What actually happened: The Pequots were a powerful group of Indians who lived near the Connecticut River Valley in New England. In the early 1630’s the Pequots attempted to control the fur trade along the Connecticut River. In doing that, they became an annoyance to the Dutch and to a lesser extent the English.

The Pequots were hit hard by a smallpox epidemic in 1633. In late 1634 they sought help from the English against their Indian and European enemies. That turned out to be a bad move. English settlers moved in quickly. 800 of them settled in about a year-and-a-half.

Indian rivals of the Pequots spread rumors that the Pequots were plotting against the English. The Pequots were also to some extent caught in a budding inter-colonial rivalry between the English. The new Connecticut colony showed signs of wanting to operate independently of the parent colony of Massachusetts Bay. Massachusetts Bay, tried to intimidate the Pequots and assert their authority by sending a punitive expedition that forced the Pequots to go to war but didn’t particularly intimidate them. The Pequots and their allies retaliated with raids that killed under a dozen English men, women, and children.

The Connecticut English decided to settle the war once and for all. In May of 1637, an expedition of 90 settlers and around 570 Indians from tribes hostile to the Pequots (70 Mohegans under their wily sachem Uncas, and 500 Narragansetts) surrounded and burned the weaker of two fortified Pequot villages in a night attack. Under a dozen Pequots out of the 500 to 700 people in the village escaped. The rest were burned or shot to death.

Pequots from the main village heard the fighting and came to help their relatives. They arrived after the battle for the village was over. They were shocked and demoralized by the destruction. The remaining Pequots fled to surrounding tribes, or were rounded up by the English without major resistance.

With the Pequots out of the way, Connecticut quickly expanded. By 1675, it had grown to 10,000 people. That made the colony a major rival of the original Puritan colony of Massachusetts.

What might have happened: What if the English had run into a bit of bad luck on that May night in 1637? A sudden heavy rainstorm catches them a few miles from the Pequot village. As the rain comes down, the English and their allies have a major problem. It is possible to use a musket in the rain, but it is very difficult. It is even more difficult to use an Indian bow in the rain, because strings stretch when they get wet. The attack will have to wait until the rain stops, but that may not happen before morning.

The Narragansetts are already somewhat spooked. Large-scale attacks are rare in their warfare. So are night attacks. They are deep in enemy country and feeling increasingly vulnerable. They respect the fighting ability of the Pequots and don’t want to be caught on the enemy’s home ground when daylight comes. Their leaders strongly urge that the expedition be abandoned for the time being. When the English reject that advice, the Narragansetts leave.

The Mohegans decide to wait out the storm with the English. Their patience is rewarded after a few uncomfortable hours, as the rain slows down to an occasional drizzle. The allies continue to the Pequot village, and as in our time-line they achieve total surprise, surrounding the sleeping village, and firing a devastating first volley into it.

The battle unfolds the way it did in our time-line up to a point. Indians rush out to expel the invaders. They quickly discover that is a bad idea, and begin fighting from within their mat houses. The English discover that the Pequots have a major advantage if the English have to fight them house-to-house.

At that point the course of the battle in this time-line and ours diverge. In both time-lines, the English try to burn the Pequots out. In our time-line that worked. In this time-line, the recent rains make that at best a slow, uncertain process. The English are forced to fight the way the Pequots want them to fight—a series of deadly encounters at close range inside the Pequot village.

The two sides are numerically about equal—with 150 to 200 Pequot men facing approximately the same number of English and Mohegans. In an open field the English would have won rather easily. In an enemy village most of their advantages are partially neutralized.

Time is not on the side of the English. The main Pequot village is only five miles away. That means that the English have no more than an hour at most to win before Pequot reinforcements arrive. That doesn’t prove possible. As the fighting drags on, the English and the Mohegans inflict quite a few casualties, but they also take quite a few, mainly wounded but a few dead.

The English and especially the Mohegans are very aware that they are running out of time. The English decide to try a feigned retreat to draw the Pequots out of their shelters. Unfortunately for them, the feigned retreat becomes a real one when a few dozen fast running Pequots from the main village attack them from behind. The Mohegans promptly take to their heels, thinking that the main body of Pequot reinforcements has arrived.

The English are now deep in enemy territory, with no Indian guides, facing an unknown but possibly large number of enemies. They are for the most part not trained soldiers and almost none of them are at home in the woods. They attempt a retreat, which quickly becomes a rout. The main body of Pequots arrives and the Pequots spend the rest of the night hunting down little groups of Englishmen blundering around in the woods. Less than a dozen Englishmen escape. Most of the Mohegans get away, though twenty them are captured or killed, including Uncas.

In spite of their triumph the Pequots are hurt badly by the battle. They’ve lost nearly 100 warriors killed or badly injured, along with over 100 women and children, a heavy burden for a tribal society of fewer than four thousand people. They continue the war, but without a great deal of enthusiasm, making small raids on Connecticut settlements, but not risking large numbers of additional casualties.

On the other hand, captured muskets and other English military equipment give the Pequots a major boost, at least as long as captured gunpowder holds out. Before the battle the Pequots had a dozen or two useable muskets and no gunpowder. Now they have around 100, far more than any of the surrounding tribes. They use those muskets to take their revenge on the Mohegans, quickly killing, capturing, or dispersing the five hundred or so members of that tribe.

The infant colony of Connecticut is devastated by the defeat. They have lost a large portion of their male population, not to mention the muskets and other military equipment. They have also lost their chance at becoming independent of Massachusetts Bay colony, which for many of them was the point of settling in Connecticut in the first place.

Massachusetts Bay quickly moves a large enough garrison in to keep the Pequots from overrunning the infant colony. That garrison is also large enough to quell any attempt to establish Connecticut as a separate colony. The war gradually fizzles out. The Connecticut settlers are no longer in a position to act independently. Massachusetts Bay is reluctant to take on the now well-armed Pequots, and has an interest in maintaining an ongoing Pequot threat to keep the Connecticut colonists on a short leash. In the long term, Pequot and English interests will clash, but for now there is no longer a reason for that clash to come quickly.

So the Pequots have won their war. What happens next? The English population along the Connecticut River falls for a while, as war widows and timid or independence-minded settlers leave. The population eventually stabilizes and gradually starts back up, but much more slowly than in our time-line. The area simply isn’t as attractive to new settlers with the still-powerful Pequots uncomfortably close. By 1675 the population is still under 3000 English settlers.

Some of the people who would have settled in Connecticut settle in Massachusetts Bay. A few settle in the colony of New Haven, which in our time-line was absorbed by Connecticut. A couple thousand end up in New Providence, a Puritan colony on an island off the coast of Nicaragua. In our time-line the Spanish overran New Providence in 1641. Would the additional colonist make New Providence viable? I would love to explore that, but I think I need to focus on New England for now.

The Pequot victory makes the colonists somewhat more cautious about going out into the wilderness after still-powerful Indian groups. At the same time, it reinforces their belief that Indians in the vicinity of English settlement need to be kept on a short leash. Little remnant tribes near or inside the frontier lose much of their remaining autonomy.

In our time-line the Dutch drew the wrong lessons from the Pequot war and launched a foolish war that they ultimately couldn’t win against the Indians of the Wappinger Confederacy in New Holland (what is now New York). In this time-line they don’t make that mistake. That has major implications. In this time-line, the Dutch aren’t forced to give the Mohawks 300 muskets as a bribe to get them to help the Dutch keep the Wappingers in line. In our time-line, that unprecedented number of muskets helped the League of Iroquois win the Huron-Iroquois war. I’ll explore some alternatives in that war in the next essay.

One major implication of Pequot victory is that New England’s Indians are not outflanked by English settlements in the Connecticut River valley. That gives independence-minded tribes somewhere to retreat to as population pressure from the growing English colonies increases. Ultimately they’ll run into the League of Iroquois, but they will have ten to twenty years of additional maneuvering room before they are forced into a showdown with the colonists. If a showdown does come, New England tribes have more room to evade the colonists. It becomes much more likely that New England tribes will survive long enough to take part in the wars between France and England for dominance in North America.

The colonies also change. In our time-line Connecticut provided a counterbalance for the power of Massachusetts. In this time-line, Massachusetts is by far the dominant colony in New England, with Plymouth Bay, Rhode Island, and New Haven colonies regarding it as a major threat to their continued existence as independent colonies. That dynamic will have a major impact on what happens if and when the colonies become independent.

Without a strong local rival to keep it in check, Massachusetts Bay colony changes subtly. It has an ongoing military commitment in the Connecticut River area, which forces it to maintain military forces on an ongoing basis. That is a drain on its economy, and it alters the mindset of the Puritan government, subtly but definitely. The New England colonies are not forced to develop the habit of working together as reasonably equal governments which may have major implications in terms of the structure of any independent government of Englishmen in the New World.

As to the Pequots themselves, they are powerful, but increasingly dependent. They need guns and gunpowder to maintain their power, and increasingly their livelihood as they become dependent on firearms for hunting. Fortunately for them they are in a position to trade with either the English or the Dutch, but not close enough to a major English or Dutch center of population to be immediately threatened by it. They survive as an ethnic and political group, losing population from epidemics, but counter-balancing that by absorbing fragments of surrounding Indian tribes.

Long-term consequences: Nothing earthshaking from a continent-wide perspective comes from this, but from a Pequot perspective things change a lot. New England’s fur trade goes away along with the most valuable fur-bearing animals in the 1700s. With the fur trade gone, the Pequots gradually lose their independence and most of their land, as they are forced to sell off land to maintain their standard of living. They maintain a reasonably large reservation, and their population eventually recovers and expands in the 1800s. By 2002 there are over 15,000 Pequots living in the Greater Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which covers of most our time-line’s New England. Most Pequots still live around their old reservation, where a Pequot cultural revival is underway.