Chapter One - Before the Pilgrims

CHAPTER ONE

Before the Pilgrims

SO HERE’S THE thing. When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, they weren’t stepping into a blank canvas. This wasn’t empty land. It wasn’t wild. It wasn’t waiting. It wasn’t theirs.

It was already somebody else’s world.

And not just a couple of teepees in the trees. We're talking full-on societies. Trade networks. Diplomacy. Agriculture. Spiritual systems. Territory lines. Cultural memory.

The Wampanoag were here. So were the Pequot. The Narragansett. The Mohegan. The Nipmuc. The Massachusett. The Sokoki. The Abenaki. All up and down what we now call New England.

They fished the Atlantic. They farmed the river valleys. They burned forest undergrowth in rotating cycles. They built longhouses, gathered in councils, and mapped their land with generations of knowledge. Not just living in nature — managing it, shaping it, partnering with it.

And they weren’t isolated tribes like you see in old Westerns — they were nations. With boundaries. With rivalries. With alliances. Some enemies. Some friends. Some complicated as hell.

So when the Pilgrims landed and looked around like they were the first ones at the party — nah.
The party had been going on for centuries. They just showed up without an invite.

Let’s zoom in.

Massasoit was the sachem — basically the head chief — of the Wampanoag Confederacy. At its height, his people numbered in the tens of thousands, spread across dozens of villages.

But by the time the Mayflower showed up, that number had dropped fast. Not from war. From plague.

The Wampanoag had already made contact with earlier European ships — Portuguese, French, English — and with them came disease. And I’m not talking about “oh, a couple people got sick.”

I’m talking about entire villages gone. Bodies left unburied. Oral histories describe a “Great Dying” between 1616 and 1619 — right before the Pilgrims arrived. Some tribes lost 90% of their population.

So when the settlers came ashore, they saw cleared fields, abandoned villages, paths already cut through the trees. And they thought, “God prepared this land for us.”

No. Smallpox did.

That’s what the Pilgrims were walking into. A civilization mid-collapse. A people still alive, still watching, still grieving. Not savages. Not side characters. Not some woodland extras in a white salvation story.

They had history. They had memory. They had reasons to be cautious.

And when they saw that weird boat appear on the horizon, you better believe they already knew what it meant.

Because this wasn’t the first boat.
It was just the next one.

And this time, it wasn’t leaving.