By Katherine Hermes and Alexandra Maravel

Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America, first published in London in 1643, is one of the earliest English sources on southern New England Algonquian language and customs. Williams claimed that Native people refreshed themselves with nothing but water, but, as Jessica Diemer-Eaton notes in “Sap Water, Corn Brew, Nut Milk and Other Eastern Native Beverages” (woodlandindianedu.com/beverages.html, rev. 2020), like many Europeans, he was probably surprised to find water as a drink of choice. English people regarded water in its natural state as dangerous. Williams’s observation is contradicted by the many words for consumable liquids found in the languages of the peoples of the northeastern woodlands: maškikkiᐧwaᐧpoᐧkkeᐧ meant “to prepare medicine to drink,” and there were words for liquids (nepyi), soup (nepoᐧpyi), and maple syrup (sinᐧzibuckᐧwud) harvested during March (the Weekapaheek moon). Indigenous people added seasonal crushed fruits to water to make it sweet and drank nasaump, a thick soup made of crushed maize, in the colder months. Williams described nasaump as “a kind of meale pottage . . . boiled and eaten hot or cold,” to which the English added, “milke or butter which are mercies beyond the natives plaine water.” Colonial-era sources from colonists and Native people provide information about what Indigenous people drank; reexamining the record through a broader lens allows us a fuller picture of why they drank what they did.

Sustenance

In a precolonial village near present-day Rocky Hill, archaeologists found several Wangunk tools used to prepare their food and drink and artifacts that revealed their dietary habits. In “Pottery Production and Cultural Process: Prehistoric Ceramics from the Morgan Site,” archaeologists Lucianne Lavin et al. described recovered clay sherds, indicating robust pottery production at the site (Northeast Historical Archaeology 22 (1993)). In colonial-era towns, Native women possessed traditional earthenware and items introduced by colonists.

The Hartford County probate record of Sarah Hopewell, a Niantic woman who lived among the Wangunk, shows she had, at the time of her death in 1704, “2 ston cups one picher and one glas botol,” indicating a variety of ways to imbibe liquids. The 1753 probate inventory of Amy Pewampskin, a Wangunk woman living in the Farmington River Valley, showed “2 Earth cups” worth 4 shillings and pewter cups worth 35 shillings. These women would have relied on the “three sisters”—beans, maize, and squash—supplemented with fish and herbs for their staple diet.

Squash was a reliable Indigenous soup base because it could be stored over winter months. Not all varieties could be produced in all gardens, though. Blue Hubbard squash was best grown in coastal areas and was harvested late in the fall. Before colonization, Wangunk people resided in semiannual villages, one for summer and fall and another for winter and spring. Over time, the seasonal patterns of removal halted. The creation of reservations and limited Indigenous access to coastal areas affected diet.

Indigenous families have preserved soup recipes, though most reflect some European influence. In Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (University of Arizona Press, 2000), Melissa Jayne Fawcett recorded that her aunt, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, a noted Mohegan anthropologist and medicine woman, and her sisters Ruth and Winnie, made a soup called “soup on the hill” named after Mohegan Hill and traditionally served on Sundays. Its ingredients included rutabaga, carrots, potatoes, celery, onion, chuck beef, and stock. The Brothertown Tribe in Wisconsin, which incorporated Mohegan, Narragansett, and Wangunk people, among others, posts traditional recipes on their website.

Medicine

Treatment of illness among Indigenous people in the Northeast was an intertwining of religious, ceremonial, and herbal practices. Medicine men, called powwows, treated maladies with a wholistic approach. The word powawim means “to dream,” and dreams were as integral to the powwows’ power to heal as the plants they used as remedies. Several plants used for treating infection possess antibacterial properties, according to Frank M. Frey and Ryan Meyers in “Antibacterial Activity of Traditional Medicinal Plants Used by Haudenosaunee Peoples of New York State” (BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 10 (2010)). They found that Indigenous northeast networks provided access to over 450 plants, 150 of which were known to have been used for their medicinal value.

Doctor Robin, a well-known Wangunk medicine man who was probably in his nineties when he died in Hartford in 1757, taught his granddaughter, Sarah Doctress, his medicinal arts. In a letter to Thomas Prince dated September 28, 1730, Rev. William Russell wrote, “Among the Wongung Indians there was a family noted for skill in curing the King’s evil. It was first practiced on the English by an Indian called Robin, and a grand-daughter of his, many years after, was very remarkable in her success in curing this terrible disease. Many very remarkable cures have been [made by] them on persons where the most skillfull English physicians have not been successful.” The “King’s evil” to which Russell referred was scrofula, an infection of the lymph nodes that English physicians thought incurable.

Today, antibiotics like pyrazinamide used to treat tuberculosis also treat scrofula. Doctor Robin would likely have used eastern figwort (Scrophularia marilandica) that grew in the dry woods of the Quinnipiac homelands surrounding the English town of New Haven. It was drunk as a strained tea, using a small amount of the dried plant in a cup of hot water. Montowese, the son of the Wangunk grand sachem Sowheage, married a Quinnipiac woman of high status in the 1630s, giving Wangunk doctors access to the remedy. Removal of the Quinnipiac away from New Haven to other coastal areas and heavy English settlement that privatized woodlands probably made the figwort harder to obtain.

The myriad Indigenous trails crisscrossing Connecticut in the first part of the 17th century gave entry to sites where particular plants could be harvested. Complex knowledge of these plants was essential to Indigenous healers. For instance, they made teas of hawthorn leaves and bark as a tonic and cure for heart ailments and mint for reducing inflammation, spasms, and nausea. Fevers and colds called for elderberry. A digestive aid was rose hip tea. Stinging nettles healed inflammation and skin diseases. The herbal remedies were effective, and access to these sites was critical, but colonial wars, farming, and deforestation disrupted that access.

The archaeological site of the Wangunk village in Rocky Hill produced evidence of several medicinal tree nuts and plants. Among these were black walnuts, the tannins of which eased pain and swelling and reduced mucous. Chestnuts aided problems with inflammation and promoted digestive health. A lower-lying plant, club moss, was useful against various maladies, including aneurysms, fevers, constipation, and chronic lung disorders.

The rare shaded hawthorn grew only at the edges of forests and fields in a single remote area of northwestern Connecticut. The Wangunk, including Amy Pewampskin’s extended family, resettled in this area after 1750, and many were members of the New Hartford Congregational Church. This plant, which local tribes used for improving blood circulation, contains antioxidant chemicals known as flavonoids.

Doctor Robin’s area of expertise among his own people was undoubtedly broader than scrofula. He likely used various plant remedies such as common yarrow, an antidiarrheal, antivenereal, and antirheumatic; Canada goldenrod, highly effective against salmonella infections; mouse-ear hawkweed, an antidiarrheal; and wild sweet potato morning glory, a general analgesic useful against coughs and gastrointestinal problems.

Indigenous use of the properties of various plants changed with Christian conversions. Rev. Samson Occom, a Mohegan, led a large Christian community known as the Brothertown movement, which drew in many Wangunk. Rev. Occom’s papers held at Dartmouth College include a list he compiled of 52 “Roots and Herbals,” many of which came from a Montauk man named Ocus. The Montauk lived on Long Island in territory claimed by New Haven Colony until 1664 and thereafter by New York. Indigenous ties were disrupted but not severed by these shifting jurisdictional claims. Occom’s use of herbs and roots differed from that of the powwows. He supplanted Indigenous religious rituals with practices acceptable in Christianity but nevertheless combined spiritual and physical approaches to medicine.

Not all medicinal drinks addressed disease. Some were love potions. Rev. Occom’s 18th-century list of roots and herbals includes “wores root” to “draw young mens to young women.” In a ritual, the root could be used as a potion, or it could be carried around to work invisibly. Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s 1942 book Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians, published by the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, included two other roots used as love medicine: “flower hangs down” and “pull-up.”

Alcohol

On September 19, 1726, the Boston Gazette reported news from New London, leading with a story about “an Indian man being very drunk,” who, the previous Wednesday, started a fight with two other Native men, who beat the first man to death. The two killers were placed in prison. The brief item gives no names, tribal affiliations, or indication of whether there was or would be a trial, nor do any documents in the colony’s inquest records provide information on such a case. Only ten inquests conducted between 1723 and 1833 involving Native people showed intoxication as a cause of death, yet, too often, when historians, folklorists, and journalists have put the words “Indian” and “drink” together in a sentence, they have brought to the minds of non-Indigenous people a stereotypical picture of Native “problems” with alcohol.

As Peter Mancall showed in Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Cornell University Press, 1995), alcohol abuse became a genuine problem in Native communities abutting European settlements. Indigenous people struggled with their need and desire to incorporate European goods into their lives. It took time, however, for trade in alcohol to become embedded. In a June 7, 1678, deposition transcribed on the Native Northeast Portal (NNP), Nuckquittaty (Onepenny), a Wangunk man, and his unnamed wife revealed that they tasted some “rum and desired Kesequonunt to sell him some of it for wampum,” but the man offered it as a gift, a sign of reciprocal respect.

In 1687, Connecticut’s General Assembly passed a law forbidding any enslaved person or servant from distributing alcohol to an Indigenous person, and in 1717, legislators prohibited settlers from selling spirits to them. Legislative documents show the assembly’s efforts over time to force Native people to adopt English-style agricultural practices and to prohibit the sale and trade of alcohol to Indigenous people.

Some 18th-century Indigenous landowners had orchards, but it was not traditional to process harvested fruit into a fermented beverage. On January 18, 1731, Moses Indian, a Wangunk man, sold two parcels of land at Indian Hill in Middletown that included orchards (NNP). Timothy Indian’s Hartford County probate record contains important documents in reconstructing the Christian Native community in Farmington comprised of Tunxis, Wangunk, Mohegan, and Quinnipiac people. His inventory reveals he possessed several farm tools. He may have had an orchard, as many of his peers did, as there is evidence of cider production.

The story of the Wangunk sachem Cushoy illustrates the impact of alcohol in the form of cider. He was the son of Sarah Onepenny the Elder, the female leader of the Wangunk at Middletown until her death in 1713. Cushoy became the sachem in Middletown after the deaths of his uncle Turramuggus and his cousin Petoosooh circa 1715. By the middle of the 18th century, he and his son Ben often labored for the colonist Joseph White for survival. White’s account book, bound with Ebenezer White’s daybook at the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, shows their wages frequently came in the form of cider and meals. Colonist Samson Howe also kept an account of his services to Cushoy and his son Tom, including providing cider to the men (NNP).

The Indigenous relationship with alcohol depicted in English account books, court records, and letters reveals colonial attitudes, but historians can tell the story from a more inclusive perspective. Indigenous peoples had not encountered alcohol before contact and had no experience with its effects. Factors in Indigenous reactions to alcohol included metabolic differences from Europeans, cultural practices, and Puritan evangelizing. As Alfred Crosby pointed out in The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood Press, 1972), a virgin soil epidemic—mass illness resulting from previously unknown pathogens like smallpox or influenza—was devastating to Native people not just because of their lack of biological immunity, but because they had no cultural practices like quarantine to abate the spread of disease. Similarly, alcoholism, which the American Medical Association classifies as a disease, was unknown before contact, and Native people lacked cultural protection from its effects.

An account in The Boston News-Letter from December 23, 1736, dramatically illustrates this point. The writer relates a story from Hartford of an Indigenous gathering at Middletown, still Wangunk territory during Cushoy’s sachemship. The colonial writer tells of a dance that put “Indian” “licentiousness” on display. A Reverend Treet attempted to break up this gathering and succeeded in persuading “a considerable Number of the Moheags, and some that Belong’d to Farmington [Tunxis] and Middletown [Wangunk]” to withdraw. Another story in the same article recounted a dance the previous fall when Indians gathered to “wash off their mourning.” “John Mattawan, a Christian Youth,” went to Governor Talcott to complain of the behavior at the dance. Talcott advised that the group of young Indians should shame their parents for their “Drunkenness” to abate the “Frolick.”

If the language of the account is decolonized by removing the English bias, we see a different picture of both occasions. These were intertribal religious events that did not conform to Puritan practices of sitting as a congregation listening to sermons and praying, whether on regular Sabbath days or on days of thanksgiving or humiliation. Indigenous ceremonies involved dances, whether for mourning or other purposes. In 1736, there were numerous reasons to mourn: loss of life, land, and autonomy or other bereavement. The incorporation of alcohol into this ritualistic, collective healing was not as foreign as it may seem at first. In other ceremonies, such as young men’s rites of passage, hallucinogenic herbs created heightened spiritual experiences. These rituals are described in numerous colonial accounts throughout eastern North America. Alcohol may have supplanted the use of herbs in some cases, especially if procuring those herbs became more difficult. The complaints of the young people reflected a growing unease with alcohol use and increasing acceptance of Christian worldviews, which saw drunkenness as a sin. Samson Occom’s Brothertown movement championed temperance, and as Peter Mancall’s research shows, the number of Indigenous temperance movements grew in the 19th century.

Conclusion

As with all people, what Indigenous people drank ranged from the essential to the pleasurable and the ceremonial. Colonization and its attendant effects on the environment, territorial possession and access, and the legal sphere changed what the Wangunk and other Indigenous people in the region consumed. So much of what we know about the Wangunk comes from the records of English colonists. Wangunk families’ knowledge has passed down through generations of their people, but the Wangunk are now a dispersed people, and their knowledge is not easily accessible to non-Indigenous historians. Archaeological historical records shed some light on what the Wangunk and other Indigenous people consumed. By examining these sources with open eyes, we can get a fuller picture of Indigenous culture, knowledge, and everyday life.

 

Katherine Hermes is the publisher of Connecticut Explored and professor of history emerita at Central Connecticut State University.

Alexandra Maravel is an adjunct professor of history at CCSU.