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In Murder on the Saltwater Frontier, Andrew C. Lipman explains how the the murder of John Oldham directly impacted the relationship between European settlers and Native Americans. While relationships between the two groups were originally intended as cultural exchange (Lipman, 282), tensions increased and violence escalated as Europeans and Native Americans took prisoners and destroyed ships. Oldham’s 1636 death and John Stone’s 1634 murder eventually led to the Pequot War (Lipman, 270). The stories and interpretations of these killings eventually changed over time, contributing to the rising animosity between the two groups. Viktoriya Shalunova stated in her post that from Oldham’s murder, “colonist’s started a two year war with the Indians that included the killing, dismembering, and enslaving of Indians.” I found this argument interesting and detailed, as the rising tension between Native Americans and Europeans are graphic and stem from small incidents that grew over time.
Shalunova’s point reminds me of Lipman’s concluding paragraph that states that Oldham’s murder was advantageous in allowing Puritan settlements to gain economic, military, and commercial dominance (Lipman, 294). When Lipman discusses the territory of the Puritans as a “landless borderland that was far too fluid and shifting for their liking” (Lipman, 294), this reminds me of John Gillis’ Islands of the Mind. A land without borders contributes to the perceived exoticism of the New World, and as a result of this mysticism, European psychology about settlement and normalization was amplified with the murder of John Oldham. What was originally an open-and-shut case, the killing of John Oldham and its tellings represent the convolution of truth over time that leads to the vague yet powerful hatred between Europeans and Native Americans.