Tweet
************************************************** ************
This Message Is Reprinted Under The Fair Use
Doctrine Of International Copyright Law:
_http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html_
(http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html)
************************************************** ************
FROM: THE GREENWICH TIME NEWSPAPER
_http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/local/scn-gt-massacre1mar05,0,1339665.story
?coll=green-news-local-headlines_
(http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/lo...ocal-headlines)
Historians Sift Clues To Long-Ago Massacre
Mar 5, 2006
By Michael Dinan
Staff Writer
Published March 5 2006
No gravestone marks their final resting place and no history book can
pinpoint the day they died.
Yet on a late winter morning in 1644, local history says, 130 Dutch and
English soldiers marched onto the Strickland Plains of Cos Cob to burn and
butcher some 600 to 1,000 Indians -- more than died at the Alamo and double the
toll at Little Bighorn.
"Roasted and tortured to agony by the fire, they darted out here and there
from the flames only to be brought to the ground by the unerring aim of the
soldiery, who were on the alert for the poor victims," Daniel Merritt Mead
wrote in his 1857 work, "History of Greenwich." "Finally their horrid moans and
cries were hushed, and the flames and the hissing of the boiling pools of
blood died away, leaving hundreds of crisped bodies on the blood-stained snow."
The slaughter of the Indians, including women and children, has been retold
many times since the era of Greenwich's founding in 1640 --Êa period of
bitter unrest between colonists and natives.
But the history of the so-called "Big Massacre" --Êwhich experts agree
pitted European forces, led from Old Greenwich's Tomac Cove by notorious Capt.
John Underhill, against Siwanoy Indians camped inland -- is beset today with
uncertainties, as historians debate where it happened. Based on the sole
firsthand account of the massacre, modern historians trace the soldiers' path much
farther north, into Westchester County, N.Y.
The difficulty with Mead's account is that it appears to rely on
questionable sources, though his dramatic telling has persisted enough to carve out a
niche in the Greenwich psyche, said Susan Richardson, former archivist of The
Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich.
"One of the problems with bad history is that when it's repeated often
enough, then it becomes the story," Richardson said. "He never says here's where
he got this or that. We don't know if this is something told by a member of
his family, or some yarn he heard hanging around Town Hall or over the wood
stove."
Mead may never have read the only eyewitness description of the massacre,
scrawled on seven pages by an anonymous Dutch soldier and lodged three years
later, in 1647, at the Royal Library in the Hague, Netherlands.
The soldier described the natives' final moments:
"They were surrounded and it was impossible for anyone to escape. In one
hour one counted 180 dead outside the houses. After that they did not dare to
come outside, keeping themselves inside and shooting with arrows through the
holes. The General, remarking that nothing else could be accomplished, decided
with the Sgt. Maj. van der Hil to put the houses to fire. Whereupon the Wild
(Indians) tried everything to escape, which they did not succeed in, from
either being burned by the fire or to die through our weapons. What was even
more remarkable was that among this big crowd of men, women and children one
could not hear anyone moan or scream."
According to the soldier, a small band of surviving Indians themselves
reported 500 dead.
The massacre's method --Êsetting fire to long houses, then stabbing or
shooting the fleeing natives --Êrecalls a far better known 1638 attack in Mystic,
also led by Underhill. That attack, a battle of the Pequot War in which an
estimated 500 natives were killed, is "comparable" to the 1644 massacre, said
Connecticut State Historian Walt Woodward.
"It's striking in some ways that the massacre of the Pequots has become a
focal point in Connecticut history where this 'secondary' event is
understudied, or unstudied," said Woodward, an assistant history professor at the
University of Connecticut.
More important to local historians, the soldier's account provides a sort of
treasure map to locating the Indian camp, a titillating series of clues
describing the terrain trod by the war party as it marched from Tomac Cove -- the
site of Old Greenwich's original "town dock" --Êto the Indian camp.
"All accounts and speculation as to the location of the Indian village stems
from those seven pages," Tony Godino, 61, of Bedford, N.Y., a retired
builder who has studied the massacre for 20 years, said on a recent evening from
the soldiers' landing site.
"This is where they started," Godino said. "This is the only place where the
water was deep enough."
Where the war party went from there is a subject of conjecture.
Newspapers, Inc.
This Message Is Reprinted Under The Fair Use
Doctrine Of International Copyright Law:
_http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html_
(http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html)
************************************************** ************
FROM: THE GREENWICH TIME NEWSPAPER
_http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/local/scn-gt-massacre1mar05,0,1339665.story
?coll=green-news-local-headlines_
(http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/lo...ocal-headlines)
Historians Sift Clues To Long-Ago Massacre
Mar 5, 2006
By Michael Dinan
Staff Writer
Published March 5 2006
No gravestone marks their final resting place and no history book can
pinpoint the day they died.
Yet on a late winter morning in 1644, local history says, 130 Dutch and
English soldiers marched onto the Strickland Plains of Cos Cob to burn and
butcher some 600 to 1,000 Indians -- more than died at the Alamo and double the
toll at Little Bighorn.
"Roasted and tortured to agony by the fire, they darted out here and there
from the flames only to be brought to the ground by the unerring aim of the
soldiery, who were on the alert for the poor victims," Daniel Merritt Mead
wrote in his 1857 work, "History of Greenwich." "Finally their horrid moans and
cries were hushed, and the flames and the hissing of the boiling pools of
blood died away, leaving hundreds of crisped bodies on the blood-stained snow."
The slaughter of the Indians, including women and children, has been retold
many times since the era of Greenwich's founding in 1640 --Êa period of
bitter unrest between colonists and natives.
But the history of the so-called "Big Massacre" --Êwhich experts agree
pitted European forces, led from Old Greenwich's Tomac Cove by notorious Capt.
John Underhill, against Siwanoy Indians camped inland -- is beset today with
uncertainties, as historians debate where it happened. Based on the sole
firsthand account of the massacre, modern historians trace the soldiers' path much
farther north, into Westchester County, N.Y.
The difficulty with Mead's account is that it appears to rely on
questionable sources, though his dramatic telling has persisted enough to carve out a
niche in the Greenwich psyche, said Susan Richardson, former archivist of The
Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich.
"One of the problems with bad history is that when it's repeated often
enough, then it becomes the story," Richardson said. "He never says here's where
he got this or that. We don't know if this is something told by a member of
his family, or some yarn he heard hanging around Town Hall or over the wood
stove."
Mead may never have read the only eyewitness description of the massacre,
scrawled on seven pages by an anonymous Dutch soldier and lodged three years
later, in 1647, at the Royal Library in the Hague, Netherlands.
The soldier described the natives' final moments:
"They were surrounded and it was impossible for anyone to escape. In one
hour one counted 180 dead outside the houses. After that they did not dare to
come outside, keeping themselves inside and shooting with arrows through the
holes. The General, remarking that nothing else could be accomplished, decided
with the Sgt. Maj. van der Hil to put the houses to fire. Whereupon the Wild
(Indians) tried everything to escape, which they did not succeed in, from
either being burned by the fire or to die through our weapons. What was even
more remarkable was that among this big crowd of men, women and children one
could not hear anyone moan or scream."
According to the soldier, a small band of surviving Indians themselves
reported 500 dead.
The massacre's method --Êsetting fire to long houses, then stabbing or
shooting the fleeing natives --Êrecalls a far better known 1638 attack in Mystic,
also led by Underhill. That attack, a battle of the Pequot War in which an
estimated 500 natives were killed, is "comparable" to the 1644 massacre, said
Connecticut State Historian Walt Woodward.
"It's striking in some ways that the massacre of the Pequots has become a
focal point in Connecticut history where this 'secondary' event is
understudied, or unstudied," said Woodward, an assistant history professor at the
University of Connecticut.
More important to local historians, the soldier's account provides a sort of
treasure map to locating the Indian camp, a titillating series of clues
describing the terrain trod by the war party as it marched from Tomac Cove -- the
site of Old Greenwich's original "town dock" --Êto the Indian camp.
"All accounts and speculation as to the location of the Indian village stems
from those seven pages," Tony Godino, 61, of Bedford, N.Y., a retired
builder who has studied the massacre for 20 years, said on a recent evening from
the soldiers' landing site.
"This is where they started," Godino said. "This is the only place where the
water was deep enough."
Where the war party went from there is a subject of conjecture.
Newspapers, Inc.
Comment