Pawtucket tribe

William Wood's 1634 map showing locations of Pawtucket Sagamores James and John.[2]

The Pawtucket lived in northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire. They specifically resided in the Merrimack Valley, near the Pawtucket Falls and what is now Lowell, Massachusetts.[1]

At the time of contact with Europeans, Nanepashemet was a sachem of the group, controlling lands from the present day Charles River north to the Piscataqua River and west to the present day Concord River. He was killed in 1617 or 1619 in present day Medford, Massachusetts in conflict with the Tarrantines, an Eastern Algonquian exonym for Miꞌkmaq, where his burial place was found by Edward Winslow in a scouting party from Plymouth.[3] After his death, leadership of the group passed to his wife, known only to history as the Squaw Sachem of Mystic, who administered the region jointly with their three sons Wonohaquaham or "Sagamore John," Montowampate or "Sagamore James," and Wenepoykin or "Sagamore George."[2]

Passaconaway was also recorded as being a Pawtucket chief sachem, who also controlled the Wamesit, Pascataqua, and Pennacook peoples.[1]

In 1633, a smallpox epidemic killed both Wonohaquaham and Montowampate along with a large portion of the tribe, leaving Wenepoykin and the Squaw Sachem as the leaders of a much smaller group. When the Squaw Sachem died in roughly 1650, Wenepoykin became sole sachem of territory extending from present day Winthrop to Malden to North Reading to Lynn or even Salem, however his attempts to assert his claim to these lands through the settler's legal system were largely ineffective. During the next two decades, the size of the group further declined as the British Long Parliament and the Massachusetts General Court worked to relocate Native Americans into praying towns such as Natick, Massachusetts, drawing some converts from within Weyepoykin's family.

In 1675, Wenepoykin and some of the remaining Pawtucket joined Metacomet in King Philip's War, which was a stark turning point in the history of Native Americans in New England, and for the Pawtucket/Naumkeag in particular. Wenepoykin was taken captive the next year in 1676 and sold into slavery in Barbados. During this same time, over 1000 nonbelligerent Praying Indians, some of them originally Pawtucket, were interned on Deer Island but only 167 survived to return to Praying Towns.

After eight years of slavery in Barbados, Wenepoykin returned to Massachusetts through the intercession of John Eliot, where he joined some remaining family members in Natick, but died later the same year, leaving his lands to a maternal kinsman James Rumney Marsh,[4] though by this time most of the hereditary territory of the sachem was occupied by English settlers. At this point, the history of the Pawtucket blends with the history of other native groups who joined to create a community at Natick, Massachusetts.

• Naumkeag people
• Pennacook
• Praying Indians of Natick

• Willey, George Franklyn (1895). Willey's Book of Nutfield. Derry Depot, NH: George F. Willey, Publisher. pp. 190–193.