Time Line 4: 1631-1661
1631 New England exile Morton works as Council for New England attorney in lawsuit vs. Mass. Bay charter. Within a year more exiles add testimonies. R. Williams begins American career. Thirty Years War sack of Magdeburg (Germany) brings "total war" civilian casualties to Europe.
1632 Morton/witnesses before King's Privy Council. By Jan. 1633, the "preliminary" decision is not to interfere with colonies' potential profits. Dutch and various English factions (Mass. Bay, Plimoth, Hartford) compete for Pequot lands and trade on the Connecticutt River. Smallpox kills great numbers of Native peoples there.
1633 More epidemics among Native New Englanders. King Charles himself an anti-Protestant "reformer" appoints Wm. Laud Archbishop. He and Sir F. Gorges/Morton arrange new "Commission for Foreign Plantations." Lancashire "witch trials." Galileo faces The Inquisition.
1634 May 1: Morton announces voiding of Mass. Bay's land-charter, plans to return w/Sir F. Gorges as Governor. Boston public meetings resolve to resist: forts built on harbor islands. Dutch murder of Pequot Tatobem makes Sassacus their Grand Sachem. His Mohegan brother-in-law Uncas and followers separate, and play off English factions as do Narragansetts. Killings of English traders on Connecticutt River bring increasing hostilities on all sides.
1635 English courts finalize legal decisions against Mass. Bay charter. Conflicts drive to Connecticutt sites: Plimothers abandon efforts there. Lords Say and BrooSAk erect CT River trade-post, fort vs. Dutch access.
1636 Rev. Hooker, more English leave Mass. Bay for Connecticutt. Uncas of Mohegans reports Pequots "certain of English attack": colonists' hold "training days" at arms, make "indiscreet speeches" fueling mutual fears. Pequot Sassacus tries to ally with "traditional enemy" Narragansetts. By May, "river towns" commission Capt. Mason to make "offensive war." R. Williams banished by Mass. Bay in "Antinomian" political strife.
English and Pequots negotiate "justice" at Saybrook. Stalemate. Trader J. Oldham killed in "random" incident: Narragansett allies of Boston avenge it, but Mass. Bay sends Capt. Endicott with widespread punishments. Saybrook surrounded and besieged. Narragansett Sachem Miantonomo pledges war-neutrality: gives Mass. Bay a war-plan, intelligence and sanctuary to all Native sides as war unfolds.
1637 Gorges named colonial Governor. To appease Puritans he "cashiers" Morton but keeps him working. Their victory revoking Mass. Bay's charter will dissolve, unenforceable, as King Charles' policies and Puritan oppositions bring on civil war. The "Martialist" approach to colonies brings on The Pequot War (See Below). Harvard founded. Mass. Bay launches its first slave-ship, Desire. Morton's Canaan published and soon mistakenly confiscated in England, (mostly) reviled in colonies.
1638-1641 Scottish Presbyterian rebellions intensify vs. Charles'/Laud's "thorough" church policies and forced loans. Soon Laud is a doomed prisoner for "treason." With 20,000 English in New England, "The Great Migration" ends in economic depression. Mass. Bay's Body of Liberties includes recognition of slavery, and "Triangular Trade" opens: rum to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, molasses/cotton/tobacco and slaves to America. Pequot and other Native "enemies" also sold in the Caribbean.
1642-1643 The English Civil War. Gorges at 80 rides with Royalist forces. Morton, near 70, makes way back to New England as "agent" of new colonial investors in colony discontent. He winters at Plimoth in 1643. "The United Colonies of New England" formed on agreements controlling war, spoils, trade and control of runaway servants. Its "first official act" (Cave) is to have Miantonomo murdered for his growing "pan-Indian" alliances.
1644 Morton rumored a Royalist "agitator" from Maine to Rhode Island. By Sept. a prisoner at Boston. His trial delayed "so evidence can be sought" through winter: none arrives. He receives "his bane" of broken health. Dissident Samuel Gorton arranges Narragansett Native appeal to Charles for equal status as English subjects. With Charles' defeat the colonies declare war on them.
1645 Spring: Morton petitions for release, is ordered out of Puritan jurisdiction. He joins West Country planters in Maine, dies "soon" or 2 years later.
1646 R. Williams publishes Key Into The Language of America. Nov.: Mass. Bay establishes death penalty for "blasphemy".
1647 J. Eliot begins evangelizing Native New England, "to hasten conversion of the Jews" and bring on Judgment Day. "Praying towns" separate and "reform" converts: some bury their dead in "Archaic" ancestral place.
1650 For aid in new United Colonies war on Niantics, Pequots receive 500 acres at Noank (CT). 350 more years bring U.S. "recognition" in 1983.
1651 Thos. Hobbes publishes Leviathan, a defense of absolute monarchy based on Native America as "primitive" life without it: "nasty, brutish, and short." Dutch settlers reach Africa's Cape of Good Hope.
1654 E. Johnson publishes Wonder-Working Providence to defend the "Pilgrim forefathers" and renew "virtue" in the increasingly fractious Northeast.
1655 Cromwell dissolves Parliament and divides England into 11 districts with military governors, prohibits Anglican Church services.
1656 Philosopher Spinoza excommunicated.
1658 Cromwell again dissolves Parliament but dies the same year.
1661 England's "Restoration" crowns anti-Puritan Charles II. Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit dies: Wamsutta and soon Metacomet ("Philip") face the constantly-expanding colonies. By next year, almost 4/5 of New England's male colonists find themselves like most other people(s): "without vote" due to politically-exclusionary church rules. "The Halfway Covenant" compromises for control (Baptism yes, Communion no).
Mystic Fiasco:
How The Indians Won The Pequot War
by
David R. Wagner and Jack Dempsey
Dawn, May 26, 1637: Catastrophe at the Pequot Nation's Mystic Village (conceived above by artist and archaeologist David R. Wagner, like all these works). But "catastrophe" for whom? This journey takes you to the astonishing answer that nobody suspected---until the land spoke up..
Supposedly that May morning---10 years after Thomas Morton's Revels---a force of English colonists and Native, allies completed a long "undetected" march and attacked this palisaded Pequot village on the Mystic River. There the English struck the war's decisive blow by wiping out 300 to 700 Pequot men, women and children.
Mystic was in fact an English fiasco. The Pequots, knowing their enemies and helped by many parties, all but evacuated Mystic and used it as a decoy in their own subtle strategy. Mystic was not the victory claimed by its captains---John Mason and John Underhill, the only eyewitness-chroniclers---and certified by historians after them.
Facts examined rather than inherited reveal a different war. Did the English know how to identify a Pequot? Did they know the land, the enemy's locations and tactics? Who had the weapons-advantage? What did it mean that their only guide Uncas was a Pequot blood-kinsman? That Captains Myles Standish and John Endicott had trained these green English to make war in America? This is not to mention the Pequots' and Native New Englanders' cooperative heroics---many of them laced with humor and, till now, glimpsed only like a grin between sanctified lines.
Mystic Fiasco takes you with Captains Mason and Underhill against the Pequots, from Saybrook Fort on the Connecticut River to that morning at Mystic and beyond. Find out what the land itself has to say. Imagine histories of Gettysburg whose writers never walked there.
Who really won The Pequot War? What do the truth and the lies mean for American war itself, and for us today? Can 365 years of history be this wrong and underwrite a nation? Unquestioned, these events doom us to repeat them. This war uncovered shakes us awake to the good---expands and enriches The American Frontiers, and our freedom to write the future.
Above-left is Sassacus, Great Sachem of the Pequots c. 1637---supposedly the "capital enemy" of all New England's colonies. Lt. Lion Gardener knows that, in Sassacus and Mohegan Uncas, Captains Mason and Underhill have more than they can hope to handle...and Narragansett Sachem Miantonomo (below) knows it too. If the captains would listen to him, they might have a chance!
Spring 1637---The Pequot Nation under Sassacus and English colonies of Mass. Bay and Connecticutt come to blows over southern New England. War councils at Saybrook Fort: Uncas, the ambitious Mohegan Sachem, is their one Native ally. Uncas is brother-in-law to Sassacus. Captains Mason, Underhill and Gardiner confess they don't know how to launch their war---They've never fought one. They depend on Uncas to identify Pequots and find their way to battle. How do they test Uncas' loyalty? What decides their plan? Would you be ready to go on what they think they know? The one seasoned man they have (Gardiner) himself will not go with you..
The Pequot River looking south from Pequot Hill in Groton, CT; the site of Sassacus' great village Weinshauks. This is where Sassacus has invited the English to come and fight---"There you shall find them; and as they were there born and bred, there their bones shall be buried and rot in spite of the English." But Mason and Underhill choose another plan, a different target...
"New England" has never fought a full-scale Indian war. The Captains think Native villages have a "rear," like a citadel in Europe. They have no idea (except a warning) that while Native forts have a purpose, the people make mobile war and make the most of swamps. The Captains got better Native advice---but plan anyhow to let themselves be seen "going away" by ship, and then to march "secretly" back for a surprise-attack.
The English cruise the coast singing Psalms, and after 3 days' delay land on the west shore of Narragansett Bay to see another "allied" blood-kinsman of the Pequots, Sachem Miantonomo. At center he hears from Uncas what these 120 untried planters mean to try. And then Miantonomo sits the Captains down, listens, and sends them along with a "neutral's" blessing on a plan that he (as well as Uncas!) knows just cannot work.
Uncas leads Mason's and Underhill's men back westward for the attack, through thickly-inhabited Niantic and Pequot country. May is hot weather if you're wearing thick leather "buff" and steel plate. Why did those Naragansetts catch up and offer to join in, only to "run home" at the Pawcatuck's Pequot frontier? Does anybody know where he is? Where the enemy? Where their villages are, what the "normal" ways to reach them? What if Uncas leads a different way---Say, by land, all the way around the "Head" of the Mystic River? For Mystic Village is across that water; but it's not on top of that hill (above, right) that you first-see when you come around Mystic Head. The Mystic River has two distinct bays that look confusingly alike. They'll find it, by God!
Alright, so the English camped the night before battle at Porter's Rocks, and every man fell asleep in the arms of Uncas till well after sunrise.Yes, they forgot the advice to lay ambush between Mystic Village and those swamps, so the Pequots might not flee to them. But wasn't it amazing how they mounted Mystic Hill, unseen by Native people there singing and dancing hours ago? Wholly incredible---Their first shots hit Pequot targets (still in bed) through a wall of wood! "What shall I say?" quoth modest Captain Mason. "God led his people through...."
It's broad daylight inside a two-acre fort. Would you stay inside your burning house? Or would you be there in the first place? Why was it so hard to find anybody? What happened when enraged Pequot braves did come out for hands-on close-quarters against half the Captains' men who did come in? What good was a matchlock-gun now? Why can't anybody account for all the "prisoners" who evaporate while held by Uncas' Mohegans? And what happened when the fires set by English rage and panic chased them back outside Mystic?
What happened was that hundreds more Pequot braves came down on the English from Weinshauks, seven miles away---and they used the burning fort like an anvil, to pound them. Mason and Underhill's men struck out into the teeth of it---for Weinshauks on the Pequot River was where they told their Mass. Bay reinforcements to meet them, after "victory." They're almost out of powder now, the worst fights sure to come. Where is Uncas!
The Captains' own landmarks in their "military histories" prove that they never made it to Pequot River---They turned their men back and slogged their way to the only "rear" they could find on this landscape: the Mystic River just down the other side of Mystic Village Hill. The Pequot counterattack drove them into "the wrong Atlantic" and only the smoke of burning Mystic told their seaborne relief (under Captain Patrick of Boston) where they were. The Pequots were closing in, and Patrick refused to come save them till sure it was safe. The Pequots, well within their own traditions of war, declined to respond with massacre of their own.
Captains Mason and Underhill were sent by their churches to crush the Pequots and break the back of their Connecticut. Their comic execution of a ludicrous plan that willfully ignored their surroundings created a fiasco. Only Gardiner whispered some of the facts decades later. The secret "made great men" and they kept it close. Its actual comedy in no way delayed a colonial tantrum of "histories" built from wishes and posed for the terrified, uninformed public as holy fact. Nobody ever went to Mystic to see what might be true: they stayed home and wrote letters that, Bie Gott, it was
Mystic Fiasco is the closest-ever look at all the evidence. Before, during, and after the war it proves in hard numbers that this (above) is "where the Pequots went"---everywhere. Some rejoined living ancestors among the Mohawks and Mahicans. Some made themselves invisible to the English with new lives among surrounding tribes' cousins and kinsmen. If yesterday you were a born "bloodthirsty" Pequot deserving death, and today (as of 1638's Hartford Treaty) you "may live" because you call yourself Niantic, who are the deluded people? And some survived by holding to the never-tiring Uncas, and the lands where they thrive today.
Click here to read the first chapter from this book just published (2004)---Book Orders too!
Plimoth, Mass. Bay and Connecticut went on to write the foundations of American education. The drawings above are tamely typical of how it set to work reforming your desire. Aren't they wild, gently beautiful, yet dangerous in countless ways? How sexy-sad---It's enough to make you forget you're the reason they're "gone." And in case you feel a twinge, remember what "happens" to such people. It's happening still.
Wherever you are in the Americas, there was a "defensive war" like this brought on and blessed by Biblical Capitalist Progress. The Americans these produced, people by definition "devoted" in their heads to a set of symbols in spite of the world around them---found that the world wouldn't go away. They could not control their desires, and knew from their Old Testament that unless they hardened themselves---created, attacked and erased enemies---they'd "lose their identity" in mingling. For human beings seek out contact, exchange, intermarriage.
Connecticut's "birthday" enshrines New England's first such needless tragedy, and the history of New England grew worldwide. From this foundation, "experts" like Standish, Mason and Underhill morphed into Custers and Calleys from The Great Plains to Southeast Asia. They "fought for their beliefs" till others' agonized screams told them belief had become psychosis. Conviction that can't compromise goes crazy.
Read up on your land. Then get out and walk it. Bring Native America with you, not the "savages" or "children" of mainstream books and films. How many other fiascos lie buried? We find them from King Philip's War to Saigon because these methods never worked in the real (multicultural) world. America's defeat in Southeast Asia turned The Expanding Empire back home. Now the system is "reforming" You---from downsizing to the numbingly-endless creation of new desires. New things you "must have," consequences be damned.
How does it feel, American Worker, to have your wants manipulated till the world is pulled out from under you? We learn how much to unlearn. You can discover how to let The Earth teach you without surrendering your "scientific rigor." You'll find it merely one helpful way to Understand.
Once you decide to pull your head out of culture's symbolic bubble, the first thing that Earth shows you will calm you down: There is no "real" reason anybody should "fail to survive," or go to war, for there's Plenty For Everybody Still. Those who rule "the mainstreams" of culture produce this anxiety and hammer you with it. Why don't we hear what Vonnegut asked 40 years ago: If you believe you "must" take far too much, you should ask what makes you so afraid of getting nothing at all.
Every horizon promises that good things await everybody. Yet today's media are hamstrung by money. Too many "elected" governments think in the shadow of Mass. Bay Colony, too many jargon-encrusted academics confine The New "for us" in ghettoes called Romantic, Utopian, PC Revisionist---as they milk injustice for careers in a specious objectivity. If these "professionals" believe in liberation, why not begin with their own? Learn to play the game and you end up playing games. What we need is to get the facts on the table for the living; to reconnect shattered pasts toward an organic useful model of what is. The rest is in the way---Work around it.
The real-world goal is more knowing, more life and more freedom, now and for The Earth you leave behind. It's what joy is for. Rise to it. Build it. Be the one in your people's story to consummate their journey toward the world. The sooner will The Garden be spread out again upon The Earth, and you will see it. We prosper only together on the frontiers of humanity.
