Who were the Pocumtuck people?
The Indigenous people known to us as Pocumtuck inhabited the territory that, in the present day, includes the towns of Deerfield, South Deerfield, Sunderland, and Greenfield in Massachusetts. The name Pocumtuck comes from the word Pocumpetekw (“by turns, swift, sandy, and shallow”), describing the river now called the Deerfield River. Culturally, these Indigenous people were Algonkian, and they spoke a dialect in the Algonquian language family. Politically, their closest allies were the neighboring Native communities along the Kwinitekw (“long river”) now called the Connecticut River: the Nonotuck of present-day Hadley, Hatfield, and Northampton; the Agawam of present-day Springfield and Agawam; the Woronoco of present-day Westfield; and the Sokoki of present-day Northfield and Brattleboro.
What were Pocumtuck lives like?
Like other Native people in present-day New England, Pocumtuck families moved seasonally throughout the landscape, hunting big and small game and waterfowl, gathering wild plant foods and medicines, fishing, and collecting wood. Some forested areas were periodically burned to clear out underbrush for easier travel and hunting, and to encourage the growth of berry bushes and nut-bearing trees.
Native technologies made it possible to live comfortably and sustainably. Specialized lithic tools (knives, axes, spears, projectile points) were chipped from flint for various purposes. Clothing was made from tanned animal hides and furs, sewn together with sinew and waterproofed with grease if needed. Plants like milkweed and dogwood were harvested and twined into thread for weaving baskets. These were also made from folded birch bark, or woven from splints harvested by pounding ash logs to separate into annual rings. Tasks like hunting, home-building, food gathering, and craftwork, in most Algonkian communities, were shared by men, women, and children alike, according to their particular abilities and skills.
Pocumtuck people had many dwelling sites in the region, where family kin groups clustered together, but there was no large central village. Pocumtuck homes, called wigwams, were constructed of various sizes, and were often portable. A traveling camp might be as simple as a triangle of saplings or a lean-to of logs covered with skins and branches. Larger homes were made with frameworks of saplings bent into dome-like shapes, covered with mats woven from reeds. Furs made for warm bedding materials. Extensive networks of foot trails and waterways, known by specific landmarks, enabled communication and travel throughout the landscape and between Native communities. Watercraft in the form of dugout and birchbark canoes facilitated travel along the rivers.
During the late Woodland era, roughly 1,000 years in the past, the Pocumtuck, like other Algonkian people in the Northeast, adopted the practice of maize horticulture, introduced from Native communities to the west and south. Small gardens were planted with the “Three Sisters,” corn, beans, and squash. Planting became a regular part of the seasonal round, with hunting in the winter, planting in the spring, traveling to harvest wild resources elsewhere during the summer, and returning to harvest in the fall.
What happened when English settlers met the Pocumtuck?
Pocumtuck people first encountered English settlers in the 1630s, when they paddled downriver to the new settlement of Springfield, in Agawam territory, to trade furs for English goods at the truck house set up by William and John Pynchon. Although a series of plagues had decimated Native populations on the Atlantic Coast, communities along the upper Connecticut River were still strong. Since the Pocumtuck and Nonotuck people were known to be fierce protectors of their territory, English settlers were reluctant to travel upriver. But the Pocumtuck were also generous; in 1638, during a devastating famine in the aftermath of the Pequot War, the Pocumtuck agreed to sell hundreds of bushels of corn to save the English settlements downriver from starvation.
In 1665, surveyors from the English town of Dedham in eastern Massachusetts, came west to the Connecticut River Valley looking for land. A section of Dedham had been turned into a “praying town” for local Nipmuc people who converted to Christianity, and town leaders sought to build a new English settlement elsewhere. John Pynchon was, at the time, acting as a fur trader and land broker, making arrangements to purchase Native lands along the Connecticut River. The pressures of over-hunting had caused a drop in fur-bearing animals, and Native individuals who traded with Pynchon had fallen into debt. Deeds and maps were drawn up to identify territories, settle the debts, and entice more English settlers to move in. However, many of those new English deeds reserved traditional rights, suggesting that Native people did not intend to leave the land that was supposedly “sold.” The deed for Deerfield signed by Chauk in 1666, for example, reserved the rights “of fishing for ye Indians in ye Rivers or waters & free Liberty to hunt deere or other wild creatures, & to gather walnuts chestnuts & other nuts things &c on ye Commons.”
Tensions built when it became clear that English settlers had no intention of honoring those Native rights. By 1675, Native people in the Connecticut River Valley were more than willing to join the rebellion started by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, who complained that English settlers had engaged in duplicitous land deals, violated peace agreements, and seemed intent on forcing all Indigenous peoples out of their homelands.
Wars
From 1675 to 1676, Metacom’s Rebellion, also called King Philip’s War, raged throughout the Massachusetts colony as Native communities combined forces in their attempt to drive out the English. Pocumtuck men joined in the attack on Brookfield, Massachusetts, and burned out the fledgling settlement of Deerfield. In May of 1676, Captain William Turner and his men retaliated in an attack at sunrise on the Pocumtuck summer fishing village of Peskeompskut (present-day Turners Falls and Gill), killing more than 300 women, children, and elderly people taking shelter while their men were fighting elsewhere.
In the aftermath of King Philip’s War, many Pocumtuck families left the valley, accepting shelter at a new refugee village in Mohican territory to the west. Others traveled north, joining Sokoki, Cowass, Pennacook, and other Abenaki communities. Some went even further north to join the Catholic missions in New France. During the 1690s, a large group of Pocumtuck families returned, settling near the familiar hillside of Pemawatchuwatunck (the Pocumtuck Range), but John Pynchon forced them to leave. The Pocumtuck and their Native neighbors in the valley were permanently labeled as enemy hostiles, and scalp bounties were imposed to encourage English soldiers to hunt them.
In the winter of 1704, in the midst of Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713, also called the “War of Spanish Succession”), a force of roughly 50 French soldiers and more than 200 Native allies (likely including some Pocumtuck men) attacked the English village of Deerfield. The goal was to halt the gradual expansion of English settlement and political domination in New England. One hundred twelve Deerfield residents were taken captive and marched to New France. Within two years, more than 60 captives had been redeemed and returned, but 26 chose to remain with the French and their Native allies.
What happened to the Pocumtuck people?
Most of the Pocumtuck people who found refuge among other Native communities in diaspora never returned to Deerfield, failing to exert the rights they had retained in earlier deeds. During the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s, some Pocumtuck families and their descendants passed through the valley regularly as part of their continuing habits of seasonal travel, but the hostility of English settlers made it unsafe to resettle there. The Pocumtuck who relocated northward and westward largely adopted the cultures of their host communities, but some of their language and memories survived. The most notable example was recorded by a Jesuit Priest in the 1740s, near Montreal, from Native refugees who came from a place they called the “long river” near a mountain, and who called themselves the amiskwôlowôkoiak, which translates to “people from the beaver-tail-hill.”
