THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Golden Hill Indians
The Housatonic
The Wepawaug
Cupheags and Pequannock
Weantinock
Goodyear's Island
Indian Slaves
Indian Remnants
Indian Troubles
New Indian Papers

THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Wm. Howard Wilcoxson

Stratford Indians

Trouble with the Indians

Establishing Title to the Land

Indian Deeds and Relics

White Hills Purchase

FORREST MORGAN

Lifestyles, Government, Religion and War

Indian Titles and Mohegan Land Troubles

Sowheag, Uncas, and Miantonomo

Owenoco, the Son of Uncas

THE HOUSATONIC

CHARD POWERS SMITH

The Promised Land
Heathen in the Land
The Lord's Scouts

The Land and The Lord

The Next Seven Tribes

ALEXANDER JOHNSTON

Connecticut Indian History

The Pequot War

Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic

The Lord”s Scouts

What was probably the second seagoing ship built in North American was appropriately christened the Onrust, in English means "Restless." In the summer of 1613, while the Dutch explorer Captain Adrian Block lay at anchor in New Amsterdam - now New York -harbor, the flagship of his fleet of four was destroyed by fire. The following winter he built the Onrust to replace it. The new flagship was forty and a half feet long and eleven and a half wide. In the spring Captain Block took it on a maiden voyage which turned out to be of diplomatic importance. He sailed up the East River, through Hell Gate and into Long Island Sound, which he called the "Great Bay." Besides its claim to be an earl ancestor of all American ships, the little Onrust has the incidentals distinction of being the first vessel that is known to have touched the shore of Connecticut.

The first, or one of the first, places that Captain Block put in was Cuph-eag, the Shut-in-Place (Stratford Harbor) where the Great River flowed in. Doubtless the gigantic white bird swimming up the harbor caused consternation among the Indians who at that season would have been clamming and musseling along the beach. In his log Captain Block called the river the "River of the red Hill," probably from the sand dunes of Stratford Point. He also reported that it was "about a bow-shot wide," implying that he explored n farther inland than the tidal marshes at the river's mouth. Proceeding eastward, he mapped the whole coast of Connecticut and, with the usual modesty of explorers claimed for Holland a vast country northward which included most of New England. Within a few years the Dutch contracted their claim westward to the Connecticut River. But the remainder of it, inherited by the colony of New York after the English took it from the Dutch in 1670, was the cause of much litigation and some bloodshed, and was not cleared from all of the Housatonic region for two centuries and half after Captain Block made his sovereign gesture.

After this glimpse through the clouds of prehistory, they close again over the Housatonic until July of 1637, when the Indians of the valley got their first close view of he white man in action. His entrance was convincing, but hardly suggestive of his fealty to the Prince of Peace. For two months, the Pequot war had been raging along the Thames and Connecticut to the east. In organized reprisal for their unprovoked forays, murders and torturings, six hundred of that savage tribe had been killed and their villages destroyed. The survivors, some eighty warriors with twice as many old men, women and children, fled westward across the Connecticut, Quinnipiack, and the Housatonic, amd made a stand in the Saco Swamp in Fairfield. Captain Mason with his small force of Connecticut and Massachusetts men pursued them.

Since all the River Indians hated and feared the Pequots, the white men in passage were welcomed by Ansantawae, sachem of the Wepawaugs, in his Great Wigwam at modern Milford. Across the river, however, in Stratford and Fairfield, the Pequannocks were in a sorry case. Under Indians law, the Pequots claimed their land by a previous conquest, and for some years had been extracting tribute from them. As a subject people, they were bound to aid their conquerors, and as a practical consideration they feared them more than they did the little known English. Consequently, about two hundred of the neighboring Pequannocks joined the Pequots in the swamp. But, after the first day of the Great Swamp Fight that followed, they had a change of heart and took advantage of the offer of the English to spare the lives of any who came out and surrendered. Some of them, mostly women, were made slaves, and the rest fled a dozen miles upriver to the fort of their kinsmen at Potatuck.