Mashantucket Pequot Community Records, 1813-1830

The vast majority of these materials are part of the New London County Court Records housed at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford, Connecticut, with the remainder residing in the collections of the Indian and Colonial Research Center in Old Mystic and the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford.

 

More than 2/3 of these digital heritage items are bills or invoices from individuals who provided goods and services to the community. While typically shorter in length, often these invoices yield additional details about entries that appear in the more general ledgers. This is certainly the case with the Mashantucket related invoices.  For example, while the general ledger might include an expense for a coffin, the corresponding bill from the carpenter might mention the name of the Pequot individual for whom the coffin was made.  Likewise, medical bills often include information regarding who was treated and in some case what the treatment was.  The accounts/ledgers themselves serve as a summary or tallying of the expenses and income of the community as provided by the overseer.  In general, the rental of reservation land to neighboring non-natives was the primary source of tribal income and was used to offset expenses such as food, supplies, and other necessaries billed to the tribe over the course of a given year. Of the documents referencing land rental there are more than a few that include important information about land use, functional landscape, and in some cases, use or hereditary rights to certain parcels of land on the reservation.

 

These records span a time period in which there are several significant cultural and historical events relevant to Mashantucket Pequot history, some of which are reflected in the documents themselves.  Similar to those of the neighboring Eastern Pequot community, this collection contains evidence of the continued connection between Brothertown Indians of Mashantucket Pequot descent and the larger Mashantucket Pequot community that remained in Connecticut.  Specifically, records show the return of Brothertown Indians to the Mashantucket reservation in the 1820s and 1830s to either visit or to collect funds that are due them.  Of course, these overseer records were penned in the context of other more local religious and temperance movements that emerged from the Second Great Awakening of which the Mashantucket Pequot were also a part, setting the stage at Mashantucket for the efforts of the Reverend William Apes, an itinerant preacher and activist of Pequot descent.

 

Perhaps most importantly, juxtaposed against these broader historical happenings, these records provide a glimpse into the day-to-day lives of members of the Mashantucket Pequot community in and around the reservation.  Highlighted in these materials are the economic realities associated with obtaining adequate food, housing, education, and healthcare on a much-diminished land base and in the face of a difficult to navigate State bureaucracy. 

 

Equally significant, the overseer records, as well as the biographies of the people associated with them, show the increasing presence of African Americans and People of Color in a shared social space with both the Eastern and Mashantucket Pequot as neighbors, friends, members of the same church, or sometimes spouses or partners.

 

Transcriptions, annotations, biographies, cultural narratives, and scholarly commentaries, as components of each digital heritage item, serve to add context and perspective, and allow a researcher to see beyond the columns of credits and debits and into the lives of the ancestors of today’s Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.

 

Below there are two entry points into the collection.  The first is an interactive timeline with links to digital heritage items and contextual information including the appointment of overseers as well as a number of other important community events.  The second is a listing of the contents of the collection, linking directly to relevant digital heritage items.