Page:The Modern Pequots and Their Language.djvu/2

Comparatively few people are aware that there are still in existence in Connecticut about one hundred Indians of Pequot-Mohegan blood. A colony of some fifty individuals of this group, now mostly employed as farm and factory hands, is still to be found at the village of Mohegan, some miles south of Norwich, Connecticut; the remaining fifty live in adjacent towns and visit their people only occasionally. The land at Mohegan is now owned in severalty, as the reservation went out of title years ago. The Indians are consequently all citizens of the United States and enjoy all the privileges of the courts and schools. A Congregational church is supported by the Indians at Mohegan.

Although these people are really Pequots in language, they nevertheless refer to themselves as Mohegans (Mûhî′gănĭŭk), a discrepancy which seems to have originated in the following manner: An old Pequot tradition tells of the emigration of that tribe in about the year 1600, from upper Hudson river, where they lived as

neighbors of those Mohicans who were, as is well known, a branch of the Lenni Lenape and who consequently spoke a Delaware dialect. The Munsees of Hagersville, Ontario, and the Delawares of the Cherokee reservation in Indian Territory and of Ottawa, Kansas, are the sole modern representatives of the Lenni Lenâpe.^[1] The