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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Massasoit Biography MASSASOIT ( ?1580-1661). A celebrated sachem of the Wampanoag or Pokanoket Indians, whose territory embraced nearly all the southern part of the present Massachusetts, from Cape Cod to Narragansett Bay. His tribe was said to have been very large at one time, but to have been almost exterminated by disease, so that, on the coming of the whites, it numbered only about 300. On March 22, 1621, he visited Plymouth with 60 warriors and on behalf of the Wampanoags concluded a treaty of peace and mutual protection with Governor Carver. This was sacredly kept by both sides for more than 50 years, and Massasoit himself remained the steadfast friend of the colonists until his death in 1661. He lived at Sowams, within the present town of Warren, R. I., where commissioners from the adjacent settlements often visited him. Consult Virginia Baker, Massasoit's Town Sowams in Pokanoket (Warren, R. I., 1904). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 219-220. |