What
Happened to the Wangunks?
by Doris Sherrow, December 1999
The Wangunk
were a strong, resourceful people. Last month's column showed their
daily interaction with the early Portland community; this month we will
look at the events which marked the early decades of their reservation
in Portland.
In 1650, Connecticut's Governor Haynes
issued a proclamation assuring the Wangunk that they would have the riverbend
area of the Connecticut for a reservation. The General Assembly concurred
in October, 1664: "Ahere was a parcel of land at Wonggum reserved
for the posterity of Sowheage."
Englishmen began to settle Middletown in
1646. Before very long, they realized that they wanted the valuable riverbank
and meadow on the other side of the "Great River." Around 1670,
the Middletown Town Votes Book noted an offer to the Wangunk of
other undivided lands "of equal value." But the Wangunk knew
that there were no other lands of equal value: much of the undivided land
consisted of Meshomasick Mountain, capable of growing little but rattlesnakes.
They held their ground-quite literally!-and in 1673, the Middletown Proprietors
granted to thirteen Wangunk Proprietors the land that Haynes had promised
them, a small parcel on Indian Hill Avenue, and a larger parcel going
from Gildersleeve back to the present day Quarry Ridge Golf Course.
In 1675, war broke out between the colonists
in Massachusetts and the Wampanoag Indians under King Philip. The
Narragansetts, traditional allies of the Wangunk, sided with Philip, but
the Wangunk seem not to have wanted war. "The Wongham have showed
willingness to dwell peaceably in our towns..." remarked the General
Assembly. They were to "set their wigwams where the authority appoints..[to
be under] English watch and ward [and] not to go forth without Lycense
from the Authority ..." Furthermore, the Wangunk were to "engage
in friendship [and] be enemies of our enemies." To this end, the
civilized, God-fearing English offered them "two yards of cloth for
every head of our enemies ... four yeards [sic] if alive."
The Wangunk must have been in Portland by
this time, but several notations in the 1675-76 Colonial Records
show that no white men were in this area yet: all along the river from
East Windsor down to Glastonbury, a house in each town on the east side
was picked to be fortified, so that in the event of attack, settlers could
retreat to it. This fortification may have
involved a brick or stone lower story, or simply walls around the property.
No house in "East Middletown" was so fortified, meaning that
no English settlers were living in Portland until at least the 1680s.
Beginning in 1691, individual Wangunks began
to sell parcels of land, usually no more than an acre, to the settlers.
The earliest deeds were for meadow land, probably for farming, rather
than houselots. In their deeds the Wangunk often explained their claim
to the land, sometimes giving their ancestry in order to justify their
ownership. Towwehashque Sunck Squa, for example, who sold that
first piece of meadowland to John Clark in 1691, stated that she was the
daughter of Sowheage, to whom Haynes had vouchsafed the reservation.
There is no indication in these deeds that
the English were taking advantage of their native neighbors. Land prices
ran about the same, and, except for the Indians' genealogy notes, which
the English didn't usually include, there were no differences between
the Indian-to-English deeds and the Englishto-English deeds.
The degree of their input on their land
sales becomes obvious in a 1717 deed for six acres sold to a prosperous
Middletown mariner named Giles Hall. The lot was located at what
is today the northeast comer of Main and Summer streets. The Wangunk included
a right-of-way for the highway that would become Summer Street. In the
deed, they described it as running from the brook which gurgles near Summer
and Prospect streets, out toward Main Street, that is, from their vantage
point inside the reservation, OUT toward the white man's main street!
Had the words of this deed been put in their mouths by whites, the description
of that road would have run from Main Street into the Wangunk territory.
There may have been unrest among the Wangunk.
In 1726, several of the Wangunk filed with the town clerk a record of
their descent from the Wangunk Proprietors of the 1673 deed. They were
descended from Wesumsha and Pewampskin. One of the most
common names in the surviving Wangunk documents is "Cuschoy,"
used by itself, with Sr. and Jr., and with English names such as Moses,
Tom, and Benjamin. The Cuschoy were descended from Robin, also
called "Doctor Robbin." It seems as if the Cuschoy were
overpowering the other descendants of the Proprietors, hence the nervous
assertion of their inherited ownership by these several Wangunk.
Yet in many ways, the Wangunk participated
in the life of the community. In the 1720S and 1730s, they assisted in
laying out the eastern parts of Bartlett and William streets, and the
section of High Street between them. They supplied the land, and in the
case of part of High and William streets, they supplied one of the surveyors,
Cuschoy.
Several of the deeds from various Wangunk
tribe members refer to the buyer's occupation: Samuel Cotton, "Housewright,"
Francis Whitmore, "Taylor," and Ebenezer Prout, "physitian."
This implies that the Wangunk were availing themselves of the services
of these men.
It is hard to say what sort of problem it
was to be a young, developing town with an Indian reservation smack dab
in the middle of your territory. Last month's description of the Wangunk
was intended to convey what appears to be a definite good-neighbor interaction
between the two cultures. By the 1730s, there seem to have been forces
which wanted the Wangunk Reservation out of the heart of Portland.
(To be continued...)
