Towns settled before 1675. Note how most of the early settlements fall in the Central Valley and Coastal Slope

probably fished and swam in Glacial Lake Hitchcock. For millenia, Connecticut was home to a very different culture from that of the European colonists.

The Indians were, for the most part, initially very friendly to the Puritans. They cheerfully offered descriptions of the climate, land, forests, and animals of New England and gave advice on how to live here. For example, the Puritans first learned of the fertile region around what became Hartford from Wahginnacut, a Mohegan sachem. Indians signed deeds allowing Puritans to settle towns and plant fields (although usually retaining hunting and fishing rights), and in several instances even encouraged European settlement of an area. With the exception of the Pequot Indians of southeastern Connecticut, native Americans seemed to welcome the new arrivals. As they saw it, there was plenty of land for the peaceful coexistence of the two groups.

But the Puritans wanted more than coexistence - they were seeking to create a new, and better, England. TO the Puritans, properly used land meant a settled landscape of towns, farms, and woodlots; to native Americans, it meant a more nomadic, cyclical life based on moving the entire village to a river or the coastline for fishing in spring, to small forest clearings for crops in summer, and into the extensive woods for the fall and winter hunt and for winter shelter. Many colonial writers complained and wondered about the unwillingness of native Americans to "improve" this wonderful land with tidy farms and fixed towns. The Puritans soon realized that their own concepts of land use and property ownership conflicted with what they saw as the Indians' care-free, drifting, and lazy lifestyle. Rather than coexistence, the solution to this conflict of values that the colonists pursued was to assimilate the Indians into European culture.

Assimilation of the Indians took two principal courses: conversion of native peoples to Christianity and bringing the tribes under Puritan law. It was a rather one-sided view of assimilation, though, as the colonists sought to change the Indians to suit European culture rather than to accommodate themselves to native values. The policy of peaceful assimilation was doomed to fail. In a story subsequently repeated many times, ever westward across America, native Americans finally realized

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