Pequot War

Pequot War
Part of the American Indian Wars

A 19th-century engraving depicting an incident in the Pequot War
DateJuly 1636 – September 1638
Location
Result
  • Pequot defeat and massacre
Belligerents
Pequot tribe
Western Niantic people
Massachusetts Bay Colony
Plymouth Colony
Saybrook Colony
Connecticut Colony
Narragansett
Mohegans
Commanders and leaders
Pequot
Sassacus Executed
Western Niantic
Sassious
Massachusetts Bay
Henry Vane
John Winthrop
John Underhill
John Endecott
Plymouth
Edward Winslow
William Bradford
Myles Standish
Connecticut
Thomas Hooker
John Mason
Robert Seeley
Native allies
Uncas
Wequash Cooke
Miantonomoh

The Pequot War was an armed conflict that took place in 1636 and ended in 1638 in New England, between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists from the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequot. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity.[1] Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to colonists in Bermuda or the West Indies;[2] other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes.

The result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in southern New England, and the colonial authorities classified them as extinct. Survivors who remained in the area were absorbed into other local tribes.

  1. ^ John Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop. ed. Dunn, Savage, Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 228.
  2. ^ Lion Gardiner, "Relation of the Pequot Warres", in History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent, and Gardiner (Cleveland, 1897), p. 138; Ethel Boissevain, "Whatever Became of the New England Indians Shipped to Bermuda to be Sold as Slaves," Man in the Northwest 11 (Spring 1981), pp. 103–114; Karen O. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 172