Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England

Abstract

This fascinating book tracks the life and times of John Wompas, a Nipmuc man who lived through early colonization in New England. Biographies of seventeenth-century native people are few. Camilla Townshend's Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004), Michael Leroy Oberg's Uncas (2003), and David Silverman's and Julie Fisher's Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts (2014), among others, feature elites, or leaders. But, studying Wompas, who was a fairly ordinary man by birth, Jenny Hale Pulsipher breathes new life into familiar stories about colonialism and early New England. Wompas lived a short life, dying at forty-two in 1679. But his life speaks to a range of New England Indian experience. The book opens in Nipmuc Country, surveying the effects of disease and encounter on native people. Wompas's parents were early converts to Christianity, a development that shaped the course of his life. To learn English ways, he was sent to live with an Englishman. He went to Harvard College. Then he went to sea. He also went to London, where, despite ending up in debtor's prison, he successfully petitioned the king for relief from a Massachusetts court ruling that prevented him from selling land.