Embedded Files
John Smith, "New England: the most remarqueable parts thus named by the high and mighty Prince Charles, nowe King of great Britaine," 1635.
As historians can best currently surmise, based upon incomplete sources, in the generations before European settlement, the Abenaki-speaking Pawtucket1 people2 populated the region surrounding the Mystic River Valley.3 Primarily farmers, the Pawtuckets hunted, fished, and gathered as well. They shifted their residences around the valley and coast depending on the season, in order to more easily gather food and allow farmed land to regain fertility. While they occasionally intermarried with the Massachusett peoples of today’s Boston and points south, the Pawtuckets were the southernmost component of the larger Pennacook alliance of peoples who controlled the Merrimack Valley from current-day New Hampshire to Cape Ann and south to Boston Harbor. As a series of clans the Pawtuckets held from Deer Island north to Cape Ann, from today's Lowell to Concord to Cambridge. The borders between these groups were in constant flux and overlapped, changing from generation to generation.4 The indigenous-run Canadian Native Land Digital initiative (see embedded map, right) attempts to map indigenous territories around the world.
Times turned tough for the Pawtuckets in the 1610s. First, an epidemic devastated the group (and many others in eastern New England) from 1616-19.5 Then the Mi’kmaqs - a hunting-gathering tribe located in today’s coastal Maine and Atlantic Canada, supported by French-supplied arms - conducted a series of raids into the Valley. Here is when Nanepashemet, the Sachem or paramount leader of the Pawtuckets, most likely lost his life.6 His territories were split amongst his three young sons and his wife, the Squa Sachem (her title, not her name), a Massachusett.7 Thereafter the Pawtuckets accepted English settlers in the 1620s and 1630s as possible allies; they were too weak to vigorously oppose them. A second epidemic swept through the region in 1633, killing many of the remaining Pawtuckets, including two of the Squa Sachem’s sons. Best estimates suppose that the adult male Pawtucket population dropped from over 3,000 to less than 200 in those decades.8 At the same time, about 20,000 English settlers, many “Puritans” seeking a more reformed interpretation of Christianity than the Church of England’s, entered the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the “Great Migration.” In 1639 the Squa Sachem deeded the lands she controlled to the Colony and lived out her remaining years on land just west of the Mystic Lakes, where the Winchester Country Club stands today.9
Rock Hill in Medford, just off the Mystic Valley Parkway and the Mystic River, between Medford Square and Whole Foods, was one of the locations where Nanepashement lived. He most likely lost his life near this location, attacked by Mi'kmaq raiders. With the sign (some decades old) labelling him a Nipmuc shows the confusion surrounding tribal borders.
Commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project and installed at the Winchester Public Library in 1934, Aiden LaSalle Ripley's "Purchase of Land From the Indians" mural depicts in a highly romanticized manner the Squa Sachem selling/transferring her land/territory to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
While the above narrative represents what professional and amateur scholars believe what occurred, we must remember that Native Americans of this time period, and all peoples of the seventeenth century, had much more fluid conceptions of identity than we do. Families and clans could fluctuate between Pawtucket, Massachusett, and Pennacook identification not only between generations, but also within lifetimes. People mattered more than land. Charismatic, dynamic leaders who could distribute gifts would attract more followers. And language differences between groups were minor, akin to dialects of the same language. Therefore scholars cannot definitively declare which peoples (Pawtucket, Massachusett, Pennacock) controlled which specific localities, particularly with the devastation and survivors’ trauma resulting from the 1610s and 1630s epidemics. For societies that depended on oral transmission of their past, the epidemics killed most of their (and therefore our) historians.10
Few accurate images exist of Native Americans from seventeenth-century New England. One of the stronger ones is this c. 1700 oil painting of Ninigret, a sachem of the Niantic/Narragansett peoples. However even this depiction, from an unknown artist, came a generation after his death. From the collection of RISD Museum.
The most well-known image of Metacom came nearly 100 years after his rebellion, engraved by Paul Revere (yes, that Paul Revere) in 1772.
In response to this societal collapse, over the next forty years most of the remaining Pawtuckets left their traditional territories, either joining praying towns11 or groupings of other, somewhat-related Native peoples to the north and west, in order to make viable communities of a large-enough size. Those Pawtuckets and other Native Americans who remained in eastern Massachusetts all had to find some sort of niche within the settler economy. Some, including children, were forced into servant and/or enslaved relationships with the settlers. With King Philip’s War or Metacom’s Rebellion (1675-78) - the most deadly of all American wars, as measured in per capita violence - many, but not all, of the indigenous peoples of eastern Massachusetts voluntarily or involuntarily left the region.12 Nanepashemet and the Squa Sachem’s two other children survived into the 1680s. Wenepoykin (Sagamore George) long contested his mother’s deed of land to the Colony, unsuccessfully suing for return, and joined Metacom’s rebellion. The Colony sold him into slavery in the Barbados, where he remained for eight years, before returning to Massachusetts to live with his sister Yawatta (Abigail Awassamog) at the Natick praying town.13
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