General Discussion

"ordered troops to march against the starving Sioux in Minnesota"

You mean the ones that Dee Brown described like this?

"Another reason was the indiscriminate killing of white settlers on the north side of the Minnesota River, a bloody slaughter carried out by marauding bands of undisciplined young men while Little Crow was besieging Fort Ridgely. Several hundred settlers had been trapped in their cabins without warning. Many had been brutally slain. Others had fled to safety, some to the villages of Sioux bands that Little Crow hoped would join his cause." (BMHWK pp 51-52)

Yeah, the poor dears were just starving. Its not like they were killing people or anything.

For another thing she makes it sound like Mystic happened a) at Thanksgiving and b) out of nowhere.

Pure bullsh*t. It happened on 26 May 1637 and it was in the midst of a war. You know, there was an attack on Wethersfield a month earlier.

"23 April 1637
Attack on settlers working in field near Wethersfield, in retribution for confiscation of land belonging to Sowheag, a sachem. Seven to nine settlers are killed and two girls are taken captive."

Wilson says this about that attack (in his pro-Indian book "The Earth Shall Weep"
"Even this (attack on Wethersfield) when set against Endecott's massacre on Block Island (which killed 90, mostly Naragansetts), seems (and was almost certainly intended to be) a fairly measured reprisal, but it provoked intense fear and anger amongst the colonists." (TESW p. 89)

Note, the attack produced - intense fear and anger.

Meanwhile Uncas, a Mohegan rival to the Pequot sachem, was stirring up crap, basically playing the colonists for his own purposes, again, here is Wilson

"Uncas - who voraciously seized the opportunity to undermine Sassacus's position by suggesting that 'out of desperate madnesse' he planned an all-out war against the settlers.' (TESW p. 89)

And this business about the Wampanoag chief. Is she perhaps talking about King Phillip? 38 years later after the events of 1637? There was 50 years of relative peace between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims after 1620. Then there was King Phillip's war (of course Francis Jennings calls that the Pilgrim's "Second war of conquest". But are we supposed to pretend that this did not happen?

During King Phillip's war, the Wampanoags, and their allies, wiped out 13 settlements and killed 600 settlers.

As the descendant of some of those Pilgrim's am I supposed to be sad because the Indians did not win the war and wipe out the Pilgrims? (Well as Queen sang I do "sometimes wish I'd never been born at all" but perhaps there will be better months ahead.)

Of course, we are supposed to remember and feel deep shame about the 300-700 Indians who were killed at Mystic.

In the meantime, probably nobody has ever heard or will ever remember the 10,400 people killed at the Battle of Noerdlingen in 1634. Perhaps 10,000,000 Germans died in the thirty years war (many of them from plagues spread by the war) from 1618-48 but it is only a genocide when 3 million Indians die of disease. (Best population estimates I have seen are in Thornton's "American Indian holocaust and survival" which shows a population of about 5 million in 1492 which was down by 40% by 1600, before there was any significant English settlement.)