The Pequot War of 1636-1638 was the first time that Europeans in the lands of today’s United States launched a fundamentally offensive war to reduce an American Indian tribe to ruin. Pious as they were, concerned as they were with God’s favor, the moral athletes of the Massachusetts Bay in the mid-1630s were the first Europeans who pretty much made it their business to wipe out an American Indian tribe. 

The question is, why? In this episode and the next, we look at the Pequot War, and the paranoiac misunderstandings that led to the most brutal fighting between Europeans and Indians in North America since Hernando de Soto had raged across Alabama in 1540.

[See the episode notes on the website, The History of the Americans, for a map of the Indians tribes in southern New England in 1630 or so, which might be useful for following the action in this episode and the next.]

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Selected references for this episode

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father

Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War

Charles Orr, History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardener

Timeline of the Pequot War