Mayflower

Spirit of the New England Tribes, pp. 176–91. The earliest, recorded by Benjamin Basset in 1792, was told by the Wampanoag Thomas Cooper, whose Native grandmother had witnessed the arrival of the English on Martha’s Vineyard in 1643. The reference to Maushop beating his wife and children comes from an English writer who grew up on Martha’s Vineyard in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and heard the legend from his Wampanoag nurse, p. 183. Maushop’s disappearance “nobody knew whither” was recorded by James Freeman in 1807, p. 178. I have written about how Native American legends reflect ever-changing historical truths in Abram’s Eyes, which provides a reading of the Native history of Nantucket through the legends of Maushop, pp. 13–15. On what happened to the Indians of New England after King Philip’s War, see Daniel Mandell’s Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts and After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, edited by Colin Calloway. After 1701, the Sakonnet Indians who had fought with Benjamin Church were granted 190 acres between Sakonnet and Assawompsett, in Mandell, p. 51. The population statistics for the Sakonnets in the eighteenth century come from Benjamin Wilbour’s Notes on Little Compton, p. 15.
    On the travels of Plymouth Rock, see Francis Russell’s “The Pilgrims and the Rock,” American Heritage, October 1962, pp. 48–55. Jill Lepore writes of how the writings of Washington Irving and William Apess and the play Meta-mora reflected changing attitudes toward King Philip’s War in The Name of War, pp. 186–226. She also cites traditions concerning Massasoit’s descendant Simeon Simon during the American Revolution, p. 235. See E. B. Dimock’s article about Simon reprinted in the Narragansett Dawn, September 1935, pp. 110–11, and cited by Lepore. Records of Simon’s service throughout the war are at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. My thanks to Richard Peuser, the supervisory archivist for the Old Military and Civil Records, for bringing these documents to my attention. Ebenezer Peirce, no fan of Benjamin Church, writes gleefully of his traitorous grandson in Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy and adds, “Were we a Mather, doubtless we should say, ‘thus doth the Lord retaliate,’” p. 162. On the evolution of the myth of the Pilgrims, see James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz’s The Times of their Lives, pp. 10–25; John Seelye’s monumental Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock; and Joseph Conforti’s Imagining New England, pp. 171–96. James Baker in “Haunted by the Pilgrims” in The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, edited by Anne Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry, writes of how it was not until the early twentieth century that the First Thanksgiving “ousted the Landing and the older patriotic images from the popular consciousness” of the Pilgrims, pp. 350–51. E. J. V. Huiginn in The Graves of Myles Standish and Other Pilgrims writes of the 1891 exhumation of Standish’s grave, pp. 122–29, 159. My thanks to Carolyn Travers, research manager at Plimoth Plantation, for bringing this source to my attention. The statistics concerning the number of Mayflower descendants appear in “Beyond the Mayflower ” by Cokie Roberts and Steven Roberts in USA Weekend, November 22–24, 2002, pp. 8–10. On the influence of Church’s narrative on the development of the American literary tradition, see Slotkin’s introduction in So Dreadfull a Judgment, pp. 386–90, and his Regeneration through Violence, pp. 146–79. On the creation and evolution of Plimoth Plantation, see the Deetzes’ The Times of Their Lives, pp. 273–91. James Deetz claims that the evidence for the Clark garrison being located on the grounds of Plimoth Plantation is “practically conclusive” in “Archaeological Identification of the Site of the Eel River Massacre,” an unpublished paper at the Plimoth Plantation Library; my thanks to Carolyn Travers for bringing this document to my attention. In their introduction to Church’s narrative, the Simpsons write, “No one was less committed to a war of extermination than Benjamin Church,” p. 63. Church writes of Conscience in