and ceramics from the Connecticut Valley for copper coming from Nova Scotia and the Great Lakes, stone for toolmaking from areas in present-day Pennsylvania, and shells, wampum, and seafood from New England’s coastal communities. Historical sources show that Connecticut Valley communities continued to produce large agricultural surpluses for trade to northern and coastal New England even after the return of (again, slightly) warmer temperatures led to the readoption of crop cultivation elsewhere.10
The earliest English colonists in North America invariably relied upon the preexisting Indian provisions trade for the survival of their settlements. For example, the settlers of England’s first permanent American colony, Jamestown, at first proved notoriously bad at feeding themselves. Those who survived the colony’s early years relied on the flow of agricultural surpluses that undergirded Powhatan’s empire, receiving food as gifts, trading for corn, and eventually using violence to extort provisions from the Indians of coastal Virginia. Captain John Smith believed that subsequent colonies could likewise rely on America’s Native communities to supply them with food. In 1616, he assured English readers that settlers in the “New England” which he had recently returned from exploring would be able to purchase corn from neighboring Indians “for a few trifles,” and thus sustain themselves until their own plantations had been firmly established. For Smith, New England agriculture was not an end in itself. Rather, Indian corn, and eventually the provisions that the colonists grew for themselves, would support the production of “merchandable fish” and “other commodities.”11
Whether intentionally or not, the early settlers of New England followed Jamestown’s lead by relying on local Indians for their initial subsistence. Perhaps taking Smith’s advice too much to heart, the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth four years later relied on Indian corn to get through their first winter—although their decision to ransack abandoned Wampanoag villages and gravesites for grain caches likely alienated their would-be trading partners and contributed to the deaths of about half of the Mayflower’s passengers. Luckily, an improvement in relations with the Wampanoags early in 1621 allowed the foundering colony to trade for seed corn. A decade later, Podunk leader Wahginnacut recognized the potential of appealing to English bellies in his search for a European trading partner, offering the leaders of Massachusetts Bay both land for a new settlement along the Connecticut River and corn to feed its settlers.12 As John Smith had recommended, the founders of the Connecticut Valley’s first English towns hoped to rely on Indian neighbors for provisions while extracting the region’s “merchandable” furs for sale to Europe.
Self-sufficiency was not easily achieved by settlers accustomed to an agricultural system developed in a society where labor was plentiful and most fields and meadows had been cleared generations ago and kept plowed, fenced, and manured annually ever since. Even given the great fertility of valley lands, and despite the fact that they were often able to take advantage of abandoned Indian fields for their early crops, there was no chance that the eight hundred English men, women, and children who moved to the banks of the Connecticut in the 1630s would be able to feed themselves without the support of local Indian communities. As at Jamestown, this dependence on the Indian provisioning trade left Connecticut Valley colonists ill at ease when famine threatened, eventually contributing to the outbreak of violence in the Pequot War.
Imperial competition and the English desire to dominate the fur trade provided the overarching impetus for the war, but hunger and a fear of famine helped to trigger the descent into violence. The two men whose deaths ostensibly sparked the war, John Stone and John Oldham, made for unlikely martyrs. Stone was a drunkard, a blasphemer, a kidnapper, and probably a pirate. Oldham lived in Plymouth only about a year before the colony’s leaders exiled him for his tendencies toward violence and rebellion. Unlike Stone, Oldham did eventually achieve a degree of respectability as a trader in the Bay Colony, but his slaying under unclear circumstances by Niantics on Block Island seems a poor justification for English colonists’ subsequent campaign to eliminate the Pequot as a nation. A number of ulterior motives—land hunger, the lure of fur trade profits, and a desire to wrest regional political hegemony from the Pequots and Dutch—better explain the English rush to war. To these may be added one further factor which helps to explain both the war’s timing and the importance that Stone’s and Oldham’s deaths likely played in English calculations: access to Indian corn.13
Recent scholarship suggests that the specter of famine stalked the communities of southern New England—native and colonist alike—in the years 1635–1636. The prospect of hunger loomed especially dire in the newly planted English towns of the Connecticut Valley. Native Americans in New England had first seen their food security threatened by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634. The disease devastated Indian communities, incapacitating and killing hunters and agriculturalists in the prime of life. Survivors, many still recovering from the ravages of illness, struggled to maintain their subsistence as best they could even as they mourned their dead. To compound problems, a hurricane struck southeastern New England in the summer of 1635, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Only a few years old, many English towns in Massachusetts and, especially, in the Connecticut Valley still struggled to achieve self-sufficiency in food and relied heavily on trade with Indian villages to stave off starvation.14
Although they may not have always been welcome in polite society, traders like Stone and Oldham served as linchpins within this nascent regional commercial network. Few other colonists possessed the experience, knowledge, and contacts needed to strike deals with Indian villages while also successfully navigating the often-treacherous waters of the New England coast. The waterborne trade carried on by a handful of merchants like Stone and Oldham provided a lifeline to the early settlers of the Connecticut Valley. In the 1630s, English settlements still only hugged the coast of what these newcomers aspirationally labeled “New England.” The territory separating the Massachusetts Bay from the Connecticut Valley belonged to communities of Massachusetts and Nipmucs and was crisscrossed by Indian paths too rough for English carts. The deaths of Stone and Oldham threatened to cut the English towns of the Connecticut Valley off from both Indian corn suppliers and any assistance that might otherwise be forthcoming from the English settlements of eastern New England. Worse yet, if the murders of Stone and Oldham signaled a new unwillingness on the part of Indian communities to trade away their own (likely diminished) supplies of corn, then the English towns faced the prospect of a hungry future.15
War offered the beleaguered towns of the Connecticut an immediate solution to their food shortages. As the corn trade floundered amid worsening relations with the Pequots, settlers instead filled their cellars with food raided from Indian stores. Early raids against the Niantics of Block Island and the Pequots at the mouth of the Thames, ostensibly to chastise those communities for their roles in Stone’s and Oldham’s deaths, yielded large caches of corn that the English hauled back to their towns. Connecticut militiamen continued their raids for corn into 1638, long after Pequot power had been effectively crushed. Along with captives/slaves, corn was one of the principal spoils that the victorious English divided up among themselves and their Narragansett and other Indian allies at war’s end.16
This victory bought the fledgling Connecticut Valley towns a respite, but did not free them from their dependence on the Indian corn trade. In early 1638, the English—riding high after their victory over the Pequots—sought to impose greater control over the provisions trade of the Connecticut Valley by fixing the price at which corn could be purchased from Indians at five shillings a bushel.17 Unfortunately, when William Pynchon, acting as broker for the Connecticut towns, attempted to buy provisions at this rate, he encountered few willing to sell. He came away empty-handed from successive visits to the villages of Agawam, Woronoco, and Nonotuck. It was only after pushing farther north to Pocumtuck that he was able to secure five hundred bushels of corn in exchange for three hundred fathoms of wampum. Despite his having saved the residents of Hartford from starvation, the Massachusetts government fined Pynchon for overpaying. A few months later, Captain John Mason of Connecticut (a leader of the previous year’s Mystic Massacre of almost five hundred Pequots, mostly women and children) managed to procure fifty canoes loaded with corn from Indians upriver “at a reasonable rate,” but only by approaching his Indian trading partners with an armed militia at his back. The Pequot War may have laid the foundations for English hegemony in the valley, but as