Pequot War, war fought in 1636–37 by the Pequot people against a coalition of English settlers from the Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Saybrook colonies and their Native American allies (including the Narragansett and Mohegan) that eliminated the Pequot as an impediment to English colonization of southern New England. It was an especially brutal war and the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and Europeans in northeastern North America.
Pequot War
Pequot War
English colonists under the command of Capt. John Mason attacking the Pequot fort at Mistick, Connecticut, in May 1637 during the Pequot War.
© North Wind Picture Archives
To best understand the Pequot War, one needs to consider the economic, political, and cultural changes brought about by the arrival of the Dutch on Long Island and in the Connecticut River valley at the beginning of the 17th century and of English traders and settlers in the early 1630s. The world into which they entered was dominated by the Pequot, who had subjugated dozens of other tribes throughout the area during the 1620s and early ’30s in an attempt to control the region’s fur and wampum trade. Through the use of diplomacy, coercion, intermarriage, and warfare, by 1635 the Pequot had exerted their economic, political, and military control over the whole of modern-day Connecticut and eastern Long Island and, in the process, established a confederacy of dozens of tribes in the region.
