Travelling extensively by canoe and on horseback, William Pynchon bartered with many tribes for beaver, otter, marten, mink, muskrat, raccoon, lynx, and fox. And, tactfully using Algonquin tribes as middlemen, it wasn’t too long before he tapped the Iroquois trade. By 1640 he had established one of his agents, Thomas Cooper, at Woronoco, later the site of Westfield, “where the Indians brought not only their own furs, but also furs which they obtained from the Mohawks.” When this happened, the Dutch no longer had a monopoly of the furs of the Iroquois. Of course Pynchon’s tremendous gains meant some real losses to the new towns below Springfield, which in 1639 had created a government of their own when they drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. In an effort to checkmate Pynchon, and bring the trade of the valley to Hartford instead, Connecticut now granted to Governor Edward Hopkins and William Whiting “liberty of free trade at Woronoco and at any place thereabouts ... all others to be restrained for the terme of seven years....” But Massachusetts came to Pynchon’s rescue, resisted the Connecticut grab, and eventually established through the Commissioners of the United Colonies that Woronoco was within its bounds. Later, the Connecticut people tried another tack. They declared an impost on all pelts and other goods that Pynchon shipped down the river, a tax that could have ruined him. However, they voted to remove this excise when the Massachusetts authorities, in retaliation, levied a large duty on Connecticut goods coming into Boston harbor. And William Pynchon went on to expand the fur frontier of Massachusetts to the north and the west, and through his beaver trade to become one of the richest men in New England. * * * * * Meanwhile, the Puritan migration was taking other avenues of expansion in the direction of New Netherland, along the shores of Long Island Sound. These routes, too, followed the paths of fur traders who as usual broke through the wilderness to make pacts with the natives or to fuse the wars that cleared the way for settlement. The Narragansett country and Long Island Sound were of course traditional Dutch trading preserves. But as early as 1632, New Plymouth established a truckhouse at Sowamset, now Barrington, Rhode Island, and in the following year daring John Oldham, filled with “vast conceits of extraordinary gaine,” was driving a trade on his own account much farther to the west in Long Island Sound. Oldham did business with both the Pequots and the Narragansetts, the latter taking so kindly to him and his trucking goods that they offered him free land for the establishment of a permanent trading post among them.