The fire at Mystic

What happened

Before dawn on 26 May 1637 Captain John Mason's ninety Connecticut men, twenty more under John Underhill, and their Mohegan and Narragansett allies stood outside the palisade of a Pequot fort on a hill above the Mystic River. Inside, several hundred people were asleep: warriors, but mostly old men, women and children. A dog barked, a voice cried "Englishmen!", and the English fired through the palisade and pushed in at the entrances. Mason wrote afterward that he went into a wigwam, came out with a firebrand and put it into the mats that covered the wigwams, and that the wind carried the fire across the fort. He then ordered his men outside to surround it. Underhill wrote that some warriors fought on through the palisade until the fire burned their bowstrings, and that many people, "men, women, and children," died in the flames or were cut down as they came out. Rothbard counts about six hundred dead in the space of an hour, "the bulk of them old men, women, and children" (CiL, p. 219). The survivors were hunted down, the women and children sold into slavery, and the Pequot people were nearly wiped out. Rothbard names this the first united action of the New England colonies, and reads in it the pattern that followed: guilt treated as collective, punishment far beyond the crime, and surprise attacks that killed men, women and children.