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Philip Ashton Escapes Vicious Pirates but Lands on a Deserted Island

Philip Ashton, a 19-year-old fisherman, escaped captivity by the ruthless pirate Edward Low on a remote Caribbean island. For 16 months he managed to survive, though his rescuers found him so weak they had to carry him across the sand.

Philip Ashton

Philip Ashton was born in Aug. 12, 1702 in the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, a fishing village north of Boston.

He had gone to sea as a child. In the summer of 1722, Philip Ashton set sail for the Grand Banks to fish for cod. He captained the schooner Milton with a half-dozen young fishermen from Marblehead. His childhood friend, Joseph Libbey, joined him on the fishing voyage and had saved him from drowning.

In June, the fishing schooner had anchored in Port Roseway, part of a fleet of 13 fishing vessels. Near sunset, a boat from a merchant vessel rowed toward the Milton and climbed aboard. Philip Ashton assumed they’d come over for a visit and some news, but then he realized something wasn’t right. Then, he wrote,

They drew their cutlasses and pistols from under their clothes, and cocked the one and brandished the other, and began to curse and swear at us and demanded a surrender of ourselves and our vessel.

Captivity

Edward Low

The pirates seized Philip Ashton and Joseph Libby and took them aboard the Rebecca, Edward Low’s pirate ship. Low had a reputation as a psychopath who mutilated, disemboweled and decapitated his prisoners. Mariners who plied the Atlantic were terrified of Low, said to have fried a French cook alive. He once cut off a captain’s lips with a cutlass, broiled them and forced the victim to eat them while still hot.

Pirates often conscripted their captives, and Low’s crew tried to threaten and cajole Philip Ashton into joining them. So they put him in chains, beat him and threatened him with death.

Joseph Libbey went along with the pirates. While Ashton lingered a castaway on a Caribbean island, Libby met his death by hanging in Rhode Island with 25 other pirates.

Roatan Island

In March of 1723, the Rebecca landed on Roatan Island, an uninhabited Caribbean island off the northern coast of Honduras. Native people and then a small group of British colonists had lived there, but by the time Philip Ashton arrived not a soul lived on the island. Five miles long and 48 miles across, dense jungle covered the island.

The pirates went ashore in a longboat to collect water. They took Philip Ashton ashore with them, probably thinking he wouldn’t escape to such a desolate island.

Once on land, though, he ran for his life and hid in the jungle until the pirates decided to leave without him.

Sapote fruit

Ashton had no shoes, nothing but his scanty clothing. He survived for 16 months in utter solitude, bedeviled by mosquitos, snakes, stifling heat and boredom. He had little to do but roam the island and gaze at the sea.

At first he kept himself alive by eating raw turtle eggs, wild figs and plums. He eventually ate sapote fruit, which he thought poisonous until he saw wild hogs eat them. He built a hut with palmetto leaves and branches.

Another Englishman

One day after about nine months, an Englishmen paddled to the island in a canoe. He had fled the Spaniards who live in Honduras and threatened to burn him to death.

The Englishman planned to live the rest of his days on Roatan with his dog and support himself by hunting. But then he went off to hunt, and Philip Ashton never saw him again. The Englishman, though, left behind 5 lbs. of pork, a knife, powder, tobacco, tongs and flint. Ashton could eat roasted turtle now, and crabs and coconut.

To escape the insects, he floated on a bamboo pole over to a small cay during the day, returning to his hut at night. His swimming, at first rudimentary, improved.

Rescue

In June 1724, after 16 months on the island, Philip Ashton saw two large canoes paddling toward the island. The men in the canoes hesitated, seeing the smoke from Ashton’s fire. Their caution convinced Philip Ashton they weren’t pirates, and he showed himself openly to them.

They sent one man ashore.

When the Man came up to me he stated back, Frighted to see such a Poor, Ragged, Lean, Wan, Forlorn, Wild, Miserable Object so near him: but upon recovering himself, he came and took me by the hand, and we fell to embracing one another, he with surprise and wonder, I with a sort of Extasy of Joy.

The man carried Philip Ashton, thin and weak, across the sand to one of the canoes.

They told him they were Baymen, English woodcutters who lived in in camps along Honduras Bay. Many considered them one step above pirates. They said they’d come to avoid a fight with Spaniards and Indians.

Roatan Island today

He lived with the Baymen until the Diamond came ashore for water in 1724. The brig came from Salem, Mass., just a few miles from Philip Ashton’s father’s house.

Two years, 10 months and 15 days after Edward Low captured him, Philip Ashton arrived home.

With thanks to At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton by Gregory Flemming.

Images: Roatan Island By Westbrowncanada – Roatan, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25239041. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Coldest Temperature Ever in Each New England State

New Hampshire poet Donald Hall’s grandmother once said, “Thirty below this morning. Seems like it might get cold.” It does get cold in New England, and the coldest temperature in the region was well below minus 30.

The good news about cold snaps in New England is that they don’t last long. “They have a tendency to be more short-lived than in other parts of the country,” wrote Gregory A. Zielinski and Barry D. Keim in New England Weather, New England Climate. Thus, “The socioeconomic impact is not as widespread or as great as in other parts of the country.” Still. “Heat waves and cold spells can be dramatic in New England,” concede the authors.

April may be the cruelest month, but January tends to be the coldest in New England. The coldest temperature in four of six New England states was recorded in January, and the other two close in late December and mid-February.

The January thaw provides some consolation during the bitter weeks of winter. It’s a climatic singularity — a climate event that happens every year at about the same time. The January thaw happens nearly every January, usually between the 21st and the 25th. Temperatures will rise from about January 22 to January 25 throughout the region.

“Snowy Night, Woodstock, Vt. Courtesy Library of Congress.

New England weather varies from the north to the south, andfrom the coast to the interior. The lowest temperature inland — in places like Caribou, Maine, Burlington, Vt., and Keene, N.H. — happen around January 17. In the south and along the coast — Hartford and Boston, for example — the coldest temperature happens around January 31.

The Lake Champlain region — northwestern Vermont — has the greatest daily variation in temperature in the country. Lowest temperatures vary day-to-day by as much as 10 degrees in January.

Here, then, are the places that recorded the coldest temperature in each New England state.

Connecticut’s Icebox

Norfolk, known as the “Icebox of Connecticut,” recorded the coldest official temperature in the state on Feb. 16, 1943. Unofficially, temperatures fell to 45 below zero in some northwest Connecticut towns. Subzero temperatures that night were also recorded in places as far south as Nantucket and New Haven.

“A chilly spot,” is how a New York Times reporter characterized the town in a Feb. 14, 1988 story. “It is the place where the snow is said to be deeper, the temperatures lower and the winters longer than elsewhere in Connecticut.” Norfolk also gets the most snow in Connecticut during an average year — 107 inches.

February 1943 was a frigid month throughout the Northeast, a time when World War II raged overseas. The government had just announced shoe rationing in order to make more leather available to the military. That spurred scare buying of apparel in early February. But then the Arctic cold that settled over the region put an end to the panic buying of clothing, the Times reported. The government, by the way, also rationed coal, the heating fuel used by most New Englanders.

Coldest Temperature in Maine

Hunting in winter is popular in Aroostook County.

The coldest cold in New England happens when high pressure in Canada pushes air from the North Pole into the region — the “Siberian Express.” It can drop temperatures well below zero for several nights and keep them below zero during the daytime.

The Siberian Express hit New England in January of 2009, a winter already colder than usual. On January 16 the thermometer read minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Clayton Lake, an unincorporated village in Aroostook County, Maine. That was two degrees colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded in Maine. So cold, in fact, that it triggered two meetings of the state’s Records Verification Committee.

The University of Maine’s Maine Climate News reported the committee brought together people from an alphabet soup of government agencies. They included the National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) in Augusta, the Maine state climatologist, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) in Ithaca, N.Y. and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

An instrument at the Big Black River station for the USGS had recorded the Arctic temperature. The climatologists then challenged the reading and had several instruments tested. In the end, the Records Verification Committee unanimously voted to accept the minus 50 degree verdict.

Henry David Thoreau had written about another cold Friday in 1810, but that was before alphabet soup.

Coldest Temperature: The Bay State

Aerial view of Chester, Mass., 1905

On Super Bowl Sunday in 1984, the temperature plunged to a record minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in Chester, Mass., a small town on the eastern edge of the Berkshires. Any Chester resident who braved the cold to attend a Super Bowl party that January 22^nd watched the Los Angeles Raiders beat the Washington Redskins, 38-9.

Chester also holds the distinction of being only one of three U.S. places that recorded the hottest and coldest temperature in its state. On Aug. 2, 1975, known as New England’s Hot Saturday, the mercury rose to 107 degrees Fahrenheit. (The other two are Millsboro, Del., and Warsaw, Mo.) That’s higher than the highest recorded temperatures in the Florida cities of Miami and Orlando.

Sargent’s Purchase (aka Mount Washington)

The White Mountains have a way of creating their own weather, and on Jan. 22, 1885, their highest peak, Mount Washington, came up with a doozy. The thermometer showed minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mount Washington, not known for its balmy weather, has recorded temperatures as low as eight degrees Fahrenheit — in June.

Mount Washington from Intervale, N.H.

The mountain’s mean annual temperature is near 26 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Zielenski and Keim. They call it “the ultimate New England example of how elevation affects temperature.” Temperature decreases at a rate of 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit every thousand feet up. Mount Washington is 6,288 feet high. It also averages 254 inches of snow every year.

Mount Washington also set a record, since broken for the highest wind speed. On April 12, 1934, observers recorded a gust of 231 mph — and lived to tell about it.

Rhode Island’s Coldest Temperature

The United States had entered World War II just six weeks earlier when Richmond, R.I., experienced the state’s coldest temperature: minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit. It was January 17, 1942, the day after a German U-boat sank the tanker Coimbra off Long Island.

It figures that the warmest coldest temperature would happen in Rhode Island. The Ocean State, along with southern Connecticut, has a mean average temperature higher than the rest of New England.

Rhode Island has widely varying weather, from day to day and from season to season, according to the state meteorologist, Lenny Giuliano.

But Richmond lies a few miles inland in the southwest part of the state. “Southwestern Rhode Island, from four to 10 miles inland, exhibits a coolness not suggested by the nearness to the ocean,” Lenny Giuliano, state meteorologist, wrote.

Subzero temperatures happen rarely in Rhode Island — typically, one day a year or not at all along the coast and five per year in most of the interior. But in cold winters, the southwest part of the state can get as many as eight below-zero days a few miles in from the coast.

Cold Comfort in Vermont

The tiny town of Bloomfield, Vt., shared the coldest temperature ever in New England with Clayton Lake, Maine, 75 years earlier. On Dec. 30, 1933, the weather service reported temperatures of −50°F in the Northern Vermont town of about 400.

Prohibition had ended that month, which may have stopped the smuggling of booze across the line from Canada. Rum running wasn’t uncommon in those lean times, and the line houses along the border were a little over 20 miles away from Bloomfield.

So when Prohibition ended that December, Bloomfield residents could warm themselves with a shot of brandy – legally.

This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Mount Washington By Harvey Barrison – originally posted to Flickr as White Mountains_12 30 09_81, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10396490. Snowy Night Wolcott, M. P., photographer. (1940) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night”. United States Vermont Windsor County Woodstock, 1940. Mar. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2017802584/..

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Six Places Renamed Out of Spite

Many New England cities and towns have been renamed over the years. When the European settlers arrived, they usually changed Indian names to those from their home country. And then they sometimes renamed a place again.

The Puritans, for example, first called Boston Trimontaine after the three hills on the peninsula. John Winthrop soon renamed the town Boston after the hometown of several prominent colonists. The new name would fit better, as Bostonians eventually cut down their three hills.

Townspeople, though, sometimes renamed themselves because they didn’t like what the old name represented. Sometimes they didn’t have a choice, as when a new authority arrived and tried to assert his power over a town.

Here, then, are six towns renamed for spite. If you know of any others, please mention them in the comments section.

Pochoug, Conn.

The Patchogue River in Westbrook.

Westbrook, Conn., originally belonged to Saybrook, which came under attack by Indians during the Pequot War. When the Pequot threat ended, about 40 families moved to West Saybrook to an area known by the Indian name of Pochoug. The word meant ‘place where the river divides,’ and refers to the Patchogue and the Menunketesuck rivers.

In 1810, the town petitioned the General Assembly to rename it Westbrook. The petition noted that ever since the first settlement it had ‘retained the Indian name of Poochague or Poorchague, which name it is believed very few if any, can either spell or pronounce correctly.’ The name was said to be ‘inconvenient to the said inhabitants and to the public.’

Connecticut is full of towns with portmanteau names, and ‘Westbrook’ probably derived from ‘West Saybrook.’ However, we note that Col. Thomas Westbrook had fought Indians during Father Rale’s War.

Gorgeana, Maine

Nubble Light in York, Maine

When King James I in 1620 gave Sir Fernando Gorges a patent to colonize the New World, Gorges thought that included Massachusetts. After all, the king had specified he was to ‘plant, rule, order and govern’ all the land between New France and Virginia.

Gorges, an Anglican and a Royalist, began by financing the settlement of Maine. He hoped to turn it into a series of feudal plantations, and he named one settlement after himself — Gorgeana.

Maine’s neighbor, Puritan Massachusetts, grew in population, wealth and power. Anglican Maine did not. So by 1658, the Puritans from Massachusetts went town by town to persuade what is now Maine to join Massachusetts.

Names carried great importance to the early New England Puritans. And so when Gorgeana agreed to join Massachusetts, the Puritans decided to rename it York. The name York carried a special sting because it was the name of a Royalist city in England that fell to the Puritan Parliament during the English Civil War.

New Glasgow, Mass.

The White Church in Blandford, Mass.

Scots-Irish families first came to Blandford in 1735 and called their settlement ‘New Glasgow.’ They had good reason: The people of Glasgow, Scotland, had promised them a church bell if they named their town after them.

The colonists of Massachusetts Bay only tolerated the Scots-Irish because they provided a useful buffer against hostile Indians on the frontier. In 1741, the settlers petitioned royal Gov. William Shirley for incorporation as the Town of New Glasgow. Shirley instead renamed the town Blandford, supposedly for the ship that had just carried him to Boston.

But what did Shirley have against Glasgow? He probably wasn’t keen to recognize the Scottish city. After all, enraged Glaswegians had recently rioted against a malt tax, driven out the British military and destroyed the home of their parliamentary representative.

Blandford didn’t get its bell.

Adams, N.H.

Jackson, New Hampshire

Nestled in the White Mountains near Maine’s border, Jackson, N.H., was originally named New Madbury after the Seacoast town from which its first settlers came. The town renamed itself Adams in 1800 to honor John Adams, just elected president as a Federalist Party member.

But then two Democratic-Republicans won election — Benjamin Pierce as governor of New Hampshire in 1827 and Andrew Jackson as president in 1829. Rivalry between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans could get fierce. So when Adams, N.H., petitioned the General Court for incorporation as a town in 1829, Pierce brought to bear his influence. Adams was renamed Jackson.

Haversham, R.I.

Westerly, R.I.

In 1684, British authorites sought to assert their control over their colonies in New England. They annulled the colonial charters and combined the colonies into the Dominion of New England. In 1686 they appointed Joseph Dudley, a native of Roxbury, Mass., as president of the Council of New England, which included Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and the Narragansett Country in Rhode Island.

Dudley had a tough time of it. Magistrates and military officers refused to serve and Puritan leaders ignored him. He traveled to Narragansett to establish his authority there, and he renamed Westerly ‘Haversham,’ Kingstown ‘Rochester’ and Greenwich ‘Dedford.’

Sir Edmund Andros took over from Dudley with the added territory of Connecticut and Rhode Island. He didn’t last long, only until 1689, when Bostonians sent him packing. In England, a new king took the throne and restored the colonial governments. Haversham was renamed Westerly.

Sodom, Vt.

Back in the day, quarrying often used to attract rough men who enjoyed women and liquor when they weren’t blasting rock. Sodom, an unincorporated village in the central Vermont town of Calais, was apparently one such place. Sodom had several active quarries, but no church.

According to lore, a local preacher pounded his fist on the pulpit and said, “I am adamant that we change the name of this town!” Citizens in 1905 petitioned the Legislature to change the name, and Sodom was renamed Adamant.

Village boosters say the name was chosen to reflect the hardness of granite. We like the other explanation better, though.

Images: The White Church, Blandford, Mass. By Rhcowles – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31505090; Sodom, Vt. By Erikamit – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39732709. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

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Hartford’s Muster Day Murder of 1748

Even by the rowdy standards of a colonial muster, a muster day murder was unusual.

Colonial era musters were militia training days. The militia members would gather from a region in a field or town square and practice their drills. Depending upon the current state of relations with the local Indians, the militia took the muster more or less seriously. The officers would inventory the stock and sign up new men.

A carnival atmosphere accompanied the military drills. People played games, ate sweets and drank alcohol, often to great excess.

The Muster at Rew’s

Muster Day by Charles Haley Granger (National Gallery of Art)

In 1748, muster was called at the home of Lieutenant Joseph Rew in Farmington, Conn. Rew, a well-respected member of the community, served as executor of several estates, according to Connecticut probate records.

The muster at Rew’s house involved about 20 men in the militia company. But what had probably started out as a serious training devolved into roughhousing late in the day.

The men, among other things, began throwing beehives at each other. Samuel Woodruff, a young man of about 25, made his way toward Lieutenant Rew’s house, perhaps to escape the rowdiness in the field.

Woodruff came from a large Farmington family. His father, Samuel, served as an ensign in the local militia, a fairly low-level officer’s rank.

As young Samuel approached the house, rowdy militiamen waylaid him. Then they struck him in the back of the head with an old broomstick. Samuel turned and threw the broomstick toward the crowd of young men.

Muster Day Murder

Josiah Northaway of Farmington, about 24 years old, was the unlucky target of the stick. The broomstick had struck Northaway in the back of the head hard enough to fracture his skull.

Josiah Northaway lived on for roughly four months, but he never recovered. Two doctors came to the Northaway house to examine Josiah. He had bled profusely, and he had a hole in his skull one-third of an inch in diameter. When the doctors examined his brain they discover it had received a major injury. They determined that caused Josiah Northaway’s death.

An inquest was then scheduled for February of 1749 to hear the case in Hartford. Four members of the militia testified as to the day’s events, and their stories all supported each other. They told about the roughhousing, how Woodruff got hit with a stick and how he threw it back at the militia.

However, the witnesses testified, the militiamen had struck Woodruff in the spirit of fun. No one held any malice toward him. Likewise, they said, Woodruff had tossed the stick that hit Northaway in the same spirit.

The inquest finally ruled the muster day murder accidental.

This story about the muster day murder was updated in 2023.

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William Pynchon Leaves Connecticut in 1637 and Takes Springfield With Him

Springfield, Mass., and the rest of Western Massachusetts, might well belong to Connecticut today if William Pynchon had not decided to leave Connecticut and join with Massachusetts in an acrimonious dispute in 1637.

William Pynchon, one of the original founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arrived with John Winthrop in 1630. Rather than staying by the coast, however, Pynchon moved inland. He bought land in what was called Agawam from the American Indians and named it Springfield after his home in England.

Out of Step

William Pynchon marched somewhat out of step with his Puritan comrades in more than just the fine points of religion. He had a more pragmatic approach to business than a typical Puritan. He believed in trading with the local Indians, not fighting with them.

As one of his first acts when coming to Springfield, he made a deal with the local Indians. He procured land and compensated them for it. Then he made agreements to allow the Indians to continue to use the land for hunting and other purposes. Further, he agreed to restrict his pigs on the side of the river where the Indians grew corn, so they couldn’t invade their cornfields.

Puritans burning the book by William Pynchon, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.

Pynchon’s fellow settlers in Connecticut and Massachusetts had more fractious relations with the Indians — perhaps because they didn’t live among so many of them.

Springfield was controlled by a government made up of the river towns of Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield and Springfield. Then that government declared war on the Pequot Indians.

The Pequot War

This left William Pynchon in a precarious position. Springfield, which only had a handful of settlers, could expect no defense in case of Indian attack. Nevertheless William Pynchon received a war tax bill. When he balked at paying, the authorities at Hartford hauled him before them.

In the spring of 1638, when the snow receded enough for William Pynchon to reach Hartford, he answered the charges (and probably paid the tax). While there, the local government gave him a monopoly on the fur trade in Springfield. The news did not sit well with Pynchon. He would have had a virtual monopoly on it anyway, and the new designation meant he had to pay a tax on every pelt he bought from Indians.

William Pynchon

The river towns to the south of Pynchon also had a food shortage that year, the war having limited the colony’s ability to focus on growing corn. So the magistrates directed Pynchon to procure 500 bushels of corn from the Indians near Springfield at five shillings per bushel. What Pynchon discovered, he would later report, was that the Indians wanted eight shillings. He was not authorized to pay that price.

The next move by the river towns was to send another man, John Mason, to Springfield to procure the corn. Mason was a hero to his Connecticut countrymen, having led a deadly rout against Pequots at Mystic the year before. The Indians did not hold him in such high esteem, though they were not Pequots.

According to William Pynchon, he tried to broker a deal between Mason and the Indians, but the Indians would not part with corn at the price offered.

Back to Hartford

Returning to Hartford, John Mason charged that William Pynchon held up any deal in hopes of profiting himself. The Puritan governments believed that the public good outweighed private profit and fixed the prices of essential commodities. To their thinking, the price for corn should be, if anything, lower than it had been in the past.

The Hartford authorities again summoned William Pynchon to answer charges of “unfaithfull dealing in the trade of corne” and for ignoring his duties as a magistrate of the colony. They fined Pynchon 40 bushels of corn for failing to deliver the Indian corn at the price of six shillings per bushel. The river towns then sent Mason again to Springfield, this time with a band of armed men, and threatened the Indians if they did not sell corn. The Indians agreed, but at a price of 12 shillings per bushel.

Despite Pynchon’s protests, the Connecticut authorities went so far as to write to the church at Roxbury to undermine his reputation there. Later that year, the leadership of Massachusetts and Connecticut gathered to settle questions over the boundary of the two colonies,. Then, William Pynchon declared Springfield belonged to Massachusetts.

Banned in Boston

Despite some protests from the river towns, Massachusetts officially took Springfield by 1642. Pynchon, meanwhile, did not live happily ever after in Massachusetts. He continued to chafe against Puritan practices and beliefs. In 1650 he published a religious tract — The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption — the first book banned in Massachusetts. Many would follow. (Read more about his banned book here.)

William Pynchon was accused of heresy. At the same time, the colonies were beginning to get whipped up over witchcraft. Sensing the dire mood, Pynchon gave title to his lands to his son. He departed for England in 1652, where he lived the life of a wealthy man for the next 21 years.

Thanks to: William Pynchon, Founder of Springfield; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This story was updated in 2022.

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