Pequot War: John Stone's Killing, the Mystic Fire and the Hartford Treaty

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The 1638 Treaty of Hartford ended the Pequot War by forbidding survivors to return to their lands or call themselves Pequots, and the episode traces how the conflict of 1636 to 1638 began. Epidemics had left a power vacuum in southeastern New England, and the Pequot Nation expanded against the Wampanoag, Narragansett and others. European metal drills turned wampum, shell beads used for diplomacy and ceremony, into a mass-produced currency for buying inland furs, and the coastal Pequots controlled the shells. Uncas broke away to lead the Mohegans, who traded with the English while the Pequots dealt with the Dutch. In 1634 the Western Niantic killed John Stone, a trader banished from Boston, and his crew of seven after he abducted two Niantic men.

The Pequots said they took Stone's ship for Dutch, in retaliation for the Dutch kidnapping of their principal sachem Tatobem, whose body was returned after a wampum ransom was paid. The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 destroyed corn harvests, and after John Oldham was killed near Block Island in 1636 and his killers sheltered with the Pequots, John Endecott led about 90 men to burn Niantic and Pequot villages and winter stores. The Pequots besieged Fort Saybrook and attacked Wethersfield in April 1637. In May, John Mason and John Underhill, with Mohegan and Narragansett allies, attacked the fortified village at Mystic before dawn and set it ablaze, killing about 500 Pequots, mostly noncombatants. A western band of the Pequot nation is federally recognized in Connecticut today.

• The Wethersfield attack killed nine colonists, and two young girls were taken captive.
• Mason wrote that God had made the fort as a fiery oven.
• Native allies complained that the English way of fighting was too furious and slew too many people.
• Pequot leader Sassacus fled to the Mohawks, who killed him and sent his head and hands to the English at Hartford.
• About 200 surviving Pequots were divided among the Mohegans and Narragansetts or sold into slavery in Bermuda.