This grim Puritan punishment came close to uniting all the Indians in those parts against the English. Only the diplomacy of Roger Williams, who traded for furs with the Narragansetts while preaching the gospel, prevented the great Narragansett tribe from joining the Pequots in the fierce revenge they now took against any isolated Englishmen they could find. Meanwhile the Pequots scourged the countryside—until, by a final campaign, the New Englanders set out to remove this powerful tribe from the face of the earth!
An army composed mostly of mercenary savages was assembled by the Englishmen for this gory task. It originated with a party of ninety white men from the Connecticut River towns under the command of John Mason. Together with an equal number of Mohegans, they went down to Fort Saybrook to meet Captain John Underhill who had been sent from Massachusetts with twenty soldiers. This nucleous force then proceeded to the Bay of the Narragansetts where it was joined by some 500 of those savages, all bent on scalps and loot. From the bay the army marched overland to the Mystic River to attack one of the chief Pequot towns, occupied at the time by some six or seven hundred men, women and children.
The English and their Indian allies took the inhabitants of the town by surprise. They put the torch to the wigwams before the sleeping natives could offer any resistance. All who were not burned to death were slaughtered as they tried to escape—all except seven who managed to escape and seven others who were taken captive. It was a terrible affair—for the Pequots. Only two Englishmen died in the encounter.
Another main body of the Pequots was routed soon afterward. But that did not end the bloody harassment. A month later, a large force from Massachusetts under Captain Stoughton, together with Captain Mason’s Connecticut men, surrounded all that remained of the once powerful tribe. This occurred in a swamp at Fairfield where the remnant of the tribe had taken refuge. The warriors put up a brave fight, but the odds were too great against them. Those few who escaped this final butchery were divided among the Mohegans and the Narragansetts, never more to be called Pequots.
The shores of the Sound west of Fort Saybrook were open now to settlers. A wave of migration from Boston resulted in the founding of New Haven, Stratford, Norwalk, Stamford, and other towns. The New Haven people, forming their own government, even spread across the Sound to Long Island which, of course, had long been occupied only by the Hollanders, whose traders exploited the natives there for the wampum so essential in the beaver trade.
To halt this encroachment on the very nerve center of their trading territory, the Dutch hurriedly purchased from the Indians all the country that remained open between Manhattan and the oncoming English, acquiring legal title to additional lands on Long Island as far west as Oyster Bay as well as to all that triangle of territory between the Hudson and the Sound south of Norwalk. The latter comprised much of present Westchester County. However the English encroachment along the north shore of the Sound, as a practical matter, was halted no farther east than Greenwich.
Only in the Narragansett country, after 1640, did the Dutch hang on to any substantial beaver trade east of Greenwich. Rhode Island, by then well populated with Englishmen, tried to keep them out. However, the Dutch simply supplied the Indians there more generously with rum and guns—in return for beaver. So did some interloping but enterprising Frenchmen. And so did some of the New Englanders themselves, for that matter. Nowhere was the competition for beaver more keen or more dangerous than in Rhode Island.
English laws at the time sincerely prohibited the sale of liquor or firearms to the savages. But such laws were difficult to enforce on a wild frontier where uncontrolled profits could be scooped up so easily. Roger Williams was later to write that he had “refused the gain of thousands by such a murderous trade.” Some of his neighbors in the wilderness and even some of his own trading associates had no such scruples however.
Richard Smith who became wealthy on the Indian trade was a man of this stripe. He and Roger Williams, along with John Wilcox, “a sturring, driving, somewhat unscrupulous fellow,” began trading in the Narragansett country as early as 1637. Each of them built trucking houses on the much-traveled Pequot and Narragansett Trail at the site of present-day Wickford. As trading practices sharpened over the years, neither Smith nor Wilcox hesitated to meet the increasing demands of the natives for liquor and powder. Williams was revolted. In 1651, when he was about to go to England, he sold his house and trading interests to Smith for 50 pounds sterling. That left Smith without any competition for this lucrative fur trade, as he had bought out Wilcox some years earlier.
Men like Smith and Wilcox furnished tinder for many flaming atrocities in Rhode Island. But their murderous trade was “the most profitable employment in these parts of America ... by which many persons of mean degree advanced to considerable estates.” Rhode Island was truly one of the most fertile of all beaver grounds—while it lasted. That was until 1660. By then the beaver was all but exhausted, while, with the help of the white man’s goods, the Indian trapper was well on the way to destroying himself too.