Two years
afterward a few pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness
as far as the Plymouth men's fort at Windsor, while a party from
Watertown went farther and came to a halt upon the site of Wethersfield.
A larger party, bringing cattle and such goods as they could carry,
set out in the autumn and succeeded in reaching Windsor. Their winter
supplies were sent around by water to meet them, but early in November
the ships had barely passed the Saybrook fort when they found the river
blocked with ice and were obliged to return to Boston. The sufferings of
the pioneers, thus cut off from the world, were dreadful. Their cattle
perished, and they were reduced to a diet of acorns and ground-nuts.
Some seventy of them, walking on the frozen river to Saybrook, were
so fortunate as to find a crazy little sloop jammed in the ice. They
succeeded in cutting her adrift, and steered themselves back to Boston.
Others surmounted greater obstacles in struggling back through the snow
over the region which the Pullman car now traverses, regardless of
seasons, in three hours. A few grim heroes, the nameless founders of a
noble commonwealth, stayed on the spot and defied starvation. In the
next June, 1636, the Newtown congregation, a hundred or more in number,
led by their sturdy pastor, and bringing with them 160 head of cattle,
made the pilgrimage to the Connecticut valley.
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