Twenty Moheags

In March of 1676 — the darkest weeks of King Philip's War — the Council of Connecticut sent for one particular old man: "that Edward Culver, w'th about 20 Moheags and Pequots, com up to Hartford forthwith." Not a captain. A wheelwright, baker, and brewer, past sixty, whom twenty Mohegan and Pequot fighting men would apparently ride to Hartford with because he asked them to.

This episode is the argument, in the open: which Edward the clerk meant, and why the answer matters; the receipts of an unglamorous life — bread, beer, and lodging "for the publicke good"; the farm that kept its Pequot name, Chepadaso, for a generation of English record-keeping; the family war story I had to give up, withdrawn in print rather than quietly deleted; the plunder declaration entered at the same day's sitting, "both of persons and corn or other estate," which an honest history cannot skip; and the Voluntown roll, where a Winthrop and a wronged neighbor stand a few names from the family's own unplaced puzzle, Ephraim.

The nations in that minute did not go anywhere: the Mohegan Tribe and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation are still the neighbors, on their own ground in the same river country.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.