Written from Saybrook at the end of June 1649, John Mason’s letter to the Commissioners of the United Colonies captures the unsettled nature of Indian affairs a decade after the end of the Pequot war. It is a world of inter-tribal and colonial rivalries, conspiracies and plots (real or imagined), uncertainties and assumptions. To read about how contested and entangled southern New England Indian country had become in the mid-seventeenth century, click here for an image and transcription of Mason’s letter, which is from the Massachusetts Archives Collection.