STOCKBRIDGE — Paradoxically, Stockbridge’s Indian burial ground signifies the presence of an absence. This sacred knoll overlooks the Great Meadow along the Housatonic River, once the site of a seasonal village that Mohican occupants called Wnathktukook, or “bend in the river.”
Today, it’s a golf course. Like manicured fairways and putting greens, the obelisk memorial installed here by white settlers’ descendants, marking this “ancient resting place” of “the friends of our fathers,” implies the area’s original Indigenous inhabitants have vanished. This is the landscape of the settler fantasy or myth of the disappearing Indian — a suburban pastoral evoking novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic trope of the Mohican as America’s last remaining “noble savage.”
Yet the burial ground that best explains why most Mohicans left Stockbridge after the American Revolution lies 130 miles southward — in the Bronx. At the edge of Van Cortland Park’s “Indian Field,” a few yards from a New York City dog park, one finds another mass Mohican grave and memorial. This rock cairn, though, displays a plaque stating that here, on Aug. 31, 1778, “Chief Nimham and seventeen Stockbridge warriors, as allies of the patriots, gave their lives for liberty.”
About this series
About this series: Revolution: Berkshires is a monthly, 12-part series exploring Berkshire County’s surprising role in the American Revolution. Too often, the story of America’s founding is told as if it began and ended in Boston, Philadelphia or Washington. But history is rooted in place, and here in the Berkshires, town meetinghouses, farms and village greens became laboratories of democracy where the principles of liberty and self-government took hold.
Through this series, historian Justin F. Jackson traces how ordinary Berkshire residents — farmers, merchants, ministers, landowners and newcomers — debated, resisted and acted in ways that helped…
Big Lyons Falls stairway constructed in 2012 by the Mohican Trails Club. This is a view from the top of the falls. Credit: Mohican Trails Club.
The historic town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Editorial credit: Lynne Neuman / Shutterstock.com
City Hall and Opera House (1909), The Ohio Theatre in Loudonville,…

