ABSTRACT

On August 30, 1883, a large crowd of Rhode Island’s civic and social leaders, including the governor and members of the congressional delegation, local townspeople, and some Narragansett, gathered at the ruins of an “old Indian fort” to dedicate a monument. At the center of the fort—associated with Ninigret, a seventeenth-century political leader or sachem of the Eastern Niantic, a group closely related to the Narragansett—stood the monument, a massive granite boulder. Carved into the side of the rock facing south toward one of the largest saltwater ponds in southern New England was the inscription “Fort Ninigret, Memorial of the Narragansett and Niantic Indians, The Unwavering Friends and Allies of Our Fathers.” Beneath these words were the names of the commissioners on the Affairs of the Narragansett Indians, who supervised the installation of the monument and presided over Rhode Island’s detribalization of the Narragansett. When the dedication exercises were over and the invited guests had feasted, some went sailing on the Great Salt Pond; others visited Coronation Rock, where one of the last hereditary Narragansett sachems had been crowned a little more than a century earlier (Providence Daily Journal 1883).