The Sham Battle and the Cochecho Massacre

It was half performance for the British troops, and half actual sham, and it led to an attack on Dover by the Pennacook tribe in 1689.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly fry So. Last ball, I took a
trip to Dover, New Hampshire, and this was mostly just
to be a little personal adventure that sounded like something

(00:22):
fun to do and a chance to look at some
really amazing autumn leaves. But one of the things that
led me to pick Dover specifically for my adventure was
the Woodman Institute Museum. So this museum opened in nineteen
sixteen and it's mostly dedicated to local and natural history,
although it has other exhibits as well. One of the
town's original garrisons is there. That building was built in

(00:44):
sixteen seventy five and then moved to the Woodman Institute
property later after it was donated to the museum. It's
actually pretty cool because there is an entire structure built
around the garrison to protect it from the elements because
it's so old. There's a lot of really fascinating stuff
in the Woodman Institute Museum, natural History and tax that
Army displays are really arranged and curated a lot like

(01:07):
they were when the museum originally opened, but one of
the things that really caught my eye was inside the garrison,
which is full of colonial era artifacts, and on the
wall was a map that traced the progression of a
conflict between British colonists and the Native Americans from the area,
and the docent told me the basic story of what

(01:27):
had happened, and the part that made me think, this
needs to be an episode hinged on a sham battle.
So today sham basically means trick or hoax um, but
at the time, and maybe also regionally, I'm not quite sure,
the term sham battle was used to describe a lot
of different mock battles, so re enactments were sham battles,

(01:47):
or UH, battles that were done as part of a
ritual were sham battles. So it wasn't necessarily meant to
be deceptive. In this case, however, it was from a
pull of different angles, So that is what we're going
to talk about today. UH. This sham led to what
came to be known as the Cohico Massacre or the

(02:10):
Raid on Dover. The Raid on Dover took place during
one of the many times in history which Britain has
been at war with France. In this case, wars were
happening both in North America and in Europe concurrently, with
each of the wars having a different name depending on
exactly when it happened and which side the historian was on. Specifically,
these were the French and Indian Wars, which in North

(02:30):
America were between Britain and its Native American allies on
one side and France and its Native American allies on
the other. So each of the French and Indian wars
ran alongside a related conflict that was happening in Europe,
and we could easily spend an entire episode outlining all
of the various nuances of who is it, were, with
whom and why if you look at uh timelines of

(02:54):
all of this. Different historians group them together differently and
define them differently in different nations, give them different names.
So for the sake of simplicity, France and England where
at war with one another off and on for almost
a hundred years, with part of the conflict focused on
their territories in North America and who should control those territories.
So it was part of like the greater history of

(03:16):
Britain being at war with France. Uh, and this part
had a specifically American component to it. And as far
as where the theater of the war was happening, and
today's subject kind of took place in the time that
it overlapped a bit with King William's War, which ran
from six nine to sixteen ninety seven, and it was
the first of the French and Indian Wars. And in

(03:37):
the European theater, it was the War of the Grand
Alliance or the War of the League of Augsburg, along
with other names that it's sometimes called King Williams War
was named after King William the Third, also known as
William of Orange, who ruled Britain and other places at
the time. I know this may sound like a soup
of many different wars, and one of the things I

(03:58):
am holly as I was working on this, I find
uh the progression of all of these battles on each
side of the Atlantic Ocean to be very confusing. It
is because there is battle soup. It really becomes that
way when you try to sort it all out. Yeah. So,
during King William's War, battles ranged all over what's now
Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York. The colonies

(04:20):
of New Hampshire and New York already existed this at
this point, but Maine was founded much later, and at
the time Nova Scotia was Acadia. And yes, we have
heard your many requests for an episode on the expulsion
of the Acadians. We will do that at some point.
I'm not sure when, but lots of people ask for that.
The French also tried and failed to conquer Boston during

(04:43):
King William's War. But before we get into this particular
event in King William's War, we're gonna have to talk
a little bit about where it happened, and before we
jump into that. Uh, it's a little early, but let's
go ahead and do a sponsor break now so that
we can keep some continuity later. So to get back
to the heading of where this event happened. Dover, New Hampshire,

(05:03):
was founded in sixteen twenty three on the Cohico River.
The colonists and Dover overall maintained generally good relationships with
the Native American tribes in the area, which were primarily
the Pennacook, and as was common with many tribes in
the area, the Pennacook tended to move from place to
place seasonally, depending on where food was most available, and

(05:24):
although they hunted, gathered, and fished, they did also cultivate corn,
and they taught these skills to the colonists in and
around Dover while trading with the colonists for tools and supplies.
There were, of course, sometimes disputes, and to be quite clear,
nearly half of the Pennacook had died of disease after
the arrival of Europeans and the Americans. But in general,

(05:48):
at this point in history, the Pennacook tried to maintain
positive diplomatic relations with their neighbors uh from Europe, while
also defending themselves from the Mohawk, which had been there
and a means for quite a long time. Pennacook chief
pass A Conaway formed a confederation among other neighboring tribes

(06:08):
to this end of having positive relations with the colonists
from Europe as well as defending themselves from the Mohawk.
His son want A Lancet, also maintained this confederation and
the ties to the colony at Dover after he uh
succeeded his father as becoming the chief. The first industry,
and Dover came via a sawmill which was founded by

(06:29):
Richard Waldron in sixteen forty two. And depending on what
records you're looking at, you're gonna see different spellings. Sometimes
it comes up as waldern d e r n E
or Waldron uh d r y n E in the
various records. But by sixteen sixty four more than forty
families had settled near the sawmill. Today that's actually downtown Dover,

(06:51):
but at this point people called it Cohico after the sawmill.
Waldron himself was put in command of the militia and
given the rank of major. The colonists in the Dover
area also constructed garrisons that could be used for both
defense of the town and to shelter people in case
there was an attack. So families would gather up their
food and their betting and they would go to the garrison,

(07:11):
which could be defended thanks to being constructed out of
immensely thick logs. I mean they are enormous. Having stood
in one of these things, they are almost incomprehensibly huge logs,
and there would be little splits in them for firearms
to be able to shoot through, and the protection of
the garrison was not just for the European colonists. Native

(07:31):
peoples in the area also frequently asked for and were
granted shelter in the garrisons for the night. The population
in this area really increased significantly in sixteen seventy six,
when Native Americans from Massachusetts fled to Dover and other
settlements in the wake of King Philip's War. So in
spite of the similarity in the name to King William's War,

(07:53):
King King Philip's War was not one of the French
and Indian Wars, and the early sixteen hundreds, colonist than
what's now Massachusetts had gradually become independent from needing Native
American help for their own survival, and as the colonists
began moving farther and farther into territory that Native peoples
were already living on, the tribes started to resist to

(08:14):
this encroachment. Relationships between the native peoples and the colonists
in the areas pretty quickly soured. Medicom, also known as
King Philip, had become the leader of the wampano Eggs
after the death of his father, and in sixteen seventy five,
Medicom led most of the Native American tribes in the
area in an uprising against the British. It went on

(08:34):
for more than a year. The Native peoples were generally
holding their own in these battles, or even winning, until
the spring of sixteen seventy six, when they faced starvation
due to the destruction of their crops. The uprising also
lost its leader when medicalm was beheaded. King Philip's War
ended not long after. This was an extremely bloody, extremely

(08:55):
destructive war, especially considering the population of the area at
the time time. It wound up killing almost three thousand
of the Native people and six hundred Europeans, and it
destroyed settlements all over the New England frontier. The area
around Dover had been less affected, largely because the Pentacook
had retreated to more remote areas to try to avoid

(09:17):
the fighting, and in the wake of King Phillip's War,
Native American refugees fled both north and west. About four
hundred wound up at the Cohico settlement at Dover. So
that's where we get to the Sham battle that led
me to want to do this episode. It's sixteen seventy six,
so King William's War has not started. Yet that's gonna

(09:37):
play a part in the next chapter of this Uh.
The area around Dover, New Hampshire at this point is
home to us a sawmill, some garrisons, fewer than fifty
families of colonists from Europe, its own local Native American population,
and also about four hundred Native American refugees who had
fled the terror and destruction of King Philip's war. And

(10:00):
we will go on to talk about how this turned
into a problem after another brief word from a sponsor.
All right, So, because the Native American refugees in Dover
had fled from around Boston, Boston actually sent two companies
of soldiers to capture them and bring them back by force. Now,
Major Waldron thought it might be possible to make this

(10:22):
problem go away without bloodshed. He did think that the
Boston area Native Americans should be returned back to Boston,
but he didn't want the Native peoples from around Dover
to be harmed. I mean, after all, especially from the
colonists point of view, relationships with the Pentica had been
pretty good. They didn't really want to mess that up.
There was a productive trade relationship going on. There was

(10:45):
cooperation between the people's and my overall a lot of
fighting at that point. So he proposed that they have
a sham battle. He would arm the Native Americans with
muskets and they would have a mock fight against the
Dover militia to make a good a show for the
Boston troops. The Boston troops would see this battle, be
satisfied that things were being taken care of, and go

(11:07):
back home. H Waldron reportedly armed them, although with only
enough for the armed men to fire one single shot
and not reload. So the part about putting on a
good show for the Boston troops and making them go
away seems to have been how he sold the refugees
on this whole plant. But here's what he did not
tell them. He had actually arranged for the Dover area

(11:29):
militia to be present, and what the Native fighters had
all fired their one shot from their muskets, surround them
and weed out the ones who were from Dover from
the ones who were from Boston, and then send the
Boston group back with the Massachusetts soldiers. The Massachusetts soldiers
took more than two hundred Native Americans back to Boston,
where some of them were executed and others were sold

(11:52):
into slavery. So this whole sham battle had done what
it was supposed to do. From Waldron's point of you,
it had gotten the Boston area native population back to Boston,
and it had left the Dover Native population unharmed. However, unsurprisingly,
this was not good for the relationship between the Dover

(12:13):
colonists and the Native Americans from the area. There's productive
trading relationships, and diplomatic ties quickly started to crumble. Things
remained tense for more than a decade, during which Dover
added to its collection of garrisons, and the newer garrisons
had a second floor that was larger than the first floor,
which created an overhang that could be used to pour
hot oil on people who were trying to set the

(12:35):
structure on fire or break their way into it. Each
neighborhood had its own garrison and five houses. Those that
were at the highest vantage points around Dover were converted
into garrison's at public expense and surrounded by a palisade.
Some accounts actually say there were a total of six
heavily fortified garrisons, so there's a little bit of lack

(12:55):
of clarity around those specifics. So major Waldron, possibly in
an effort to try to keep things under control, also
started putting a number of restrictions on the native people
around Dover. He started restricting their life, their rights to
travel in the woods, and he started quote trading with
them for land. But these trades always happened under durest

(13:17):
and they always worked strongly in the colonists favor. So
things were going south pretty quickly. Eventually, Chief one A
Lancett died and he was succeeded by Concamegus. While one
A Lancet had followed his father's example in maintaining cooperative
relationships with the Dover colonists, Concamegus had no intention of

(13:37):
doing any such thing. While his father and his grandfather
had tried to maintain these diplomatic ties with colonists, he
had seen one injustice after another following in the wake
of the Sham Battle. Also running concurrently with all of
this escalation was, as we mentioned at the top of
the podcast, King William's War. So things are becoming increasingly

(13:59):
tense all over the area. Small scale attacks against colonial
homes and settlements were happening all over New England, and
it was clear to the colonists at Dover that more
serious hostility was eminent. People started taking refuge in the
garrisons every single night. Governor Edward Cranfield decided to enlist
the aid of the Mohawk, who remember had long been

(14:21):
enemies of the Pennacook, for support. So cock Omegus at
first moved as many of his people as he could
into a more remote area to try to keep them safe,
and he sent a series of letters to Governor Cranfield
to try to reach some kind of agreement. The Governor
apparently didn't enter into serious negotiations with Conchamegus at any point,

(14:43):
so Concamegus eventually started planning a more coordinated attack against
the colonists and Dover. Although Major Waldron insisted that everyone's
fears were overblown, some of the Pennacook who were loyal
to the colonists tried to warn them that there was
an incoming attack. Word made it to the governor, who
wrote to Waldron warning him of a large gathering of

(15:04):
Native Americans in the area who seemed to have hostile intentions.
He sent this letter on the twenty seven of June nine. Unfortunately,
that same night, before the letter reached its destination. Two
or three Native American women asked for shelter at the
garrisons around Dover, and we're allowed in it, all but

(15:24):
one of them. While everyone was asleep, these women unbarred
the doors and opened the gates so that the UH
warriors who were waiting outside could come in. At Major
Waldron's garrison, the major himself was tied to a chair
and slashed with his own sword, with his attacker reportedly
saying quote, I crossed out my account. He was dismembered

(15:47):
and killed, and his family was killed or taken captive
before his house was burned down. Similar scenes played out
at Dover's other garrisons. The colonists within were killed and
captured before the garrison itself was set on fire. Some
of the garrisons were ultimately left standing, but their contents
were looted and their inhabitants killed or captured before the

(16:08):
raiders moved on. The only garrison that was left untouched
was one where a barking dog had alerted the family
who were there. Most of them were actually away UH,
and someone who was there had woken up, closed the
gate and mounted a defense. Twenty three people were killed
and twenty nine were taken captive, and this was about
a quarter of Dover's population. Some of the captives were

(16:30):
reportedly also sold into slavery. As had happened after the
Sham battle, conca Vegas and the Pennacook retreated quickly before
the militia could be raised or before any kind of
real resistance could be mounted, and uh coca Vegas eventually
relocated the Pennacook and then joined his people with the
Abenaki people, which was a closely related tribe that was

(16:52):
native to the area. Many of conco vegas family was
killed or captured and arraid later on by Captain Benjamin
Shure that took place in sixteen ninety. He and the
Pennacook continued to attack other settlements in the area after
the raid on Cahico, and this stopped only when he
learned that the British were holding his his surviving family

(17:13):
members hostage. Because such a large proportion of the population
of Dover had been lost, it took quite a while
for the town to recover. It continued to be the
target of similar attacks and raids, but there was never
anything on the scale of this massacre. When you look
into information about the Pennacook and the Ibanaki today. A
lot of times they're written about as one tribe or

(17:34):
as like different parts of the same tribe are the
same people. So, UM, there are still members of those
tribes who are alive today. They're not a group that
has disappeared. So that is what I learned when I
delved more deeply into something that I had heard the
very brief UM museum docent version of while on a

(17:57):
weekend trip. Museums are very inspiring places. They are I
tend even when I am deliberately like, Okay, I am
on vacation and I am not going to think about
the podcast because we like to work on the podcast,
but it is still our jobs is work, and sometimes
we need to break from work. UM. So even when
I am conscientiously like I'm at this museum for myself

(18:20):
and my own edification, I still wind up writing down
things to do episodes about later on. To do you, however,
at the moment, have some listener mail I do. And
this is another that is about our episode about the
history of special education in the United States. UM. And
it is from Amy and she starts by gushing a

(18:42):
bit and I'm just gonna skip that part, and she says,
while I have probably fifty favorite episodes, that as the
most recent podcast you did on the special education movement
that finally got me to email you. My father taught
special education for thirty seven years, starting in the early
nineteen seventies, so he lived all of this history. It's
amazing how times have changed. When he first started teaching,

(19:03):
his students were completely self contained and their room was
in the farthest part of the school, away from all
the other students and next to the boiler room. By
the time he retired, schools started doing co teaching where
he would go with his students to their court classes
where they would be included with the quote regular students,
and he would offer support. It's amazing how times have changed.

(19:24):
The podcast really hit home for another reason. My daughter
was born this past June and was diagnosed at birth
with Down syndrome. As a teacher, I'm fortunate enough to
know about legislation and what her legal rights are to
an education and know the system and how to get
how to get the best for my daughter. I ache
for parents who don't know how the system works. Your
podcast really shows how the lives of so many children

(19:45):
have been changed for the better. I'm lucky my sweet
girl was born in and that we're able to get
her the various therapies at three months old. I'm lucky
to live in a country that provides resources and opportunities
to children like her. The day she was born, we
had no idea she had down syndrome. All I could
think about was what a limited life she was going
to have and that she would be bullied. However, I

(20:05):
now realize how amazing she is and how there are
college programs all over the country for people like her.
Her life has already inspired me to follow my own dreams,
as I want to be an example for her. I
have always wanted to write and published books. I've started
writing a series of children's books in which the main
character is a girl with special needs. There are no
books out there for these children that really celebrate them.
The books don't focus on limitations. They show amazing, funny, brave,

(20:28):
individual kids who happen to have differences. I'd like to
have it eventually published and start a company that has books, dolls,
and a magazine. I know this ended up being a
really long message. Thank you so much, for teaching me
about things I've never heard of, and for having such
an awesome podcast. Sincerely, Amy, and then she suggests some
future things. UM. One of the reasons that I wanted

(20:49):
to read this letter is that I almost wonder if
Amy's uh, if Amy's father taught special education at one
of the elementary schools that I went to, because literally
that is athlete of situations. The special education classroom was
literally in the basement, separated completely from all the other children. UM.
And I didn't really talk about it in that episode,
but I vividly remember going through school. I started public

(21:14):
school in night, so it was not long at all
after the passage of all this legislation, UM, and there
was still debate going on for at least a decade,
probably more about the idea of quote mainstreaming, which is
putting children who had special needs, ince you are a
classroom for quote regular students, UM. And now that seems

(21:36):
to be I'm sure there are definitely school systems where
this is not so much the case, but that seems
to be more like the goal and not some giant
controversy for people to talk about about whether children should
be mainstream. The answer seems to be yes. If it
is possible, children should be in a classroom with peers
of all ability types. So it's great to hear from

(21:59):
folks who have first or some perspective on all of that.
If you would like to write to us, we're a
history podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are
on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History.
We have a spreadshirt store where you can buy t

(22:20):
shirts and whatnot, and that is that ms in History
dot spreadshirt dot com. You can come to our parent
company's website, which is how stuff Works dot com and
look up information about anything you want, basically all kinds
of stuff. You can also come to our website, which
is missed in History dot com, and you will find
uh show notes of the episodes that Holly and I
have done with all of our resources that we used.

(22:41):
You can find an archive of every single episode we
have ever done, and you can find lots of other
cool stuff. So you can do all that and a
lot more at how stuff Works dot com or missing
history dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Because it how stuff works. Dot even