The Camp at the Place Near the Little Neck

Shawmut
1613-1617

In January 1613, the sachem, Tasawin, and his two sons lead a party of hunters to Monadnock, “Mountain that Stands Alone.” At a rock shelter, they rouse a three hundred pound bear and corner the animal, which puts up a terrific fight before falling to their spears. Wolves shadow the hunters as they head home through the Monadnock woods but a greater dread is their enemy, the Abnaki. They reach the Merrimac valley and stay with a band of friendly Pennacooks, before returning safely to their winter camp on the Charles River.

Tasawin heads a clan of the Massachusett, an Algonquin tribe that takes its name from the quarry at Blue Hills – “People at the Hill of Arrowhead Stone.” – Tasawin’s sons, Witawamet, “White Eagle,” and Wapikicho, “White Crane,” are seventeen-year-old twins, tall, well-formed young men with intense black eyes. Witawamet is quiet and sober; Wapikicho often plays the jester filled with merriment.

Their mother, Chitanawoo, “Strong and Bold,” is a woman of parts and character, whom every female in the clan looks up to. Every male, too, knows well to walk softly in Chitanawoo’s presence, for the songs she sings reminds them that the one who plants was First Mother and the corn with its milk, Second Mother. Without them, a hungry man will have nothing to eat.

 

 

Chitanawoo and Tasawin have one daughter, Pemoleni, “Ever-Beloved,” plump as a partridge. The twenty-year-old is still unwed, but has a covey of bachelors who visit her nest. The Massachusett see no sin in sex before marriage.

The summer of 1613 finds Tasawin and his band of three hundred camped at Sha-um-ut, “Near the Little Neck,” on the north of the peninsula where Hut-Maker built his abode. The camp stands on a shelf of land overlooking a cove with a canoe-landing place. – Future inhabitants of Shawmut will throng to this same location: raucous, bustling Scollay Square.

 

Scollay Square, late 19th century
Robert N Dennis collection/Wikipedia

 

Like Quenop, Tasawin often climbs the high mountain that dominates the peninsula, the view as breathtaking as it was four thousand years ago but with two major changes. The fish weir is gone, abandoned and buried beneath tons of silt. The greatest change is in the number of people living around the bay, as many as ten bands gathering here annually, three thousand people in all.

 

Imagining Boston - 4