Wassoogett his marke
From Pennacook, of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Wassoogott’s homelands in the southernmost portions of so-called New Hampshire and Maine, and at the northern border of so-called Massachusetts.
Wassoogott’s mark appears on a 1668 document preserving Native testimony after violence at an English truck house (trading post) at Pennacook (now “Concord, NH”), where government agents were illegally selling liquor to Native people. Commonly referred to in scholarship as the Dickinson Incident, it began around Richard Waldron’s trading house where Thomas Dickinson, a settler connected to the post, was killed. The heretofore unnamed Native man accused of killing him was then also killed the following day.
What began in the colonial record as a murder investigation later exposed something larger: the role of powerful English traders, truck houses, and illegal liquor distribution in destabilizing Native communities while advancing settlement and colonial control.
Signed August 1668. Seen at the Massachusetts State Archives.
