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CONNECTICUT
PAUGAUSSETT INDIANS
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THE HISTORY OF
STRATFORD
Golden Hill Indians THE HISTORY OF
STRATFORD
Wm.Howard Wilcoxson Establishing
Title to the Land FORREST MORGAN
Lifestyles, Government, Religion and WarIndian Titles and Mohegan Land TroublesSowheag, Uncas, and MiantonomoOwenoco, the Son of Uncas
THE HOUSATONIC CHARD POWERS SMITH The
Promised Land ALEXANDER JOHNSTON
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Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic Heathen in
the Land The travelers information that the place was
formerly inhabited by the Indians presumably came either from somebody?s
living memory or from, surviving relics of the flimsy, former Indian village
which thirty years would have obliterate. In either case, it would seem that
the exodus had occurred not many years before. Conjecture suggests one of the
closing episodes of King Philips War, in the late summer of 1676, when a band
of two hundred fugitive Indians was overtaken and almost annihilated at the
ford of the river within the Great Wigwam locality. It may well have been at
that time, either before or during the battle, that the local Indians, being
unwarlike and not allied with Philip, decamped to join their kin over the
Taconics in the Hudson Valley, and so left their capital deserted. Whatever may have been the prehistory of the
original Indians of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, which contains the whole
of the Upper Valley, they yet performed the service of establishing the
principle and most enduring place name in the valley. When they immigrated,
they came in from the west over the mountains, and the place where they
established became Wussi-adene-uk, the Beyond-the Mountain -Place, the
country beyond the mountains. The Indians accented the first syllable, and,
allowing for the elision that would have been close to Wusadenuk or
Wusatenuk. Through innumerable spellings by the whites-including Westenuk.
Through Westonock-Hooestennuc Awoosrenok Ansotunnog Ousetonuck - Ousatunick
Housatunack - House of Tunnuck Housatonac - and with the transference of
accent to the third syllable, it had reached its modern form, Housatonic. As
late as 2859, Princess Mahwee, the last pureblooded survivor of the
Scatacooks in Kent, said that it should be pronounced Housetenuc. Like Potatuck, the place name was transferred to
numerous features of the region it describes. The traveler in 1694 said the
place where he crossed the river-otherwise identifies as the Great Wigwam-was
called Ousetonuck. Thus the place name was attached to the principal village
in that place. And, at the coming of the whites, the Indians of the Upper
Valley were known as the Housetonucks, the people who lived in the place
beyond the mountains. It was not until the eighteenth century that the name
flowed downstream to become generic for the whole River, replacing Potatuck,
the Great River, and the other Indian and English names that had been used in
the Lower Valley. Outside of surviving place names, the only
peculiarly local contribution of the valley Indians to the white mans culture
was the baskets of the vestigial, conglomerate tribe at Scatacook in Kent and
Sherman. With their ornamental curlicues, these baskets have remained until
very recently a source of income for the remnant of the tribe. The numerous
other and more valuable legacies of the Indians were universal throughout New
England, and not peculiar to the valley: their real science of medicinal
herbs, many examples of which survive in modern pharmacy; the mysteries of
maple syrup; the whole culture of corn, from planting when the lead of the
dog-wood was the size of a squirrels ear and the first leaf of the oak as
large as his foot to roasted corn-on the-cob, succotash (suktac), ground
meal, corn cakes, and numerous other preparations; the use of bark dyes; the
more than two hundred Indian words in the modern American language. A
possible survival of the Indian feast of spring was the old Yankee Strawberry
Festival. And the white man?s Thanksgiving is suggestively reminiscent of the
Indians corn Feast, a gluttonous orgy of thanks to the Earth and the Life
Spirit after the harvest was in. With the exception of the legendary suicide of
the maiden on Monument Mountain, the Indian stories that have come down in
history or legend belong to the period after the white man?s coming in the
seventeenth century, and some of them will be recounted in later chapters. At
this point in the story of the valley, the period of transition from the Age
of the Indians to the Age of the English, it remains only to state a few
generalities about the relatively happy relations between the races in this
region. It is true that when the heirs of the weaker
culture came in contact with the stronger the Indians usually degenerated
into alcoholics, beggars, petty thieves, and more less picturesque local
characters. Yet, it cannot be said that in the gradual acquisition of the
land by the whites, and in their treatment of the Indians generally, there
was more than sporadic and exceptional injustice. The behavior of the
colonists in settling can be questioned only by denying that a population of
not over three thousand natives should have been asked or permitted to sell
for use their three thousand square miles of wilderness, very little of which
they used and none of which they developed. The natives themselves had
appropriated the territory not many generations before, without paying
anything for it. In every case, the colonists acquired the land by means that
were legal. By both Indian and English law; and, in every case but one, they
got it by fair purchase. The price scale of between one and ten cents per acre of wilderness, whether paid in money or in excellent tools, weapons, and blankets, was the same scale that the purchasers applied to subsequent resales among themselves. And the Indians often got especially good bargains in collateral terms, such as the reserved right to hunt or plant on the land or much of it, along with other stipulations, which the colonial governments and most of the individual colonists always respected. Important among collateral terms were those dealings with defense. Although the valley Indians undoubtedly feared and hated the English, they had even greater hatred and fear of their predatory neighbors, the Mohawks to the northwest and the Pequots to the east. Both of these strong tribes exacted regular tribute from the valley, and made additional sporadic raids, there for good measure. Consequently, a frequent stipulation in many of the contracts of sale was that the white purchasers would protect the sellers against the Mohawks and the Pequots, and this the English certainly did. |
ALEXANDER JOHNSTON
SOUTHPORT Colonial History of Pequot Swamp COLONIAL INDIAN ARCHIVES Hon. Ralph D.
Smith David D. Fields Sarah Day Woodward Winthrop's Journal |