Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic

Heathen in the Land

The first human beings to inhabit the valley were the heathen of the Mohicans family of the great Algonkin race. They did not come in search of truth, but were driven out of the Hudson Valley. Those who entered the upper Housatonic region were probably expelled by the Dutch, in the first half of the seventeenth century, those of the lower valley by stronger Indians, at an earlier but not remotely earlier date. They brought with them one great human quality, the recognition of a Great Spirit informing all things, whim they would rejoin after death in the Happy Hunting Grounds far to the southwest. Otherwise, they were a paradoxical people: generally faithful to their larger, treaty undertakings, but rarely above petty pilfering; magnificent in courtesy and picturesque in dress, but filthier in person than any animals; capable of great fortitude under physical suffering and strain, yet without self-control in eating drinking and gambling; affectionately generous, and at the same time sub humanly cruel.

Though the men were of splendid physique, they were an unwarlike, submissive and pessimistic people. Their solution of emotional problems was suicide, normally by leaping from a cliff into the arms of the Great Spirit, after singing a hymn to apprise him of their approach. Bryant immortalized the legend of the maiden who leapt from the escarpment of Monument Mountain, after her betrothed was killed in battle. Two young chiefs destroyed themselves in the same way from Mt. Tom in Litchfield. An old sagamore, his land in future Bethlehem having been sold to the English by younger chiefs against his will, climbed to the lofty summit of Nonewaug Falls, chanted his death song and jumped. An Indian girl, having been refused by her family to the brave she loved, and being already bedecked for her enforced marriage to another, ran to the summit of Squaw Rock in South Britain and leapt to her death. Having no doubt that at their death they would be welcomed by the great Spirit, the chief concern of the river Indians during their bodily lives was with Hobbamocko, the Evil Spirit who, they believed, would ultimately destroy their world. Their principle festivals were horrid orgies to propitiate him, during which the frenzied powwows or medicine men threw their possessions and sometimes their children into the flames.

The river Indians lived in villages ranging from two or three up to a hundred or more families, The normal family occupied a hide wigwam, while the hereditary sachems and nonhereditary sagamores had houses, sometimes a hundred feet in length, framed of bent saplings and covered with bark. Occasionally, several families occupied a long house with a chief, and ceremonial dances were held in their halls in the winter. On defensible high ground near their principle settlements, the sachems and sagamores usually maintained palisaded forts.

The Indians were in the Stone Age of culture, and their livelihood was by hunting, fishing and crude agriculture. The woman, squat, deformed and frequently sterile from overwork, cultivated corn, squashes, and a few beans with wooden or stone hoes. The men raised tobacco, but otherwise were above manual labor. In the autumn they burned the underbrush out of the forest, both to clear the view for hunting and to fertilize for planting. Each spring all the tribes came downriver to catch shad anywhere below the Great Falls at New Milford, which was the top of their run. Thence they proceeded down to the Sound, where they spent the summer digging shellfish on the beaches of Milford and Stratford, feasting on them and making wampum from their shells. After the English came, black wampum beads made from the eye of the hen clam-passed current in the settlements at three for a penny. Twenty-four acres on Milford Point were virtually covered with discarded clamshells. On the Stratford side of the river, just above the railroad bridge, a large heap of them remains today, having somehow escaped use for wither road building or fertilizer.

All the Indians of the valley were one people in physique, language, law, customs, and way of life generally. When the white men appeared, there were at least six fairly well organized tribes in Connecticut part of the valley, but only the remnant of one in the Massachusetts part. Although watch of the tribes in the Lower Valley was gathered round its own sachem at his Great Wigwam or Council Fire, and although each hunted and planted in a more or less distinct region, yet each made traditional claims roughly to all the land on both sides of the river from the sea to its source.

A plausible explanation of this is that all the tribes represented fairly recent emigrations from a common center-traditionally Scatacook in Kent-and that each group, in moving to a new domain, carried with it all the laws and claims of the parent tribe. Wars of succession were avoided because the hereditary sachems, whose power was absolute and who personally owned all their respective tribes hunting grounds, were all related to each other, constituting a horizontal royal family cutting across the tribal divisions, and they alone understood and applied the traditional laws. The sachems kept in close contact touch with each other and consulted and acted together on matters of importance. The colonists learned early that, in order to get a good deed to a large tract, it was desirable to get on the deed the marks of as many sachems as possible. The sachems were like brothers, each delegated to rule over his part of the land of their single father, who no longer existed.

The confusion of tribes is further simplified when it is understood that in a philological sense the Indians of the valley were not divided into tribes at all, that they had no generic tribe names. The apparent tribe names were no more than the names of the places where a subdivision of the main tribe lived. The Indians living around the ford were called in their language The Fords, those near the cleared field were The Cleared Fields, those at the narrows were The Narrows, those at the falls were The Falls, and so forth. When an Indian moved his family from the ford to the cleared field, he was no longer a Ford, but became a Cleared Field. Only the sachems were more or less fixed at their little capitals, and around them the tribes were fluid. Incidentally, a fact that tended to keep all the Indians unified was their common trek every spring over each others trails to the fishing grounds down the river, and every summer to the shellfishing grounds on the beaches of the Sound.

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