About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the twenty-first century.
In Stockbridge 1739 – 1939, Christina Marquand and Sarah Sedgwick wrote, “The Stockbridge of today, swept clean of its original owners, the Indians, is the actuality that the Williams and the English families up on the hill have built for us.”
It was robbery but it was not armed robbery. If you take land from an indigenous people by trickery, is it morally superior to taking it by force?
The original owners
In March 1736 the General Court in Boston granted six miles square (23,040 acres) on the river north of Sheffield to the Housatunnucks.
In addition, six white families, “the English,” were permitted to settle. Each of the six, the missionary John Sergeant, Timothy Woodbridge, his brother Joseph, Ephraim Williams, Ephraim Brown, and Josiah Jones, was granted 400 acres. That represented little over 10 percent of the total acreage: 2400 acres out of 23,000. The Indians retained 90 percent and the settlement was briefly called Indian Town. Later, it would be renamed Stockbridge.
Highway Robbery
John Stoddard was selected to survey the township. When he arrived he found the Indians had both questions and doubts. Stoddard reassured them that they held title to the land and enjoyed the full protection of law exactly as other citizens.
The survey of 1739 laid out 32 meadow lots along either side of the river for the Indians. Each lot was between two and ten acres. The meadow was considered the most desirable land. The six English proprietors had lots on the hill above. Each of their “settling lots” was 75-100 acres.
In “The Red Man Dispossessed” (New England Quarterly March 1994) Lion Miles traces the dispossession and ousting of the Indians from their land in Stockbridge. He writes, “The Indians found the English were not content with that [the size and position of the land grants].
The Indians charged that the English had claimed lands amounting to 4,800 acres, twice the 2,400 originally allocated.”
Modus Operandi
The methods of theft were various. The whites purchased land from members of the tribe for outrageously low prices without first securing the approval of the General Court. The approval was required precisely to insure fair prices.
The English swapped land rather than purchasing to avoid the involvement of the General Court. For example, Williams swapped 290 acres of land closer to town for 4,000 acres of wild and unimproved lands further removed. The Indians thought it a fair trade because they did not understand the value of undeveloped land.
With Williams in the lead and others following, many questionable practices were employed. They paid for a 500-year lease at a reduced rate because a lease was not a purchase when holding land for 500 years certainly equated to ownership. They asked a tribesman to pledge title to his land as security or collateral when the General Court had forbidden titles be used as collateral in order to protect the Indians’ holdings. When, in 1765, the General Court released the Stockbridge Indians from using their lands for debt payment, a cash-strapped people already had liens on a significant share of their holdings, and the English were in a position to grab their land at a dizzying speed.
Politics in the aid of Commerce
The land-grabbers concealed bribes, bought votes, and generally operated on the edge of the law. The goal was invariably the same: enhance white holdings at the expense of the Indians.
There were those who sought to defend the Indians, their rights and property. Chief among them was John Sergeant, but Sergeant died prematurely in 1749.
The government of Massachusetts itself believed it advantageous to befriend the Indians on the western frontier as a defense against the French. However, when the threat of French invasion was removed after Quebec fell in 1759 the General Court lost interest in the Stockbridge Indians.
Again and again Williams successfully used the political system for his own ends. For example during the town meeting of 1763, Williams secured votes by questionable means. To vote at town meetings required one was a male with forty shillings, or other property valued at forty pounds, and had lived in town at least three months. Williams introduced nine young men as voters whose credentials were questionable but whose loyalty to him was not in doubt.
Both Timothy and Joseph Woodbridge fought for the Indians after Sergeant’s death. Joseph called Williams’ on his shenanigans: “Williams and a party he has made…are endeavoring not only to get all the power but all our lands too into their hands.”
Unfortunately, the Woodbridge brothers were often outmaneuvered politically by Williams. Increasingly, the Court upheld the theft of land by Williams.
The Numbers Game
Williams and Brown were joined by traders from Berkshire County and New York and other entrepreneurs throughout New England. They all conspired to get Indian land by whatever means. Their numbers were small, however, compared to what happened next.
“When the French Indian War was over, English settlers poured into Western Massachusetts looking for cheap land. By the end of 1759, more than one thousand English families had migrated into the northern part of Berkshire County without making payment to the tribe for the lands on which they had settled,” Miles reports.
Indian lands were dwindling, and compared to the influx of English, so were their numbers.
The Last Strip of Indian Ground
The last bit of ground under their control was their burial ground. It was given in exchange for “$10 in services rendered” to a white man whom they trusted.
Miles writes, “In 1809 they granted to Dr. Oliver Partridge… the Indian burial ground on condition that ‘the bones of our Ancestors may there lie undisturbed.’ ”
Partridge could fence the property, plant trees, and improve the land in any way but “tilling or breaking up the Soil” was forbidden.
Their land gone, unable to sustain their living members, the Indians did what they could for their dead, and they left what was once Indian Town.
