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  • Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England by Jenny Hale Pulsipher
  • Julie A. Fisher
Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. By Jenny Hale Pulsipher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 384 pages. Cloth, ebook.

Recovering historical Native lives matters, not least because their experiences can invigorate seemingly familiar histories. Take, for example, Boston in the seventeenth century. Could there be a more studied colonial space in North America? Yet Jenny Hale Pulsipher's new biography, Swindler Sachem, uses the life of the Nipmuc John Wompas—a man whose unique experiences included claiming to be a leader (a sachem) among his people so he could profit (swindle) from the Native land market—to render Boston, New England, and even the English Atlantic refreshingly unfamiliar. To probe the moment when colonists and Indians were determining if and how they would coexist, Pulsipher follows Wompas as he lived in colonial homes, studied in grammar school, read Latin at Harvard, worked on Boston's wharves, and sailed on English ships. Though the enduring image of colonial Boston remains a place brimming with English people as they labored to build their city on a hill, Pulsipher joins scholars such as Margaret Ellen Newell, Wendy Warren, and Linford D. Fisher in highlighting not only the existence but the importance of Native men's and women's labor in Boston and the larger region's economy.1 And though Swindler Sachem is a remarkable story, Pulsipher carefully balances Wompas's extraordinary adventures with major events in New England Indian history, including bouts of epidemic disease, forced labor, land loss, and King Philip's War.

Wompas was born around 1637 into the Nipmuc community of Hassanamesit at a moment when the town, along with many others in Native New England, was struggling with the ravages of epidemic disease, the fallout of the Pequot War, and colonial encroachment. Like a number of their contemporaries, Wompas's parents turned to the Christianity propagated by English missionary John Eliot and Native missionaries. By 1646, the family had moved to Nonantum, a nascent praying town (or community of Christian Indians). Wompas's mother died the following year, and his father soon after apprenticed him into an English home in nearby Roxbury, where he learned to read and write. His education propelled him to Harvard's newly formed Indian College; Pulsipher carefully [End Page 588] re-creates his experience there, providing an intimate treatment of the school's early Indian scholars. Her discussion of Wompas's notations within his copy of Cicero's De Officiis offers a rare glimpse into his frustrations during coursework, the subversive wit he used to cope, and his hopes for life beyond Cambridge—namely (as he wrote in Latin), his "desire to be at sea" (82). Wompas proved serious about this desire and, after three years of study, abandoned his Latin tutors for the high seas. In discussing this move, Pulsipher offers one of the earlier examples of the many Native seamen from New England who joined sailing crews in the decades that followed. Over the course of many years, this maritime community would provide essential support to Wompas at home and abroad.

Pulsipher also carefully weaves in the life story of Wompas's wife, Ann Prask—which is particularly valuable given that glimpses into the lives of Native women from this period remain frustratingly rare. A young girl from Mahican country near present-day Albany, New York, Prask had only recently arrived in southern New England with her father when English forces captured her and transported her to Roxbury following the Pequot War. Her young age, unfamiliarity with the area, and distance from kin may explain why Prask did not escape, and, having grown up there, she chose to live the remainder of her life in the Boston area. Though the details are unclear, it seems Prask regained her freedom through her marriage to Wompas. Prask claimed rights to a large tract of land from her father, which her new husband sold for a large sum, evidently...

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