Part 6 (1/2)

”Mercy they did deserve for their valor,” Underhill admits of the Pequot. Not that they get any. William Bradford was told by a partic.i.p.ant that ”it was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.”

The Englishmen escape the flames and then guard the two exits so that no Pequot can escape. According to Underhill, those who try to get away ”our soldiers entertained with the point of the sword; down fell men, women, and children.”

Mason summarizes, ”And thus . . . in little more than an hour's s.p.a.ce was their impregnable fort with themselves utterly destroyed, to the number of six or seven hundred.” That's right-as many as seven hundred people, some of them babies, some of them those babies' mothers, were burned alive in their homes.

Two Englishmen die and about twenty are wounded.

Mason is triumphant. After all, this is the will of a righteous G.o.d. He praises the Lord for ”burning them up in the fire of his wrath, and dunging the ground with their flesh: It is the Lord's doings, and it is marvelous in our eyes!” That might be the creepiest exclamation point in American literature. No, wait-it's this one: ”Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies!”

Underhill has read enough of the New Testament to at least pretend to stop and question this human barbecue. He asks, ”Should not Christians have more mercy and compa.s.sion?” Answer: Nope. The Bible offers reasoning enough: ”When a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against G.o.d and man . . . there He hath no respect to persons, but harrows them and saws them and puts them to the sword and the most terriblest death that may be.” Even children? Yes. ”Sometimes,” Underhill continues, ”the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.” He concludes, ”We had sufficient light from the word of G.o.d for our proceedings.”

For Underhill, biblical justification is enough of an air freshener to erase the smell of burning human flesh. But the Narragansett and Mohegan, whom Underhill calls ”our Indians,” were shaken by the viciousness of the English and the horror of the carnage. Especially the Narragansett. Recall they had explicitly asked before the campaign, via Roger Williams, ”that it would be pleasing to all natives, that women and children be spared.”

”Our Indians,” Underhill writes, ”came to us and much rejoiced at our victories, and greatly admired the manner of Englishmen's fight, but cried 'Mach it, mach it,' 'Mach it, mach it,' that is, 'It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious and slays too many men.'” The word ”naught,” to a seventeenth-century English speaker, meant ”evil.” that is, 'It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious and slays too many men.'” The word ”naught,” to a seventeenth-century English speaker, meant ”evil.”

In 1889, a statue of Mason drawing his sword was erected on the site of the Mystic Fort ma.s.sacre, in the present-day town of Groton. In 1992, a Pequot named Wolf Jackson pet.i.tioned the town council to remove the statue. According to the Hartford Courant, Hartford Courant, in one of the meetings in which the statue's fate was debated, one citizen proclaimed ”that the statue on Pequot Avenue is about as appropriate as a monument at Auschwitz to Heinrich Himmler, architect of the n.a.z.is' Final Solution.” As a compromise between the faction who wanted the statue destroyed and boosters who wanted to keep it in place, in 1996 the statue was moved away from the site of the ma.s.sacre to nearby Windsor, which was founded by Mason. The in one of the meetings in which the statue's fate was debated, one citizen proclaimed ”that the statue on Pequot Avenue is about as appropriate as a monument at Auschwitz to Heinrich Himmler, architect of the n.a.z.is' Final Solution.” As a compromise between the faction who wanted the statue destroyed and boosters who wanted to keep it in place, in 1996 the statue was moved away from the site of the ma.s.sacre to nearby Windsor, which was founded by Mason. The New York Times New York Times reported that nine protestors attended the rededication ceremony: ”'No Hero,' said one sign; 'Remember the Pequot Ma.s.sacres,' said another.” A few weeks later, vandals doused the bronze Mason with red paint. reported that nine protestors attended the rededication ceremony: ”'No Hero,' said one sign; 'Remember the Pequot Ma.s.sacres,' said another.” A few weeks later, vandals doused the bronze Mason with red paint.

After the Mystic Fort Ma.s.sacre, there are a few more dwindling skirmishes here and there in the Pequot War. Individual Pequot are hunted down by other Indians, who decapitate their corpses and send their severed heads along to the English, including the head of the princ.i.p.al sachem, Sa.s.sacus, who is beheaded by Mohawks. These grisly trophies, reports Mason, ”came almost daily to Windsor or Hartford.” But Mystic more or less marks the end of the Pequot War, as well as the end of Pequot power.

Captured Pequot are divvied up as spoils among the victors. Boston sells some of its share of Pequot survivors into slavery in Bermuda. (Many Pequot descendants still live on Bermuda's St. David's Island, their Indian slave ancestors having intermarried with their African slave ancestors.) In 1638, the Connecticut English host a treaty party in Hartford where a few remaining Pequot are divided among Uncas, Miantonomi, and the leaders of other tribes that had been English allies. The treaty mandates that the Pequot are to be absorbed into their adoptive tribes, their own tribal ident.i.ty outlawed. ”The Pequots were then bound by covenant,” writes Mason, ”that none should inhabit their native country, nor should any of them be called Pequots any more, but Mohegans and Narragansetts forever.” After trying to physically annihilate the Pequot, the English attempt to wipe out the Pequot linguistically, forbidding the tribe to refer to themselves as Pequot.

The Pequot absorbed into Uncas's tribe later became known as the Mashantucket Pequot. In 1976, this tribe successfully sued the state of Connecticut for recovery of some of its land in Connecticut and received federal recognition from Ronald Reagan in 1983. This is the home to the tribe's wildly profitable Foxwoods Resort Casino.

On our Plymouth-bound vacation, my sister Amy, my nephew Owen, and I visit the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, a stone's throw from Foxwoods. It's an impressive facility with a tower where visitors can look across the tree-tops and admire the landscape and the casino's teal roof. The museum features life-size dioramas with mannequins depicting the Pequot way of life, including a caribou hunt and a wigwam village enclosed in a palisade like the one at Mystic. Inside, a child naps on a bed of animal skins, a woman guts a fish, an elder teaches a teenager how to make an arrow.

We sit in the museum's theater and watch a film-a dramatic reenactment of the ma.s.sacre at the Mystic fort. Owen is seven. His knowledge of seventeenth-century New England derives entirely from what he learned in his school's Thanksgiving pageant the previous fall and repeated viewings of s...o...b..-Doo and the Witch's Ghost, s...o...b..-Doo and the Witch's Ghost, in which a cartoon dog and his teenage friends visit a haunted New England town. in which a cartoon dog and his teenage friends visit a haunted New England town.

When the film shows the Pequot clas.h.i.+ng with Connecticut settlers, Owen whispers, ”I don't get it. Why are they fighting? They eat together on Thanksgiving.”

When Uncas shows up at Fort Saybrook and bestows upon the English his offering of Pequot heads, Owen is outraged. He screams, ”What?!”

Cut to the Pequot fort, where we have already seen a little girl around Owen's age playing with a cornhusk doll while being teased by her brother. The reenactor playing Captain Mason yells, ”Burn them!” As the wigwams catch fire, Pequot kids are shrieking and holding on to their mothers. The English shoot at the Pequot who flee the flames. Horrified, Owen tugs my sleeve, demanding, ”Aunt Sarah! When do they have Thanksgiving?”

”The one with the Pilgrims?” I whisper. ” That happened sixteen years earlier.”

Owen closes his eyes and refuses to watch the rest of the movie. When the lights go up, he asks his mother, ”Who won?”

” The English,” she replies.

One answer to Owen's question-When's Thanksgiving?-might be June 15, 1637. Winthrop writes in his journal that in Boston ”There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequot.” To the Puritans, days of thanksgiving were not annual events. Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by U.S. calendars calling for a holiday, Thanksgiving, with a capital T, on the fourth Thursday of November every year. What if we didn't deserve it? What if a day of fast was called for instead, days of fast being occasional days of punishment to repent for wayward collective behavior or as an act of prayer to call for G.o.d's help in precarious situations. In fact, Boston had held a fast the day before the ma.s.sacre at Mystic, and Winthrop credits that one day's missed dinner for the resulting ”general defeat of the Pequot.” Thus did they earn the day of thanksgiving after the victory.

If the idea of putting on a picnic to celebrate seven hundred people being burned alive sounds cra.s.s, it was nevertheless not unheard of in the seventeenth century. In fact, during the English Civil War, when the Puritan Oliver Cromwell led his army to sack the Irish village of Drogheda on September 11, 1649, at least two thousand people died, including some who barricaded themselves inside a church that Cromwell set on fire, thus burning them alive like the Pequot in their fort. Cromwell prosecuted this holocaust in the same manner Captain Underhill applauded his men at Mystic-”without compa.s.sion.” Though, according to Cromwell's biographer Antonia Fraser, ”Oliver's own mercy was said to have been stirred by the sight of a tiny baby still trying hopelessly to feed from the breast of its dead mother.” And what was the verdict on Drogheda back home in England? Fraser writes that the news was met with ”delight and rejoicing. The ministers gave out the happy tidings from the pulpits; 30 October was set aside to be a day of public thanksgiving.”

After the Mystic ma.s.sacre movie ends, Amy and Owen and I leave the museum and repair to our nearby hotel, the Mohegan Sun Casino, operated by the Mohegan tribe. It looks like it was designed by Ralph Lauren, Bugsy Siegel, and w.i.l.l.y Wonka after a night of peyote. Which is to say that I kind of like it.

The registration desks are nestled under a half-dome, meant to evoke a wigwam. Inside, amidst the standard gambling accoutrements, like c.r.a.ps tables and slot machines, the building is done up in woven wood and birch bark. Support columns look like trees with candy-colored leaves. Mu rals depict Mohegan mythology. There's a display featuring a giant replica of Shantok cookware-the pottery a.s.sociated with Uncas's nearby village-and it makes me wonder if four hundred years from now my nonstick frying pan will be made into a colossal sculpture for gamblers to admire. A charming statue of the late Mohegan anthropologist Gladys Tantaquidgeon is facing a sign that tallies up the ”slot jack-pot paid today.” Uncas would undoubtedly get a kick out of his tribe presiding over such an impressive edifice built for the sole purpose of taking white people's wampum.

The three of us sit outside by the pool and Owen does a martial arts-influenced interpretive dance to d.i.c.k Dale's ”Misirlou” while quizzing me on the story of the Pequot War.

”Don't tell me!” he says. ”No, tell me.”

I hit the highlights, starting with the Dutch murdering the Pequot chief and the Pequot avenging his death by mistakenly killing an Englishman and how the whole thing just kind of escalated into war. He says that sounds stupid. I say that most wars are. Then he asks me what state we're in.

”Connecticut,” I tell him.

”And that war was here?” he asks.

Yes, I answer.

”Name a state where there was never a war,” he says.

Flipping through various Indian skirmishes and the Civil War in my head, I reply, ”I'm not sure I can.”

”Then name a state where there was the least amount of war.”

”I don't know,” I say. ”Idaho?” (I looked it up later; turns out I was unaware of the Battle of White Bird Canyon during the Nez Perce War.) The next morning, we drive around in search of Uncas, walking around his headquarters, now Fort Shantok State Park. Then we drive to Norwich to look at Indian Leap, a chasm next to a waterfall where Uncas supposedly chased some Narragansett to their deaths in 1643.

”Was he trying to cut their heads off?” asks Owen.

No, I tell him. The sign says, ”They plunged to their death into the abyss below.”

In Norwich, we stop to look at the Uncas Monument, an obelisk, at the ”Royal Mohegan Burial Ground.” A plaque notes the monument was dedicated by President Andrew Jackson in 1833.

”Figures,” my sister says. ”One a.s.shole honoring another.” (For his Indian-removal policies Jackson is not remembered kindly by my family and our fellow Cherokee descendants.) Amy and Owen can't get past Uncas decapitating those Pequot and taking part in the Mystic Ma.s.sacre. Not that I find his behavior particularly uplifting, but I can understand the desperation behind Uncas's every lick of an English boot. He was ruthless in the pursuit of one goal, Mohegan survival. Standing in that cemetery, looking at the grave of Uncas's great-grandson, reading a plaque that states the Mohegan ”descendants reside in Norwich today,” it appears that Uncas succeeded in keeping his people intact and in proximity to the graves of their ancestors. What he did wasn't pretty. It wasn't even right. But it worked.

In a famous ill.u.s.tration from John Underhill's book on the Pequot War, the situation couldn't be more clear. Concentric circles depict the overwhelming force of the English and their allies surrounding the Pequot fort. The lesson? You're either burning or getting burnt.

We leave the Mohegan cemetery and stop off at the Mystic Aquarium to take a break from Indian troubles. But an exhibit devoted to algae living inside giant clams reminds me of Uncas's relations.h.i.+p with the English nonetheless.

In order to survive, giant clams and zooxanth.e.l.la have adopted a mutualistic relations.h.i.+p (one that benefits both partners). Zooxanth.e.l.la (plant-like algae) live inside giant clams to receive protection and a home. In turn zooxanth.e.l.la provide the giant clam with the nutrients it needs to survive.

Obviously, the English are the clam and the Mohegan are the algae. If that a.n.a.logy sounds unfair and one-sided and insulting to the Mohegan, that's because it is. Uncas simply decided that the only way to live was to live off the biggest giant clam around.

After the Pequot War, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi took the exact opposite course of action from Uncas, with disastrous results. Horrified by the Mystic Ma.s.sacre, Miantonomi could only conclude that the English were h.e.l.l-bent on native annihilation. So he set out to build a coalition of tribes to fight back, just as Tec.u.mseh would at the turn of the nineteenth century.

In 1642, Lion Gardener, one of the officers from Fort Saybrook, was pa.s.sing through Long Island when he witnessed a speech Miantonomi delivered to a local tribe.

He said: For so are we all Indians as the English are and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly. For you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the gra.s.s and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the gra.s.s, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.

After enumerating his other Indian allies, he outlines a forthcoming plan of attack. He says, ”And when you see the fires that will be made forty days hence in a clear night, then do as we, and the next day fall on and kill men, women, and children, but no cows, for they will serve to eat 'til our deer be increased again.”

Miantonomi's speech foreshadows similar testimony among nineteenth-century American Indians such as Chief Seattle and Tec.u.mseh himself, who would one day try and gather together allied Indian forces invoking the memory of what happened to the Pequot, whom he said had ”vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun.”

When the English get wind of Miantonomi's plot, Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth, and Connecticut form the United Colonies of New England, also called the New England Confederation, to officially act as a collective defensive alliance. (Roger Williams's heretical colony is purposefully left out of the coalition so Rhode Island's anything-goes coo-ties won't rub off on its proper, G.o.d-fearing neighbors.) Meanwhile, Uncas captures Miantonomi and turns him over to the English authorities at Hartford. This prompts a secret meeting among representatives from the United Colonies to decide what to do about the prisoner. Winthrop reports in his journal that they conclude that ”there was a general conspiracy among the Indians to cut off all the English and that Miantonomi was the head and contriver of it.” Secondly, they agree that the Narragansett sachem ”was of a turbulent and proud spirit, and would never be at rest.”