Mystic River Rising: The Pequot War and the Fall of a Nation
By Nathaniel Cole Bradstreet
Length3h 52m
About this audiobook
Along the coast of what is now Connecticut, a belt of wampum could carry a treaty, a marriage or a grief, and speak for a man two hundred miles away. Nobody spent one the way you would spend a handful of corn. Then Dutch and English traders arrived wanting beaver pelts and shell beads, and began to spend wampum as money. The Pequot held the shores where the quahog and whelk were gathered and the rivers that brought furs down from the interior, and that position made them the strongest people in southern New England when the English came.
Their great sachem was Sassacus, a man the English remembered for the way his gaze fixed on a stranger and did not move. In July 1636 the trader John Oldham was killed off Block Island, and Massachusetts sent soldiers to take revenge on the island and then on the Pequot coast. Within a year Connecticut and Massachusetts, with Mohegan and Narragansett allies, were at war with the Pequot, and on May 26, 1637, they surrounded the palisaded town at Mystic, set it on fire, and killed the people who tried to escape. Hundreds died, and most of the dead were women, children and the elderly.
Sassacus fled west toward the Mohawk, who killed him that summer. By the Treaty of Hartford in 1638 the victors divided the surviving Pequot among the Mohegan and the Narragansett and forbade the use of their name. What came after was captivity, the rise of Uncas and the Mohegan, and the long survival of the Pequot themselves. The treaty outlawed a name. The Pequot kept it.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length3 hrs 52 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The River of Black Snakes
2Chapter 2: Wampum and Beaver
3Chapter 3: The Killings on the Water
4Chapter 4: A Connecticut Alliance
5Chapter 5: Into the Swamp Country
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6Chapter 6: Mystic, May 26, 1637
7Chapter 7: Sassacus's Flight
8Chapter 8: The Captive People
9Chapter 9: The Name Erased
10Chapter 10: Uncas and the Long Peace of the Bay
11Chapter 11: Pequot Survivance
12Chapter 12: What the Fire Left
13About the Author
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