Pilgrims Puritans Wampanoag people

The Wampanoag people, the Pilgrims, and the Puritans are all connected to the history of New England:

The Wampanoag
The Wampanoag people have lived in the area of present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island for over 12,000 years. They were the first tribe the Pilgrims encountered when they landed in Provincetown harbor in 1620. The Wampanoag are known for their generosity in helping the Pilgrims survive the winter of 1620–21. The Wampanoag's respect for nature and use of resources is the basis for the story of the first American Thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims
The Pilgrims were a group of English settlers who arrived in the Americas in 1620 on the Mayflower. The majority of the Pilgrims were Puritan Separatists who wanted to escape the Church of England. They believed the Church of England violated biblical precepts and wanted to return to a simpler form of worship.

The Puritans
The Puritans were a group of people who wanted to purify the Church of England and return to a simpler form of worship.

The Wampanoag-Pilgrim peace treaty
In 1621, the leaders of the Plymouth colonists and Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoag, signed a defensive alliance. This was the first treaty between a Native American tribe and a group of American colonists. The treaty included promises not to harm each other, not to steal from each other, and to aid each other if they were in an unjust war.

The facts on the ground in November 1620 were that the eastern Algonquin tribes from roughly, north to south, present day Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Plymouth, Massachusetts and east to west from Boston to Worcester, Massachusetts had been annihilated by some sort of epidemic in the mid-1610s. There were almost no survivors along the coast of Massachusetts Bay. The Wampanoags themselves were under pressure from the Narragansetts to their south and the Pequots to their west and so the the Pilgrims (the Brewster Party) with their ship, firearms and the sufficiently bi-lingual Squanto, a Wampanoag who had been abducted by an English survey party before epidemic and by chance found himself back in Plymouth when the Pilgrims arrived, were welcome allies. Ten years later, the much larger Winthrop Fleet (the Puritans) landed at Cape Ann and Boston. They reinforced and quickly assimilated the Bradford Party. They also entered into the same sort of relationship with the surviving members of the Massachusett, Nipmunk and other tribes who were to the north of the Wampanoags and who were also under pressure from the Abenaki confederation in present day Maine and New Hampshire and tribes of the Iroquois Confederation to the west of the Connecticut River. Throughout the Pequot War, but less so during King Philip’s War, the Wampanoags, Narragansetts and Massachusett tribes usually aligned with the English against other Algonquin tribes to the north and south and against the Iroquois tribes to the west. In King Philip’s War the Nipmunks and the other eastern Algonquin tribes tended to align with King Philip

Links:
AD 1621: Wampanoag people save Pilgrims | NIH - National Library of Medicine (NLM) /html last updated 11 Dec 2024