Simeon Simons: Remembering a Pokanoket Patriot

Indigenous Survival, Family Memory, & the American Revolution

As the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, renewed attention is being given to the Indigenous men who fought for American independence. Among them was Simeon Simons, an Indigenous soldier from Connecticut whose remarkable story connects the American Revolution with an earlier and often forgotten chapter of New England history concerning the survival of the Pokanoket people after King Philip's War.

Born around 1759 in the Pachaug region of Connecticut, Simeon served as a soldier in the Continental Army. Historian David J. Naumec identifies him specifically with the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, while Simeon's surviving Revolutionary War pension file provides additional documentary evidence of his military service.[1] Family tradition and later local histories also remembered him as having served closely with General George Washington as a bodyguard. In 1824, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited nearby Jewett City, Simeon was among the Revolutionary veterans who gathered to greet him.[2]

As Simeon's story receives renewed attention during the nation's 250th anniversary, he has increasingly been remembered in connection with Pequot history. That connection should not simply be dismissed. Simeon lived within the complicated colonial society of Connecticut, and members of the Simon-Weeden family have connections with Indigenous communities there.[3] Like many Indigenous families in southern New England, Simeons family lived amongst and intermarried with people whose ancestry and affiliations extended across numerous Indigenous peoples.

Yet another important part of Simeon's history deserves a place within this conversation which anchors around how he was remembered by his own descendants.

Long before today's renewed interest in Simeon Simons, members of his family preserved an oral tradition identifying him as Pokanoket and a descendant of Metacom, known to the English as King Philip. Understanding how these histories can coexist requires looking at the extraordinary transformation of Indigenous New England during the century separating Metacom from Simeon. This article is not intended to challenge the connections that the Pequot's have more recently recognized with Simeon Simons. Rather, its purpose is to recover another part of his history, the Pokanoket identity and ancestry preserved within Simeon's own extended family and passed through generations of his descendants. This is, therefore, a Pokanoket telling of Simeon Simons's story, while recognizing that the interconnected Indigenous world in which he and his descendants lived allowed multiple histories and relationships to coexist.

From Metacom's World to Simeon's

At first glance, the lives of Metacom and Simeon Simons appear separated by two entirely different worlds. One led a desperate war against English colonial expansion during the 17th century while the other fought beside the descendants of the very same English colonists who sought independence from Great Britain during the 18th century. Yet the century separating these two men is precisely what makes Simeon's story so important. For understanding the distinction between political collapse of the Pokanoket tribe and demographic survival of these descendants essential in understanding this connection.

King Philip's War devastated the Indigenous political landscape that had existed when the English first established their colonies in New England. For the Pokanokets, the consequences were catastrophic. Metacom was killed at Mount Hope in August 1676. Subsequently other prominent Indigenous leaders such as Annawon, Weetamoo, Tuspaquin, Canonchet, Napham, Quaiapen, Muttawmp and Matoonas were all hunted down, killed, or executed by colonial forces and their allies. Indigenous captives were enslaved, transported, indentured, or scattered. Families were separated, ancestral lands were lost, and the political autonomy once exercised by many of the Indigenous nations of southern New England was dramatically weakened.[4] Yet the destruction of political autonomy did not mean the disappearance of the Indigenous people themselves. For survivors remained, and their descendants continued their story.

Some sought refuge among neighboring Indigenous nations. Others entered praying towns, colonial households as indentured servants, or settlements created for Indigenous refugees and surrenderers. Families relocated and intermarried, while older kinship relationships continued beneath the realities of new geographical and political arrangements. Connecticut records preserve remarkable evidence of this process. Reverend James Fitch reported approximately 111 of "Philip's men, women and children" among Indigenous captives taken following the wake of the conflict. Other Connecticut records identify followers and relatives of Metacom living among the Mohegans. One particularly revealing entry even records "Philip's sister" among Indigenous people then under the protection of Uncas.[5]

These people did not cease being Indigenous simply because the political world from which they came had collapsed. Instead, it illustrated what many colonial histories failed to recognize as the emergence of a different Indigenous world. One where Indigenous people were not vanishing but beginning to transition into a new chapter of understanding their enduring identity.

The Rise of Composite Indigenous Communities

By the 1700s, the Indigenous landscape of southern New England was no longer identical to that encountered by English colonists a century earlier. The wars, epidemics, migrations, land loss, enslavement, cultural suppression, and political upheavals of the 17th century had transformed Indigenous communities throughout the region. Thus survivors and descendants of Pokanoket, Pequot, Narragansett, Niantic, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Massachusetts, and other peoples increasingly lived beside and among one another.

More importantly, kinship relationships survived even when earlier tribal political structures did not. New communities formed from families whose ancestors made difficult choices to survive, navigating different outcomes from colonial conflicts and forced migrations. Over generations, intermarriage created extensive networks crossing older 16th and 17th-century political boundaries. These composite communities were not evidence that Indigenous identity had disappeared. Rather, they demonstrate how Indigenous people adapted to survive within an increasingly dominant English colonial world.

The Shetucket community near Norwich provides us with one such example. Following King Philip's War, surrendered and displaced Pokanket amongst other Indigenous families were settled in the region under the supervision of Reverend James Fitch. Later records could refer collectively to the "Shetucket Indians," but that label should not be mistaken for evidence that they represented a single older tribal population. The community emerged from the upheavals of the 17th century and brought together Indigenous people of different origins.[6] Communities such as this, became an important part of Indigenous life in southern New England.

 By the 18th century therefore, it should be understood that where an Indigenous person lived did not necessarily tell us the entirety of who that person was. For a Pokanoket family might live among Pequots or Mohegans. A Narragansett might marry into a Niantic family. An individual living within a community administratively associated in colonial documentation with one tribe might simultaneously preserve ancestry and kinship relationships connecting that person to numerous other tribal identities. Therefore, residence, ancestry, kinship, political affiliation, and family identity could overlap without being identical. This shifting landscape is essential for understanding Simeon Simons.

His birth in colonial Connecticut does not by itself determine the entirety of his ancestry or identity. Nor would later family connections with Pequot communities necessarily erase an older Pokanoket lineage remembered within his family. 

Recognizing the Pokanoket tradition surrounding Simeon therefore does not require denying contemporary Pequot connections to him. Likewise, recognizing Pequot connections should not require erasing the Pokanoket identity preserved by his descendants. Both histories can belong to the same complicated Indigenous past.

When Government Records Changed the Names

There is another difficulty historians must confront when attempting to reconstruct this world being that the terminology used in colonial and later government records was often inconsistent and imposed from outside Indigenous communities by colonial authorities. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Indigenous people living within colonial and later  American towns were frequently recorded not according to a specific tribal identity but through broad racial categories. Depending upon the bias of the recorder, the time, place, ancestry, appearance, or legal circumstances, Indigenous people and their descendants could appear in records as Indian, colored, Negro, mulatto, mustee, or under other racial descriptions.[7]

Those categories can become misleading when later historians treat them as precise descriptions of identity. An Indigenous man classified as "colored" by a town clerk did not necessarily cease understanding himself as Indigenous. A family classified as "mulatto" in a census did not necessarily stop remembering its Indigenous ancestors. These federal census practices themselves illustrate this problem. Indigenous people were not always separately enumerated, and individuals of Indigenous ancestry could appear under rigid colonial racial classifications.

This problem is particularly significant when studying Indigenous soldiers of the American Revolution. Military rolls, pension applications, censuses, town records, and court proceedings were generally not designed to preserve tribal genealogy. Indigenous soldiers could consequently disappear into broader racial categories within the documentary archive.

If historians later search only for people explicitly identified as "Indian," those men and their families can effectively disappear from the historical narrative a second time. The absence of a tribal name from a government document therefore cannot always be treated as proof that the family had abandoned that identity. More often the record changed while the family memory did not.

Colonial Indigenous Life in the 18th Century

By Simeon's generation, Indigenous life in southern New England had also changed considerably from the world Metacom had known. Many Indigenous people spoke English, wore clothing similar to their colonial neighbors, practiced Christianity, worked in English households, participated in local markets, and lived within or alongside colonial towns. Indigenous men and women worked as farmers, laborers, whalers, sailors, soldiers, guides, servants, craftspeople, and interpreters.

Yet cultural adaptation did not necessarily bring equality. An English surname did not erase Indigenous ancestry, nor did Christianity erase cultural memory. Living within a colonial town did not mean that a person had ceased being Indigenous. Families could speak English, worship in Christian congregations, work beside their English neighbors, and serve in colonial wars while still facing racial discrimination, legal vulnerability, restricted opportunities, and the persistent assumption that they did not fully belong within colonial society.

This was the world into which Simeon Simons was born. It was no longer the political world of Massasoit Ousamequin and Metacom, but neither was it a world in which Indigenous people had disappeared. Rather, it was a new Indigenous landscape shaped by survival, kinship, adaptation, intermarriage, and composite communities living within increasingly dominant English colonies. Older histories sometimes interpreted cultural change as disappearance. Yet Indigenous people did not have to live exactly as their ancestors had lived in 1620 to remain Indigenous in 1775. Survival, endurance and continuity itself required change.

From King Philip's War to the American Revolution

Seen within this context, it should not be surprising that the revolutionary language of liberty and freedom appealed to at least some Indigenous men and their families .Military service could carry many meanings. Indigenous soldiers fought for different reasons, and we should be cautious about assuming that all shared the same motivations. Yet for at least some, fighting alongside their “American” neighbors may have represented more than opposition to British rule. It may also have carried the hope of securing a place for themselves and their descendants within a new society founded, at least in principle upon a different set of political ideals.

The descendants of Metacom were no exception to the ideas of liberty. Nearly a century earlier, Metacom had taken up arms against English colonial expansion. Now a man remembered by his descendants as belonging to Metacom's own bloodline would take up arms alongside the descendants of those very same English colonists in a revolution against Great Britain.

The contrast is striking. Yet it is also a story of continuity. A people who were supposed to have been vanquished and written out of history after 1676 would once again find themselves participating in events that transformed New England. The Pokanokets had not suddenly reappeared. The reality was much more sobering. We never disappeared.

Their descendants remained throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and beyond, working, marrying, raising families, preserving memories, and adapting to a changing world. Simeon Simons's presence in the American Revolution therefore represents more than the story of one Indigenous soldier. It demonstrates what political histories of King Philip's War can sometimes obscure, the defeat of an Indigenous tribe did not mean the extinction of the families who had once belonged to it.

 Pokanoket Family Memory

One of the most important custodians of his family history was Princess Red Wing, Mary E. Glasko Weeden (1896–1987), an Indigenous historian, lecturer, educator, and direct descendant of Simeon Simons. For Red Wing was not simply a later historian who encountered Simeon's story in books or government archives. She was born in Connecticut and grew up within the extended Indigenous family networks in which the Simons family had lived for generations. Her grandmother, Susan L. Simons, was in turn a granddaughter of Simeon Simons. Red Wing therefore learned about her ancestry within Simeon's own family, from a grandmother whose grandfather was Simeon. This creates a remarkably close chain of family transmission

While we cannot reconstruct every conversation through which this history passed. Nor should oral history be exempt from the same critical examination applied to written sources. But the closeness of the transmission is historically significant. For the Pokanoket identification of Simeon did not originate during today's discussions surrounding his identity. It existed within the oral history of his descendants generations earlier.

Red Wing eventually committed portions of that history to writing. In recounting the family's descent from Metacom, she wrote of Simeon:

"From this union Simmeon Simons was descended. He had the insignia of Pokanoket…"[8]

Additionally, her manuscript preserves another particularly striking family tradition. According to Red Wing, when George Washington stopped at Pachaug while traveling north to assume command of the Continental Army in 1775, the young Simeon came to his attention.

Washington reportedly asked:

"Whence your line?"

Simeon answered:

"I'm from the line of Pokanoket, but my line is a dead book."[9]

Whether those precise words survived unchanged across generations cannot now be established. Yet their significance extends beyond whether every word has been transmitted verbatim. The family's memory is remarkably specific. Simeon was not remembered merely as "Indian." He was not remembered simply according to where he lived. Within his descendants' oral history, he identified his lineage specifically as Pokanoket.

The phrase "my line is a dead book" becomes particularly profound when placed against the history of the preceding century. The political world of the Pokanoket Massasoits had been destroyed. Their lands had been taken, families scattered, and the Pokanoket name largely disappeared from the colonial political record, and replaced by Wampanoag in the histories written after the King Philips War. [10] Yet the family memory suggests something very different from extinction. The public book on Pokanoket may have appeared closed but descendants continued remembering, as do the Pokanoket Tribe today.

Princess Red Wing & Her Many Indigenous Roots

It is equally important not to force Princess Red Wing herself into a single tribal category.Throughout her life, Red Wing recognized and participated in the interconnected Narragansett, Niantic, and Pokanoket worlds from which her family descended.] These identities were not necessarily contradictory. They reflected precisely the interconnected Indigenous landscape that had developed in southern New England over previous centuries.

Red Wing was deeply involved in Narragansett cultural life. She was a co-founder and editor of The Narragansett Dawn during the 1930s and devoted decades of her life to Indigenous education and cultural preservation. Yet she also openly maintained her Pokanoket ancestry.

There is particularly strong primary evidence of this from Red Wing's own lifetime. On June 23, 1978, Rhode Island Governor J. Joseph Garrahy issued an official proclamation declaring "Princess Red Wing Day." The proclamation explicitly identified her as being from the "Seven Crescents, Royal House of Pokanoket." At the same time, it honored her decades of educational and cultural work relating to the Narragansett Indian community.[11]

hat combination is significant. The State of Rhode Island was publicly recognizing Red Wing's Pokanoket identity during her lifetime while simultaneously honoring her work within Narragansett cultural life. There was no necessary contradiction. Red Wing could honor her Narragansett and Niantic relations while preserving her Pokanoket descent through the Simons family. Her life therefore illustrates the very point that Simeon's history teaches us when we consider Indigenous identity even today. Indigenous identity in southern New England could be genealogical, familial, communal, political, and multilayered at the same time. Acknowledging one ancestry did not require denying another.

Simeon Was Remembered Before the 250th Anniversary

The present interest in Simeon Simons is far from the first time his descendants participated in preserving and publicly commemorating his story. Local memory of Simeon was already well established by the early 20th century. Daniel L. Phillips's Griswold—A History, included Simeon within the Revolutionary history of the town and recorded his presence among the veterans who greeted the Marquis de Lafayette during his visit to Jewett City in 1824.[12]

Even more significant evidence survives from 1935. On August 13, 1935, Miss Alice Brown, writing on behalf of the Annie Brewster Fanning Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Jewett City, Connecticut, invited Princess Red Wing to participate in a local historical pageant to be held on August 17 commemorating the story of George Washington and Simeon Simons at Pachaug.[13] The invitation is important for another reason as Red Wing was not merely attending as an interested historian. She belonged to the extended Simons family that preserved Simeon's memory.

Here, generations before the present 250th-anniversary commemorations, a local historical organization in Simeon's own Connecticut community was reaching out to one of his Indigenous descendants as part of the public remembrance of his Revolutionary story. The timing is also noteworthy as only a month later, in September 1935, The Narragansett Dawn, which Red Wing helped edit, published E. B. Dimock's "The Story of Simmons from an Old Newspaper: Washington—His Life Guardsman, a Pachaug Soldier."[14] Taken together, Phillips's town history, the 1935 Daughters of the American Revolution invitation, and the publication of Simeon's story in The Narragansett Dawn demonstrate that Simeon was not suddenly rediscovered during today's 250th anniversary. His story was being preserved simultaneously in local Connecticut historical memory and within the Indigenous family that remembered him and this chronology mattered. As it demonstrates that the relationship between Simeon and his Indigenous descendants was publicly visible generations before present discussions surrounding his tribal identity. Princess Red Wing and the Simons, Glasko, and Weeden families were not attaching themselves to a newly discovered historical figure. They belonged to a family that had been preserving his memory for generations.

More than a family photograph, the image provides a window into the interconnected character of Indigenous communities during the first half of the 20th century. Pokanoket and Narragansett relatives lived, gathered, celebrated, and maintained family relationships across tribal communities. Before the modern era of federal recognition and the increasingly formal political boundaries between tribal nations, Indigenous people in southern New England could openly maintain multiple familial, ancestral, and community connections. The photograph reminds us that tribal identity and kinship were not always confined within the sharper boundaries through which Indigenous communities are often understood today.

Intermarriage Was Survival, Not Extinction

However, after the Revolutionary War, state and federal bureaucracies routinely weaponized the documentation of Indigenous intermarriage, treating these cross-cultural unions as evidence of tribal "extinction" rather than recognizing them as continuous family and Indigenous survival. In a strange irony, the living descendants of Simeon Simons, like many Indigenous people of their era, had to endure relentless attempts at paper erasure of their identity, even while white American society continued to champion and mythologize their ancestors. One clear case of this dynamic occurred in late 19th-century Rhode Island, where intermarriage became a primary legal argument used to claim the Narragansett had become too racially mixed to remain a distinct Indigenous tribe. These aggressive detribalization policies culminated in the Rhode Island Detribalization Act of 1880, an administrative effort to forcefully dissolve Narragansett tribal status and acquire their remaining communal lands claiming, “there is not an Indian of full blood remaining; only two of three-fourths, and nine of half blood.” [15]

The language used by the Rhode Island Supreme Court in its 1898 consideration of the Narragansett case is particularly revealing. The court described the Narragansett as supposedly "extinct in all but name" and discussed intermarriage with people of African and European ancestry as part of the explanation for that supposed disappearance. [16]

Today, the assumptions underlying that reasoning are themselves historically revealing. Like the Pokanokets in Connecticut, the Narragansett had not disappeared. The community survived the state's attempted detribalization and continued maintaining relationships, memory, and identity. More than a century after Rhode Island attempted to declare that political identity effectively extinct, the continued existence of the Narragansett stands as a powerful reminder of the difference between government classification and Indigenous survival.

This history matters deeply when considering Simeon Simons and his modern descendants. Extensive intermarriage among the Pokanoket, Narragansett, Niantic, Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Mashpee, Aquinnah, African American, and European families must never be misinterpreted as evidence that Indigenous identity dissolved. Instead, these cross-cultural relationships formed the core of a resilient, highly human kinship network. It was precisely through these interconnected family trees that Indigenous peoples successfully navigated, resisted, and survived the structural upheavals of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

The historical mistake was to treat racial mixture as cultural extinction rather than change or adaptation. Indigenous families themselves could understand identity very differently. Kinship, descent, community participation, inherited memory, and relationships with other Indigenous families could remain meaningful even when an outside government classified an individual as "colored," "mulatto," or "negro."

Princess Red Wing provides an especially revealing example. Her own life reflected Narragansett, Niantic, and Pokanoket ancestry rather than a single isolated lineage. Yet those multiple relationships did not prevent her from preserving a specific Simons family tradition identifying Simeon as Pokanoket and descended from Metacom. The very intermarriage once used by outsiders as evidence that Indigenous peoples were "vanishing" may instead be understood as part of the story of how they survived.

When the Written Record Falls Silent

Simeon's story therefore raises a larger historical question. How should Indigenous history be reconstructed when government records and family memory preserve different parts of the past?

Colonial and later American government documents are invaluable sources, but they were rarely created to preserve Indigenous genealogy or explain how Indigenous families understood themselves. Officials recorded what governments needed to know such as taxation, military service, land ownership, legal status, race, residence, reservations, court proceedings, and political jurisdiction. Those records in turn can tell us where Indigenous people lived and how governments classified them. However, they do not necessarily tell us what grandparents told their grandchildren. They rarely record which ancestors a family remembered, what identities were preserved privately, or how Indigenous families understood kinship relationships extending across the boundaries colonial governments imposed upon them.

Oral history preserves something different. Like every historical source, oral traditions must be evaluated critically. Stories can change. Generations can be compressed. Details may be lost, embellished, or reinterpreted. But critically examining oral history is not the same as ignoring it. This is particularly important in Indigenous history, where so much of the surviving documentary archive was created by outsiders.

In Simeon's case, documentary and oral evidence often complement rather than contradict one another. Colonial records demonstrate that Pokanoket survivors entered Connecticut after King Philip's War. Revolutionary records establish Simeon's presence and military service there generations later. Local histories and The Narragansett Dawn preserve traditions surrounding his Revolutionary life. Red Wing's family history preserves something those government documents generally do not.

How Simeon's descendants remembered who he was. How each source preserves a different part of the story.

The "Vanishing Indian" & the Descendants Left Behind

The absence of a clear Pokanoket identification in many surviving government records must also be considered within another problem in American history. During the 18th and especially the 19th century, Americans increasingly transformed Indigenous leaders such as Massasoit Ousamequin and Metacom into romanticized figures of the distant colonial past. Ousamequin could be celebrated as the friendly welcoming Massasoit of Plymouth tradition. Metacom could be villainized or heroically remembered as the tragic warrior whose struggle supposedly represented the final doomed resistance of a disappearing people.

Yet, living descendants of the very people being memorialized remained almost entirely invisible to public onlookers. This stark contradiction directly fueled the broader "vanishing Indian" mythology of the 19th century. Driven by the aggressive ideology of Manifest Destiny sweeping across the United States, white observers routinely assumed that the Indigenous peoples encountered by their English ancestors had completely faded away. In reality, these descendants continued to live and thrive throughout New England within dynamic, changing communities. To the colonial state, adaptation was dismissed or easily mistaken for extinction. Intermarriage became mistaken for disappearance. Christianity became mistaken for the abandonment of Indigenous identity. The adoption of English surnames became mistaken for total assimilation. Crucially, arbitrary racial labels such as "colored," "mulatto," "Negro," and "mustee" effectively scrubbed Indigenous identity from town records, burying these living descendants even deeper beneath the official ledgers of history written generations later. The irony is striking.Americans could commemorate Massasoit while overlooking families claiming descent from him living within their own communities. They could romanticize King Philip while failing to recognize descendants preserving memories of Metacom through their grandparents and great-grandparents.

Today, the enduring memory of Simeon Simons’ Pokanoket identity among his living descendants directly challenges that exclusionary colonial narrative. This was an identity he actively possessed and passed on to his children, and by keeping his history alive, he remains present with his descendants today in memory, spirit, and admiration. In this way, he stands alongside Metacom and all the ancestors before and after him who kept the torch of their people's identity burning from one generation to the next. Ultimately, the supposed "disappearance" of “Native Americans” was never a physical vanishing of Indigenous peoples, but rather a profound failure of the official historical record, and subsequent historians to recognize the resilient, adaptive forms that their survival had taken.

Competing Memories Are Part of History

None of this means that every element of the Simons family oral tradition can presently be demonstrated through surviving documentary evidence. Nor does it mean that Pequot communities are wrong to recognize Simeon Simons as connected to their history today.

That is not the point. Simeon's story instead demonstrates the danger of forcing complicated 18th-century Indigenous lives into rigid modern categories. His family inhabited an Indigenous Connecticut shaped by generations of displacement, intermarriage, kinship, and composite communities. Pequot connections can therefore be historically meaningful while an older Pokanoket family memory can also be historically meaningful.

One does not necessarily erase the other. What should be considered is the chronology and provenance of those memories. When did a tradition emerge? Who preserved it? How close were those people to the ancestor being remembered? What documentary evidence surrounds it? How did Indigenous families understand themselves? And what might government records have failed to preserve?

For Simeon, the Pokanoket identification can be traced well before today's 250th-anniversary discussions. Princess Red Wing preserved it as part of her inherited family history. Her story appeared in The Narragansett Dawn in 1935. Red Wing continued publicly identifying with her Pokanoket ancestry throughout her lifetime, and Rhode Island officially recognized that identity in 1978.

History itself is not static. New documents emerge. Older evidence is reconsidered. Oral traditions receive renewed attention. Different communities may preserve different memories of the same ancestor. Historians must continually reassess earlier conclusions as additional evidence becomes available. This is especially true of Indigenous history, where the written archive was overwhelmingly created by colonial and later American governments rather than by the Indigenous families whose lives historians are attempting to reconstruct.

The historian's responsibility is therefore not always to choose one memory and silence another. It is to listen carefully to all of them. For the descendants of Simeon Simons, one memory has endured across generations. Although he was born in colonial Connecticut and belonged to its increasingly interconnected Indigenous world, Simeon Simons was remembered within his family as Pokanoket, descended from Metacom.

As the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, that Indigenous family memory deserves a place alongside the other histories now being told about him. Simeon's story ultimately reminds us that the Indigenous history of New England did not end when political autonomy was broken, when ancestral lands were taken, or when Indigenous people disappeared from the categories later historians expected to find them in.

For Indigenous people at the dawn of the American Revolution like Simeon Simons, their political world fundamentally changed. Their communities adapted. Their labels were reclassified. But the people survived. Their families survived. And so did their memories of self and their sense of identity. Our story did not end in 1676. Pokanoket history, and the history of Indigenous people across Turtle Island, continues vibrant and unbroken today.

© 2026 The Seven Crescents

Strong Turtle of Pokanoket.

 All rights reserved.

Endnotes

1. David J. Naumec, "Connecticut Indians in the War of Independence," Connecticut History Review 47, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 181–207, esp. the roster identifying "Simeon Simons—1st Rhode Island Regiment"; Simeon Simons, Revolutionary War Pension File R9587, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. Naumec specifically identifies Simons with the 1st Rhode Island Regiment and cites his federal pension file. Naumec, “Connecticut Indians in the War of Independence”

2. Daniel L. Phillips, Griswold—A History: Being a History of the Town of Griswold, Connecticut, from the Earliest Times to the Entrance of Our Country into the World War in 1917 (Griswold, CT, 1929), 155–58; E. B. Dimock, "The Story of Simmons from an Old Newspaper: Washington—His Life Guardsman, a Pachaug Soldier," The Narragansett Dawn 1, no. 5 (September 1935): 110–11.

3. "Names of the Western Pequot Tribe," New London County Court, March 1825. The record provides evidence of later Simons family relationships with Indigenous communities in eastern Connecticut. Such affiliations should be considered within the broader history of migration, intermarriage, and composite Indigenous communities rather than treated alone as evidence of exclusive ancestry.

4. Linford D. Fisher, "'Why Shall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves': Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip's War," Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 91–114; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

5. J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678; with the Journal of the Council of War, 1675 to 1678 (Hartford: F. A. Brown, 1852), 355–56, 485–87.

6. Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of Norwich, Connecticut: From Its Settlement in 1660 to January 1845 (Norwich, CT: Thomas Robinson, 1845), 115; Fisher, "'Why Shall Wee Have Peace,'" 91–114; "Report on Status of Surrenderers Living at Shetucket," Native Northeast Research Collaborative, annotated transcription, digcoll3883, accessed August 10, 2026. Native Northeast Research Collaborative, “Report on Status of Surrenderers Living at Shetucket”

7. James P. Collins, "Native Americans in the Census, 1860–1890," Prologue 38, no. 2 (Summer 2006), National Archives and Records Administration, accessed August 10, 2026; National Archives and Records Administration, "American Indians in the Federal Decennial Census, 1790–1930," accessed August 10, 2026. These federal records illustrate the instability of official racial classification and the circumstances under which Indigenous people could appear under racial categories other than "Indian." National Archives, “Native Americans in the Census, 1860–1890” National Archives, “American Indians in the Federal Decennial Census, 1790–1930”

8. Princess Red Wing (Mary E. Glasko Weeden), handwritten family history, Pokanoket oral tradition, family collection. Red Wing described the account as information preserved through older generations together with years of her own research. Of Simeon's ancestry she wrote, "From this union Simmeon Simons was descended. He had the insignia of Pokanoket."

9. Princess Red Wing, handwritten family history, family collection. Red Wing records Washington asking Simeon, "Whence your line?" and Simeon's remembered response, "I'm from the line of Pokanoket, but my line is a dead book." As an inherited oral tradition later committed to writing, the account should be understood as family testimony rather than a verbatim contemporary transcript of a conversation in 1775.

10. Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676), 1–5, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons. 

11. State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Executive Chamber, "Proclamation: Princess Red Wing Day," proclamation by Governor J. Joseph Garrahy, June 23, 1978, family collection. The proclamation identifies Red Wing as being from the "Seven Crescents, Royal House of Pokanoket," while simultaneously recognizing her decades of cultural and educational work relating to the Narragansett Indian community. See also Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame, "Princess Red Wing (Mary E. Glasko)," accessed August 10, 2026; Tomaquag Museum, "From the Archives: Princess Red Wing Television Interview, December 19, 1971," June 12, 2020, accessed August 10, 2026. Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame, “Princess Red Wing” Tomaquag Museum, “Princess Red Wing Television Interview, December 19, 1971” 

12. Phillips, Griswold—A History, 155–58. Phillips includes Simeon Simons within Griswold's Revolutionary history and records him among the veterans who greeted the Marquis de Lafayette during his 1824 visit to Jewett City.

13. Alice Brown, Annie Brewster Fanning Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, Jewett City, CT, to Princess Red Wing, August 13, 1935. Brown's correspondence invited Red Wing to participate in the August 17, 1935, historical pageant commemorating the story of General George Washington and Simeon Simons at Pachaug. The precise archival or published location of the surviving letter should be added to this citation once confirmed.

14. E. B. Dimock, "The Story of Simmons from an Old Newspaper: Washington—His Life Guardsman, a Pachaug Soldier," The Narragansett Dawn 1, no. 5 (September 1935): 110–11. See also Indian & Colonial Research Center, "Narr. Dawn Index S," accessed August 10, 2026. Indian & Colonial Research Center, “Narr. Dawn Index S”

15. In re Narragansett Indians, 20 R.I. 715, 40 A. 347 (1898); U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, federal acknowledgment materials concerning the Narragansett Indian Tribe; U.S. Department of Justice, "Carcieri v. Kempthorne—Brief for the Federal Respondents," accessed August 10, 2026. These sources document Rhode Island's late 19th-century detribalization policy and the racialized treatment of intermarriage as evidence of supposed Narragansett decline, as well as the persistence of the Narragansett community following the state's actions. U.S. Department of Justice, “Carcieri v. Kempthorne—Brief for the Federal Respondents”

16.  In re Narragansett Indians, 20 R.I. 715, 40 A. 347, 362 (R.I. 1898).