Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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A force of 90–120 men from Massachusetts first launched a retaliatory raid against the Indians of Block Island, and then, after being joined by troops from Connecticut, continued on to a large Pequot village at the mouth of the Thames River. The English demanded that the Pequots surrender those responsible for Oldham’s murder. In the process they also renewed their demand that John Stone’s killers be turned over and further insisted that the Pequots accept the extortionary terms of the 1634 treaty of friendship. Unable to satisfy these demands (the Narragansett Indians guilty of Oldham’s death were beyond their reach, the Niantics who had led the assault against Stone’s ship had since all either died of smallpox or been killed by the Dutch, and the demands of the 1634 treaty remained infeasible), the Pequots prepared for war. Their demands unmet, the English attacked the Pequots at the mouth of the Thames only to find their village deserted.51
These hostilities came at an especially disastrous time for the Pequot nation. Their villages had been particularly hard hit by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634, in which three out of every four Pequots died. Then, in the summer of 1635, a hurricane made ground in southern New England, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Hunger stalked New England from 1635 to 1636, striking European and Indian communities alike. Shortages in maize harvests may have placed further strain on subordinate villages who owed tribute to the Pequots, and the specter of famine likely contributed to the English rush to war. Raiding parties, especially those coming out of the hard-hit Connecticut Valley, made the seizure of Pequot corn supplies a wartime priority.52 Finally, the wealth and authority that came from the fur trade had not been evenly distributed among the villages and sachems of the Pequot nation. By the 1630s, a group of Pequot leaders who had been shut out of the inner circles of power, led by the sachem Uncas, had formed a splinter nation, the Mohegans, who sought their own commercial and military alliance with the English at the expense of the larger Pequot confederacy.53 Reeling from natural disasters and beset by enemies both without and within, the Pequots had, by 1636, reached the nadir of their military and political power.
Despite now being outnumbered by the English, the Pequots retaliated in 1637, leading to a full-scale war for political control of southern New England. Rival nations (most notably the Narragansetts), eager to see the Pequots defeated and their hold over the regional fur trade destroyed, allied with the English. Meanwhile, many of the Indian communities whom the Pequots had reduced to political subordination, and upon whom the Pequots depended for military assistance, abandoned their erstwhile political masters. The Mohegans became key allies of the English, while many Connecticut Valley villages chose to remain neutral in the conflict. English colonists waged a campaign of fire and wanton slaughter against the hopelessly outnumbered Pequots. The majority who survived the war were either taken captive by their Indian opponents or enslaved by the English. Many of the latter were sold to the West Indies, joining other victims of the transatlantic slave trade to toil on tobacco and cotton plantations, and perhaps contribute their labor to the development of the still nascent sugar economy. Only a small fraction of the nation escaped to reconstitute a community on the Thames River. Having violently expelled the Pequots from their position in the New England fur trade, English traders eagerly began a direct commerce with the Indian nations of the lower and middle Connecticut Valley.
English entry into the valley fur trade quickly disrupted relationships between competing Native American nations in the region. Competition between European traders—both between individual English traders and between the English and the Dutch—led to a sharp uptick in the quantity of manufactured goods flowing into the hands of Indian traders. At the center of this new English fur trade in the valley sat the town of Springfield. William Pynchon and the other founders of Springfield located their town at the site where the Connecticut River was joined by the Westfield River; the latter’s basin being especially renowned among early traders for the density of its beaver populations.54 The town’s location to the north of the other Connecticut Valley towns granted William Pynchon, and later his son John, an advantage in wooing Indian traders traveling down the Connecticut from the north. Since Springfield was located just above what became known as Enfield Falls, the Pynchons were well-situated to intercept Indian traders who otherwise would have needed to portage their canoes around the rapids. Writing in 1645, Edward Johnson, author of the first printed history of New England, declared that the fur trade at Springfield had already become “of little worth” through the practice of competing merchants “out-buying one another.”55 In 1650, the Dutch director-general at New Amsterdam wrote to the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England to complain that English terms of trade were far too generous. As a result the Dutch found their trade “damnified and undervalued.”56
Local Connecticut Valley Indian nations proved the winners—at least in the short run—in this competition between colonial European merchants. For English and Dutch merchants in New England, and the French farther north, their bidding war represented yet another front in the commercial contest being waged by their respective empires in the early seventeenth century. Indian nations in the northeast willingly and shrewdly exploited these interimperial tensions to their own gain. In doing so, they parleyed access to European goods—especially firearms and other metal weaponry—into military and diplomatic power within the shifting network of Indian alliances that defined political relationships in the region.
Local Indian leaders established new trading relationships with first William and, later, his son John Pynchon. The majority of the furs acquired by the Pynchons at Springfield came from hunters and traders operating out of the Pocumtuck villages of Pocumtuck, and Norwottuck, from the Agawam (today’s Westfield) River watershed, from the Sokoki town of Squakheag, and from hunters (other western Abenakis and likely Mahicans, as well) operating farther north in the Connecticut basin. The Indians of the valley also provided the Pynchons with maize, upon which the survival of Springfield and the other Connecticut towns depended in the early years of settlement.57 Wampum obtained for furs and maize paid off the tribute demands of the Mohawks and could, potentially, buy the support of new Native allies. Meanwhile, direct access to English tools and weaponry increased the military power of those tribes who called the middle Connecticut home.
The fur trade of the Connecticut watershed, and of New England more generally, continued to revolve around the shifting military and diplomatic relationships between the Native nations of the region. The fur trade between the Pynchons of Springfield and the Indians of the Connecticut Valley reached its apex in the early 1650s, peaking in 1654 before declining precipitously. During these years, the Iroquois redirected their hunting and military efforts to the west and north, toward the lands of the Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals. This realignment of Iroquois imperial interests freed Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, and Sokoki hunters from competition both in the northern Connecticut Valley and in the lands lying immediately westward. It also lessened the risk of renewed warfare with the Mohawks. The conclusion of hostilities following the Mahican War in 1628 had brought an uneasy peace. The Connecticut Valley nations resented Mohawk demands for tribute, and their acquiescence was ensured only by the threat of superior Iroquois military might. As long as Mohawk hunters ranged the same territories as hunters from the Connecticut Valley villages, the potential existed for misunderstanding and violence. This threat kept valley hunters close to home during the 1630s–1640s. But in the 1650s, with the Mohawks distracted farther west, valley hunters expanded their hunting efforts northward and westward along Connecticut tributaries and, consequently, increased their take of beaver and other furbearing species.58
Although the volume of pelts traded to English merchants during the seventeenth century fluctuated with the political climate, the overall trend was clearly one of declining fur yields.59 Conflict in any given year could divert hunters and trappers to more martial pursuits, or else make them fearful of venturing into hunting territories that lay too far from the relative safety of fortified villages. As a long-term process, however, the incessant warfare that surrounded competition over the fur wealth of New England, and of northeastern North American more generally, created conditions that encouraged the extirpation of beaver from the region. French agents operating to the northeast of the Connecticut Valley had noted as early as the 1630s the tendency of Indian fur traders to “kill all, great and small, male and female” when harvesting beaver from a colony.60 A similar practice seems to have prevailed