Cape Cod: Articles: History, Yarmouth -- post an article

Six Pairs of Pants Bought Yarmouth

Six coats, six pairs of small breeches, two hatchets, and a like number of hoes, besides two brass kettles in good working order, was the price paid for most of what is now the town of Yarmouth, Massachusetts. Sachem Yanno got the payment from the Court at Plymouth.

The payment eased the conscience of the white settlers who a least made a show of paying for the land that belonged to the Indians. The Indians of the Cape were Wampanoags, but each tribe was independent. At Yarmouth and Barnstable they were Mattakees and Cummaquids and the land belonged to them but the whites had no moral scruples about helping themselves to it with a token payment of a few old clothes. The Indians were friendly either through fear or because they wanted to be.

With the coming of the white men the Indian population died off rapidly. They could not survive the diseases brought to them by the Whites. In 1767 there were only six wigwams at the mouth of Bass River. Ten years later smallpox carried most of them off and not long after the Revolution their land was sold.

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