Petition of Thomas Jernegan and Other Chappaquiddick Indians to the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives

To the Honorable the Senate and the Honorable the House of Representatives in General Court Assembled

Humbly shews that we, the undersigned proprietors of lands situate on the Island of Chappaquiddick in the County of Dukes County, feeling ourselves highly aggrieved at the evil conduct of the Indians and Coloured People of said Island, for many years past by their invading our said lands, pulling down and destroying the fence and cutting, carrying away, and converting to their own use the wood standing and growing thereon without our liberty, and in open defiance of the laws of this Commonwealth.  We have thought it advisable to represent to Your Honors our grievances aforesaid, requesting your attention to the same, praying that you provide some way or means to suppress and put a stop to a practice so pernicious and injurious to our interest and the peace of the White inhabitants of said Island, that unless the said practice be suppressed the wood still standing and growing on our lands aforesaid will be so reduced and destroyed as to render them scarcely worth our possessing, that every endeavor by all reasonable means on our part to put a stop to said practice has proved ineffectual, that they the said Indians and Coloured People have, from time to time, cut down, laid waste and destroyed large quantities of wood belonging to us the undersigned.  Your complainants are ready to produce the most satisfactory proof before any court to try the same that the said aggressors not only during the last winter persisted in said practice but still persist in it, that we, your complainants, esteem the said practice to be a subject of sufficient magnitude to make at our incumbent duty to lay the same before Your Honors and to urge the necessity of due notice being taken thereof, that an entire stop may be put to a course of conduct calculated to impoverish your complainants and disturb the peace of the White community of said Island, that we, knowing the inability of the aggressors aforesaid, by means of their idleness’ and poverty, to pay any expense which might accrue to them from a suit or suits being brought for trespass now stands is no terrour to them for to put them to jail the complainant is put to cost and the debtor may swear out and commits the same act.  It appears to us that there ought to be some special law or mode of punishment enacted so that, if possible, a stop may be put to so gross an evil.

As in duty bound will ever pray,

• 1. The term "attorney" is meant here as a legal representative or proxy.