Beginnings.

Between 1634 and 1638 the population of the Massachusetts Bay Colony rose from about four thousand to more than eleven thousand all as a result of migration from England. As new arrivals began to crowd the coastal areas, Puritan colonists began to look to their west, into territory controlled by the Pequots and their allies, for additional lands. In 1635 colonists led by the former Baptist minister Thomas Hooker left present-day Cambridge, Massachusetts, and established the colony of Hartford. Simultaneously, a group of squatters—settlers with little or no legal claim to the land—from Watertown moved near the Pequot town of Pyquag and renamed it Wethersfield. At the same time, a group of English investors called the Saybrook Company built Fort Saybrook near the mouth of the Connecticut River, near the Pequot village of Mystic.

Native Allegiances.

The Pequots were the dominant native people...