Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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and upper Connecticut watershed—the Mahicans, the Pocumtucks, the Sokokis, and, one could add, the Nipmucs and Pennacooks—straddled three separate spheres of influence within the broader fur trade of the northeast. To the west were the lands that by 1628 had become dominated by Mohawk hunters trading with the Dutch operating out of the Hudson River. The growing political hegemony of the Pequots lay to the south. But trading opportunities also presented themselves to the north. The French founded their first permanent trading post at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 1615, just one year after Adriaen Block opened Dutch commercial relations with the Pequots. The Wabanaki nations inhabiting what would become Maine and southern Quebec maintained close commercial and political ties to the French from the early sixteenth century forward and participated actively in the fur trade. Western Abenaki nations like the Sokokis and Cowasucks maintained ties with the French and with other Native American middlemen in the north, providing their regional allies with an alternative market for their Connecticut Valley furs.
The fur trade tied the Indian hunters and trappers of the Connecticut Valley not just to European merchants and, through them, European customers and producers living across the ocean, but also to Indian manufacturers living to their south.39 Following their victory in the Mahican War of 1628, the Mohawks began extracting annual tribute from the defeated nations of the middle Connecticut Valley, a large portion of which had to be paid in wampum. Wampum was produced in largest quantities along the shores of Long Island Sound. During the 1620s, the Pequots began consolidating their control over these wampum-producing communities as a means of monopolizing trade with the Dutch. In the 1620s and the early 1630s, Iroquois tribute demands forced the middle and upper valley Indians to integrate themselves into the Dutch fur trade system by providing pelts to the Pequots in exchange for wampum. As a result, the tribes of the middle Connecticut Valley found themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place; militarily and politically envassaled to the emerging hegemony of Iroquoia to the west and commercially beholden to growing Pequot power in the south. Consequently, the nations of the valley welcomed the appearance of the English in the east, first at Plymouth in 1620 and then along Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, as an opportunity to free themselves from the control of their powerful neighbors.40
As they settled the New England coast in the early seventeenth century, English adventurers began to view the fur trade of the Connecticut Valley as theirs for the taking. Edward Winslow, the governor of Plymouth, led a successful trading expedition up the Connecticut in 1633.41 A second group of Plymouth traders, seeking to follow their governor’s example, founded a trading house on the future site of Windsor in the same year. The Dutch responded to these English incursions by establishing the House of Good Hope, a trading fort built on Podunk lands but granted to the Dutch by the hegemonic Pequots.42 Many Bay Colony leaders and merchants also began to agitate for a trade route into New England’s interior and access to the fur wealth that could be found there.43 A 1634 petition from a group of settlers eager to take up lands in what would become Hartford laid the matter bare: the Massachusetts Bay Colony needed to secure control of the Connecticut or risk losing out to either Dutch competitors or rival English colonists from Plymouth.44
A breakdown in relations between the Dutch and their erstwhile trading partners, the Pequots, finally triggered a shift in Bay Colony policy. In early 1634, a band of Pequots, jealous of their nation’s commercial monopoly in the southern Connecticut Valley, attacked a group of Narragansett Indians traveling to trade with the Dutch at the House of Good Hope. Incensed at this interference with their trade, the Dutch retaliated by imposing an embargo on their former commercial partners. In all likelihood, the Dutch reasoned that weakening the Pequots would allow them to establish a more direct commerce with the other Indian peoples of the region. In fact, this attempt to shake up the distribution of power within the fur trade of New England merely drove the Pequots into the arms of the English, with whom they sought to negotiate a new treaty of friendship at the end of 1634. In exchange for this friendship, Governor Winthrop recorded, the Pequots offered “all their right at Connecticut.”45
With the Pequots now in an uncertain position, the Massachusetts General Court moved to supplant Dutch influence in southern New England. In 1635, the court reversed its position and allowed the settlement of Newtown (later Hartford) on the north bank of the Little River (today’s Park River) at its junction with the Connecticut. This placed the Dutch House of Good Hope, located on the Little River’s southern bank, under the watchful eyes of English colonists. Also in 1635, the general court formally approved settlements at Windsor and Wethersfield (both of which had been founded without the Court’s sanction at the end of 1634). Adventurers backed by two wealthy Puritan lords founded Saybrook toward the end of 1635. Finally, wealthy merchant William Pynchon founded Springfield, the last of the original English Connecticut Valley towns, in 1636. Each of these towns owed its early settlement, at least in part, to English ambitions to dominate the beaver trade of the New England interior.
For the Pequots, the chance of a treaty with the English offered the hope of maintaining the status quo—trade with the English would replace trade with the Dutch and allow the Pequots to continue in their role as middlemen and regional hegemon. The English, however, viewed the treaty as an opportunity to bring the Pequots under their political heel. In exchange for peace and commerce, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required the Pequots to pay forty beaver skins, thirty otter skins, and four hundred fathoms of wampum. This small fortune would have given Massachusetts a strong advantage in competing for the trade of those more northerly Connecticut Valley nations who required wampum as tribute payments for the Mohawks. The Pequot delegates at Boston promised to bring the proposal to their sachems.46
Such a demand represented a double insult to the Pequots. It would likely have beggared the nation to gather such a wealth of wampum, forcing the Pequots to lean heavily upon their tributary networks and likely stirring resentment. In Indian diplomacy such a one-sided payment of wampum held strong symbolic meaning, marking the paying nation as a political subordinate of the recipient. In effect, the Bay Colony’s leaders, through their demand, had declared the Pequots a dependent nation of the English. In the face of these insults, and despite the risk of being shut out of the fur trade, the Pequot council rejected the treaty’s terms.47
Their commercial and political rivalry with the Pequots shaped how English colonial officials reacted to the deaths at Indian hands of two English traders, the first in 1633 and the second in 1636.48 In late 1633, Captain John Stone of Virginia—a man who had formerly been banished from Boston for drunkenness and suspicion of piracy—kidnapped two Western Niantics, whom he forced to act as pilots for his pinnace while trading up the Connecticut River. The next night, while at anchor, a party of Niantics boarded Stone’s ship to rescue their captive comrades. Stone and the other Englishmen aboard were killed during the rescue, and the powder stores of the ship were accidentally set alight, causing it to explode. News of Stone’s death arrived in the Bay Colony in January of 1634. Many in Massachusetts and Plymouth took the view that Stone deserved his fate—one Massachusetts colonist even suggested that the Niantics had acted as God’s divine retribution against the sinful Captain Stone. Publicly, however, Massachusetts blamed the Pequots—to whom the Western Niantics were tributary—for Stone’s death and for sheltering his killers. The Pequots insisted that the Niantics were justified in their actions and, besides, had not known that Stone was English and instead thought they were killing Dutchmen. Within the context of the Anglo-Pequot trade negotiations taking place in 1634, English insistence on restitution for Stone’s murder provided the Pequots one more reason to reject the Bay Colony’s extortionary demands.49
In July of 1636, another English trader, John Oldham, was discovered dead upon his pinnace, which had run aground on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast. Oldham had been exiled from Plymouth Plantation in 1624 for conspiring against the colony’s government, but had subsequently settled in Massachusetts and prospered through trade with the Indians and other English colonies. Massachusetts officials strongly suspected that Oldham’s murder had been engineered by a group of Narragansett leaders angry that the Englishman had been trading with their Pequot rivals. However, Narragansett ambassadors insisted that these conspirators had fled Narragansett territory and been given sanctuary among the Pequots. English leaders proved surprisingly willing to accept this somewhat unlikely story, and the fallout