Wampus, John, - 1679

John Wampus (alias John White) was the son of the Nipmuck leader Wampus of Hassanamessit.  Exposed to the teaching of John Eliot as a child, Wampus was raised in the household of Isaac Heath, an elder of the Roxbury Church, where he became fluent in English.  In 1661 he married Ann Prask, daughter of Romanock, the sachem of Aspatuck and Sasquaugh.  Called “a towardly lad and apt witt for a scholler,” he entered Harvard College in 1665 but left the next year for the maritime trade.  He and his wife resided in Boston, taking on the English form of his last name, White.  In 1670 the Natick relied on Wampus’ literacy to protect their lands.  From all appearances, he became a land speculator in Massachusetts and through his wife claimed land at Fairfield, Connecticut.  During one trip to England in 1676, he found himself in debtor’s prison and unsuccessfully attempted to sell some of his property to satisfy his creditors.  A favorable appeal to the King for the ability to sell his land at Massachusetts to pay the fine allowed his to borrow enough money to return home, but more significantly, his memorial prompted a royal articulation of the rights of New England Native Americans, who had taken the oaths of alliance and supremacy, under English law.  Back in New England, Wampus found his Native world upended by the end of King Philip’s War and a government unsympathetic to his land claims.  Moreover, his personal life was in trauma with his wife dead and his house under colonial ownership.  Several of his larger Nipmuck family contested his claim to tribal property and petitioned Massachusetts authorities to bar him from further representation.  By the spring of 1677, he was often behaving “disorderly” and taunted colonists with threatening speech.  For these offenses, Wampus was imprisoned at Cambridge but escaped to Connecticut.  Receiving a similar response from residents there, he returned to London and presented his case favorably to the Privy Council.  Before he had an opportunity to recover his land, Wampus contracted an illness and died in London.  In a will dated September 5, 1679, he bequeathed his property to several Englishmen.  Claims to his estate at Fairfield were ultimately denied in 1684, but his legal heirs received a more favorable response in Massachusetts, where they eventually procured a four-mile square parcel at Hassanamisco.  Grant-Costa, The Last Indian War in New England, 28- 33.  Jenny Hale Pulispher, “Playing John White: John Wompas and Racial Identity in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World,” in Joshua D. Bellin and Laura L. Nielke, eds., Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 20112), 195-215.  O’Brian, Dispossession by Degrees, 75-78.Eben Putnam, Lieutenant Joshua Hewes: A New England Pioneer, and Some of His Descendants (New York: J. F. Tapley, 1913), 100-104.