The Wordy Shipmates (22 page)

The registration desks are nestled under a half-dome, meant to evoke a wigwam. Inside, amidst the standard gambling accoutrements, like craps tables and slot machines, the building is done up in woven wood and birch bark. Support columns look like trees with candy-colored leaves. Mu rals depict Mohegan mythology. There’s a display featuring a giant replica of Shantok cookware—the pottery associated with Uncas’s nearby village—and it makes me wonder if four hundred years from now my nonstick frying pan will be made into a colossal sculpture for gamblers to admire. A charming statue of the late Mohegan anthropologist Gladys Tantaquidgeon is facing a sign that tallies up the “slot jack-pot paid today.” Uncas would undoubtedly get a kick out of his tribe presiding over such an impressive edifice built for the sole purpose of taking white people’s wampum.

The three of us sit outside by the pool and Owen does a martial arts-influenced interpretive dance to Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” while quizzing me on the story of the Pequot War.

“Don’t tell me!” he says. “No, tell me.”

I hit the highlights, starting with the Dutch murdering the Pequot chief and the Pequot avenging his death by mistakenly killing an Englishman and how the whole thing just kind of escalated into war. He says that sounds stupid. I say that most wars are. Then he asks me what state we’re in.

“Connecticut,” I tell him.

“And that war was here?” he asks.

Yes, I answer.

“Name a state where there was never a war,” he says.

Flipping through various Indian skirmishes and the Civil War in my head, I reply, “I’m not sure I can.”

“Then name a state where there was the least amount of war.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Idaho?” (I looked it up later; turns out I was unaware of the Battle of White Bird Canyon during the Nez Perce War.)

The next morning, we drive around in search of Uncas, walking around his headquarters, now Fort Shantok State Park. Then we drive to Norwich to look at Indian Leap, a chasm next to a waterfall where Uncas supposedly chased some Narragansett to their deaths in 1643.

“Was he trying to cut their heads off?” asks Owen.

No, I tell him. The sign says, “They plunged to their death into the abyss below.”

In Norwich, we stop to look at the Uncas Monument, an obelisk, at the “Royal Mohegan Burial Ground.” A plaque notes the monument was dedicated by President Andrew Jackson in 1833.

“Figures,” my sister says. “One asshole honoring another.” (For his Indian-removal policies Jackson is not remembered kindly by my family and our fellow Cherokee descendants.)

Amy and Owen can’t get past Uncas decapitating those Pequot and taking part in the Mystic Massacre. Not that I find his behavior particularly uplifting, but I can understand the desperation behind Uncas’s every lick of an English boot. He was ruthless in the pursuit of one goal, Mohegan survival. Standing in that cemetery, looking at the grave of Uncas’s great-grandson, reading a plaque that states the Mohegan “descendants reside in Norwich today,” it appears that Uncas succeeded in keeping his people intact and in proximity to the graves of their ancestors. What he did wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even right. But it worked.

In a famous illustration from John Underhill’s book on the Pequot War, the situation couldn’t be more clear. Concentric circles depict the overwhelming force of the English and their allies surrounding the Pequot fort. The lesson? You’re either burning or getting burnt.

We leave the Mohegan cemetery and stop off at the Mystic Aquarium to take a break from Indian troubles. But an exhibit devoted to algae living inside giant clams reminds me of Uncas’s relationship with the English nonetheless.

In order to survive, giant clams and zooxanthella have adopted a mutualistic relationship (one that benefits both partners). Zooxanthella (plant-like algae) live inside giant clams to receive protection and a home. In turn zooxanthella provide the giant clam with the nutrients it needs to survive.

Obviously, the English are the clam and the Mohegan are the algae. If that analogy sounds unfair and one-sided and insulting to the Mohegan, that’s because it is. Uncas simply decided that the only way to live was to live off the biggest giant clam around.

After the Pequot War, the Narragansett sachem Miantonomi took the exact opposite course of action from Uncas, with disastrous results. Horrified by the Mystic Massacre, Miantonomi could only conclude that the English were hell-bent on native annihilation. So he set out to build a coalition of tribes to fight back, just as Tecumseh would at the turn of the nineteenth century.

In 1642, Lion Gardener, one of the officers from Fort Saybrook, was passing through Long Island when he witnessed a speech Miantonomi delivered to a local tribe.

He said:

For so are we all Indians as the English are and say brother to one another; so must we be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly. For you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.

After enumerating his other Indian allies, he outlines a forthcoming plan of attack. He says, “And when you see the fires that will be made forty days hence in a clear night, then do as we, and the next day fall on and kill men, women, and children, but no cows, for they will serve to eat ’til our deer be increased again.”

Miantonomi’s speech foreshadows similar testimony among nineteenth-century American Indians such as Chief Seattle and Tecumseh himself, who would one day try and gather together allied Indian forces invoking the memory of what happened to the Pequot, whom he said had “vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun.”

When the English get wind of Miantonomi’s plot, Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth, and Connecticut form the United Colonies of New England, also called the New England Confederation, to officially act as a collective defensive alliance. (Roger Williams’s heretical colony is purposefully left out of the coalition so Rhode Island’s anything-goes coo-ties won’t rub off on its proper, God-fearing neighbors.)

Meanwhile, Uncas captures Miantonomi and turns him over to the English authorities at Hartford. This prompts a secret meeting among representatives from the United Colonies to decide what to do about the prisoner. Winthrop reports in his journal that they conclude that “there was a general conspiracy among the Indians to cut off all the English and that Miantonomi was the head and contriver of it.” Secondly, they agree that the Narragansett sachem “was of a turbulent and proud spirit, and would never be at rest.”

They agree that Miantonomi should be assassinated, and that Uncas is the man to do it. They send for him, and the Mohegan, according to Winthrop, “readily undertook the execution.” Uncas orders his brother to carry out the task. Winthrop writes that Uncas’s brother “clave [Miantonomi’s] head with a hatchet, some English being present.”

For the English, the Pequot War was a success ratified by God. It became the blueprint for all future Indian wars on the continent conducted by the colonists and the subsequent United States. The Mystic Massacre set a precedent. The mass murder of the Pequot made the mass murder of other tribes possible and therefore repeatable. It was the first of many similar horrors to come: the Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone in 1863 (after the U.S. Army killed a couple of hundred Shoshone men in battle, American soldiers allegedly raped the tribe’s women and murdered children—which happened, with apologies to Owen, in Idaho); the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 (in which the army slays almost two hundred Cheyenne); the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 (when the army gunned down nearly three hundred Lakota Sioux in the South Dakota snow).

Some U.S. Army veterans of the latter Lakota massacre, by the way, would then be dispatched by the McKinley administration to fight guerrilla warriors in the Philippines after we had won the islands from Spain, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, at the end of the Spanish-American War. That year, 1898, was the magic moment when the United States became a true world power, allowing previously isolationist America to return to its Puritan, come-over-and-help-us roots. Soon enough we were helping Europe in two world wars, helping South Korea, helping South Vietnam, just as we are now, as I write this, helping Iraq.

For Captain John Underhill, the co-architect of the Mystic Massacre, having commanded the soldiers who decimated the Pequot was not enough to sustain his hero’s welcome back in Boston. He was a friend of the troublemaker Anne Hutchinson. To the General Court, no amount of Pequot blood could wash off the stain of her beliefs. Underhill was forced to flee the colony he had so stalwartly, and so cruelly, defended.

 

 

 

A
nne Marbury Hutchinson, her husband, William, and their whopping brood of fifteen children arrive in Boston on September 18, 1634. In Winthrop’s diary, he notes the arrival of their ship, the
Griffin,
but not the Hutchinsons themselves. Later on, he would call Will Hutchinson “a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife.”

Anne herself is guided by John Cotton. Cotton is why they’re here. Back in England, the Hutchinsons used to travel routinely over twenty miles just to hear him preach. Anne is Cotton’s groupie, and after he emigrates to America she soon packs up her family and follows.

And hers is one large family. Anne and Will Hutchinson have fifteen children. The daughter of a persecuted Puritan minister who helped her cobble together the best education possible for female children (who were denied university attendance), Anne Hutchinson is one of the brainiest English-women of the seventeenth century. Yet she is no stranger to the goopy fluids of female biology. Besides birthing her own litter, she works as a midwife, delivering babies and no doubt serving the brew imbibed before and after labor, the wonderfully named “groaning beer.”

By aiding Boston’s new mothers, Hutchinson quickly befriends a lot of women. She starts leading the women in a regular Bible study in her large, fine home. (Her husband might be whipped but he sure is rich.) At first, they simply discuss Cotton’s latest sermon.

Unfortunately, Hutchinson didn’t write down or publish any of her commentaries. She suffers the same fate in the historical record as the Pequot; her thoughts and deeds have been passed down to us solely through the writings of white men who pretty much hate her guts.

A ladies’ study group is one of the most ubiquitous social subsets in the history of Christian churches. I attended one regularly with my mother as a child. Once, when I told a member of the fabled East Coast Media Elite that I was raised Pentecostal he asked if that meant I grew up “fondling snakes in trailers.” I replied, “You know that book club you’re in? Well, my church was a lot like that, except we actually read the book.”

Anne Hutchinson is hosting more than a ladies’ study group. Dozens and dozens of Bostonians come to her home to hear her preach. Men start coming, too. And not just any old men—young Governor Henry Vane himself. She has something other people want, some combination of confidence and glamour and hope. She is the Puritan Oprah—a leader, a guru, a star.

Hutchinson, still swooning, spiritually speaking, for Cotton, nevertheless starts departing from her mentor’s lectures and lets rip her own opinions and beliefs.

One person keeping an eye on her, both theologically and literally, is John Winthrop, who lives across the street. (The site of her home would later house Ticknor and Fields, the famous book publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, appropriately, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in
The Scarlet Letter
’s first chapter, misspells her first name but nevertheless honors Hutchinson by describing a rose bush in bloom said to have “sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door” and symbolizing “some sweet moral blossom.” Nowadays, the place is a jewelry store. Last time I walked by it there were Canadian diamonds in the window with necklaces displayed next to photos of grazing caribou, grazing caribou apparently being a Canadian girl’s best friend.)

On October 21, 1636, Winthrop writes in his journal, “One Mrs. Hutchinson, a member of the church of Boston, a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit, brought over with her two dangerous errors.” Her first error, he says, is the belief “that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person.” Puritan orthodoxy prefers to think of said Holy Ghost as hanging around next to a person who has been saved—kind of like a garden-variety ghost, actually. Winthrop will later explain this with the analogy of a marriage: in “a union . . . as between husband and wife, he is a man still, and she a woman.” As opposed to Hutchinson’s version, in which the spirit dwells within,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
style.

As Edmund S. Morgan writes in
The Puritan Dilemma,
Hutchinson’s notion of the Holy Ghost living inside a believer “was dangerously close to a belief in immediate personal revelation.” Earlier, when I was trying to point out that the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony had little in common with present-day evangelical Christians, this is what I meant. Hutchinson’s emphasis on “immediate personal revelation”—radical at the time—is now a core value of many American Protestant sects, including the Pentecostal one I was raised in.

For example, my family attended church three times a week. Once, when I was around eight, I complained about having to go to the Wednesday-night sermon because sometimes it went late and I wanted to get home in time to watch my favorite TV show,
Charlie’s Angels.
Granted, that program’s teachings were often at odds with the teachings of the Wednesday-night sermon, which my mother discovered to her horror when my Barbie started ordering a green cocktail called a “grasshopper” and climbing into bed with Ken, whom she refused to marry because she was more interested in her career.