In the meantime Winslow’s people at New Plymouth moved more quickly. With them fresh beaver territory was always a pressing necessity. Their very survival as a colony depended on their fur exports. They also sensed profit in taking sides with the Mohegans. Whereas the Massachusetts men cautiously avoided any complicating alliances with the Connecticut valley Indians, the Pilgrims in their desperate anxiety for pelts were quite willing, as usual, to involve themselves in inter-tribal disputes. In this case it led to most unhappy results for the traders, the farmers, and their families. Some have claimed that it was the genesis of the fierce war between the Pequots and the white men that exploded a few years later.
In any event, by early September of 1633 Captain William Holmes of New Plymouth, carrying a prefabricated house frame in “a great new bark,” was on his way up the Connecticut River. Undaunted by the Dutch fort and the Hollanders, who “threatened [him] hard, yet ... shot not,” Captain Holmes sailed past Fort Good Hope and erected his house above it at Windsor. There his people established a trading post that prospered at once on upriver furs at the expense of the Dutch traders below them. Strongly palisading this post, Holmes and his company then stood firm against a force of seventy Hollanders who were sent from New Amsterdam to eject them.
The Pilgrim coup was short-lived however. Competition from Boston had even more to do with this than Indian troubles, for in another three years a wholesale exodus from Massachusetts to the Connecticut was under way, over 800 people already having moved west to the fruitful valley. In the forefront of this migration were the fur traders, but farmers followed them to found Wethersfield and other towns. Invading Windsor, they swallowed up the small band of their Pilgrim brethren there.
The Puritans completely surrounded the isolated Dutch trading post at Hartford. But, although the New Englanders on the Connecticut at this time outnumbered the population of all New Netherland, they made no attempt to oust the garrison of Hollanders in their midst. Some twenty men, sent out by the younger Winthrop from Boston, did however take possession of the Dutch claims about the mouth of the Connecticut. There they tore down the arms of the States General which had been affixed to a tree and contemptuously engraved “a ridiculous face in their place.” When a Dutch sloop came from New Amsterdam to dislodge them, it was compelled to withdraw in the face of two cannon threateningly mounted ashore. The Boston men then went about constructing fortifications and buildings which they called Fort Saybrook.
After that the English had control of the river and, as they thought, easy access also to the beaver trade “of that so pleasant and commodious country of Erocoise before us.”
One Puritan merchant, William Pynchon, who was to found a great fortune in the Indian trade, now spearheaded the economic attack on New Netherland’s northern flank. Because of his relentless search for fur he did more than any other man to defeat the Dutch traders and to expand the frontiers of Massachusetts.
William Pynchon was one of the original company of twenty-seven grantees of Massachusetts. For their concession these adventurers were committed to pay the crown one-fifth of all the gold and silver ore found within the limits of the grant. Pynchon, however, wasn’t interested in ore. He was of a more practical bent of mind. He traded with the Indians near Boston from the start, supplying them with guns and ammunition in exchange for their beaver.
Although this trade in guns was carried on with the court’s approval, Pynchon was severely criticized for doing it, fined in fact. Annoyed about this, dissatisfied anyway with the dwindling fur trade about the bay, and not being particularly in sympathy with the rigid Calvinism of the church he had helped to found there, Pynchon’s eyes turned westward.
This keen-minded, resolute man was probably one of John Oldham’s financial backers when that extraordinary adventurer pioneered the Connecticut Path. Pynchon himself made a trip up the Connecticut River by shallop in 1635 and chose a location for a trading post near the Indian village of Agawam. Somewhat above the other river towns which were being laid out, this strategic site was relied upon to intercept most of the Indian trade from the north and west.
Early in 1636 Pynchon with his son-in-law, Henry Smith, led a group of traders overland to Agawam. They shipped their goods by water. For 18 fathoms of wampum, and 18 each of coats, hatchets, hoes and knives, with “two extra coats thrown in for good measure,” land was purchased from the Indians, and a trading settlement was established. It wasn’t too long before every one was calling this trading post Springfield, in honor of its founder’s home town in England.