1690 was a bad year for Nathaniel Niles. Three times he was taken captive by French Indians and twice had his property plundered, all within a span of sixteen months. By the fall of 1691, as King William’s War continued,…
Category: This Week in New England Native Documentary History
A House in Dispute
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
On September 9, 1772, Abigail Meason, an itinerant Indian woman from Farmington, Connecticut, appeared in Northampton, Massachusetts at the doorstep of Nathaniel Day and his wife Experience with a growing temperature. The Days recognized the symptoms as “slow fever” or…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
During one hot summer at the end of the seventeenth century, the weather in Westerly, Rhode Island became unbearable and caused a drought. This prompted a group of Narragansetts living nearby to turn to their cultural practices for a remedy…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
Increase Mather, in his A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New England (Boston, 1676), wrote that the Native people “amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us…
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…
This Week in New England Native Documentary History
” . . . our English Fathers inform us that we are Considered by them as being Subjects to the Laws and Civil regulations of this Colony . . .” ” . . . the most of us have .…