The Pequot and King Philip’s Wars

Much of the literature dealing with Indians in Connecticut exclusively focuses on the Pequot War, 1636-37, and King Philip’s War, 1675-76. The best account of the Pequot War is in Alden T. Vaughan’s New Eng­land Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston: Little Brown, 1965). A few minor errors are corrected in the revised paperback edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).

Douglas Edward Leach’s Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (New York: Macmillan, 1958) and The Northern Colonial Fron­tier, 1607-1763 (New York: Holt, 1966) also deal very competently with the War, though Leach and Vaughan differ as to the culpability of the Puritans in bringing it about. Francis Jennings, in the work cited above, lays the blame for all Indian-European difficulties on the white settlers, but his use of sources should be scrutinized carefully. See also

Bradstreet, H. The Story of the War with the Pequots Retold. Tercentenary pamphlet V(1933).

Bourne, Russell. The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678. New York, Atheneum, 1990.

Dave, Alfred A. The Pequot War. Amherst University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. The most recent and most authoritative work.

Ditzer, David W. “The Causes of the Pequot War.” The Connecticut Review 1 (April, 1967). A four-page review which concludes that the War can be called “the first imperialist war in British North America.”

Hauptman, Laurence M. and James D. Wherry, eds. The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Katz, Steven T. "The Pequot War Reconsidered," NEQ 64 (June, 1991) 2:206-24. See his cits 1-3 for list of books on the subject.

Learned, Bela Peck. “Distribution of the Pequot Lands.” Proceedings of the Society of Colonial Wars 1(1903):49-60. A talk presented before die Society. A slight matter.

Peale, Arthur L. Memorials and Pilgrimages in the Mohegan Country. Norwich: The Bulletin, 1930. Don’t bother looking for this collection of one- and two-page essays on miscellaneous aspects of Mohegan history.

—Uncas and the Mohegan-Pequot. Boston: Meador Publishing Co., 1939. The au­thor was president of the Archaeological Society of America, but this is not a scholarly study. Slight bibliography and no citations.

Perry, John Hoyt. The Great Swamp Fight New York: n. pub., 1905. Superseded by Vaughan.

Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643. New York, Oxford University Press, 1982. New light on the Pequot War and other matters, some relating to Connecticut. Glenn W. LaFantasie in William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd series, XL (April '83) 2:312 praises it highly but says it is marred by  lack of sympathy for the English leadership -- a pro-Indian bias "Beneath his analysis of Anglo-Indian relations is a stridency, a tone of special pleading . . . [that] mars an otherwise brilliant study."

Vaughan, Alden T. “Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of 1637.” Wil­liam and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series 21(April, 1964)2:256-69. The best short study.

Leach’s book on King Philip’s War can be supported by Diary of King Philip’s War, 1675-1676 By Colonel Benjamin Church, edited by Alan and Mary Simpson (Chester: the Pequot Press, 1975). In addition to this diary there are some other interesting contemporary accounts:

Carlton, W. N. Chattin, ed. “Leift Lion Gardner his ‘Relation of the Pequot Warres.”‘ Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 3rd series 3(1833): 131-60. Includes a twenty-two-page biography of Gardner (1599-1663) and a bibliographic account of the document, which was written in 1660, twenty-four years after the event in which Gardner played a central part.

Hopkins, Samuel. Historical Memories Relating to the Housatonnuck Indians. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1753.

Wolcott, Roger. Poetical Meditations. New London: T. Green, 1725. Has an in­troduction, by John Bulkley, that discusses native rights to land.

Many other contemporary accounts of the Pequot War were published, and they are listed in the bibliography of the work by Alden Vaughan cited above.