The meeting place of salt and fresh water, low hills, and tidal grasslands provided a favorable environment for Algonquian-speaking peoples to develop settlements. The Central Library sits on a filled bay that was once criss-crossed by an extensive infrastructure of wooden fish weirs, an ecological engineering feat that formed the basis for a thriving economic and cultural system. These lifeways were upended when Europeans arrived in the Americas. European diseases reached New England even before colonists, and by the time the English began to build farms and towns in the area, warfare and property enclosure accelerated the genocidal process of Native removal. Maps of this period show New England as the Europeans wanted it to appear, with Native peoples receding into the hinterland and new territories forming the outlines of a colonial geography. Native peoples resisted and persisted in this landscape, however, and today the region is still home to members of the Massachusett tribe as well as Indigenous people from across the Americas.
A map of New-England
1677
Mapping Boston Collection
This map, the earliest map drawn, engraved and printed in North America by Europeans, is oriented with west at the top. Such a view corresponds with the mental picture of the region as English settlers would have perceived it arriving from the east. Towns, named for familiar locations back in England, hug the coastline and extend inland only along major water routes, like the Connecticut River, which stretches horizontally across the top, and the Merrimack River, which forms an inverted L in the middle. Even 50 years into colonization, much of the interior remained under the control of a mosaic of Native nations, and this map labels the land of the Pequid (Pequot), Nipmuk, and Naraganset in what is today the state of Connecticut. A landscape dotted by trees, animals, and two hunters in the lower right obscures the reality on the ground of a violent and bitterly contested frontier. This map was printed to accompany a book describing King Philip’s War, one of the most catastrophically destructive conflicts ever waged in North America.
Plan of the Pequot Country and testimony of Uncas, Casasinomon, and Wesawegun
1662
Massachusetts Archives
Very few written records exist documenting Indigenous groups’ understanding of their own geography prior to the arrival of European settlers, though we know from oral traditions and other sources that the tribes of North America had an extensive, sophisticated set of knowledge systems about the places they inhabited. This manuscript, a combination map and legal testimony, is one of the only surviving examples of a cartographic work created directly by a Native person in seventeenth-century New England. The sketch at the top of the document shows the coastline and rivers of what is now Rhode Island, demonstrating how the Mohegan and Pequot tribes conceptualized their littoral environment. However, the manuscript itself—a verbal testimony given to colonists by tribal leaders—shows how Europeans like John Tinker primarily recorded Indigenous geographical knowledge in order to settle their own territorial disputes and vacate prior claims to the land.