An adjunct assistant professor at Indiana University at Indianapolis, Jon T. Coleman is the author of Vicious: Wolves and American History, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

"Severed wolf heads stood at the juncture of peace and war in colonial New England."

Terms of Dismemberment
Jon T. Coleman

Instead of uniting New England’s humans, predator eradication exposed the fault lines that separated them. The animals’ heads became symbols in the colonists’ and Indians’ struggle over land and political ascendancy. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New England Algonquians and English colonists fought several major wars and engaged in a series of raids and skirmishes. The violence sometimes plunged the bipeds into the basements of hell. Many of the instances of colonists labeling Algonquians animals came from these periods of intense conflict. John Underhill, an English captain who watched Indian men, women, and children burn at Mystic Fort during the Pequot War, compared his enemies to "roaring lions." William Hubbard called Metacom a den-dwelling "beast" after King Philip’s War. A war hostage in the same conflict, Mary Rowlandson likened her Narragansett captors to "hell-hounds," "ravenous bears," and "wolves," while, a few weeks before French, Abaneki, and Canadian Indian fighters raided his town, killing fifty residents and carrying a hundred into captivity, Solomon Stoddard of Deerfield wrote that Indians "act like wolves and are to be dealt withal as wolves."

Violence and heartbreak led English writers to question their Indian adversaries’ humanity, but the actual lines of cultural division in wartime were never as clearly drawn as their animal metaphors implied. War generated cross-cultural alliances as well as inhuman violence. The English, for instance, fought the Pequots with the assistance of Narragansett warriors. Later, during King Philip’s War, the colonists battled the Narragansetts with the aid of Mohegan fighters. Wolf symbols and metaphors signaled the cultural distance between warring peoples; they also helped span this gap through military alliances.

Severed wolf heads stood at the juncture of peace and war in colonial New England. Nailed to the side of a meetinghouse or set atop a post in a public space, the heads symbolized the colonists’ desire to punish outlaw animals and bring order to a rambunctious natural environment. In England, criminals and traitors received similar treatment. Displayed in public, the human skulls served as warnings to would-be thieves and rebels. Of course, no human signal however vivid could prompt a hungry wolf to mull the consequence of biting a lamb, and the predators’ inability to read the messages disgruntled colonists were sending them makes the public display of wolf heads a puzzling activity. They were signs, but signs for whom?

In 1671, Metacom, known to the English as King Philip, negotiated a treaty with the Plymouth Colony, and this document illustrated the multiple signals lopped off heads sent in Colonial New England. The Wampanoag Sachem agreed to abide by Plymouth’s laws, to pay a fine of one hundred pounds for past "misdemeanors," to "not make war without approbation," to allow the court at Plymouth to settle future disputes, and to submit to a ban on selling Wampanoag land without the approval of the court. He also promised to send five wolves’ heads to the governor every year as a "token of his fealty." Later that year, Metacom escorted Takamunna, Sachem of the Saconet, to the Plymouth Court. Takamunna signed a similar treaty and pledged one wolf’s head a year. The wolf head tributes the Plymouth Colony extracted from Metacom and Takamunna represented the colonists’ attempt to fashion a symbol that communicated their right to control the demarcation, transference, and ownership of territory. Metacom contested this right. Four years after signing the treaty, he led an uprising against the English. Many skulls rolled during King Philip’s War, but only one ended up rotting on a pole in Plymouth town–Metacom’s.

Propped up for display like a wolf’s head, King Philip’s skull was a symbol of English ascendancy. The colonists tried to use human skulls as tokens of power from the earliest years of settlement. In 1623, Myles Standish decapitated Wituwamat, a Massachusett Indian accused of conspiring to destroy the English settlements, and stuck his head on a pole outside of Plymouth’s fort. The colonists received Wituwamat’s head "with joy;" it signaled their ability to defend themselves and punish their enemies. This was hubris. In 1623, the Plymouth Colony could barely feed itself much less fend off a coordinated Indian attack. Wituwamat’s head symbolized the colonists’ yearning for power, domination, and control, aspirations thwarted by the continued presence of human rivals who interpreted skulls differently. Miles Standish seized physical command of an Indian body when he chopped off Wituwamat’s head, but the English never acquired the cultural authority to determine the skull’s meaning.

During the Pequot War, the colonists’ Narragansett and Mohegan allies offered Pequot heads as gifts. For the Indians, the gifts re-enforced their equal partnership with the English. The colonists, however, saw the skulls as tokens of not only the Pequots’ subordination but the Mohegans’ and Narragansetts’ as well. The heads represented the Indians’ "service" and "fidelity." In 1637, Roger Williams indulged in the ultimate power fantasy. In a letter to the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, he suggested that the conquered Pequots be dispersed throughout the colonies. They would live in small, isolated groups and send an annual tribute of wolves’ heads to the governor: "as once Edgar the Peacable did with the Welsh in North Wales, a tribute of wolves heads be imposed on them . . . which I conceave an incomparable way to Save much Cattell alive in the land."

Williams’s plan linked the conquests of wolves and Indians through communication and territory. The vanquished Pequots would destroy wolves to communicate their fidelity to and compliance with English authority. In the process, they would make the wilderness safe for the colonists’ meandering property. Williams imagined a line of communication that worked like a chain of command. Indians would subordinate wolves in order to collect the emblems of their own subordination. The plan, however, contained a glaring weakness. Controlling the symbolism of wolves’ heads was beyond the colonists’ power.

The Algonquians exchanged both human and animal body parts for their own reasons. They traded black wolves’ skins to heal alliances and restore reciprocity. Wolf killing was a byproduct of seasonal deer trapping in Southern New England. Indian trappers destroyed the wolves that robbed their deer snares, and every so often they caught an exceptional thief, a trespasser with all black pelage (most wolves are gray in forest habitats). Repairing the damage done by the crime rather than punishing the criminal was a core idea of Algonquian justice. Trappers did not punish wolves as much as exact restitution comparable to the animal’s offense. A wolf skin signified atonement. That was why black wolves’ skins worked so well as peace offerings. They were rare gifts that signaled the giver’s desire to expiate past misdeeds.

It is hard to tell what wolves’ heads, as opposed to pelts, meant to Indians, but the events leading up to King Philip’s War hold a few clues. Metacom’s revolt in 1675 makes more sense if he understood the wolves’ heads he committed to give in 1671 as symbols of restored equality instead of imposed fealty. The skulls may have hastened the war by convincing both the English and the Wampanoags that each broke promises neither made.