In the resolutions which were framed for the government of Springfield a provision was shrewdly included to limit the population. This was intended to prevent an influx of farmers who would spoil the fur trade. Actually, the founder brought out only twelve families. As a result of his plan the main business of Springfield for many years was the beaver trade.
There was a provision in the resolutions, too, for obtaining a minister, Pynchon himself acting in this capacity until the Reverend George Moxon was finally installed. It is recorded of this good parson that when he did arrive he preached a sermon that lasted for twenty-eight days. It is also a matter of record that an early purchase for the church was an hourglass. But whether its purpose was to impose a time limit or to insure good measure is not stated.
Travelling extensively by canoe and on horseback, William Pynchon bartered with many tribes for beaver, otter, marten, mink, muskrat, raccoon, lynx, and fox. And, tactfully using Algonquin tribes as middlemen, it wasn’t too long before he tapped the Iroquois trade. By 1640 he had established one of his agents, Thomas Cooper, at Woronoco, later the site of Westfield, “where the Indians brought not only their own furs, but also furs which they obtained from the Mohawks.” When this happened, the Dutch no longer had a monopoly of the furs of the Iroquois.
Of course Pynchon’s tremendous gains meant some real losses to the new towns below Springfield, which in 1639 had created a government of their own when they drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. In an effort to checkmate Pynchon, and bring the trade of the valley to Hartford instead, Connecticut now granted to Governor Edward Hopkins and William Whiting “liberty of free trade at Woronoco and at any place thereabouts ... all others to be restrained for the terme of seven years....” But Massachusetts came to Pynchon’s rescue, resisted the Connecticut grab, and eventually established through the Commissioners of the United Colonies that Woronoco was within its bounds.
Later, the Connecticut people tried another tack. They declared an impost on all pelts and other goods that Pynchon shipped down the river, a tax that could have ruined him. However, they voted to remove this excise when the Massachusetts authorities, in retaliation, levied a large duty on Connecticut goods coming into Boston harbor. And William Pynchon went on to expand the fur frontier of Massachusetts to the north and the west, and through his beaver trade to become one of the richest men in New England.
Meanwhile, the Puritan migration was taking other avenues of expansion in the direction of New Netherland, along the shores of Long Island Sound. These routes, too, followed the paths of fur traders who as usual broke through the wilderness to make pacts with the natives or to fuse the wars that cleared the way for settlement.
The Narragansett country and Long Island Sound were of course traditional Dutch trading preserves. But as early as 1632, New Plymouth established a truckhouse at Sowamset, now Barrington, Rhode Island, and in the following year daring John Oldham, filled with “vast conceits of extraordinary gaine,” was driving a trade on his own account much farther to the west in Long Island Sound. Oldham did business with both the Pequots and the Narragansetts, the latter taking so kindly to him and his trucking goods that they offered him free land for the establishment of a permanent trading post among them.
Three years later however, on a trading voyage in the Sound, Oldham was murdered at Block Island by Indians under Pequot control. His boat was plundered and two English boys with him at the time were carried off into captivity. This episode fused the Pequot War, the chief results of which was a bloody purge by the New Englanders that cleared the shores of the Sound for settlement.
The campaign commenced against the Pequots in 1637 quickly became a hundredfold more terrible than the murderous episode the white men set out originally to avenge. Under the leadership of Captain John Endicott of Massachusetts, a devastating blow was first delivered at Block Island. A hundred men went there with him in three ships. They burned the native wigwams, spoiled the corn, and slew all the Indians they could catch. Then they repaired to the mainland, where they invaded the heart of the Pequot country and repeated their brutal chastisement of the red men.