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,…
War, employment at sea, and westward emigration had a significant impact on the demographics of many late eighteenth to early nineteenth century reservation communities in New England. With the population of adult males much reduced, Indian women were often left…
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…
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…
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…
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…
” . . . 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 .…
