"Why Should You Be So Furious?": The Violence of the Pequot War

Abstract

As dawn broke on the morning of May 26, 1637, English troops from the colonies of Connecticut Massachusetts Bay, aided by Indian allies, launched an attack on a fortified Pequot village in what now is West Mystic, Connecticut. Approaching undetected, they surrounded the fort then fired a deadly volley into the sleeping encampment. Quickly forcing their way into the stockade through its two entrances, the soldiers brushed aside what resistance the unprepared Indians could offer began to slaughter them. The troops, however, faced a problem: the encampment was crowded wigwams, each of which would have to be entered. The commander of the English troops, Capt. John Mason, rose to the occasion. WE MUST BURN THEM, he commanded, and immediately stepping into the Wigwam where he had been before, brought out a Fire Brand, putting it into the Matts which they were covered, set the Wigwams on Fire. Fires were set at each entrance to the fort with a traine of Powder, the fires of both meeting in the center of the Fort blazed most terribly, burnt all in the space of halfe an houre. The handful of panic-stricken Pequots who managed to escape the conflagration were cut down by the troops the Narragansett Mohegan Indians who ringed the stockade. Half an hour after the assault began, some four hundred or more Pequots were dead, the majority of them old men, women, children.1 New England had never before seen such combat. Whatever cruelties warfare among Indians had hitherto featured, the extent of violence was limited. Wars more resembled family feuds than they did clashes of armies, an emphasis on raids