The Significance of the Pequot War of 1637 was that.

Between 1636 and 1638 in New England, there was an armed conflict between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the Massachusetts Bay, Pilgrim, and Saybrook colonies.The Pequot were defeated in the war.700 Pequots were killed or taken into captivity.Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the colonies in the West Indies.

The Pequot tribe was classified as extinct by the colonial authorities after they eliminated them as a viable polity in Southern New England.The survivors who remained in the area were absorbed into other tribes.

There is a dispute over the meaning of the name Pequot.The theories of Frank Speck, an early 20th-century anthropologist and specialist of the Pequot-Mohegan language, are the basis of most recent sources.After reading about the "shallowness of a body of water", he had doubts about this etymology.[4]

There was a time when the Pequot and the Mohegan people were a single sociopolitical entity.Historians say that the two competing groups split before contact with the Puritan English.The Pequot people migrated from the upper Hudson River Valley to central and eastern Connecticut around 1500.The evidence of modern archaeology and anthropology does not agree with these claims.[5]

The Connecticut River Valley was in turmoil in the 1630s.At the expense of the Wampanoag, the Pequot extended their area of control to the east, as well as the Connecticut River Valley and the people of Long Island.The tribes wanted control of the European fur trade.There was a power vacuum in the area because of a series of epidemics that reduced the Indian population.

The Dutch and English were trying to expand their trade into the North American interior to achieve dominance.The original settlements of the colonies were founded in the 1620s.The Dutch fortified their trading post while the English built a trading fort.The four recently established river towns of Windsor, Wethersfield, Hartford, and Springfield were settled by English Puritans.

Tensions between the tribes of southeastern New England and the English began to increase in the early 1630s.Efforts to control fur trade access resulted in a series of attacks that increased tensions on both sides.The Pequots and the Mohegans aligned with different trade sources, including the English and Dutch.When a tribe of Indians tried to trade in the area of Hartford, they were attacked by the Pequots.As the Massachusetts Bay Colony became a stronghold for wampum production, tensions grew.[7]

John Stone and seven of his crew were murdered in 1634 by the Western clients of the Pequots.The Pequots claimed to be unaware that Stone was English, and that they murdered him in reprisal for the Dutch murder of the sachem.The Pequots knew Stone to be English, according to some accounts.In the earlier incident, he boarded a Dutch vessel to trade.The Dutch seized the sachem and demanded a large amount of money for his safe return.The Pequots sent a lot of wampum, but only received one dead person in return.Stone had been kicked out of Boston for drunkenness, adultery, and piracy.He forced the two Western Niantic men to show him the way up the Connecticut River.He and his crew were killed by a larger group of Western Niantics.The initial reactions in Boston varied from indifference to joy at Stone's death, but the colonial officials still felt compelled to protest the killing.They didn't accept the Pequots' excuses that they were unaware of Stone's nationality.The warriors responsible for Stone's death were given some wampum to atone for, but they were not handed over to the colonists for trial and punishment.It was [13].

The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 put a lot of pressure on the harvests of that year, increasing competition for winter food supplies for several years afterwards throughout much of coastal Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.The English were ill-prepared to face periods of famine and the Pequots were not.There are no comments at this time.

The war was caused by the killing of a trader named John Oldham who was attacked on a voyage to Block Island.He and several of his crew were killed and his ship was stolen by Indians who wanted to discourage settlers from trading with their rivals.Prior to the incident on Block Island, Oldham had been exiled fromPlymouth Colony, where he had a reputation as a trouble maker.The officials from Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Connecticut assumed that the culprits were the Narragansetts.They were suspicious of the Narragansetts because they knew that the Indians of Block Island were allied with the Eastern Niantics.The murderers escaped and were given sanctuary by the Pequots.[17]

The subject of sermons in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the news of Oldham's death.John Endecott was sent by Governor Vane to exact revenge on the Indians of Block Island.Endecott's party of roughly 90 men sailed to Block Island and attacked two abandoned villages.Endecott's men were injured, but most of the Niantic escaped.The English claimed to have killed 14, but later reports claimed that only one Indian was killed on the island.The villages were burned to the ground by the Massachusetts Bay militia.They destroyed crops that the Niantic had stored for the winter.Endecott went to Fort Saybrook.

The English at Saybrook were not happy about the raid, but agreed that some of them would accompany Endecott as guides.The previous year Endecott demanded that those responsible for the death of Stone and the murder of Oldham be brought to justice.Endecott concluded that the Pequots were stalling and attacking, but most of them escaped into the woods.The village and crops were burned down by Endecott's forces.

The English of Connecticut Colony had to deal with the anger of the Pequots.The Pequots tried to get their allies to join their cause, but were only partially effective.The Eastern Niantic remained neutral as the Western Niantic joined them.The English were supported by the traditional enemies of the Pequot.In 1622, the Narragansetts lost territory to the Pequots.Roger Williams urged the Narragansetts to side with the English.

Fort Saybrook was effectively besieged through the autumn and winter.People who went outside were killed.In 1637, the Pequots intensified their raids on Connecticut towns.On April 23, Wongunk chief Sequin attacked Wethersfield.They took two young girls captive and killed a number of men and women.William Swaine's daughters were later kidnapped by Dutch traders.The towns lost about thirty settlers.

In May, leaders of Connecticut river towns met in Hartford, raised a militia, and placed Captain John Mason in command.Mason ordered his militia and warriors to attack the Pequot at their fort.At Fort Saybrook, Captain Mason was joined by another twenty men.The English sailors sailed from Fort Saybrook to the bay in order to fool Pequot spies into thinking the English were not planning an attack.After gaining the support of 200 Narragansetts, Mason and Underhill marched their forces with Uncas and Wequash Cooke towards Mistick Fort.They briefly camped at Porter's Rocks before launching a surprise attack just before dawn.

In the pre-dawn hours of May 26, 1637, Captains John Mason and John Underhill, along with their allies from the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes, surrounded one of two main fortified Pequot villages at Mistick.They used fire to create chaos and facilitate their escape after only 20 soldiers broke through the gate.Those who escaped the fire were killed by the soldiers and warriors who surrounded the fort.

The Pequot fort was made a fiery Oven by the act of a God who "laughed his Enemies and the En emies of his People to disdain", according to Mason.Of the estimated 500 Pequots in the fort, seven were taken prisoner and another seven escaped.[23]

The Englishmen's fight was too furious and killed too many men.The Narragansetts attempted to leave and return home but were cut off by the Pequots from the other village of Weinshauks and had to be rescued by Underhill's men.

After the destruction of the village at Mistick Fort and the loss of more warriors during the withdrawal pursuit, the Pequot decided to abandon their villages and seek refuge with the Mohawk tribe.The Pequots killed three men near Fort Saybrook when they crossed the Connecticut River.

John Mason set out from Saybrook with 160 men and 40 scouts.They caught up with the refugees at Sasqua.The Great Swamp Fight during King Philip's War was not memorialized by the colonists.The English surrounded the swamp and allowed several hundred to surrender, most of them women and children.

The Mohawk in New York was where the followers of Sassacus hoped to find refuge.After murdering him and his bodyguard, the Mohawk sent his head and hands to Hartford.After war's end, colonial officials continued to call for hunting down what remained of the Pequots, but they granted asylum to anyone who went to live with the tribes.[26]

After a meeting at the General Court of Connecticut, the tribes agreed on the disposition of the Pequot survivors.The first Treaty of Hartford was signed in 1638.After surviving the war, about 200 Pequots gave up and submitted themselves under the authority of the sachem.

When he should satisfy for a Mare of Edward Pomroye's killed by his Men, there were given to Onkos, Sachem of Monheag, Eighty, and to Myan Tonimo, who is from Narragansett.The Pequots were bound by a Covenant, that no one should live in their native country, and that they should be called Moheag and Narragansatts.27]:18

Pequots were either enslaved or forced to become household slaves in English households in Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay.The Pequots were declared extinct by the Colonies because they couldn't use the name anymore.