The Pequot War

The Pequot War was the first major armed conflict between the New England colonists and a Native nation, growing out of a struggle for control of the wampum trade and the fertile lands of the Connecticut River valley. The powerful Pequot stood astride that commerce, and as Puritan settlers poured into the region, tensions over trade, jurisdiction, and a series of killings on both sides flared into open war between the Pequot and an alliance of English colonists with their Narragansett and Mohegan allies.

The war is remembered above all for its savagery. In May 1637 a colonial force surrounded the Pequot fort at Mystic before dawn, set it ablaze, and cut down those who fled the flames—killing as many as five hundred people, most of them women, children, and the elderly. The surviving Pequot were hunted down, killed, or sold into slavery in the Caribbean, and the 1638 Treaty of Hartford sought to erase the nation's very name. The war established a pattern of total war against Native peoples that would echo through New England's history.