This Week in New England Native Documentary History

Written from Saybrook at the end of June 1649, John Mason’s letter to the Commissioners of the United Colonies captures the unsettled nature of Indian affairs a decade after the end of the Pequot war.  It is a world of inter-tribal and colonial rivalries, conspiracies and plots (real or imagined), uncertainties and assumptions.  To read about how contested and entangled southern New England Indian country had become in the mid-seventeenth century, click here for an image and transcription of Mason’s letter, which is from the Massachusetts Archives Collection.

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