Fairfield Swamp Fight, 1637

The ground you are passing through was the site of one of the most consequential and violent moments in the early history of southern New England. In the summer of sixteen thirty-seven, the Pequot War ended here in the marshes of what is now Fairfield.

The war had begun with a cycle of raids and reprisals between the Pequot nation and English colonists in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Its defining atrocity came on the night of May twenty-sixth, sixteen thirty-seven, when English forces under Captain John Mason, allied with Narragansett and Mohegan warriors, surrounded a Pequot village near the Mystic River and set it on fire. Somewhere between four hundred and seven hundred Pequot men, women, and children died in the flames or were cut down as they fled. The colonists called it a victory.

The surviving Pequot, led by their chief sachem Sassacus, fled westward along the coast of Long Island Sound. They numbered perhaps seven hundred people: warriors, elders, families. They were exhausted, grieving, and hunted. Near present-day Fairfield they sought refuge with the Sasqua people, a local band of roughly two hundred.

On July thirteenth and fourteenth, sixteen thirty-seven, Captain Israel Stoughton and a force of about one hundred twenty English soldiers, again with Narragansett and Mohegan allies, surrounded the swamp where the Pequot had taken shelter. Fighting continued through the day and into the night. Under cover of morning fog, approximately sixty to eighty Pequot broke through the English lines and slipped away. The rest, roughly one hundred eighty people, were captured. A dozen or more were killed.

Sassacus and his bodyguard of about eighty warriors escaped briefly into Mohawk territory. The Mohawk, seeking to demonstrate their friendship with the English colonies, murdered Sassacus and sent his head to Hartford.

On September twenty-first, sixteen thirty-eight, the Treaty of Hartford formally dissolved the Pequot as a recognized political entity. Their survivors were distributed among allied tribes or sold into slavery. The Pequot nation, which had been the most powerful in the region, was erased from the map. The swamp where it ended is somewhere beneath the streets and neighborhoods of Fairfield today.