Humans settled along the rich middle Connecticut River Valley soon after the glaciers receded some 13,000 years ago. They hunted and fished on the shores of glacial Lake Hitchcock that filled the valley in what is now Massachusetts and Connecticut, and moved into the silt-rich bottomlands when the lake drained some 8,000 years ago. By the time Europeans began settling New England after 1620, several Indigenos nations had homelands in the region. Many of the most prominent spoke the Algonkian (Algonquian) language, including the Pocumtucks. Before contact, they controlled much of the Connecticut River in what is now Massachusetts. Their smaller neighbors, the Squawkheags (who lived around present-day Northfield), and the Norwottucks (north and south of present-day Hadley), paid tribute to the Pocumtucks in exchange for protection. The Pocumtucks in turn paid tribute to the Pequots in Connecticut and the Mahicans (Mohicans) along the Massachusetts-New York border. The Pocumtucks were hard hit by the epidemics that surged among Indigenous people in New England in 1616-1617, and particularly in 1634. Their numbers were drastically diminished, and many of their villages were abandoned. By the time John Pynchon established Springfield in 1636, the Pocumtucks mainly lived in a village in what is now Deerfield. There they continued the traditional relationships with their neighbors, but European influence, trade, and political manipulation raised the power and influence of some other Native groups, including the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and the Iroquois confederacy (to which the Mohawks, traditional enemies of the Pocumtucks, belonged). The Pocumtucks were able to survive contact with the English and profited from trade with them but aggressively protected their rights and sought to limit English expansion, which led to conflict with them in the 1650s. The English were too weak to move decisively against the Pocumtucks and for the next decade they continued to trade with them, although uneasily. The Pocumtucks also warred with the Mohawks, who were using their alliance with the Dutch to extend their influence eastward into Massachusetts. This war intensified in 1663. In 1664, the English and Dutch went to war and the English easily took the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (now New York). With this victory the English controlled Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, including Albany. These settlements bordered on the lands of the powerful Iroquois confederacy, which had good relations with the Dutch, and the English then began courting the Iroquois. In October 1664, the English signed a treaty with the Iroquois promising they would not help the Pocumtucks, and that fall the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois confederacy attacked their eastern enemies. The exact date of the Mohawk attack on the Pocumtuck village is not known, but by early February 1665, it was destroyed. Facing extermination, the surviving Pocumtucks dispersed. Many histories end there, but the fate of some survivors is known. Many appeared to have moved south to join the Norwottucks, living there for another decade before being forced to move on due to English encroachments. They then moved westward to become a tributary tribe of the Mohawks in the Hudson Valley, at Schaghticoke, a village about ten miles north of Albany. From there some joined in Metacom’s (King Philip’s) War (1675-1676) – the last effort by Native people to regain their traditional lands, which drove the English settlers from both Northfield and Deerfield. In 1676, some Pocumtucks probably returned to settle at Peskeompskut (present-day Turners Falls), a settlement that was attacked and destroyed by the English on May 19 of that year (in partial retribution for a Native attack on an English convoy the previous September, at a site in present-day South Deerfield that came to be called Bloody Brook). The surviving Pocumtucks returned to New York. Their numbers declined, and the last known mention of them is from 1754, when they were taken to Canada by a Native raiding party. Some other Pocumtucks appear to have gone to Canada, many ending up in the village of Odanak (St. Francis), where the memory of the Pocumtuck nation is still held. The settlers around Deerfield sought land rights from Pocumtucks or persons claiming to be Pocumtuck, gathering signatures to deeds from a number of scattered people. Whether these signatories had the authority to deed the land is in many cases questionable, but the Pocumtuck nation’s decline left many things in doubt, including the title to what had once been very closely-held land.