GREENFIELD — The last installment of the Nolumbeka Project’s series, “River Stories 2020: Recovering Indigenous Voices in the Connecticut River Valley,” on Nov. 29, focused on the suspicious transactions that allowed Massachusetts to incorporate the land stretching from present-day Deerfield to Leverett, Sunderland and Montague.
In 1633, a Massachusetts court recruited John Pynchon to help settle a land dispute involving groups of colonists and Native Americans. Pynchon’s job would be to acquire, somehow, a large tract of land in the river valley, which was to be legally reapportioned.
The land was identified to be 12 miles north of Hadley — present-day Deerfield.
Pynchon, according to Nolumbeka Project President David Brule, was a “wheeler-dealer and an entrepreneur. He was a fast talker, and capable of all kinds of duplicity.”
Among his business interests were cideries, and his customers seemed to fall into debt to him frequently. Sarah Pirtle, an educator who spoke during Sunday’s panel, said that, by the time of Pynchon’s death, about one-third of the people in the Deerfield area were in debt to him, and about half worked for him.
Doug Harris, a ceremonial stone landscape preservationist, said, “The wealth that Pynchon acquired — did he do so by good debt, or bad?”
Within a year of the 1633 court order, a diplomatic mission from a Mohawk group of the Hudson Valley to a Pocumtuk group of the Connecticut River Valley fell through. All parties had expected to strike a peace deal. But, while meeting in a Pocumtuk fort, in present-day Deerfield, the Mohawk ambassador was unexpectedly assassinated.
Historians now know that agents of Pynchon were at the meeting, Brule said.
“We feel that Pynchon had a hand in this,” he said.
In the political fallout, many Pocumtuk people fled the area. On their way out, many evidently signed deeds, granting the land they were vacating to Pynchon.
These deeds don’t hold up under legal scrutiny; in almost all cases, the signers had no right to the land, Brule said. But, effectively, Pynchon had gained control.
The last major holdout against his acquisition was a woman named Mashalisque. She had hereditary stewardship of land on both sides of the Connecticut River, running from Deerfield as far north as Montague.
But Pynchon eventually got that land, too. Over the course of about seven years, Mashalisque’s son became entangled with Pynchon, and sank into debt to him. In 1672, Mashalisque struck a deal with Pynchon to transfer her land to him in exchange for clearing her son’s debt.
Reach Max Marcus at
mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.