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

illustrative of the vagueness of boundaries in the early grants is a Great Barrington legend, without date or authentication. A Dutchman proposed to purchase--presumably form the Westenhook patentees--a tract of land running as far eastward from the Hudson as a man could run in day, and the contract was duly signed. To enlarge his bargain the purchaser employed a famous Indian runner, who between dawn and sunset covered forty miles from the Hudson to the Housatonic in Sheffield, including the passage of the Taconic Mountains.

The legalities of the conflicting English and Dutch claims in Western New England derived from the grandiose gestures of the early explorers--the English Cabots had claimed to the Pacific--and from Indian deeds that were readily repudiated, for a consideration, by later Indians. Practically what mattered was the actual possession, clearing and cultivation of the land claimed. With half a dozen exceptions, the Dutch failed to confirm their Indian grants by actual settlement. But for the trading post, the trapper's cabin, a few scattered settlers, and a remnant of Indians, the Upper Valley remained uninhabited till the 1720's, when organized colonies from the east began seriously to makes good the English claims. They recognized the holdings of those Dutch who had actually settled, but as for the enormous claims of the Westenhook Patent, they referred to the claims of the Cabots as more than a century older than those of Block. And they naturally got a new set of deeds form the Indians.

Meanwhile, in 1694, the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, a young minister of Boston, afterwards a president of Harvard, recorded his impressions of the Upper Valley. He was accompanying certain commissioners of Massachusetts and Connecticut to a treaty convention at Albany with commissioners from other colonies and the Five Nations of New York, the little cavalcade being escorted by a guard of sixty dragoons under Captain Wadsworth of Hartford. The Reverend Benjamin confided to a diary the irritation of his metropolitan sensibilities by the ruggedness of the region, which was later considered one of the most picturesque in the world.

The party set out from Westfield for Albany by the old Indian trail, "the nearest way thro' the woods; The road which we traveled this day was very woody, rocky, mountainous, swampy; extreme bad riding it was. I never yet saw so bad traveling as this was." It took them five days to reach the valley where, on August 10th, "we ... took up our lodgings, about sundown, in the wood, at a place called Ousetonuck formerly inhabited by Indians"--that is, at the Great Wigwam, the ford in future Great Barrington, the scene of Major Talcot's fight eighteen years before. "Thro' this place runs a very curious river, the same which some say runs thro' Stratford, and it has on each side some parcels of pleasant, fertile intervale land. ... The greatest part of our road this day was a hideous, howling wilderness..."

Having completed their mission in Albany, the commissioners returned by a southern route through Kinderhook, Claverack, Taghkanick, Kent, Woodbury and Hartford. After leaving "Turconnick," they rode twelve or fifteen miles, "on our left a hideous high mountain" ---possibly any of the main Taconics of which the Reverend Mr. Wadsworth of Boston had now seen plenty, perhaps---as claimed by one local historian--a particular bold escarpment that rises a thousand feet sheer near the source of the Weebatuck (Ten-mile) river in New York. A few hours after passing the "hideous high mountain," the party reached "Ten miles" river, "called so from its distance from Wyantenuck, runs into Wyantenuck ... Wyantenuck river is the same that passeth thro' Ousetonnuck; it is Stratford river also."

Here we have a glimpse at the transitional nomenclature of the Great River. In the lower tidal reaches, the period of discovery, exploration and pioneering is long past. The English are more than fifty years established at Stratford and they have attached the name of their place to the river, supplanting both the Indian Potatuck and the Great River of the first white settlers. In the central span, the Indians, retreating from their colonization, have concentrated at Weantinock, or New Milford, and some whites, visiting them there, have accepted and reported their local name for the river. In the upper reaches, "Ousetonnuck" is till simply the name of a place in the English vocabulary, though both the Indians and the Dutch have already applied it to the river. This supercilious young minister records what appears to be the white man's first discovery of the fact that the river at Ousetonnuck is the same as that at Weantinock and Stratford. Twenty-five years later the name of that obscure "beyond-the mountain-place" will have flowed down to entitle the whole stream.

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