The same year the overland route to the Connecticut was explored by the Massachusetts trader, John Oldham, who was afterwards slain by the Pequods at Block Island. The favorable reports which Oldham carried back induced a number of people in Newtown (Cambridge), Dorchester, and Watertown, in the Massachusetts colony, to remove to the Connecticut and set up an independent State. "Hereing of ye fame of Conightecute river, they had a hankering mind after it." Ostensibly they sought better pasturage for their cattle, to prevent the Dutch from gaining a permanent hold on the country, and to plant an outpost in the Pequod country; but there also appear to have been some differences of opinion between these people and the Massachusetts authorities, growing out of the taxation of Watertown in 1631; and no doubt their ministers and elders--among whom were such strong men as Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Roger Ludlow--were desirous of greater recognition than they obtained at home. These differences were not so grave but that Massachusetts, after a spasm of opposition, formally permitted the migration, gave to the outgoing colonists a commission, and lent to them a cannon and some ammunition. Sidenote: Plymouth overawed. During the summer of 1635 a Dorchester party planted a settlement at Windsor around the walls of the Plymouth post. Plymouth did not approve of this cavalier treatment of her prior rights by the Massachusetts pioneers, but was obliged to submit with what grace she might, as she had in many controversies with her domineering neighbor to the north. Sidenote: Winthrop at Saybrook. That same autumn (1635) John Winthrop, Jr., appeared at the mouth of the Connecticut with a commission as governor, issued by Lord Brook, Lord Say and Sele, and their partners, to whom in 1631 Lord Warwick, as president of the council for New England, had granted all the country between the Narragansett River and the Pacific Ocean. Winthrop had just thrown up a breastwork when a Dutch vessel appeared on its way to Hartford with supplies for the traders, and was ordered back; thus were the New Amsterdam people cut off from a profitable commerce on the Connecticut, and from territorial expansion eastward, although their Hartford colony lived for many years. Sidenote: Condition of the colony (1636-1637).