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Narragansetts

The History of Epidemics in New England

The history of epidemics in New England teaches us that they arrive with terrifying swiftness. They also don’t get less lethal with time, no matter the improvements in medicine, science or public health.

For example, more people died from the flu pandemic in 1918 than from the Black Death in a hundred during the Middle Ages.

Epidemics, it seems, have always come to New England from across the sea. Europeans fishing the Grand Banks brought plague and smallpox to the native population in the 16^th century. Three centuries later, sailors home from World War I brought the Spanish influenza to Boston and then to the rest of the United States.

And then as now, children and the elderly were usually the ones who died during epidemics of smallpox, flu, measles, cholera and diphtheria.

History of Epidemics: Indians

In the history of epidemics, perhaps no people suffered more than the indigenous people of New England.

The first recorded epidemics in New England killed many Indians more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

Illustration: Indians lament death by disease. In the history of epidemics, the indigenous population suffered greatly.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began at least in 1504 with the first documented French vessel on the Grand Banks. By 1519, more than 300 European ships made round trips to Newfoundland in the summer. All came to fish.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

In 1586, a typhus epidemic devastated Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans.

In 1616, a terrible plaque swept the Massachusetts coast – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague. It killed as many as 90 percent of the Massachusetts people and devastated the Pennacooks in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It also felled the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem. And it cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston.

Then a smallpox epidemic in 1633 killed many more Massachusetts and Narragansetts in Rhode Island.

And after the Pequot War, smallpox, diphtheria, flu and measles killed two-thirds of the Pequot-Mohegans in Connecticut.

Measles

On Oct. 18, 1713, Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote in his diary that he feared a measles epidemic: “The Measles coming into the Town, it is likely to be a Time of Sickness.”

How right he was. Measles killed five of the 11 people in his household. His son Increase brought the measles home. Then his wife Elizabeth and two newborn twins died from it. So did his two-year-old daughter and a maid.

Cotton Mather

His grief was almost unbearable. “My poor family is now left without any infant in it, or any under seven years of age,” he wrote. “The dying of a child is like the tearing off of a limb,” he later preached.

By the 20^th century, however, people stopped viewing measles as a life-threatening disease, though it killed 20 percent of children under two who got it.

A measles epidemic in 1904 swept through Connecticut. C.A. Lindsley, secretary of the state Board of Health complained that towns weren’t enforcing quarantines, at that time the only way to stop the disease from spreading.

Between 1900 and 1910, measles killed an average of 774 people a year in the United States. But the mortality rate declined slowly, and then in 1963 came the development of the measles vaccine.

There still is no cure.

A quarantine sign

Smallpox

Judge Samuel Sewall went to five funerals in Boston in one day during the horrific smallpox epidemic of 1721. Called ‘the speckled monster, it had no cure. The only recourse was to flee from it.

Samuel Sewall

That year Boston had about 10,600 people, but 900 fled the disease, about 6,000 came down with it and 844 died from it. In the history of epidemics, the 1721 smallpox scourge ranked as the worst.

From 1620 to 1720, New England experienced 12 smallpox epidemics, along with some sporadic cases. During that time smallpox caused one in 10 deaths in Massachusetts—more than war, Indian raids or other illnesses.

In 1706, Cotton Mather’s congregation bought him a gift – a slave named Onesimus. Mather kept a close eye on him, thinking he had a tendency to steal. But he acknowledged that Onesimus was a pretty intelligent fellow. In 1716, Onesimus told Mather how he could prevent smallpox: by rubbing pus from an infected person into an open wound. That caused a mild, but more survivable, case of smallpox.

When the horrific smallpox epidemic of 1721 sickened half of Boston, Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston inoculated 242 people. Of those, six, or one in 40, died. For the rest of the population, smallpox killed one in seven people who had the disease.

It was the first place anyone was inoculated this side of the Atlantic. An English doctor developed a vaccine in 1796. Massachusetts later became the first state to pass a compulsory vaccine law. And by 1932 Massachusetts achieved comparative immunity to the disease, reporting fewer incidences of smallpox per capita than any other state in the Union.

In 1979, public health officials declared smallpox eradicated.

The Throat Distemper of 1735

In 1735, a young child in Kingston, N.H., came down with a cold and all of New England would get sick. The throat distemper of 1735 to 1740 was one of the greatest epidemics ever to terrify New England.

What modern physicians recognize as diphtheria first showed up in in the spring of 1735. The symptoms started out looking like a cold that produced a very sore throat. But they then escalated to lost appetite and fever. The bacteria then attacked the throat, nose and lungs – poisoning the tissue and killing it off. The coating of dead tissue eventually interfered with breathing and killed the sufferer.

Travel patterns in New England made it relatively simple for epidemiologists to track the spread of the throat distemper. Ernest Caulfield described its path in his The A History of the Terrible Epidemic, Vulgarly Called the Throat DistemperDistemper of 1735-1740.

It spread from Kingston to Kittery, Maine, and Hampton Falls, N.H. From Kittery it spread north to Maine and from Hampton Falls south to Massachusetts

Gradually the disease progressed into Connecticut and sporadically to Western Massachusetts.

Across New England some 5,000 people died of diphtheria between 1735 and 1740. More than 75 percent were children. Overall, it killed 22 of every 1,000 people. In New Hampshire, where it struck first and worst, 75 out of every 1,000 people died of it.

Influenza

In the history of epidemics, it’s hard to know just how many times flu sickened New England. People called it different things: ‘uncommon colds,’ ‘very deep colds,’ ‘pleuritic fever’ or ‘malignant pleurisy.’

As Caulfield writes in his essay, The Pursuit of Pestilence, accounts of disease and epidemics in colonial New England amount to ‘a confusing array of dates.’

There was a severe outbreak of flu in 1647. Another influenza pandemic began in 1697, raced through the Americas and ended in 1698. We know about other flu epidemics in the 17th and 18^th centuries, but we don’t know much.

Victims of the 1918 flu epidemic. In the history of epidemics, this one was probably the worst.

Spanish Flu

We know a lot, however, about the 1917-1918 flu pandemic. It killed as many as 100 million people and struck young adults hardest. It could have killed as many as 10 percent of all young adults in the world.

Nicknamed the ‘Spanish flu,’ it came to New England with a couple of sailors on Boston’s Commonwealth Pier on Aug. 27, 1918. The next day, eight more people had it. On the third day, 58.

The close quarters and massive troop movement of World War I quickened the spread of the disease and helped it mutate. The Boston area was especially susceptible because of the soldiers and sailors moving through the city.

“To see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves,” wrote one U.S. Army doctor at Fort Devens, a hellhole of death.

The flu came to Connecticut through New London. It spread to Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island.

The death toll from the flu in Massachusetts was said to be 45,000. An estimated 8,500 died in Connecticut, 1,772 in Vermont, 2,300 in Rhode Island, 5,000 in Maine and 3,000 in New Hampshire. Those numbers may be low, however.

Doctors could do nothing to contain the disease. They desperately searched for a vaccine and treatments, but failed. They could just hope, and keep people away from each other.

On Oct. 2, Boston canceled its Liberty Bond parades and sporting events, closed churches, shut down school and put the stock market on half-day.

The flu epidemic finally ended in the summer of 1919 when people either died from it or developed an immunity. “The virus burned through available fuel,” wrote John Barry in The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. “Then it quickly faded away.”

Barry also argues the virus mutated into a less lethal strain.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Puritans Blame Provoking Evils for King Philip’s War

Increase Mather could see King Philip’s War coming from his pulpit. All around him he saw sinful activity: periwigs, high prices, tippling in the ordinary, even people leaving the Sunday meeting before it ended. And so when the Native Americans rose up and began to destroy entire villages, Mather pressed the Massachusetts General Court to legislate morality. The lawmakers then passed the 1675 Provoking Evils legislation, New England’s most notorious blue laws.

Increase Mather

Increase Mather, an ambitious 36-year-old minister, had a fanatical desire to reform Puritan society. He believed the Puritans had strayed from the founding generation’s moral purpose. He was literally a product of those founders: His father, the influential Rev. Richard Mather, had come to Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Puritan Migration.

“Mather seems to have been on the side of the declining old-style,” wrote historian Anne Kusener Nelsen. “All that was new in any way — the merest toleration, luxurious apparel, or the changing character of the churches — presented a threat to Mather’s ideal of the Puritan state.”

Increase Mather

Mather thought the Puritans had gone horribly soft even before the Nipmucks, Wampanoags and Narragansetts began attacking New England’s frontier. Parents weren’t bringing up children properly within the church. Fashions had gotten out of hand, with men wearing long hair and women wearing bangs and topless dresses.

And that wasn’t all. The lower orders of society showed contempt for authority and people didn’t behave in church. Merchants and laborers charged exorbitant prices. Some people even rode to other towns on the pretext of going to lecture but really frequented taverns.

Clearly, the Puritans were going to hell in a handbasket.

King Philip, or Metacomet

And so when King Philip unleashed his fury on the New England colonists, Mather was quite certain the Lord had sent them as his agents to purify his people.

The way to win the war, Mather believed, was to eliminate the provoking evils.

“Let them no more say, God must do all, we can do nothing, and so encourage themselves to live in a careless neglect of God, and of their own souls, and salvation,” he wrote in his history of the conflict.

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War began on June 20, 1675 when a war party of Pokanokets struck the tiny Plymouth Colony settlement of Swansea. Thereafter, Indian allies shocked and terrified New England. Hundreds of warriors would strike swiftly and suddenly, burning villages, taking captives and slaughtering families.

During the 14 months of fighting, Plymouth Colony lost 8 percent of its adult male population. In the end, 35 towns were burned or abandoned, leaving only 65 in New England.

The war also disrupted the homogenous, self-governing Puritan communities. Military commissioners had authority over the Puritan ministers. Large numbers of armed soldiers, usually strangers, moved into small, close-knit towns.

The Indians suffered even more as a result of the war. The colonists sold as many as a thousand into slavery, and 5,000 died in battle, of sickness or of starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north. At the outset of the war, Indians comprised 30 percent of New England’s population; by the end, they dwindled to 15 percent.

King Philip’s War

Provoking Evils

In October 1675, four months into the war, Increase Mather took his turn delivering a lecture before the General Court.

He told them only one thing could turn God from his displeasure and spare Massachusetts from the heathen: a thorough reformation of provoking evils.

The lower house, the democratic deputies (now known as the House of Representatives) quickly passed the laws banning provoking evils. The aristocratic magistrates in the upper house (now the Senate) didn’t go along with them. One week later, an Indian war party attacked a town. The magistrates quickly passed the Provoking Evils law.

On the day the magistrates acted, the Puritans scored a victory against the Indians. Mather, of course, interpreted that to mean God approved of the Provoking Evils law.

The horror! Slashed sleeves.

The General Court passed a strict dress code prohibiting such fashion excesses as slashed sleeves, periwigs and bared bosoms. The law authorized local officials to prosecute men for wearing long hair and women for wearing bangs or curling their hair.

Town officers had to close the meeting house doors so no one could leave before service ended. If children didn’t come to Sabbath service, town officials would fine their parents or whip the children.

Massachusetts already had laws on the books against swearing, but lawmakers strengthened them by ordering punishment to anyone who overheard a swear word and didn’t report it.

The General Court ordered every person found at a Quakers meeting to be apprehended, jailed for three days or fined five pounds. If the constable didn’t enforce the law, he would pay a four pound fine.

No longer could townspeople drink in taverns (known as ordinaries), which existed only for travelers.

Finally, they fixed wages and prices.

Backlash

Enforcing the Provoking Evils law would surely end the war, wouldn’t it?

Not everyone thought so.

Gov. John Leverett

Gov. John Leverett told Mather over dinner he’d gone too far when he complained about rampant drunkenness in the colony.

Three months after the Provoking Evils law passed, Increase Mather gave another sermon about excess in apparel and the frequenting of taverns. After meeting, two wealthy parishioners, Capt. Thomas Lake and John Richards, stayed behind. They told him he might have persuaded the ignorant, but no rational man would buy his argument. .

And Mather’s rival, the less-fanatical Rev. William Hubbard, believed the Puritans’ land grabbing caused King Philip’s War. Hubbard also thought military ineptitude and overconfidence prolonged the bloodshed.

Land

Eventually, of course, the Puritans won the war and the provoking evils laws were repealed. And in the end, Mather came around to Hubbard’s view that land hunger caused the conflict.

Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New-England: whereas the first Planters here that they might keep themselves together were satisfied with one Acre for each person, as his propriety, an after that with twenty Acres for a Family, how have men since coveted after the earth, that many hundreds, nay thousands of Acres, have been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians, have forsaken Churches, and Ordinances, and all for land and elbow-room enough in the world.

Thanks to King Philip’s War and the Hubbard-Mather Rivalry by Anne Kusener Nelsen, published in the William and Mary Quarterly, and The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723 by Michael G. Hall. This story was updated in 2022.

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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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Exactly How New England’s Indian Population Was Decimated

Even before European colonists thinned the Indian population in New England, war and disease had already begun their dirty work.

A team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists studied the health of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere over 7,000 years. Native American health had declined even before Columbus came to the New World, they concluded in a book published in August 2017, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere.

The researchers found Indians’ health got worse because they came to depend on corn. They also began to live in denser communities, allowing infectious disease to spread quickly.

Still, the Indian population didn’t begin its demise until the Europeans arrived in the 16^th century.

Indians lament death by disease.

About 60,000 Indians lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut at the beginning of the 17^th century, according to Sherburne Cook. Maine had a robust population of Abenaki tribes. According to some estimates, Maine had more than 20,000 Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy Indians.

A century later, New England’s Indian population began to disappear. Some tribes were already extinct.

This is how the Europeans nearly wiped out the Indian population.

Indian Population Before the Pilgrims

The seeds of the Indians’ destruction were planted more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began even before English and French explorers showed up at the turn of the 16^th century. In 1504, a French vessel was documented fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Portuguese fishermen arrived two years later.

Early map of the Grand Banks.

By 1519, a hundred European ships made round trips to the Grand Banks. The first tourist cruise to North America sailed from London in 1536, but food ran short and many died.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans, were devastated by a typhus epidemic in 1586. Other diseases brought the Passamaquoddy population to 4,000 from 20,000.

The 1616 Plague

In 1616, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast, wreaking the most devastation north of Boston. It’s not clear what it was – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague.

Whatever it was, it was terrifying. So much of the Indian population died there weren’t enough left to bury the dead. English colonist Thomas Morton described the heaps of dead Indians ‘a new found Golgotha.’

As many as 90 percent of the 4,500 Indians of the Massachusetts tribe perished. The disease cleared the Boston Harbor islands of inhabitants.

John Smith

English explorer John Smith had visited New England before the plague in 1614. He returned eight years later, and what he saw shocked him.

“God had laid this country open for us,” he wrote. “Where I had seen 100 or 200 people, there is scarce ten to be found.”

Disease persisted among the Massachusetts from 1620 to 1630. When smallpox struck in 1633, it left only about 750 and obliterated entire villages. The colonists herded the Massachusetts who survived into Christian villages of ‘praying Indians.’

Puritan minister Increase Mather wrote ‘about this time [1631] the Indians began to be quarrelsome touching the Bounds of the Land which they had sold to the English, but God ended the Controversy by sending the Smallpox amongst the Indians of Saugust, who were before that time exceeding numerous.’

Along the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, Mohawk raids had already weakened the Pennacook Indians when the 1616 plague arrived. It killed three out of four Pennacooks.

That same plague almost completely obliterated two other Pennacook tribes in Massachusetts, the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem.

Wampanoags

The plague of 1616-1618 cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston, but was far less severe south of Plymouth.

King Philip

A year after the Pilgrims arrived, their Indian visitor Samoset told them, ‘about foure yeares agoe, all the Inhabitants dyed of an extraordinary plague, and there is neither man, woman, nor childe remaining, as indeed we haue found none, so as there is none to hinder our possession, or to lay claime unto it.’

“Thousands of them died,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor. “They not being able to bury one another, their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground.”

Enough Wampanoag Indians survived to resist the colonists’ land grab during King Philip’s War in 1675.

But disease persisted among the tribe, weakening it further. By the war’s outbreak, the Wampanoag Indian population fell to 2,500 from as many as 5,500. Those who weren’t killed in the war were sold into slavery, moved to praying towns or migrated west. King Philip’s War virtually obliterated the Wampanoag.

Narragansett

Roger Williams with Narragansett Indians

The Narragansett were the biggest tribe in New England, with 7,800 members including 300 on Block Island. Protected by Narragansett Bay, they didn’t come into contact with the white invaders as early or as frequently as northern tribes. The great plague of 1616 didn’t affect them.

Because the Narragansetts were so much larger, Wampanoag leader Massasoit made peace with the Plymouth colonists to ally them against his Narragansett rivals.

The Narragansetts’ first epidemic was smallpox in 1633, which killed 700 of them. Chronic ailments further reduced their numbers to 5,000 by the outbreak of King Philip’s War. Wrote Roger Williams in 1643,

They commonly abound with children, and increase mightily; except the plague fall amongst them, or other lesser sicknesses, and then having no means of recovery, they perish wonderfully.

Infectious disease terrified the Narragansetts. “I have often seene a poore House left alone in the wild Woods, all being fled, the living not being able to bury the dead, so terrible is the apprehension of an infectious disease, that not only persons, but Houses and the whole Towne take flight,” wrote Williams.

The Narragansetts tried to stay out of King Philip’s War, but after English colonists massacred as many as 1,100 of them at the Great Swamp Fight in 1675, they had no choice but to fight. After King Philip’s War fewer than 500 Narragansetts remained. They were allowed to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown, R.I., where they frequently intermarried with African-Americans and Indians from other tribes.

The Nauset

The Nauset, a tribe of about 8,000 on Cape Cod and the islands, were also apparently unaffected by the plague of 1616. But other diseases gradually reduced their numbers. The 2,100 Nausets on Cape Cod were down to 1,250 by 1700, and all had been converted to Christianity. By 1660, they had been driven into the Mashpee Reservation; the population of 2,100 Nausets fell to 1,250 by 1700.

Disease had also reduced the Indian population of 6,000 on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket by more than half, to 2,330.

Connecticut’s Indian Population

Before the English arrived, an Algonkian tribe that became the Pequots moved into Connecticut from the Connecticut River to the Rhode Island border, displacing the people who lived there. There were about 3,000 of them, and the population remained stable with little European contact and in the absence of war and severe epidemic disease.

War devastated the Pequot Indian population.

Then English colonists and Mohegan warriors attacked them in the Pequot War of 1637. Hundreds were killed or captured and hundreds more fled to southwestern Connecticut and Long Island. Only 200 were left by war’s end, and they were absorbed into the Mohegan tribe.

Shortly after the Pequot War in 1643, there were about 2,200 Pequot-Mohegans. Smallpox, flu, diphtheria and measles reduced their numbers to 750 by 1705. By then, the colonists had already herded them into Connecticut reservations at Ledyard and Groton.

One Connecticut tribe tried to protect itself by building a fort. A thousand Mattabesic Indians sealed their fate when they enclosed themselves in a palisade fort in Hartford County. By 1634, smallpox and plague killed all but 50 of them with terrifying swiftness.

Of the 3,000 other Connecticut Indians in the vicinity – Podunk, Mattabesic, Hammonasset and Wongunk – most who survived sold their land and moved away.

Reservations

During the 17^th century, life was short for the English colonists as well as the Indian population. By 1700, life expectancy in New England rose to 45-50 years, 15 years higher than in old England.

The Europeans had large families, and the colonist population grew 3 percent a year, doubling every 23 years. The land-hungry colonists pushed the remaining Indian population into warfare, and then into reservations and to parts west.

Before the Europeans arrived, about 10,000 Penobscot Indians lived in what is now Maine. The population collapsed from infectious diseases and fighting between the Iroquois over the fur trade. The Penobscot sided with the French during four Anglo-French wars, which the French ultimately lost.

The Indian Population Makes a Comeback

Both the Penobscot and the Passamaquoddy ceded their land to Massachusetts (which later became Maine). They had only a reservation on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. By 1800, the Penobscot Indian population fell to 500.

Many Indians converted to Christianity and moved to one of 14 praying towns. Indians moved to reservations in Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard and Fall River in Massachusetts.

During the 20^th century, New England’s Indian population made a comeback. But that is a story for another day.

With thanks to The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century by S.F. Cook and to The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose. This story about New England’s Indian population was updated in 2022.

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Old Roger Williams Tries To Stop King Philip’s War

On March 29, 1676, old Roger Williams was one of 30 men who remained in the town of Providence. Most of the population had taken refuge on Aquidneck Island, rightly fearing an attack from indigenous people. It was the midst of King Philip’s War, and Roger Williams tried to stop the bloodshed. He was 77 years old.

Old Roger Williams tried to stop the bloodshed.

That day, Native Americans roamed Providence unmolested as they set fire to houses, barns, sheds and churches. They burned Roger Williams’ home, though he had long been their friend.

Williams sent an ominous letter to his brother, then staying on Aquidneck Island.

[P]repare forts for women and children at Newport and on the island or it will be shortly worse with you than us.

King Philip’s War

King Philip

No U.S. war was as catastrophic as King Philip’s War. For 55 years, New England colonists had lived in peace with the Native Americans. But then Plymouth Colony grabbed too much land, subjected them to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three Wampanoags.

War broke out.

Metacomet, also known as King Philip, led the rebellion. He was the son of Massasoit, the sachem who had negotiated a peace treaty with the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Native Americans attacked nearly half the towns in New England, but it was all over after 14 months of fighting. Philip was dead, his head displayed in Plymouth Colony for 20 years. As many as a thousand indigenous people were sold into slavery, and 5,000 were killed in battle, of sickness or starvation. Another 2,000 fled west or north. At the outset of the war, Native Americans comprised 30 percent of New England’s population; by the end, they were down to 15 percent.

King Philip’s War devastated New England. Plymouth Colony lost 8 percent of its adult male population. Compare that to the Civil War, in which less than 5 percent of the country’s men died.

The New England economy suffered, and it would take a century before per capita income rose to its level before the war.

Before the bloodshed, there had been about 100 towns in New England; afterward, only about 65, the rest having been burned or abandoned.

Great Swamp Massacre

Old Roger Williams did his best to stanch the bloodshed. As the colony’s leader, he and Rhode Island’s largest tribe, the Narragansetts, tried to stay out of the escalating violence.

Roger Williams

Williams had consistently upheld Native rights. He bought land from them, instead of appropriating it, and he learned their language, publishing a guide to it in 1643, A Key Into the Language of America.

At the outset of King Philip’s War, the Narragansetts had signed a treaty of neutrality with Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Knowing this, King Philip sent the women, children and infirm from warring tribes to safety with the Narragansetts. But a 1,000-man militia from three colonies – Plymouth, Massachusetts and Connecticut – invaded Rhode Island and massacred the Narragansett winter settlement in the Great Swamp, now South Kingstown. Seven hundred indigenous men, women and children died in agony.

The Narragansetts had no choice but to go to war. The Narragansett sachem Canonchet assembled an army that attacked towns in Central Massachusetts, Rhode Island and, finally, Providence.

Old Roger Williams

As Providence burned, a group of Native Americans from several tribes assembled on the banks of a salt cove across from the town. Williams walked out to talk with them across the water, his back to the burning town.

The conversation between the warriors and the old minister lasted an hour.

Roger Williams asked them why they burned and killed their kind neighbors. He told them,

This house of mine now burning before mine eyes hath lodged kindly some thousands of you these ten years.

They said Rhode Island had joined the other colonies in the Great Swamp massacre.

In a letter to his brother, Williams recounted his reply:

I told them they … had forgot they were mankind and ran around the country like wolves tearing the innocent and peacable….They confessed they were in a strange way.

Roger Williams then warned them that it was almost time to plant. The Indians said they didn’t care about planting; they would take food from the English. They argued some more, and finally Williams suggested he intervene to make peace.

The Native Americans said they would spend the next month burning Plymouth Colony, and then they would talk to him.

But they never used Rogers Williams’ services as a peacemaker. They did, however, tell him the safe way home.

Old Roger Williams lived for another seven years.

With thanks to Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. This story was updated in 2022.

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Mad Jack Oldham Starts the Pequot War

War between the early English colonists of New England and the Native Americans already here was perhaps unavoidable, though it wasn’t the goal of the Pilgrims when they crossed the Atlantic. But then Mad Jack Oldham changed everything.

John Oldham was an early arrival to the new colony in 1623. He, his wife and his sister arrived aboard the Anne, and religious intentions did not drive him to America. Rather, at age 21, it was ambition that fueled him. He had come to make a fortune in the new world.

William Bradford

Men unaffiliated with the Pilgrim religious cause had come to America “on their particular,” Plymouth’s governor William Bradford would write. Without an affiliation with the Pilgrims, Oldham and others like him agreed to abide by the Pilgrims’ laws. They would pay taxes and participate in defending the burgeoning colony. They would also refrain from trading with the American Indians.

In the Pilgrims’ plan, peaceful trade with the Indians would support their economy. It would provide the profit England wanted, and they had to handle it delicately. Men like Jack Oldham and the other ‘particulars’ were to keep to selling and reselling goods to the settlers in Plymouth and along coastal New England.

Jack Oldham, Troublemaker

The Mayflower

Oldham and 10 other “particulars” almost immediately started trouble. Oldham refused to stand watch, provoked Miles Standish and raged at him as a ‘beggarly rascal.’ With little in common with the Pilgrims, Oldham’s pugnacious nature came to define him.

Shortly after arriving, Oldham and other malcontents wrote to England of their complaints against the Pilgrims. He criticized the new, godly world they were trying to construct. And he complained of their religious practices, the bad water, thievery in the community and too many mosquitoes.

Bradford intercepted Oldham’s letters. When they were shipped to England a reply to the complaints from Bradford accompanied them. He wrote a point-by-point rebuttal and the sarcastic observation that men like Oldham were “too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies . . . till at least they be mosquito-proof.”

Jack Oldham was furious when he learned Bradford had intercepted his letters, and his angry and quarrelsome nature sealed his fate.

Banishment

While the Pilgrims needed manpower and knew there was strength in numbers, they weren’t desperate enough to need a man like Oldham. They banished him from Plymouth in 1624. At first, Oldham flourished under his new freedom. Liberated from the Pilgrims’ taxes and rules, he settled at Nantasket and would go on to be one of the founders of Wethersfield, Conn.

He traded profitably with the Indians, as well as other settlers, and even gained positions in Massachusetts’ early government. But his demeanor got the best of him. Fellow outcast Thomas Morton described him as “a mad jack in his mood.”

In July 1636, American Indians, probably Narragansetts, waylaid his ship on a trading trip to Block Island. They killed Jack Oldham and several members of his crew. His two nephews returned to land.

The death of Mad Jack Oldham was a flashpoint in the ongoing friction between some of the Indians and the colonists over trade and other matters.

Gov. Endecott invades Block Island

The Narragansetts convinced the colonists that the Pequot tribe harbored the Indians who killed Jack Oldham. Though it was perfectly plausible that Jack Oldham provoked the fight that killed him, ministers throughout Massachusetts spoke out against the murders. Massachusetts Governor John Endecott was ordered to retaliate.

Ninety men invaded Block Island, and killed one Indian there. Thus started the Pequot War, which wouldn’t end until 1638.

This story was updated in 2022.

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