From Stockbridge, Massachusetts to...not only New Stockbridge, New York

Pictured above: The Berkshire mountains (hills) of western Massachusetts.

The Munsee Indians by Robert Grumet covers a people who had - to a large extent - intermarried with other tribes by the end of the Revolutionary War. It seems the Munsees were most likely to mix-in with Mohicans (Mahicans) and other scattered Algonquian-speaking people. So I was not surprised that Gromet appears to do as good a job of anybody in following the Stockbridge Mohicans from their town in Massachusetts to their next home, which, he points out, wasn't New Stockbridge, New York for everybody.

Some Stockbridgers also moved north to the Abenaki town of St. Francis Odanak. A few trekked west to join with the Delaware Indian main body in Ohio. Family traditions also affirm that a small number of families refusing to leave settled in remote hollows in the mountainous country about Stockbridge [Mass.] (page 279).

It shouldn't really surprise us that the make-up of a tribe would change somewhat with each migration. To some extent, it also explains how the "people of many trails" came to be made up of many tribes.

I was surprised that Grumet doesn't cover the Gnadenhutten Massacre. I'm saving that shameful event in American history for a later post, but I hoped that Grumet would at least mention it and weigh in on the somewhat controversial issue of whether the victims at Gnadenhutten were Delawares or Mohicans. Nevertheless, the tone of the whole book suggests that by 1782, the Munsee Delawares were so inter-married with other tribes that it might be pointless for him to argue whether they were Mohicans or Delawares: they must have been both.

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