The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736-1818

Abstract

THE quincentennial celebration of Columbus's voyage to the Americas has occasioned much discus ion about first contact. In colonial New England, no less than in Central America, disruptions were more common than accommodations as two quite different cultures collided. The English settlers' established rules regarding law, religion, and ownership of property did not mesh with the Indians' complex patterns of tradition. Nowhere is this cultural discrepancy more evident than in the attempts Indians made to reconcile their needs with the settlers' ever growing demands for land. Scarcity of documentation revealing the Indian point of view complicates study of the matter.' The experimental Indian community at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, active in the second half of the eighteenth century, therefore provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the divergent attitudes of the two groups.