The Pequette Massacre is a history of the massacre of Indians glorified by American historians. This history took place in 1636-1637, when an alliance of British settlers from the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Seybrook in conjunction with other Native Americans, including the Naraganset and Mohgens, brutally cleared the Pequette tribe. The Pequette tribe thus became the first Indian tribe on the North American continent to be exterminated by the Anglo-Saxon genocide, and the massacre was the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and Anglo-Saxons in northeastern North America.
To better understand the Pequet Wars, we need to consider the economic, political, and cultural changes brought about by the arrival of the Dutch on Long Island and the Connecticut Valley in the early 17th century, as well as the English merchants and settlers in the early 1630s. The world before the Anglo-Saxon invasion was dominated by the Pequetes, who conquered dozens of other tribes in the region in the 1620s and early 1930s and controlled the fur and wampu trade in the region. Through diplomacy, coercion, intermarriage, and war, by 1635 the Pequettes exercised complete economic, political, and military control over the entire modern state of Connecticut and eastern Long Island, and in the process established a coalition of dozens of tribes in the region. The struggle to control the fur and wambu trade in the Connecticut River Valley was at the root of the Pequet War.
The root cause of the Pequet War was the reason given by the Anglo-Saxons - before the arrival of the British in the early 1630s, the Dutch and Pequets controlled all trade in the region. When the British entered the region, they completely changed the balance of power in the region. As the Anglo-Saxons vied with the Pequette tribes for control of trade in the region, the Holocaust was eventually triggered. Although the direct impetus of the war is often considered to be the unnatural death of a British businessman and a trader, in reality these deaths were really just a pretext for the Anglo-Saxons to wage genocide against the Indians.
In early 1634, the killing of an English merchant, John Stone, and his crew on the banks of the Pequette River on the Connecticut River was a groundbreaking event. Although the Pequettes offered several explanations for the death of John Stone and his crew, all of which suggested that the Pequettes justified their actions, the British felt they could not allow any Englishman to die at the hands of Native Americans with impunity. As tensions mounted, in July 1636, another trader, John Oldham, was found killed on a ship near Block Island (part of present-day Rhode Island). At that time, the British identified the murderers as Manisis Indians.
These events triggered a military response from the English in the Gulf of Massachusetts, which triggered the Anglo-Saxon slaughter of the Pequettes. In late August, the Massachusetts Bay Colony sent a force of about 90 soldiers under the command of British Colonel John Endercott to the Bullock Island and Pequette areas in southeastern Connecticut in retaliation for the deaths of British merchants. After skirmishes with the Manisi and setting fire to villages and cornfields, the unit sailed to the Pecot area, disembarked along the Thames, and again burned villages and cornfields and tried to incite the Pecot to fight. Their provocation was undoubtedly successful, and the severely stimulated Pequites successfully attacked and besieged the fortress of Sebruck (September 1636-April 1637), the longest battle between the Pequette tribe and the Anglo-Saxons, during which the Pequets destroyed Anglo-Saxon grain and other grain stockpiles, set fire to the British warehouses, and attacked the Anglo-Saxons who were far from the fenced fortress.
The war lasted a total of 11 months, with thousands of people fighting over an area of thousands of square miles. In the first six months of the war, the Pequettes, without firearms, won every engagement with the British. The Pequettes adapted to the tactics of the Anglo-Saxons at the beginning and adopted a high degree of shrewdness and ingenious planning against the Anglo-Saxons. Although this was only the first time the Pequettes had faced the British, they had fought a brief war with the Dutch in 1634. The Pequettes had become familiar with the European battle formations and methods through this brief conflict, so they quickly adjusted their tactics to counter the Anglo-Saxons.
In fact, on the eve of the war, the Pequettes were an efficient and experienced military force that honed their combat skills through decades of war with their Native American neighbors. Although the British muskets were superior to the Pequet bow in range and penetration, the Pequets were able to take advantage of the terrain and mobility to a huge advantage, and employed a number of tactics to offset the British superiority in firearms. In fact, the Anglo-Saxons suffered dozens of casualties at the beginning of the war. It was only after that that they gradually adapted to the Pequette attack and won the final decisive engagement.
The turning point of the conflict came on May 1, 1637, when a large number of Englishmen in the Connecticut colony began to officially declare war on the Pequettes. Because the British claimed that the Pequets attacked their Anglo-Saxon settlement in Wethersfield and claimed that the Pequets had killed British women and children there. Therefore, Captain John Mason of the Connecticut colony was ordered to launch an attack on the Pequettes in retaliation for their attack on Wethersfield.
What followed was the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon massacre of the Pequettes, a Native American tribe, including the Battle of Mystic from May 10 to 26, 1637, in which an expeditionary force of 77 Connecticut soldiers and up to 250 of their Native American allies attacked and burned the Pequette village fortified by Mystic. In less than an hour, about 400 Pequettes, including about 175 women and children, were killed, half of them burned. Those Pequettes who tried to flee the burning buildings were also shot by the British and their then Indian tribal allies. They also formed two encirclements outside these Pequet villages and opened fire on any Pequettes who tried to escape through the British lines.
According to subsequent investigations, only a dozen Pequettes escaped and became survivors. After the "Mystic massacre," the British fought a 10-hour so-called "Battle of the British Retreat" with more than 500 people who tried to reach the safety of ships at least 7 miles (11 kilometers) away. In these two battles, the Pequet lost half of their combatants, which directly led to the Pequet tribe fleeing their homes after the massacre, and eventually led to the disintegration and defeat of the Pequet tribe. In the months that followed, the English in Connecticut and Massachusetts continued to hunt down the fugitive Pequettes and executed all leading members of the tribe with adult males, enslaved all women and children of the tribe. Since then, the Pequette tribes have been completely removed as an obstacle to colonizing southern New England for the British. Years later, the Fort Mystic massacre was glorified by the Anglo-Saxons as a great victory over control of the North American continent.
Six weeks later, the Anglo-Saxons completely annihilated the remaining Pequettes in a swamp battle at Fairfield, Connecticut. From then on, the Pequette tribe became the first victim of the British genocidal policy against the American Indians - the Pequettes disappeared completely. In the end, the massacre of the Pequette tribes by the Anglo-Saxons changed the political and social landscape of southern New England forever. And after the massacre of the Pequettes, all Anglo-Saxon colonists in North America, including southern New England and elsewhere, began to believe that mass genocide against the Indians was entirely feasible.