The Praying Towns: Nipmuc Survival in Colonial New England
By Margaret Ellsworth Cheney
Length4h 30m
About this audiobook
What startled the people gathered at Nonantum on October 28, 1646, was not the sermon. It was that the Englishman giving it had bothered to learn their language. John Eliot spoke to Waban's people in Massachusett, heavily accented and stopping now and then to be corrected, about one God who made all things. His listeners kept their own counsel. They had heard English promises before, and a sickness had already emptied their villages once.
Out of that morning grew fourteen praying towns by the early 1670s, and a Bible that Eliot and his Native collaborators printed in Massachusett in 1663, the first complete Bible printed anywhere in the Americas. Deeds and fences came with them, then the death of John Sassamon and King Philip's War. Nipmuc men who would not pray fought the English; Christian Indians, trusted by neither side, were shipped to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where many died that winter. Many of the survivors went home to Natick and spent the next century defending what land they had left, and today the language of Eliot's Bible is being spoken again. In Grafton, a few acres of old Hassanamesit remain Nipmuc land.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 30 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Water and the Word
2Chapter 2: A Language Made Printable
3Chapter 3: The Seven Praying Towns and the Nipmuc Sachems
4Chapter 4: Deeds, Fences, and the Losing of Hassanamesit
5Chapter 5: John Sassamon and the Road to War
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6Chapter 6: The Men Who Would Not Pray: Nipmuc in the War
7Chapter 7: Deer Island
8Chapter 8: The Weight of the Bible
9Chapter 9: Natick and the Survivors
10Chapter 10: The Nipmuc and the Question of Land in the 18th Century
11Chapter 11: The Bible in the Language of the People
12Chapter 12: Wabanay Aquene: Still Here
13About the Author
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