Mystic massacre

On May 26, 1637, during the Pequot War, colonial militia from Connecticut Colony, led by Captain John Mason and joined by Narragansett and Mohegan warriors, set the Pequot Fort near the Mystic River ablaze. This event became known by several names: the Mystic massacre, the Pequot massacre, or the Battle of Mystic Fort. As Pequots tried to flee the burning palisade, the attackers gunned them down, leaving few of the village's inhabitants alive. Somewhere between 400 and 700 Pequots died that day. The sole survivors were warriors who happened to be absent, off raiding alongside their sachem Sassacus.

Background

In the southeastern reaches of the Connecticut Colony, the Pequot tribe held sway over the region, having stood for a long time as adversaries of the Mohegan and Narragansett peoples nearby. Trade connected all three groups with the settlers arriving from New England, who bartered manufactured goods in return for furs and wampum. Over time the Pequots forged a partnership with Dutch settlers, whereas the Mohegans and other groups sided with the New England colonists instead.

Violence erupted after Pequots killed a trader by the name of John Oldham and stripped his vessel of its cargo, prompting colonists and their native partners to strike back. Then, on April 23, 1637, a force of two hundred Pequot fighters descended upon Wethersfield, leaving six men and three women dead, none of whom had taken up arms or posed any threat. This assault marked a decisive shift in the conflict, since the killing of ordinary civilians stirred outrage among the settlers and rallied broader backing for war against the Pequots. Historian Katherine Grandjean has pointed out that the Great Colonial Hurricane, which struck in 1635, had ruined corn and other crops that year, leaving food scarce and sparking rivalry over what supplies remained for winter. Such pressures deepened the friction between the Pequots and colonists, neither of whom had the means to withstand prolonged hunger.

Modern reappraisals

As the contemporary Pequot nation began to take shape during the 1990s, a piece published in The New England Quarterly weighed both sides of the question of whether the events at Mystic amounted to genocide. In her 2009 work Genocide and International Justice, Rebecca Joyce Frey categorizes the episode as such. Harvard Law School's Steven M. Wise described the events at Mystic as "the Puritans genocidal Indian War," claiming that a thousand Indians lost their lives. According to Wise, Captain John Underhill defended the slaughter of children, women, the elderly, and the infirm by arguing that scripture sometimes decrees that women and children must die alongside their parents, insisting that he and his men possessed ample scriptural justification for what they had done.

By 2020, amid a wave of nationwide civil rights demonstrations targeting Confederate monuments, activists began pushing for the removal of a John Mason statue located at Palisado Green in Windsor, Connecticut. This monument had first gone up in 1889 at the very site of the Mystic killings, before being relocated to Windsor in 1996 owing to its connection with Mason's residence there. That September, the town council voted five to four in favor of taking the statue down and turning it over to the Windsor Historical Society. Yet Dr. Kevin McBride, who directs research at the Pequot Museum, pointed out that when the monument had been relocated away from the Mystic site in the 1990s, tribal chairman Skip Hayward had opposed removing it altogether, warning that once it disappeared, the memory of what had occurred there would vanish with it.

Then, in early 2021, attention turned to a second Mason statue, this one positioned outside the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford, which also drew calls for removal. Following a full year of discussion, a state commission concluded that the statue ought to come down, though it left room for members of the Connecticut General Assembly to continue debating what should ultimately become of it.

The events at Mystic later found their way into popular media as well, appearing as a segment in the History Channel program 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America.

Aftermath

The death toll among the Pequots remains uncertain, with figures ranging anywhere from 400 to 700, a count that included women, children, and older tribal members. On the colonial side, casualties numbered between 22 and 26, though only two deaths were confirmed. About 40 Narragansett fighters also sustained wounds, since the colonists frequently confused them with Pequot warriors in the chaos.

This devastating loss shattered Pequot power as a fighting force. Sassacus and a group of his followers found themselves trapped in a swamp close to a Mattabesset settlement known as Sasqua. What unfolded there became known as the Fairfield Swamp Fight, an engagement that left close to 180 warriors dead, injured, or taken prisoner. Though Sassacus managed to flee alongside roughly 80 men, his life ended at the hands of the Mohawks, who then dispatched his scalp to the colonists as a gesture of goodwill.

So severe was the reduction in Pequot numbers that the tribe essentially disappeared as a recognized entity. Under the terms of the treaty that followed, survivors were required to merge into either the Mohegan or Narragansett tribes, and the Pequot name itself was forbidden to them. It was not until the later decades of the twentieth century that descendants of the tribe worked to restore Pequot identity, ultimately gaining federal recognition in 1983 along with resolution of certain disputes over tribal lands.