The First Nations of the Long Tidal River

Long before any European mapped this coastline, the river the Algonquian-speaking peoples called Quinnetukut, "the long tidal river", gave this land its name and its identity. That river, what we now call the Connecticut, ran through a patchwork of Indigenous nations who had lived here for thousands of years after the glaciers retreated north roughly fourteen thousand years ago. Along the coast and in the river valleys lived the Quinnipiac, the Niantic, the Paugussett, and the Schaghticoke.

The Mohegan and the Pequot, closely related peoples who had split into rival nations by the early sixteen hundreds, held the eastern part of the territory. In the north, along the upper Connecticut River valley, lived the Pocumtuc, centered in what is now Massachusetts, and their neighbors. Each nation maintained its own sachems, its own trade networks, its own carefully tended cornfields and fishing weirs.

The Connecticut River itself was a highway. Salmon ran so thick in spring that early colonial accounts described men walking into the shallows and simply scooping fish by hand. Shad, sturgeon, and alewife followed the same calendar the nations had tracked for generations.

These were not static peoples frozen in a timeless past. The nations of this region traded over long distances, incorporating wampum, the polished shell beads cut from quahog and whelk, as a currency that linked the Algonquian world from the Hudson to Cape Cod. The Pequot, by the early sixteen thirties, had grown into the most powerful nation in the region, controlling trade access through much of present-day southeastern Connecticut.

The arrival of Dutch and English traders in the sixteen twenties began a cascade of disruption, smallpox epidemics in sixteen thirty-three and thirty-four may have killed more than seventy percent of some coastal communities before a single English settlement had even taken root. The land that English colonists found apparently empty had, in many places, been emptied by disease just months before their arrival. The descendants of these nations remain in Connecticut today.

The Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan hold federal recognition, and several other communities continue to seek that recognition. The river still carries their name, every time you say where you are.