224 TRIBES AND DIALECTS OF CONNECTICUT (eth. ann. 43 



still Mohegan.' She was raised by her grandmother, Martha Uncas. 

 Between the two Mohegan was about the only means of communi- 

 cation. After Martha's death, supposed to have occurred in 1859, 

 Mrs. Fielding had practically no one with whom she could converse 

 in Indian, consequently her knowledge of the idiom had begun to 

 wane. With her passing away there is now no one who has a 

 consecutive knowledge of the old language, though there are still in 

 the tribe a number who know scattered words and sentences, and one, 

 an old man of almost pure Indian blood, who may possibly have 

 known the language when a boy. But he has not at this time the 

 ability either to translate it or to impart it to another, a condition, 

 strange as it may seem, quite true in a number of cases of unintel- 

 lectual individuals who are bilingual. In my own remembrance of 

 the Mohegan, covering a period of about 25 years, there have died 

 four persons who probably understood the language, at least, if they 

 did not speak it in their younger days.^ 



Mrs. Fielding was, accordingly, a personage of rather unique im- 

 portance in the history of the eastern tribes, on account of which a 

 few particulars of her life and personality, so far as these are known, 

 may be of incidental value. In the report of the commission of 

 1876 she was listed as being of five-eighths Pequot blood. She 

 possessed a cast of mind and appearance typically Indian. Her home 

 in her later years was a place of solitude amid the brush and pasture 

 land of the old Mohegan settlement. Here she tended a tiny garden, 

 alone except for the companionship of creatures of her imagination 

 and an occasional stray dog, a fox or deer appearing in her 

 clearing, always bearing to her sensitive mind some augury or 

 omen. Her atmosphere was that fairyland of giants, dwarfs, 

 will-o'-the-wisps, ghosts, and haunts, which beset her ways more and 

 more as she grew older. In this respect she portrayed a phase of the 

 old New England Indian paganism in her anthropomorphic concept 

 of Ma'ndu, di'bi, and other monsters of the intangible world. 

 Her inclination to moralize from Nature evidently exhibited another 

 influence of early Indian training, the cause of her animistic and 

 superstitious deductions in any attempt on her part to reason out her 

 environment. 



It may be observed how Mrs. Fielding's point of view toward 

 religion, her diction, her order of thought, resemble those of the 

 talks and addresses given in the ceremonies of the Central Algon- 

 kian. From our point of view, hers is peculiarly erratic at times, 

 her interests self-centered. Like many Indians, she manifests an 



1 These were represented by the Uncas, Occum, Wyyoughs, Teecomwas, Ashbow, Bohemy, Hoscutt, 

 Tantaquidgeon, Cooper, and Fowler families, most of them full bloods. 



' Besides Mrs. Fielding, there were Hannah Dolheare, Lester Skeesucks, Emma Baker, and possibly 

 Amy Cooper. 



