“Turned Indian”

by ELIC WEITZEL

Elic Weitzel is an archaeologist and doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut. He is fascinated by how people both adapt to and modify their environments, and his current research concerns the ecological consequences of European settlercolonialism in seventeenth-century New England. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork along the East Coast of the United States as well as in Eastern Europe.

In October 1637, Roger Williams—the founder of Rhode Island—wrote of a troubling rumor that had reached him: he heard that there was an Englishman living among the Mohegan Tribe in Connecticut.

In that day and age, such news was unprecedented, scandalous, and existentially threatening to European society. A white man, born and raised in England and recently arrived in North America, had left his own people and taken up with a Native tribe. To make matters worse, this man was not only living with the Mohegan, but he had married a Native woman and fathered a child. His name was William Baker.

Today, searching history books for references to Baker produces little success. He is treated as no more than a minor footnote in the colonial history of New England, mentioned only in a series of five letters between Roger Williams and Governor John Winthrop from October 1637 to May 1638, and then never heard about again. I first encountered these mentions of William Baker while reading Roger Williams’s correspondences as part of my dissertation research several years ago. Given their age, all these letters are now in the public domain, so anyone can find digitized versions of them through a quick internet search. Though I was reading Williams’s letters while conducting research unrelated to cross-cultural adoption, I found Baker’s story fascinating. Yet I could find hardly any mention of the man’s existence in other sources.

Conjectural depiction titled “Roger Williams Seeking Refuge Among The Indians” from a 1902 American history book by Henry Davenport Northrop. After he was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, the outspoken Puritan minister who advocated religious tolerance and believed that Indigenous peoples were the rightful owners of North American lands sheltered with the Wampanoag in the early part of 1636.

What I have been able to find suggests that Baker most likely sailed to Plymouth Colony from England sometime in 1632. Beyond the letters of Roger Williams, little is known for certain about his life. There were two men named William Baker living in Plymouth, Massachusetts, by 1633

(and more William Bakers would arrive soon after), so it is difficult to ascertain who is who in colonial records. But in a letter from October 1637, Roger Williams says that when he himself lived in Plymouth between 1631 and 1633, he heard stories of our Baker’s “evil course that way with the Natives,” suggesting that even then, Baker already had a reputation for being a bit too close with Native folks.

In September 1633, the Plymouth colony established a trading post on the Connecticut River near the present-day town of Windsor, Connecticut, and Baker was one of the men sent there. Sometime in the ensuing four years, Baker’s life changed dramatically. As Williams tells us, by the autumn of 1637, Baker had left or been kicked out of the Windsor trading post and a Native woman had become pregnant with his child (though not necessarily in that order). He then settled down with a different Native woman and lived with her tribe, the Mohegan. Baker is said to have been able to speak the Mohegan language.

Three months later, in a second letter, Williams details additional activities of Baker. He writes that Baker has “turned Indian in nakedness and cutting of hair, and after many whoredoms, is there married.” Baker, who had arrived from England just a few years prior, was now living as a Native American man. He had learned to speak the language, fathered a child with one Native woman, married a second, and was now wearing his hair and dressing in the Mohegan style.

But why was Williams so concerned about one Englishman residing with the Mohegan who had “turned Indian?” The problem was not that one Englishman left his own people for a life among a Native tribe, but that many did. Baker may have been one of the first, but within a few decades, he was far from alone in his preference to live his life with Native people. Many hundreds of European settlers either voluntarily joined Native tribes or refused to leave after being captured and adopted. Many of these accounts have been synthesized and analyzed by historians like Colin Calloway and James Axtell, who write that those renegade white settlers described a stronger sense of community, more social equality, and a general sense of greater freedom in Native cultures. To be sure, many white captives happily returned to their former lives, and some violently resisted capture and adoption. Hannah Duston, for example, was taken from her home in Haverhill, Massachusetts, during a raid in 1697 and reportedly watched her Native captors kill her infant. She then killed and scalped ten members of the Abenaki family—six of them children—who were holding her, another woman, and a boy before making her escape and collecting a bounty from the government of Massachusetts for the scalps. Yet many others, like the adopted Seneca woman Dehgewanus, originally named Mary Jemison, declined to leave their tribes even when free to return to colonial society. Some colonists are even known to have refused “rescue” from perceived Native captors, having to be bound like prisoners and returned to colonial settlements so that they wouldn’t flee back to their adoptive

Native communities.

These people, like Baker, who chose to live as adoptees in Native American tribes, shook the foundation of European and American society. European colonialism and imperialism were (and are) predicated on the assumed superiority of European culture. It was taken as fact that everyone would be better off living as Europeans did, and that when given the chance, people would gladly become part of European civilization.

William Baker, however, was proof that life was not necessarily better in Europe or its colonies. Here was an Englishman who preferred to live with the very people whom the English were trying to “civilize,” whose cultures were deemed savage and inferior and whose souls were said to be in need of salvation. That an Englishman could leave European society for a life among a Native American tribe threatened to reveal the falseness and hypocrisy of European cultural superiority.

Accounts from this period highlight the confusion and alarm of European colonists in the face of this evidence against their presumed superiority. At a 1699 peace treaty signing in Albany, New York, nearly all of the French prisoners taken by the Iroquois during the preceding conflict refused to leave their Native captors. This occurrence was recorded as being far from unique, as the English also had trouble convincing their own people to return following time spent with Native groups.

Benjamin Franklin commented on this same trend, writing that “when an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations … there is no perswading him ever to return.

But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them … they become disgusted with our manner of life … and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

To be sure, Native society was not some idyllic utopia. Generalizing across tribes is problematic, but practices such as entrenched gender inequality, forms of slavery, and sometimes brutal violence were often commonplace. In fact, violence was often how white settlers and others were adopted into Native tribes: through ceremonial torture. Yet it is telling that despite all of this, so many Europeans and Americans opted to reside with Native tribes nonetheless.

Sadly, according to the letters of Roger Williams, William Baker was not permitted to live in peace with his adopted tribe and new family. Williams’s October 1637 letter notes that Baker was pursued by the Colony of Connecticut for “uncleanliness” with a Native woman, which may indicate that Baker was forced to flee the Windsor trading post sometime between 1633 and 1637. In a letter from early 1638, Williams wrote that Uncas, the chief of the Mohegan, was ordered to return Baker to the English, but that Baker had “again escaped.” Reading between the lines, one must wonder whether Uncas had any intention of turning over his adopted compatriot. The English soldiers threatened death to any Native person who concealed Baker from them, but none came forward to turn him in.

Unfortunately, Baker’s luck would soon run out. In May 1638, Williams wrote that despite Uncas's attempt to hide Baker, Baker was captured by a contingent of English soldiers and taken to Hartford, Connecticut. There, he was held as a prisoner and whipped “for his much uncleanness.”

In the wake of Baker’s capture and punishment, Williams revealed his fears that Baker was too “strongly affected” by his adoptive Native tribe and that Baker and the Mohegan were “studying revenge.” Williams’s worries reflect the political context of the time. The English had just won the Pequot War, and the few surviving members of the Pequot Tribe were mostly adopted by the Mohegan. Williams feared that the Mohegan and the Pequot survivors would rise together against the English with the help of Baker. To prevent this from occurring, Williams recommended the “prudent disposal and dispersion of the Pequots”—whom he blamed for concealing Baker—and that the Mohegan should not be trusted.

Nothing more is known of Baker following his capture and punishment at Hartford. Following the incident, Williams expressed his belief that Baker should be separated from his adoptive Native family and monitored for seditious tendencies. Perhaps this was Baker’s fate and he remained in Hartford or returned to Massachusetts Bay or even England. One might hope that instead, Baker found a way to escape the English and live out the rest of his life with his Mohegan family. We will probably never know, but the story of William Baker’s life as an adopted Mohegan man on the run from English “justice” provides great insights into the politics of seventeenth-century New England, the widespread appeal of a Native way of life, and the fears that English colonial leaders had about their subjects betraying their natal cultures to do as Baker did and be “turned Indian.”