Rhode Island, with barely 1,000 square miles, is the smallest state in the Union in terms of area. It is surprising to discover that most of the territory south of the Pawtuxet River, where I stand, was considered to be wild territory, what was referred to as Narragansett Country. It is also surprising to discover that much of the early history of Rhode Island involved a great deal of territorial wrangling with both the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies. Indeed the expansion of the original Providence Plantation into southern Rhode Island not only occurred under dubious legal circumstances, but also engaged the avid interest and participation of leaders of all three colonies, each one eager to grab whatever territory it could from the Narragansett Indians who lived there. This despite the fact that, on the whole, the Narragansett Indians maintained friendly relations with the English, especially with Roger Williams. There is no honor among thieves.  Any beliefs I might once have held about the mostly honorable intentions of the English settlers and their attempts to treat with the Indians on an equal footing have certainly been destroyed once and for all by the research I have undertaken during the course of this project.

*****

    Sometimes a map can hold information which can be enlightening. Let me explain. For years I have had in my possession a map drawn by William Carlton in 1940 showing the journey made by John Winthrop, Jr., who became the first Governor of Connecticut, in late 1645.  On December 1, 1645, Winthrop, son of the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “lodged by the way at Patuxet, at old William Arnold’s house.”(1)  Winthrop was returning to the Boston area after a trip that included a survey of the area he was soon to settle in, what became New London, Connecticut.  The territory through which he traveled was primarily the home of tribes of Narragansett and Pequot Indians, and Arnold’s house represented at the time the very edge of the settlement of New England by the English. The following evening Winthrop moved on to lodge at the house of Benedict Arnold, the son of William Arnold, great-grandfather of the famous Revolutionary War military commander, and the first governor of Rhode Island once the colony received a charter in 1663.

    William Arnold was one of the settlers who, with Roger Williams, established what is today the state of Rhode Island in 1636, but disputes over the limits of territorial boundaries of the Providence Plantations resulted in a split between Williams and a faction led by Arnold. Arnold’s group claimed that the original treaty with the Narragansett allowed them to settle a much larger territory, which now includes much of Warwick, Rhode Island, referred to as the “Pawtuxet Purchase.”(2)  So intractable did relations become between the two factions that Arnold appealed to Massachusetts to adjudicate the dispute. The leaders of Massachusetts, looking for any opportunity to expand their territory, especially at the expense of a “renegade” settlement such as the one Williams had established, were eager to get involved in the fracas. The dispute between Arnold and his Massachusetts backers and the Williams Providence Plantation group continued until 1658, when the Arnold faction merged with the town of Providence.(3) Territorial disputes over land in what is now Rhode Island continued until well into the nineteenth century as both Massachusetts and Connecticut claimed territories that were well within the present boundaries of the state.

    When I originally looked at this map for the first time my first thought was “wow, look at this guy living way out there in the sticks. He must have been friendly with the Indians.”  I am sure Winthrop welcomed a familiar face on his way back to “civilization.” Now when I look at this map I see intrigues, deceit, manipulation, and a foreshadowing of the destruction of a civilization. By the end of the seventeenth century the lives of the few remaining Pequots of Connecticut and the Narragansett of southern Rhode Island would be utterly changed forever. Winthrop’s journey was pivotal in many ways to the impending cataclysm. First, his settlement of southeastern Connecticut, a subject to which I shall return, precipitated the extermination of much of Pequot culture. Second, his visit to Arnold, seen in the light of the events mentioned above, clearly involved intrigue regarding the dispute with Roger Williams and the Providence Plantation. Williams himself thought that Arnold and his followers were exceeding the limits of the boundaries established by the agreement between the Narragansett and the English, effected by Williams himself in 1636.  But the boundaries expanded, and expanded again, until there was only the boundary between Rhode Island and Connecticut that was in dispute, and any discussion of Narragansett territorial rights had become irrelevant.

*****

    The Pawtuxet dispute continued between Providence and what became Warwick and the old claims of the Arnold faction until 1714, when the border question was settled by Governor Samuel Cranston in favor of the towns of Providence and Warwick. The boundary between the two towns was established at the Pawtuxet River. (4) In 1754, the southern area of Providence seceded to become the town of Cranston, and so the current border between Cranston and Warwick remains the Pawtuxet River. Hence the original Patuxet settlement is today divided in half between two towns. I ask the proprietor of the Little Falls Bakery and Cafe how the local residents of Pawtuxet think of themselves. He says that there is a sense of community between the two sides of the river, but that everybody knows who to call for services and where to pay the tax bill.

    Pawtuxet is one in a series of “villages” in Rhode Island, which one would be hard pressed to find in any listing of official towns in the census, because they are usually part of a larger political entity, as described above. Wickford in North Kingstown and Tower Hill in South Kingstown are two more examples of place names that are important in eighteenth-century almanacs and travel diaries but do not technically exist as towns in Rhode Island. This village however, like the others I will visit, has a strong sense of identity and a deep historical richness that are independent of its affiliation with any larger town entity. Pawtuxet for instance, as I mentioned briefly in the last entry, has red, white, and blue median strips running down the middle of Broad Street, which begin at what I take to be the edge of the village limits. This is a product of deep local pride in the participation of the citizens of the village in what many claim to be the first act of violent resistance to the forces of the British military, the burning of His Majesty’s Ship Gaspee and the shooting of its captain on June 9, 1772. (5) The efforts of the Gaspee to prevent smuggling and the overbearing attitude of the captain and his crew incited the residents of the village, who lured the ship onto the rocks nearby and attacked the ship, shooting the captain and spilling “the first blood of the Revolution.”

    Pawtuxet certainly could be used as the set of a movie about the Revolution. It has a great many colonial era and early federal houses lining its streets, particularly on the Warwick side. The Carder Tavern at 118 Post Road, for instance, was constructed in 1740.  The Cranston side is mainly the commercial district, but it too holds a few architectural gems, including the Remington Arnold house of 1740. An Arnold’s Tavern is listed in Thomas Prince’s Vade Mecum at Patuxet, five miles from Providence Bridge, and a milestone a few yards past the river indicates that the village is five miles from Providence Bridge. My Google map also tells me I am 5.06 miles from “Providence Bridge” as well, so both old and new are in agreement.

*****

 

    The area south of the Pawtuxet River is now known as Warwick, Rhode Island, in honor of the Earl of Warwick who helped uphold the claims of yet another early settler in the wilderness, Samuel Gorton, who purchased the land south of Pawtuxet, called Shawomet at the time, under somewhat murky circumstances. The details of the establishment of the town of Warwick are also quite complicated, involving political fights, with many of the claimants shuttling back and forth to England to plead their cases, religious disputes, troops from Massachusetts arriving to seize Gorton and his followers, who holed themselves up in a house for two days and exchanged shots with soldiers. Gorton himself narrowly escaped hanging in Boston and served nine months hard labor for blasphemy. (6)

    The area to the south of what became Warwick, still nominally Narragansett territory, was christened King’s Province, later known as King’s County, and today as Washington County. I will be heading there in the near future, but suffice to say here, that the naming of land belonging to the Narragansett in honor of the King of England did not bode well for the Narragansett and puts the lie to the oft stated claims that the English tried to deal fairly with the Indians they encountered. To name an area one does not have any territorial claim to was an obvious demonstration that the English had no intention of maintaining the territorial boundaries established by Williams in 1636. First Pawtuxet, then Warwick, and soon all of southern Rhode Island would fall under English control.  Unfortunately, as I continue my walk south, passing from Providence to Cranston, over the Pawtuxet River to Warwick into what was once called Narragansett Country, the words of Metacom still ring in my head (see my entry # 24). William McLoughlin, in his Rhode Island: a History is brutally honest when he says “The tragic story of Indian-white relations in Rhode Island- from friendly and welcoming to merciless annihilation- covered little more than half a century. The same scenario, with minor variations, was repeated many times thereafter as the white man moved westward. But little that happened in the Far West had not already taken place on the coastal frontier, two centuries before the days of Buffalo Bill, George Custer, and the six shooter.” (7)