USA > Connecticut > The history of Connecticut, from the first settlement of the colony to the adoption of the present constitution, vol. I > Part 3
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* Notwithstanding these provisions of the glorious constitution, (which was adopted at the preceding date,) the "committees" continued to attend the court until April, 1640, when " deputies" were substituted.
+ Vide J. Hammond Trumbull's " Colonial Records."
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29
HOOKER AND HIS COMPANY.
[1636.]
making treaties, a power much exercised in alliances with the Indians.
On the 26th of April, 1636, the first court was held in the colony. It met at Newtown (soon after named Hartford.) Roger Ludlow, Esq., of whose liberal views and far-sighted policy, as a statesman, it will be our pleasure by and by to treat, was a member. At this court, it was ordered, among other excellent sumptuary regulations, that the inhabitants should not sell arms and ammunition to the Indians.
With the first springing of the green grass, and the unfold- ing of the leaves, so that their cattle could subsist in the woods, those who fled from the plantations in the winter, now hastened to return. Others came with them, and others still followed them, in little groups, through the whole month of May.
About the beginning of June, the first soft, warm month of the New England year, Mr. Hooker, with his assistant, Mr. Stone, and followed by about one hundred men, women, and children, set out upon the long-contemplated journey. Over mountains, through swamps, across rivers, fording, or upon rafts, with the compass to point out their irregular way, slowly they moved westward ; now in the open spaces of the forest, where the sun looked in; now under the shades of the old trees; now struggling through the entanglement of bushes and vines-driving their flocks and herds before them-the strong supporting the weak, the old caring for the young, with hearts cheerful as the month, slowly they moved on. Mrs. Hooker was ill, and was borne gently upon a litter .* A stately, well-ordered journey it was, for gentlemen of for- tune and rank were of the company, and ladies who had been delicately bred, and who had known little of toil or hardship until now. But they endured it with the sweet alacrity that belongs alone to woman, high-toned and gentle, when summoned, by a voice whose call can not be resisted, to lay aside the trappings of ease, and to step from a position that she once adorned, to a level that her presence ennobles.
* Winthrop, i. 223; Trumbull, i. 64, 65.
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HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
The howl of the wolf, his stealthy step among the rustling leaves, the sighing of the pines, the roar of the mountain tor- rent, losing itself in echoes sent back from rock and hill, the smoking ruins of the Indian council fire-all forcing upon the mind the oppressive sense of solitariness and danger, the more dreaded because unseen-all these, the wife, the mother, the daughter, encountered, with a calm trust that they should one day see the wilderness blossom as the rose.
At the end of about two weeks, they reached the land almost fabulous to them-so long had hope and fancy been shaping to their minds pictures of an ideal loveliness-the valley of the Connecticut. It lay at their feet, beneath the shadow of the low-browed hills, that tossed the foliage of their trees in billows, heaving for miles away to the east and west, as the breath of June touched them with life. It lay, holding its silvery river in its embrace, like a strong bow half bent in the hands of the swarthy hunter, who still called himself lord of its rich acres.
Let us, in imagination, stand by the side of those wander- ers, now in sight of a resting-place, and look with them on their new home. What glorious oaks pierce yonder hill- sides with their rugged roots, that, with the lapse of centuries, seem never to grow old. What clumps of tulip-trees, each shooting high into the air its cluster of quaint-fashioned leaves and yellow flowers. More than one of those smooth trunks might be hollowed to form as large a canoe as any in sight, that ripples over the eddies of the river, or is tied by its cord to the trees that grow by the cove. In the thatch grass at your feet, some Indian fishermen, with hempen nets or hooks of bone, are dragging ashore a score or two of yel- low salmon ; and near by, at the entrance of that wigwam, where the smoke rises so faintly, a few squaws are kindling a fire of drift wood to broil a meal for their lazy lords, that they will eat in approving silence. There are some fields of hemp growing; and further on is a clearing in the woods, though here and there a scattered tree with its rough bark has escaped the fire that felled its companions, where
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THE FUTURE.
you may see maize, and beans, and squashes, struggling with the grass that taxes the strength of the squaws to keep it down. Who ever saw such patriarchal elms, with such gracefully spreading branches, that droop till they dip their leaves in the brim of the river? At intervals, up and down the valley, are the log huts erected by their friends who pre- ceded them, that rest in the eye of these tired travelers more lovingly than the pleasant manor houses and cottages that they have left behind them. Here these men shall found a city, the capital of a State that shall not be unknown to fame, that shall extend itself under the influences of mild laws, equally administered, contending bravely for its rights, sometimes for its existence, on fields of battle, against wild savages, against the armies of France; and she confesses with tears, yet not with shame, that the most bloody conflict, in the course of two centuries, to be recorded by her histo- rian, was with the children of the country from which her founders fled, contending for principles planted, by Hooker and such as he, ineradicably in the soil.
CHAPTER II.
CONNECTICUT A WILDERNESS. THE PEQUOT WAR AND ITS CAUSES.
THE difficulties that were to be encountered by the Eng- lish in making settlements in Connecticut, can hardly be estimated by us who now occupy the same territory. We have our sea-ports, our cities, our villages, swarming with a thriving population. The steam engine is hurrying us from one great business centre to another with astonishing velocity, dragging in its train the products of our varied industry, and bringing back those of all nations in return. We have our banks and other corporations, that represent the accumulated earnings both of the dead and living ; our city mansions, our hospitable country houses, surrounded by their well-tilled acres, where the ploughshare, as it glides along, is scarcely obstructed by the roots of the forest trees, that once lay coiled like serpents beneath the sod.
Forest trees, standing alone, or in the scattered patches of our woodlands, we have still remaining, though constantly decreasing in number and size, and gradually withdrawing from our habitations to the tops of mountains or the beds of streams, where yet they may be safe for a little while, until the necessities of some newly-built furnace or manufactory shall follow them even there.
How different is the Connecticut of to-day from that of the first half of the seventeenth century! With the exception of the clearings made by the Indians, by burning over the bent grass and dry leaves in the fall or spring, for the pur- poses of hunting or of their meagre tillage, the whole country was covered with primitive trees. The oak, the chestnut, the pine in all its varieties, the walnut, the cedar, the wild cherry, the maple,-these, with other sturdy trees that thrive in high or temperate latitudes, here shot up and grew luxuri- antly, extending over the rough country and the smooth for
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33
GAME IN THE FOREST.
hundreds of miles,-trees of no puny growth, for they fed on the decayed trunks of other trees, their predecessors, and on the leaves that annually fell and slowly mouldered above their roots. Every year their season of growth was brief, for then, as now, summer came late, and did not tarry long ; yet they grew with wonderful rapidity, usurping to them- selves all the richness of the soil. Many of them, especially oaks, pines, and elms, attained a vast size, for they stood in such close neighborhood that their branches intertwined and screened each other from the ice and snows that loaded them, and the winds that buffeted them in vain. Not broken, as our thin woods are in modern times, from exposure to the fierceness of the elements, they kept their vigor and grew for many ages. They sheltered a great variety of wild animals-for game, the moose, the deer, the bear; along the streams, the otter, the beaver, and many other fur-producing animals, that requited well the labors of the trapper. There were not a few of the destructive order. Wolves, in thous- ands, infested the new settlements. They killed the cattle, they stole and carried off the sheep, and did what they could by their unearthly howlings at night, to add to the horrors that thickened on the skirts of the wilderness. It will be a part of our task to call to the reader's mind the many stat- utes that our ancestors passed to regulate those unruly citi- zens-how they kept watch and ward to defend against them-how they set bounties upon the heads and ears of those who offended by coming within a given number of miles of their settlements, and how these depredators proved, after all, incorrigible, and with their fellow malefactors, the bears and catamounts, could only be brought into subjection by totally exterminating the whole race, the innocent with the guilty. Wild-fowl also abounded in the woods. Tur- keys, more swift-footed than the Indian runners themselves, and of a size almost incredible, were nearly as numerous as the fallen logs beneath which they hatched their young. Pigeons innumerable might be seen on the wing constantly in the spring and autumn days, or startled in the midsummer
3
34
HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
from the thicket where they had built their nests. In the lakes and rivers were plenty of wild geese, and the whole duck family in all its varieties .* All the little creeks and inlets of Long Island sound, sent ashore their treasures of lobsters, oysters, and other shellfish of all sorts, that how supply the tables of the inhabitants, as well of those who dwell inland, as of those who inhabit the sea-shore.
Within the limits of Connecticut, as its boundaries are now fixed, were probably from twelve to fifteen thousandt Indians, broken into many clans or tribes, speaking different dialects, that had a common basis, so that the individuals belonging to one tribe could understand the words spoken by those of another. All their gestures, too, and ordinary modes of life- their rules of war and of peace, their traditionary laws, their gods, their heaven and hell, had a common origin. They were quite unequally distributed in different parts of the com- monwealth. Those who lived on either bank of the Con- necticut, and were hence called river Indians, were nearly all within the old limits of Windsor, Hartford, Wethers- field, and Middletown. There were ten sovereignties of them in Windsor alone, who could muster, it was said, an aggregate of two thousand bowmen. Hartford swarmed with them. We shall name only a few of the tribes now, reserving a more particular notice of them when we come to treat of the places where they lived, as each, in its order of time, we gather the new plantations or towns into the con- stantly enlarging circle reclaimed by our fathers from the solitudes of nature.
We must not omit, however, to make allusion to the In- dians called Pequots and Mohegans, who occupied a large tract of country, about thirty miles square, extending from
* Hoyt's Indian Wars.
+ The number has been variously estimated by different historians, some placing it as high as twenty thousand, while Mr. Deforest, in his "History of the Con- necticut Indians," estimates the number at from six to seven thousand only. A careful investigation of all the accessible authorities, leads us to the conclusion that the number stated in our text can not be far from the truth.
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35
SASSACUS.
the Connecticut river, on the west, to the Narragansett coun- try, on the east, and from the sea-coast, on the south, to the northern boundary line of the colony-making up the whole of the counties of New London and Windham, with a large part of Tolland county. Though usually treated of by histo- rians as separate tribes, yet they do not appear to have been so, except that Uncas, the Mohegan chief, who was too am- bitious, himself, to favor the aspiring views of Sassacus, the head sachem of the Pequots, thought it best, from motives of policy, to take the part of the English settlers, in order that he might find in them an ally against the burdensome power of his superior chieftain. Uncas was a rebel chief, who was glad to avail himself of such aid as he could find, and the more powerful the better, against his master. Why he has received the laudations of so many writers, it is not easy to see, unless, in their love of the treason that helped them to crush a troublesome enemy, they have learned also to cherish the memory of the traitor. For ourselves, we set a much lower estimate upon the character of this Indian, than upon that of the Pequot chief, who fought the English to the last hour of his life, and scorned to ask quarter of those to whom he had himself denied it. As the event proved, Uncas was doubtless the shrewder politician of the two; and was too cunning, after witnessing the prowess of his new allies, ever to think of deserting them. Uncas, both by his father's and mother's side, was descended from the royal Pequot line, and he also married a daughter of a Pequot chief; so that he is entitled to whatever honor can be derived from rejoicing over the downfall of the family and the nation from which he sprung.
1208920
Sassacus was the most intractable and proud of all the New England Indians. He is described as having excelled all the other men of his tribe in courage and address as a warrior, as much as that tribe surpassed all the neighboring ones in its haughty claims to dominion. Sassacus had twenty-six sachems under him, when the English settlers first came to the Connecticut river. His most familiar
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HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
haunts were in the present towns of Groton and New Lon- don. He had two harbors, one at the mouth of the Pequot river, (now called the Thames,) and the other at the mouth of the river Mistick. He had also two principal forts. The larger one occupied the summit of a high hill, that looks off upon the indented line of the shore and the quiet waters of that part of the Atlantic that is shut away from the main by the low sandy barrier of Long Island-a little archipelago, as viewed from this eminence, containing in its bosom a cluster of islands as lovely as any that lie in the embraces of the ocean. Here, in such rude state as savages know how to put on, lived Sassacus, keeping watch over his fishing- coast and hunting-grounds, administering justice after the rude manner of his ancestors, punishing rebels, bringing home the scalps of conquered chiefs, and sending his haughty messengers for hundreds of miles, into far off regions, whose inhabitants trembled at the terrors of his name. In the ex- pressive language of those who feared him, he was "all one god." Here, by the copious spring that still bubbles up to the lips of him who goes thither to read the lost memorials of a nation now extinct, he had gathered the grim trophies of his savage grandeur; here, were his treasures of wampum, his armory of war clubs, and bows, and arrows pointed with bone or flint.
A few miles to the eastward of this fort, and having a pleasant lookout upon the adjacent country, and his harbor at the mouth of the river Mistick, was the other fort just named.
I have been thus minute in regard to this sachem and his tribe, because their fate is first in the order of events to be set forth in this work. But, before proceeding to the details of a story not so pleasant to dwell upon as to induce us to hasten our steps, let us premise a few words in reference to the personal appearance, character, and habits, of the Con- necticut Indians.
They were almost without exception athletic, well-developed men, tall, graceful in their movements, with not very regular features, high cheek-bones, thin lips, black eyes, and coarse
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37
TRAITS OF THE INDIANS.
hair of the same color. They dressed in a fantastic, yet very becoming manner, in the skins of wild beasts, the warriors having an eye to the picturesque and the terrible, seeking to make themselves as frightful as possible when they went forth to make war. The women wore petticoats of skins about the loins, extending below the knees. The chiefs wore belts of wampum, some of them very costly and beautiful, and of a variety of colors. When dressed for a war council, they were decorated with great care and magnificence.
The Indian was roving and untamable in his disposition. He set a high value upon demeanor. Possessed of the most intense curiosity, he habitually hid it beneath the mask of a stony indifference. He was proud, beyond all other men, both by nature and education. He has been called cowardly in his mode of warfare .* But when it is recollected how puny were his offensive weapons, how slight those of defense, how little his dress protected his person, and how deadly were the guns of the English, we ought not to form hasty conclusions adverse to his valor. The Indians were not wanting in intel- lectual endowments. They had little sympathy with external nature, and yet they were from necessity keen observers of all natural phenomena. They had a rude, wild gift of elo- quence, highly impassioned, abounding in metaphors some- times extravagant, always bold and striking. In all their allusions to the glory of their ancestors, and the places where their bones had been laid, they spoke with a delicate sim- plicity, that formed a striking contrast with the frigid selfish- ness that is stamped as indelibly upon the Indian character as it is written legibly in his face. They were too good tacti- tians to be trustworthy as friends. As enemies, they were
* From the frequent taunts made by the Indians to the inmates of the fortifica- tion at Saybrook, we may infer that they regarded it as the perfection of cow- ardice to fight from behind the walls of a fort. "Come out here, and fight like men," was their summons to the English ; yet, no sooner was the call complied with, than the wily savages flew to the thicket for shelter, and there, skulking behind trees, or beneath the tall underbrush, sent forth the swift messengers of death upon their enemies. Self-protection was the object in both cases, though different means were used to attain the end.
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HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
implacable, and seldom suffered the embers of an old feud to go out in their bosoms. They schooled themselves to endure tortures, the most excruciating that can rack the human frame, with a grim composure of countenance, or smilingly courted still keener agonies by menacing gestures, scornful distortions of the lip, and the most insulting way of rolling the eye-balls in the presence of their tormentors. The most complex tortures known to the traditionary code of the Indian, called forth from the victim no confession of their efficacy. Limb after limb might be torn from him, his face mutilated, his tongue plucked out by the roots, his body scorched in the hot breath of the flames that wreathed around the stake, still, like the images of stone that embodied his rude ideal of a creating intelligence, he preserved his scornfulness of look, until his spirit left the shriveled body for such a heaven as the tradi- tions of his people had promised to the warrior whose brown cheek had never paled with fear.
The male Indians did little manual labor. They spent their time in hunting, fishing, contriving wars and executing them, or, when leisure was allowed for indulgence, in a dull round of animal enjoyments. They had no regular division of time, ate no regular meals, and had no hours set apart for social enjoyment. While her lord lay under the shade of a tree within sight of the cornfield, and snored away the hours of a summer afternoon, the squaw turned up the sods, and drew the dark, rich loam around the maize; or, not far off, in the mortar that had been worn ages before in some earth- fast rock, her stone pestle fell in regular strokes upon the shining kernels that she had raised the year before, and laid carefully aside, to furnish the requisite supply of "samp," that constituted the staple of the Indian's food. As might be inferred from their habits, the squaws were strong and hardy, and more capable of enduring fatigue than the men, though their figures were not so slender and graceful. Of household furniture they had little. A few cooking vessels of wood and stone, a knife made of shell or a species of reed, made up nearly the whole inventory. They had stone axes,
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39
INDIAN ARTS AND MANUFACTURES.
too, and chisels. Their most delicate manufactures were weapons of war. Of these, they had a good variety, and they were often wrought by the warriors themselves. The most graceful, as well as the most complex, appear to have been the bow and arrow. The bow was made of ash, oak, walnut, but especially of the sassafras, the most elastic and fragrant of all the kinds of wood known to them. Their bow strings were made of hemp, or of the sinews of the deer. The swamps supplied them with an abundance of reeds for arrows, and some of them were carefully wrought of wood. They were all loaded with a piece of flint stone, or bone, sharpened to a point, and shaped like a spearhead, that steadied their flight, and made them, in the hands of such good marksmen as the Indians were, formidable weapons .* They had, also, a prominent weapon, the well-known toma- hawk-a name terrible to us from associations of horrible cruelty connected with its use in all wars waged by them against the English. This weapon was made of various materials, and was of various forms of construction. It was either a short, strong club of hard wood, with one of its ends fitted to the hand, and the other in the form of a large knob of deer's horn; or else it was a hatchet of stone, with a grooved neck for the reception of the little stick that was twisted around it as a handle. This weapon the warriors managed with a great deal of skill, and threw to a considera- ble distance with fatal dexterity and force. They made spears, too, several feet long, with heads of stone like their arrows.t
Lastly, as connected with the science of war, they had some skill in the manufacture of canoes. In Connecticut, these do not appear to have been made of bark, but of the vast trunks of trees. The pine and whitewood, or tulip-tree, were usually selected. Some of these trees shot upward seventy or eighty feet, straight as an arrow, before sending out a limb. As fire was the main agent in felling the tree and hollowing it, the task of making a canoe must have been almost as formidable as our own ship-building.
Trumbull, i. 47, 48.
t Deforest's History of the Indians of Conn. p. 6.
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HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT.
Like many other pagan nations, the Indian deities repre- sented the abstract idea of force-illimitable, indeterminate force. They worshiped the elements. The waters, whether rolling between the banks of rivers, or tossing, white capped, upon the shores of the sea; the fire, the lightning, the thun- der, the wind-nature in all her rude forms-every phe- nomenon that seemed to bespeak a power superior to their own, they deemed worthy of homage, but propably not so much as gods as the symbols of gods. Of these deities, there were two of especial note. The first was called Kitchtan, or Kritchtan, and was believed to be the benevolent or " good god," who cared for them in this world, and received the souls of the good and brave when they died. He was the Great Spirit of the Indian's heaven. He lived in a lovely land, far away to the sweet south-west, beyond the hills where the haze of the Indian summer rested like a dim dream, inhabit- ing hunting grounds where the deer and the moose awaited his children ; a land of plenty, a land of rest from labor and freedom from care, where the warrior could sate himself in the enjoyment of those animal pleasures that could alone make up the Indian's heaven. To this land they made ready to go. The young brave had it in his eye when he went forth to battle; the old chief spoke of it to his children when he laid himself down upon his mat to die. There they were to meet to part no more.
But the deity who received most of their offerings, was Hob- bomocko, the representative of the principle of evil .* Love him they could not, for not one of his attributes was lovely ; but, true to the instincts of the savage, they feared him, and, therefore, from motives of policy, they worshiped him. It has been thought that they sacrificed human victims to him. At any rate, they set apart a large share of their most valua- ble property for the festal days consecrated to him, and burned it with well-dissembled pleasure, in the hope of delud- ing him into the belief that they revered and honored him. These ceremonies were usually connected with some great
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