ABSTRACT
Daniel Gookin’s ideas for turning Indians into productive, assimilated Protestants bore the stamp of his transatlantic connections. In his Historical Collections of the Indians in New England, completed one year prior to the outbreak of King Philip’s War, Gookin specifically drew attention to the Irish example. In 1668, Daniel Gookin took the deposition of a praying Indian woman, Sarah Ahaton – the wife of the prominent praying Indian teacher William Ahaton of Packemit, or Punkapoag– who had confessed to adultery, a capital crime in Puritan Massachusetts. The inner conflict that took place within Sarah Ahaton, and her instinct to run away to a leader who had rejected Christianity, was precisely the sort of thing that made English Puritans suspicious as to whether the Christianity of Indian converts was sincere. An 1893 history of the town of Canton indicates that Sarah may have hurled herself off of a large rock, known as “Squaw Rock,” for fear of corporal punishment.
