Massachusett

The Massachusett were an Eastern Algonquian people around Massachusetts Bay, in the watersheds of the Charles and Neponset rivers; their name refers to the Great Blue Hill overlooking their country. They lived in riverside villages of domed bark houses called wetu and grew maize, beans and squash alongside fishing and hunting.

Samuel de Champlain met their leaders in Boston Harbor in 1605. The Great Dying of 1616 to 1619, probably leptospirosis, carried off up to ninety percent of them, with smallpox returning in 1633. English colonists then occupied their shoreline almost unopposed.

Many survivors settled in the Christian praying towns of Natick and Ponkapoag founded through John Eliot's mission, which also printed a Bible translation in their language. Massachusett ceased to be everyday speech by the 1750s and died out around the turn of the nineteenth century.