“Many Rumours Gone To and Fro": The Indian Conspiracy of 1669

     In the spring and early summer of 1669, the English Northeast buzzed with rumors of what the English officials called an “Indian conspiracy,” a carefully-coordinated, multitribal attack to kill all the English. Indians themselves were the sources of the rumor. Ranging from sachems to indentured servants, Pequots, Mohegans, and Wampanoags whispered the startling news to English men, women, and even children, who, in turn, sounded the alarm to colonial authorities. This paper uses the alleged “Indian Conspiracy” of 1669 as a portal into Native and English political culture of the seventeenth century. It argues that Native leaders found rumors to be an effective political weapon because English leaders had only superficial access to Native intelligence. The English inability to penetrate Native information networks was a handicap that had been decades in the making, a direct result of their refusal to engage in such Native diplomacy such as intermarriage and child exchange. Consequently, each wave of conspiracy accusations revealed the English inability to sift fact from fiction.

     Historians have tended to treat rumors in the context of isolated war scares rather than as a regular feature of Indian politics. I argue that Algonquian tribes disseminated rumors as a routine political strategy for the better part of the seventeenth century. For the Native leaders in this study—Pequot, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Niantic, and Mohegan—spreading rumors allowed them to drive wedges between their Indian enemies and the colonies. At other times, rumors awakened colonial authorities to the need to take Native grievances seriously. In each case, subversive storytelling was not fanciful but an indispensable feature in Native politics.