The Pequot War Is Hard to Forget

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The Pequot War is a war that should be hard to forget. It completely wiped out an entire Native American tribe. In reality that is not the case. It is in fact, “the complexity of the Pequot War of 1636–37 is rarely appreciated.” According to Matthew S Muehlbauer, the only thing lots of historian and researchers in general tend to just focus on the massacre that occurred near the Mystic River in May of 1937. This was in fact a tragic and fatal event for the Pequot tribe, but the struggles did not end there. It goes on beyond what happened at the river. The Pequot war lead to some changes in history and it is only right to go back and look at the after affects of the war. Those affects that not only impacted the Pequot tribe but the years after the war had ended. It is with the help of two secondary sources by Matthew S Muehlbauer, Austin Peay State University, Tennessee, and Katherine A. Grandjean, Wellesley College, that it is possible to look past the actual war itself and focus on the aftermath of it.
It is important to talk about the actual war because there can be no after war results without having a war to begin with. “By the mid-1630s, the two largest and most influential indigenous groups in New England were the Narragansetts and Pequots. Unlike most others, these peoples had weathered well an epidemic during 1616–19.” (Muehlbauer). That epidemic was smallpox that was brought by unintentionally by the Englishmen. The Indians were not immune to it and it took away a lot of their people in general.
Unfortunately for the Pequot tribe they were going through some things not only with other groups but internally as well. There was tension between both the Narragansetts and Pequots. The internal tension was caused...

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... was not a place that anyone really wanted to be. It was full of anxiety and uneasiness. There was an entire war started because of the killing of one man, a man who may or may not have been killed by the Pequots. Yet they were wiped out because of it. The article by Matthew S Muehlbauer goes more into the technical aspects of the situation. It gives facts about what happened and it is good for putting together a time line of events. The article by Katherine A. Grandjean does give facts, but focuses on the psychological aspect of this time. She gives a story to read and makes the reader feel like they are in the story. Both are affective in delivering a good picture of the affects of this war and actually work really well together to get a well rounded story of the events and reaction to those events that took place all because of the Pequot War.

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