and Underhill’s hip is grazed. Mason is faced, on a smaller scale, with the same problem Harry Truman would confront when he was forced to ponder the logistics of invading Japan in 1945. A ground war would damn untold thousands of American troops to certain slaughter. The Puritan commander, in a smaller, grubbier, lower-tech way, arrives at the same conclusion as Truman when he ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mason says, “We must burn them.”
And they do.
Mason dashes inside a hut, lights a torch, and “set the wigwam on fire.” The inhabitants are stunned. “When it was thoroughly kindled,” Mason recalls, “the Indians ran as men most dreadfully amazed.”
Underhill, too, lights up his vicinity, and “the fires of both meeting in the center of the fort blazed most terribly and burnt all in the space of half an hour.”
The wind helps. According to Mason, the fire “did swiftly overrun the fort, to the extreme amazement of the enemy, and great rejoicing of ourselves.” Mason notes that some of the Indians try to climb over the palisade and others start “running into the very flames.” They shoot arrows at the Englishmen, who answer them with gunfire, but, writes Underhill, “the fire burnt their very bowstrings.”
“Mercy they did deserve for their valor,” Underhill admits of the Pequot. Not that they get any. William Bradford was told by a participant that “it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.”
The Englishmen escape the flames and then guard the two exits so that no Pequot can escape. According to Underhill, those who try to get away “our soldiers entertained with the point of the sword; down fell men, women, and children.”
Mason summarizes, “And thus . . . in little more than an hour’s space was their impregnable fort with themselves utterly destroyed, to the number of six or seven hundred.” That’s right—as many as seven hundred people, some of them babies, some of them those babies’ mothers, were burned alive in their homes.
Two Englishmen die and about twenty are wounded.
Mason is triumphant. After all, this is the will of a righteous God. He praises the Lord for “burning them up in the fire of his wrath, and dunging the ground with their flesh: It is the Lord’s doings, and it is marvelous in our eyes!” That might be the creepiest exclamation point in American literature. No, wait—it’s this one: “Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies!”
Underhill has read enough of the New Testament to at least pretend to stop and question this human barbecue. He asks, “Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?” Answer: Nope. The Bible offers reasoning enough: “When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against God and man . . . there He hath no respect to persons, but harrows them and saws them and puts them to the sword and the most terriblest death that may be.” Even children? Yes. “Sometimes,” Underhill continues, “the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.” He concludes, “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”
For Underhill, biblical justification is enough of an air freshener to erase the smell of burning human flesh. But the Narragansett and Mohegan, whom Underhill calls “our Indians,” were shaken by the viciousness of the English and the horror of the carnage. Especially the Narragansett. Recall they had explicitly asked before the campaign, via Roger Williams, “that it would be pleasing to all natives, that women and children be spared.”
“Our Indians,” Underhill writes, “came to us and much rejoiced at our victories, and greatly admired the manner of Englishmen’s fight, but cried ‘Mach it, mach it,’ that is, ‘It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious and slays too many men.’” The word “naught,” to a seventeenth-century English speaker, meant “evil.”
In 1889, a statue of Mason drawing his sword was erected on the site of the Mystic Fort massacre, in the present-day town of Groton. In 1992, a Pequot named Wolf Jackson petitioned the town council to remove the statue. According to the Hartford Courant, in one of the meetings in which the statue’s fate was debated, one citizen proclaimed “that the statue on Pequot Avenue is about as appropriate as a monument at Auschwitz to Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution.” As a compromise between the faction who wanted the statue destroyed and boosters who wanted to keep it in place, in 1996 the statue was moved away from the site of the massacre to nearby Windsor, which was founded by Mason. The New York Times reported that nine protestors attended the rededication ceremony: “‘No Hero,’ said one sign; ‘Remember the Pequot Massacres,’ said another.” A few weeks later, vandals doused the bronze Mason with red paint.
After the Mystic Fort Massacre, there are a few more dwindling skirmishes here and there in the Pequot War. Individual Pequot are hunted down by other Indians, who decapitate their corpses and send their severed heads along to the English, including the head of the principal sachem, Sassacus, who is beheaded by Mohawks. These grisly trophies, reports Mason, “came almost daily to Windsor or Hartford.” But Mystic more or less marks the end of the Pequot War, as well as the end of Pequot power.
Captured Pequot are divvied up as spoils amo
ng the victors. Boston sells some of its share of Pequot survivors into slavery in Bermuda. (Many Pequot descendants still live on Bermuda’s St. David’s Island, their Indian slave ancestors having intermarried with their African slave ancestors.) In 1638, the Connecticut English host a treaty party in Hartford where a few remaining Pequot are divided among Uncas, Miantonomi, and the leaders of other tribes that had been English allies. The treaty mandates that the Pequot are to be absorbed into their adoptive tribes, their own tribal identity outlawed. “The Pequots were then bound by covenant,” writes Mason, “that none should inhabit their native country, nor should any of them be called Pequots any more, but Mohegans and Narragansetts forever.” After trying to physically annihilate the Pequot, the English attempt to wipe out the Pequot linguistically, forbidding the tribe to refer to themselves as Pequot.
The Pequot absorbed into Uncas’s tribe later became known as the Mashantucket Pequot. In 1976, this tribe successfully sued the state of Connecticut for recovery of some of its land in Connecticut and received federal recognition from Ronald Reagan in 1983. This is the home to the tribe’s wildly profitable Foxwoods Resort Casino.
On our Plymouth-bound vacation, my sister Amy, my nephew Owen, and I visit the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, a stone’s throw from Foxwoods. It’s an impressive facility with a tower where visitors can look across the tree-tops and admire the landscape and the casino’s teal roof. The museum features life-size dioramas with mannequins depicting the Pequot way of life, including a caribou hunt and a wigwam village enclosed in a palisade like the one at Mystic. Inside, a child naps on a bed of animal skins, a woman guts a fish, an elder teaches a teenager how to make an arrow.
We sit in the museum’s theater and watch a film—a dramatic reenactment of the massacre at the Mystic fort. Owen is seven. His knowledge of seventeenth-century New England derives entirely from what he learned in his school’s Thanksgiving pageant the previous fall and repeated viewings of Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, in which a cartoon dog and his teenage friends visit a haunted New England town.
When the film shows the Pequot clashing with Connecticut settlers, Owen whispers, “I don’t get it. Why are they fighting? They eat together on Thanksgiving.”
When Uncas shows up at Fort Saybrook and bestows upon the English his offering of Pequot heads, Owen is outraged. He screams, “What?!”
Cut to the Pequot fort, where we have already seen a little girl around Owen’s age playing with a cornhusk doll while being teased by her brother. The reenactor playing Captain Mason yells, “Burn them!” As the wigwams catch fire, Pequot kids are shrieking and holding on to their mothers. The English shoot at the Pequot who flee the flames. Horrified, Owen tugs my sleeve, demanding, “Aunt Sarah! When do they have Thanksgiving?”
“The one with the Pilgrims?” I whisper. “ That happened sixteen years earlier.”
Owen closes his eyes and refuses to watch the rest of the movie. When the lights go up, he asks his mother, “Who won?”
“ The English,” she replies.
One answer to Owen’s question—When’s Thanksgiving?—might be June 15, 1637. Winthrop writes in his journal that in Boston “There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequot.” To the Puritans, days of thanksgiving were not annual events. Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by U.S. calendars calling for a holiday, Thanksgiving, with a capital T, on the fourth Thursday of November every year. What if we didn’t deserve it? What if a day of fast was called for instead, days of fast being occasional days of punishment to repent for wayward collective behavior or as an act of prayer to call for God’s help in precarious situations. In fact, Boston had held a fast the day before the massacre at Mystic, and Winthrop credits that one day’s missed dinner for the resulting “general defeat of the Pequot.” Thus did they earn the day of thanksgiving after the victory.
If the idea of putting on a picnic to celebrate seven hundred people being burned alive sounds crass, it was nevertheless not unheard of in the seventeenth century. In fact, during the English Civil War, when the Puritan Oliver Cromwell led his army to sack the Irish village of Drogheda on September 11, 1649, at least two thousand people died, including some who barricaded themselves inside a church that Cromwell set on fire, thus burning them alive like the Pequot in their fort. Cromwell prosecuted this holocaust in the same manner Captain Underhill applauded his men at Mystic—“without compassion.” Though, according to Cromwell’s biographer Antonia Fraser, “Oliver’s own mercy was said to have been stirred by the sight of a tiny baby still trying hopelessly to feed from the breast of its dead mother.” And what was the verdict on Drogheda back home in England? Fraser writes that the news was met with “delight and rejoicing. The ministers gave out the happy tidings from the pulpits; 30 October was set aside to be a day of public thanksgiving.”
After the Mystic massacre movie ends, Amy and Owen and I leave the museum and repair to our nearby hotel, the Mohegan Sun Casino, operated by the Mohegan tribe. It looks like it was designed by Ralph Lauren, Bugsy Siegel, and Willy Wonka after a night of peyote. Which is to say that I kind of like it.
The registration desks are nestled under a half-dome, meant to evoke a wigwam. Inside, amidst the standard gambling accoutrements, like craps tables and slot machines, the building is done up in woven wood and birch bark. Support columns look like trees with candy-colored leaves. Mu rals depict Mohegan mythology. There’s a display featuring a giant replica of Shantok cookware—the pottery associated with Uncas’s nearby village—and it makes me wonder if four hundred years from now my nonstick frying pan will be made into a colossal sculpture for gamblers to admire. A charming statue of the late Mohegan anthropologist Gladys Tantaquidgeon is facing a sign that tallies up the “slot jack-pot paid today.” Uncas would undoubtedly get a kick out of his tribe presiding over such an impressive edifice built for the sole purpose of taking white people’s wampum.
The three of us sit outside by the pool and Owen does a martial arts-influenced interpretive dance to Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” while quizzing me on the story of the Pequot War.
“Don’t tell me!” he says. “No, tell me.”
I hit the highlights, starting with the Dutch murdering the Pequot chief and the Pequot avenging his death by mistakenly killing an Englishman and how the whole thing just kind of escalated into war. He says that sounds stupid. I say that most wars are. Then he asks me what state we’re in.
“Connecticut,” I tell him.
“And that war was here?” he asks.
Yes, I answer.
“Name a state where there was never a war,” he says.
Flipping through various Indian skirmishes and the Civil War in my head, I reply, “I’m not sure I can.”
“Then name a state where there was the least amount of war.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Idaho?” (I looked it up later; turns out I was unaware of the Battle of White Bird Canyon during the Nez Perce War.)
The next morning, we drive around in search of Uncas, walking around his headquarters, now Fort Shantok State Park. Then we drive to Norwich to look at Indian Leap, a chasm next to a waterfall where Uncas supposedly chased some Narragansett to their deaths in 1643.
“Was he trying to cut their heads off?” asks Owen.
No, I tell him. The sign says, “They plunged to their death into the abyss below.”
In Norwich, we stop to look at the Uncas Monument, an obelisk, at the “Royal Mohegan Burial Ground.” A plaque notes the monument was dedicated by President Andrew Jackson in 1833.
“Figures,” my sister says. “One asshole honoring another.” (For his Indian-removal policies Jackson is not remembered kindly by my family and our fellow Cherokee descendants.)
Amy and Owen can’t get past Uncas decapitating those Pequot and taking part in the Mystic Massacre. Not that I find his behavior particularly uplifting, but I can understand the desperation behind Uncas’s every l
ick of an English boot. He was ruthless in the pursuit of one goal, Mohegan survival. Standing in that cemetery, looking at the grave of Uncas’s great-grandson, reading a plaque that states the Mohegan “descendants reside in Norwich today,” it appears that Uncas succeeded in keeping his people intact and in proximity to the graves of their ancestors. What he did wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even right. But it worked.
In a famous illustration from John Underhill’s book on the Pequot War, the situation couldn’t be more clear. Concentric circles depict the overwhelming force of the English and their allies surrounding the Pequot fort. The lesson? You’re either burning or getting burnt.
We leave the Mohegan cemetery and stop off at the Mystic Aquarium to take a break from Indian troubles. But an exhibit devoted to algae living inside giant clams reminds me of Uncas’s relationship with the English nonetheless.
In order to survive, giant clams and zooxanthella have adopted a mutualistic relationship (one that benefits both partners). Zooxanthella (plant-like algae) live inside giant clams to receive protection and a home. In turn zooxanthella provide the giant clam with the nutrients it needs to survive.
Obviously, the English are the clam and the Mohegan are the algae. If that analogy sounds unfair and one-sided and insulting to the Mohegan, that’s because it is. Uncas simply decided that the only way to live was to live off the biggest giant clam around.
After the Pequot War, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi took the exact opposite course of action from Uncas, with disastrous results. Horrified by the Mystic Massacre, Miantonomi could only conclude that the English were hell-bent on native annihilation. So he set out to build a coalition of tribes to fight back, just as Tecumseh would at the turn of the nineteenth century.
In 1642, Lion Gardener, one of the officers from Fort Saybrook, was passing through Long Island when he witnessed a speech Miantonomi delivered to a local tribe.
