An Early History of the Shawmut Peninsula

In 1625, the Shawmut Peninsula, home to modern day Boston, was known in the Algonquian language as “Mushauwomuk” (“the boat landing place”), and sat within the territory of the Massachuset nation, serving as a seasonal base for fishing and light farming. Within ten years, the Massachuset people lost the Shawmut to English settlers who claimed and occupied it as their land of promise.

Approximately 10,000 years ago, the form of the Shawmut Peninsula began to appear as its surface of ice that formed during the Great Ice Age gradually receded. The thaw revealed a rough landscape of moraine (rocky debris) and drumlins (oval-shaped hills). Three of these larger hills (later named West, Beacon, and Cotton) would influence Boston’s first English name, Trimountain (or Tremont). This landmass of 487 acres was surrounded by water on three sides: the Charles River to the west, the Mystic River to the north, and the Boston Main Channel to the east. A narrow neck of land, a mere 120 feet wide, connected the Peninsula to the mainland (at modern day Roxbury). Over time, trees covered the surface of Shawmut and it served as home to animals long since extinct from the area, such as Great Auks (large flightless birds), mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and wolves.

The first human visitors to the Shawmut Peninsula were ancestors of Eurasian people who had migrated across the former ice bridge from what is now Siberia to the west coast of North America between 14,000 and 16,000 years ago. The earliest evidence of their presence are remnants of fishing weirs (man-made water barriers used to capture fish) found by archaeologists near today’s Boylston Street – 3,700 to 5,300 years ago, these fishweirs were built along the tidal flats to catch the spring spawn. The Shawmut Peninsula eventually became part of the territory claimed by the Massachuset (“People of the Blue Hills”), one of the Algonquian-speaking tribes in New England.*  The dominion of the tribe ranged from the Shawmut, south along the coast to Marshfield, west to Taunton, north towards Newton, and then eastward to the mouth of the Charles River (“Quinnebequi,” meaning “long still water”). 

The Massachuset were semi-sedentary, with seasonal movements. In the warmer months, they fished in the waters around Shawmut, and cleared its trees in order to plant staple crops of maize, beans, and squash. They preserved much of this food for the winter, when they retreated to Massawachusett (near the Great Blue Hills in Canton, MA), and supplemented their diet with wild game. The Massachuset were actually a loose confederation of smaller bands, named after the areas they lived (e.g., Neponset and Ponkapoag) which was led by a Sac’hem, who demanded some form of tribute from anyone desiring to use Massachuset land. Those who paid could live and move freely within the tribal boundaries.

As early as the 16th century, the ships of European fishermen and traders could be seen in the waters surrounding the Shawmut Peninsula; some Massachuset people said that they first mistook the sailing ships for floating islands. Initial meetings between Native people and Europeans were naturally tense and sometimes led to violence, but eventually they began to trade with each other. Europeans were especially interested in furs which the Massachusets and other tribes offered in exchange for manufactured products such as metal pans and textiles. Tragically for the local tribes, European ships and crews also brought previously unknown diseases for which they had no immunity. Even before the first settlers arrived in Plymouth, an epidemic believed to have been Hepatitis B from French ships raged through the region’s population between 1616 and 1618; of the approximately 100,000 people, all but 25,000 people were killed.

When the Shawmut Peninsula’s first White inhabitant, an Englishman named William Blaxton, arrived in 1625, the Grand Sac’hem of the Massachuet was Chickataubut (“House-a-fire”). His sub-Sac’hem of the Shawmut region was named Obbatinewat. Blaxton, a Cambridge-University-trained Anglican minister, had been part of a failed attempt by English investor Robert Gorges to colonize the area known as Wessagusset (near modern Weymouth). In search of a new home, Blaxton traveled along the north coast until he reached the Shawmut Peninsula. There he built a log home in the shadow of Beacon Hill (near Charles and Beacon Streets), planted crops and an orchard (reportedly, he grew the first apples in North America), and traded with his seasonal Massachuset neighbors. Because of a standing treaty between Chickataubut and the English colony at Plymouth, the Sac’hem allowed Blaxton freedom to settle on the Shawmut, though in Blaxton’s mind, this permission was moot because he already had considered the land his based on English law.

Even before the 1630 arrival of John Winthrop and his company of approximately 1,000 Puritan settlers on the Shawmut Peninsula, Chickataubut understood the dire predicament of his people. In just over ten years, he had seen three-quarters of the tribe wiped out by disease and a growing number of better-armed Europeans arriving in his territory. He also may have begun to understand the difference between Native American and English views on land ownership. Though Native tribes in North America controlled and often fought over territory, they held no notions of private property. Because the English regarded indigenous people as “uncivilized” and without any written law, they considered North America legally unoccupied or “terra nullius.” Thus, when King Charles I of England granted a charter to Winthrop’s Massachusetts Company, he had already claimed “New England, America and everything in it.” Winthrop arrived believing he held rights to “all land between the Merrimack and Charles Rivers including land and islands within Massachusetts Bay and land extending three miles north of the Merrimack River and three miles to the south of the Charles River or Massachusetts Bay.”

When Chickataubut first met Governor Winthrop in 1631 at the latter’s home on the Shawmut, now renamed Boston, he had in effect already lost this piece of his domain. Knowing he had no choice but to protect what was left of his people’s land, Chickataubut agreed to a treaty in 1633 with Winthrop, ceding his rights to the Shawmut Peninsula, while maintaining his winter home in the Ponkapoag (Canton) near the Blue Hills. Later in the same year, Chickataubut died at the Moswetusett Hummock during a smallpox epidemic. While the size and strength of Boston grew over the years, the Massachuset continued to decline due to disease, war, and the gradual loss of their territory. Many were also enslaved by English settlers. A majority of the remaining tribe converted to Christianity and moved into the “Praying Towns” organized by missionary John Eliot. Though they received some protection in these towns, they were also pressured to adopt English culture at the cost of losing their own. Today, members of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag continue to proudly celebrate and preserve their history and culture.

*The chosen spelling of “Masschuset” is based on research by Ed Quill, author of When the Last Glorious Light: Lay of the Massachuset.