USA > Connecticut > Historic towns of the Connecticut River Valley > Part 2
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INDIAN CHARACTER.
T is a most difficult thing now, to form any accurate judgment of the character of the Indians of 250 years ago. Not that there has been a lack of writers, who were willing to ex- press their opinions and fix the Indians' character by those opinions, but that prejudice entered so greatly into the subject, both for and against the Indians -- chiefly against,- that a just estimation cannot be arrived at by the readers of the twentieth century.
The first settlers, as a class, regarded the Indians as heathen ;
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INDIAN CHARACTER.
barbarians, without the germ of virtue. That there were very many of them who were devout and faithful followers of the only religion of which they possessed any knowledge, did not appeal to the early settlers. They were not Christians and above all, they cared nothing for Congregationalism and would have none of it. Forgetting that they, themselves, had been more than thirteen hundred years in arriving at the somewhat primitive ideas of the simple principles taught by the founder of Christianity, they re- garded the Indians as hopeless heathen because they refused to give up, at command, the picturesque, symbolical religion they had inherited for more centuries than Christianity was centuries old. Their tenacity in regard to their ancient faith ; their unwillingness to resign it, the moment that one or another Congregational min- ister told them they should; did not seem to the early settlers an admirable quality.
They had left Great Britain and had come to a wilderness because they would not submit to being told by men how they should or should not worship God. They were proud of their courage and determination in this respect and the world is even more proud of them and that which they accomplished, but they condemned the Indians to walk for eternity through the streets of that hell which Jonathan Edwards paved with infants' skulls, because they would not submit to being told by men how they should or should not worship Kiehtan, "The Great Spirit ". So the Indian was damned by the early religious writers.
If the early writer, who gave an opinion of the Indians, was a hunter and trapper, he had no use for them, for they were skilful rivals; if he happened to be a military man, he had no use for them, because of the trouble they caused and because they presumed to fight for what they believed to be their rights; for their hunting grounds; their children and their wigwams. If the writer happened to be an official of the colony, or a man of law, he had no use for the Indians, because they refused to acknowl- edge any man-made regulation which interfered with their inher- ent rights. So, when the poor Indian died he found himself so thoroughly damned by all classes and conditions of his white Christian brothers, that even Kiehtan was powerless to guide his weary feet off from that pavement made of the smooth, polished skulls of his white, Christian brothers' infants.
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THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.
About two hundred years after the first settlements were made, a small class of champions of the Red-man came into exist- ence, whose mawkish sentimentality was great. Their writings were as far.from the truth as were the unjust, general condemna- tion of the earlier writers. The result is, that not only has the Indian been robbed of his home and his very existence, by civiliza- tion, but of his character - good or bad - as well, by his would- be civilizers.
Two examples are given. One by a writer who condemns and the other by one who makes a saint of the Indian. The individual must decide for himself whether the souls of dead Indians are treading for eternity on white infants' skulls, or if they are walk- ing through the lovely valleys and over the beautiful hills, in the abode of Kiehtan : that fair country in the " South-West ", where all that is perfect for Indian happiness exists; where the Red infants, with their skulls where Kiehtan placed them, wander about in joyous, delightful abandon, to add to the unspeakable happiness of their parents and be but another evidence of the Great Spirit's love for man.
Obverse.
A point of special interest, connected with our early annals and the incipient fortunes of the settlement, is the character and conduct of the natives of the soil. Most of the recent historical writers push us to the unwelcome opinion that, after all, our high notions about the New England Indians must be a good deal lowered and many of our admirations sacri- ficed. I is hard for hero worshippers to hear the blows of the iconoclast's hammer upon their idol, and it is hard for everybody to see an ideal vision of honor, courage or genius dispelled. With a pain of this sort we are shown too many reasons to believe that these wild children of the forest, instead of being magnanimous, intrepid, enterprising, intellectual, and reverential, were, to a miserable degree, mean, cowardly, cruel, lazy, filthy, and easily sunk in some disgusting forms of sensuality. Their braves very often turn out to have no other courage than a brutal and revengeful ferocity. The men tyrannized over the women, which is always one of the surest signs of a low nature. Their intelligence was little else than a small species of cunning. The propensities to thieving, treachery and falsehood were a continual disappointment to those who trusted them. Philip himself was wily and cautious rather than heroic, and was not often seen in bold engagements. Instances of cannibalism occurred, at least among the Mohawks ( Mohawk means man-eater), for twenty-seven Frenchmen appear to have been roasted and devoured.
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INDIAN CHARACTER.
This suggests the query; are the tens of thousands of white Christians who fill the prisons of the world, for wife-beating, theft, treachery, lying, perjury, cruelty and lust, really Indians? It would seem that they must be, or else that the Indians did not have a patent right on the characteristics attributed to them.
Reverse.
Time has shown that the longer their residence in the vicinity of the white man continued, the more vicious and corrupt they became, and that they almost invariably were the object, or subjects of his fraud and im- position. From the first settlement of the whites among them, they have constantly been dwindling in numbers; they continue to be driven farther and still farther toward the setting sun, by the restless flow of emigration and the cupidity of white men; their habits are unsocial and altogether averse to civilized life. An Indian wants no splended mansion, nor elegant furniture, nor bed of down; he will not learn to manufacture a button or a jewsharp, or to drive a team; he wants no workshop, he can "catch no beaver there". The forest is his home and his delight is in the chase and by the riverside. Nature has so taught him, and before he became con- taminated by proximity to, and dealing with the white man, he lived according to his dictates. *
* the besom of destruction is fast sweep- ing him away from the home of his youth and the grave of his fathers. The white man wants his land, and will have it. Our ancestors denounced the natives as savage barbarians. They committed no offences without provocation, and in the long black catalogue of crimes committed in Christian nations, but few, comparatively, are found to occur among this uncivilized race. Is ingratitude among the number of their sins? The most eminent and glorious examples of the opposite are upon record. Was an Indian ever guilty of suicide, seduction, fraud, scandal, and innumerable other sins? Did an Indian ever sell wooden nutmegs, cucumber seeds, horn and flints, or powder, under pretence that by planting it would pro- duce its like? While he may take your life in war or torture you as his victim, he would disdain to persecute you for opposing his favorite opinions, to take away your reputation for revenge, to defraud you of your property, which you might value equally with life. The civilized man will exert all the power over you which the law will give him, oftentimes more; and if you stand in his way or incur his resentment, his tender mercies are often cruel compared with the tomahawk, which destroys at a blow and all is over. Subjected as many are to obloquy and the persecu- tions of society, their death is slow and lingering, while the Indian tortures the body only. There can be little doubt that more acts of cruelty have been committed on this continent by French, Spanish and English or by their instigation, than by the natives. In war or peace; in the midst of change and revolution, near or remote, they have remained, like the Jews, a distinct people and it requires wiser heads than ours to see the justice
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THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.
of that policy, which, while it offers home and protection to foreigners of all nations, seems to pursue a system any other than protective of the natives, the rightful inhabitants of the soil. The weak, the defenceless and the poor have ever suffered from the encroachments of the strong, the powerful and the rich, and always will, as poverty is taken as presumptive evidence of want of merit; almost of actual guilt.
The obverse was by the Rev. Dr. F. D. Huntington, professor at Harvard, in 1859. The reverse was by David Willard, the historian of Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1838. It is as difficult to answer the question, which is the truer picture, as it was to guess, was it the lady or the tiger.
INDIAN NAMES.
T HE Rev. Dr. A. B. Chapin gives the following interesting and valuable information in regard to Indian names of persons and places, in and near the Connecticut Valley, in his history of Glastenbury.
The Indians living on the river were called Quinitikoock, or Qunihtitukqut, signifying those who lived on the Great or Long- river. The word Connecticut, is generally translated Long-river and is derived from Quinih, long; took, or tuk, water, and ut, ock, on, upon, place of. The usage of the Indians in this vicinity, however, seems to imply that they supposed the first part of the compound to be, Quiniqui, great, the name by which it is described in all of our early records. "Great river ", there- fore, is simply a translation of the Indian word Connecticut. The original Indian word was spelled in several different ways but all of them giving the same general sound.
The Tribe of Indians called Nipmucks, were those living away from the river. Nip, meaning water or river, and muck, away from.
The Mohegans were the Wolf-tribe. The Rev. Dr. Edwards, who spoke their language with as great fluency as he did English, spelled the word Muhhekaneew, and the name was also spelled, Mohicans and Mahingans.
The Mohawks were Men-eaters, the proper spelling of the word being Mohowaug, moho meaning to eat.
The Pequttoog, or Pequots were the Gray-for tribe, Pequawus
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INDIAN NAMES.
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meaning Gray-for. The name of the Indian Wopigwoot, and of his father, Woipeguana, as given by Uncas, in 1679, are evi- dently from the same root. The Woi seems to be an Indian prefix equivalent to the article the, and Pequana and Pigwoot, are simply different spellings of Pequot. So the name signifies The Gray For, or the chief who bore the Gray-fox totem.
The Wonggum Indians, or Wonggunks, were those Indians who lived at the bond of the river, wonkun, meaning to bond and referring to the bend just below Glastenbury, in Portland.
A very common Indian word along the Connecticut River is Hoccanum and a variation of it, Higganum, the latter being a different way of spelling the word, which means the fishing-placc. Higganum is in the north-western corner of Haddam, and Hoc- canum ferry crosses the river from the foot of Mount Holyoke to the Northampton meadows.
The meaning of Pyquag, the Indian name for Wethersfield, is uncertain, but it is supposed to mean the place where the Indians held their public games, or possibly the dancing-place. Other ways of spelling the word are found at different places. At Hadley it is, Paquayyag ; near Hudson, Paquayag or Paquiag. Pauochauog, means, they are playing, or dancing.
The Mattabesick, or Mattabesetts, or Black-lull Indians in- habited Middletown and neighborhood. This word, which was written by Roger Williams, Metewemesick, is derived from Mete- wis, meaning black carth. It is generally supposed that the great chief of the Mattabesetts was named Sowheag, but in fact, this was the name of the sachemdom and not of the sachem, Sow- heag meaning, South-country, or kingdom. This great Sachem, whom the white settlers feared, was named Sequasson (or lengthened to Sunckquasson and sometimes shortened to Sequin, or Sequeen) and Dr. Chapin thought this word might be a modi- fication of Sachem. Sequasson means, hard-stone, Sunckquas- son, cold-stone, from siokke, hard, and hussum, stone. Giving Sachem its English equivalent, the Indian's full title-Sequasson- Sequin-Sowheag, means, Hard-stone, King-of-the-South-country. Sequasson's son took the name of Manittowese, or Mantowese (from which Montowese, near New Haven, is probably derived) meaning Little-god and his totem was a large bow with arrow, its nock fitted to the string ready for shooting.
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THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.
According to Barber, the Indian name for Hartford was Suc- kiag, meaning black-earth, but Dr. Chapin gives other spelling and another name and meaning and says, that there is no posi- tive knowledge as to what the Indian name was. According to this other definition of Dr. Chapin's, the Siccaog Indians lived on a river called Siccanum, but in the absence of all history it is impossible to say what the meaning of the word is. Sic- canum may be but a variation of Higganum. Or it may have been made from the compound Siokke, hard, and Namas, fish, meaning hard-fish or clams, the word for clams being Sickissoug. It may have been compounded from Sequi, black, and ake, earth and hence Se-qui-ak, black or rich earth and so Suckiag would be but another way of spelling this latter word given by Dr. Chapin.
The Tunxis Indians were the Crane Indians and they lived on Tunxis Sepus, or Little-Crane-river; Taunck meaning crane, and Sepeose, little-river.
The Poquonnuc, Peconnuc, Pughquonnuc and Pocatonnuc, were those who lived at a battle-field and each of these names is seemingly derived from Pauqua, meaning to destroy, kill, slaughter.
The Podunks, were those Indians who lived at the place of fire, or burning; Potaw, meaning fire, and unck, place of. Hence, Potaunck, Potunk, or Podunk.
The word Scantic describes a low, watery country.
Up in the north-east corner of Portland is Mesomersic Mountain, sometimes called, locally, Somersic. This word is from Mishom, meaning great, and sesek and assek, meaning rattlesnake, hence, Mesomersic Mountain is a mountain that is the home of great numbers of rattlesnakes, as indeed it is.
In the eastern portion of Glastenbury, near Diamond Lake, is a hill locally known as Skunkscut, but in early records it was known as Kongscut and was probably derived from Honcksit meaning goose-country, from Honck, meaning a goose (which is the word for the call the wild goose makes while in flight, from which is the old saying, when matters are going well, " everything is lovely and the goose honcks high ", not hangs high) and ausit or sit, place or country.
North and west of Diamond Lake is Minnechaug Mountain,
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which means the berry-land, from Minne, berry, and uk, or awk, place.
The Pool at Neipseic, as Barber calls it, or Nipsic, near the center of Glastenbury, sometimes locally called " Red-spring ", means the place of water, from Nip, water, and sic, place.
The meaning of Uncas in English is Bold, and of Aramamet, who was a son of Uncas', is Dog's-tongue.
The Indians did not have individual names for fixed places. If there were a dozen fishing-places, on as many different rivers, there were a dozen Hoccanums. All places, or natural features, that could be designated by a word or words in their descriptive language, were called by that word or those words. As an in- stance : the sites of the cities of Albany and Schenectady, New York, were called by the Mohawks, Schenectady. In the days of the Indians the sixteen miles between those cities was a vast pine-plain covered with pine trees. An Indian trail crossed these great pine-plains and the first opening at the east and west ends of the trail was Schenectady which meant "Beyond the Pine- plains ". Thus it is seen, that the Mohawks called two places, but sixteen miles apart, by the same name, as the one word described them both.
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AFTER THE SETTLEMENT.
T HE first white men to visit Connecticut were Dutch. Adrian Block and Cornelius Hendricksen sailed from New Amsterdam, now New York, through the Sound to the mouth of the Great River, which they called Fresh River, in 1614, and up it as far as what is now Hartford. Later the Dutch East India Company sent men to the Con- necticut River who sailed up to the point reached by Block and Hendricksen, and established a trading post at Dutch Point, now within the bounds of the City of Hartford, and still called Dutch Point. But the Dutch were not settlers in the sense that they were there to establish homes and to work the soil. New Amsterdam, Fort Orange ( Albany) and Dutch Point were not settlements in this sense of the word. Probably the first actual Dutch settlement on the Continent of North America was at Schenectady, in 1662, and it is a matter of historical fact that less than two-thirds of the original fifteen "Dutch " proprietors who settled in the Mohawk Valley, at Schenectady, were Dutch for some of the fifteen were of British, Spanish, French and Scandanavian descent.
The two chief points of difference between the Dutch and British in America were, that the Dutch were traders, possessed of wealth, but rather commonplace, from a social and intellectual . standpoint ; the British were settlers and home-makers, and were of a superior class socially and intellectually but possessed of less fortune. This social and mental difference was probably due to the fact, that the Dutch pioneer traders in America were men who were born to that calling and in that station of life, while the British settlers were people of education and gentle birth who were forced to leave their homes in Great Britain, because of their strong religious convictions. They came to found homes in the New World as settlers, rather than as traders, whose place of abode was changed for a more profitable location when trade diminished or the chief commodity of trade, fur-pelts, became
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AFTER THE SETTLEMENT.
scarce. The trading posts of New Amsterdam and Fort Orange became permanent settlements when the British superceded the Dutch, and the names of those posts were changed to New York and Albany.
· The first white settlement in the Connecticut Valley was made in Wethersfield in 1634, for, when Captain William Holmes, when he sailed up the Connecticut, past the dumb Dutch cannon at Hartford, to Windsor and set up his frame trading house, he did no more than to establish a trading post which, however, became a settlement later.
The Dutch purchased their right to the land from the chiefs of the Pequot Indians. It was but a small area immediately about Dutch Point. The English purchased their right to the land from the Sachems of the Indians who were generally spoken of by the settlers as the River Indians. It was a vast territory. The English claimed the stronger title from the fact that they had purchased from the original owners of the land while the Dutch had purchased from a usurping nation.
The Pequots were a powerful, savage and cruel tribe which had come to the Connecticut from the north-west, in the neigh- borhood of the Mohawks, of New York, to which tribe it is not improbable that they were related, or at least allied, in times long past. The Pequots became the terror of the southern New England Indians and were regarded as their conquerors. They drove the River Indians from their long-time homes in the valley.
The law-loving, law-making, and law-abiding English, wishing to base their claim to the land upon a deed that would be sus- tained in law, sent with Captain William Holmes, in his little vessel, to Windsor the Sachems who had been driven out by the Pequots. The English restored the River Indians to their ancient birth-right and then purchased it from them. There was probably no wish to be just in this transaction. It was a matter of shrewd business on the part of the English. The superficial friendship of the River Indians for the English was almost as good business since, without the support of the irresistible wills of the English and their straight shooting firearms, the River Indians would soon again have been reduced to their former abject, homeless state. On the part of the settlers, their intense desire to save the souls of the heathen was gratified to a certain extent
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THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.
by the closeness of the Indian village to the white settlement. They felt, that although the Indians generally refused Christian- ity, some good was accomplished through the example of the whites. And besides this, so long as they maintained a nominal friendship for the settlers, the number of Indian enemies, against whom they must be constantly on the watch, was lessened. But the people were greatly annoyed by these same friendly Indians for they were habitual thieves and once in a while would-be murderers.
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OLD SAYBROOK.
S AYBROOK, the mother of Congregationalism in Con- necticut and western New England, was set apart and granted as a home of refuge for some of Britain's high nobility and gentry, whose religious convictions caused them to uphold the Puritan faith, and although the high nobility did not arrive in the New World to claim their own, Saybrook and the whole United States were the gainers, for an even higher manhood and nobility of life came to Saybrook, in the persons of the men and women who settled the grant and founded American families, whose descendants have gone broadcast over the territory of the Nation, taking with them the sterling prin- ciples of Christian citizenship that were their most precious inheritance from their ancestors, the first settlers.
The Earl of Warwick, having obtained title to the lands from the Plymouth Company in 1631, granted the same territory, ex- tending from the Narragansett river to the Pacific Ocean (includ- ing the lower valley of the Connecticut river and consequently the site of Saybrook), to Lord Say-and-Sele, Lord Brooke, Lord Rich, Sir Richard Saltonstall, John Pym, John Hampden and several other men of birth and position.
This is the generally accepted historical fact as given in the school histories. Professor Alexander Johnston, of Princeton, in his " Connecticut ", one of the American Commonwealth Series, questions the grant from the Plymouth Company to the Earl of Warwick, on the ground that Warwick never exhibited or referred to such grant. He regards it as nothing more than "a quitclaim deed which warrants nothing and does not even assert title to the soil transferred." The actual area of Saybrook was ten miles east and west and about eight north and south.
However that may be, John Winthrop, son of Governor Win- throp, of Massachusetts, was appointed Governor of the Connect- icut River and the harbor and places adjoining by the company composed of the noblemen to whom Warwick made his grant, on July 7, 1635. His appointment was for one year from the time he arrived there. On his part, Winthrop agreed to build
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NATHANIEL LYNDE'S GRAVE IN THE SAYBROOK CEMETERY.
The grave of Nathaniel Lynde in Saybrook Cemetery, who gave the house and lot to The Collegiate School, now Yale University.
THE CONNECTICUT VALLEY.
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OLD SAYBROOK.
a fort and effect a settlement; to build a fort within the bounds of which should be houses for "men of quality." He was directed to reserve 1,000 or 1,500 acres of fertile land for the maintenance of the fort and its garrison.
· Winthrop arrived in Boston in October, 1635, and sent a vessel with twenty men to the mouth of the Connecticut River, where · they arrived on November 24, of the same year. The Dutch already had possession, up the river on the site of Hartford, and were intending to take possession of the mouth of the river, but the arrival of Winthrop's ship and men prevented it. The ter- ritory was taken possession of in the name of Lord Say-and-Sele and the other members of the company, to whom the Earl of Warwick had made the grant. John Winthrop, the Governor, arrived not long after the ship. That the titled proprietors intended their American possessions should be in keeping with their high estate, is shown by the employment of Lion Gardiner, a' skilled English engineer, to take charge of the building of the fort and the laying out of the town. And then, later in the year, 300 men were to go to Saybrook from the Old Country ; 200 to garrison the fortifications ; 50 to make the soil produce food for the community ; and 50 to build houses.
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