One of the more harrowing altercations between New England colonists and Native Americans occurred in the spring of 1637, when 110 militia troops from Connecticut with close to 300 allied warriors from the Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic tribes laid waste to an encampment on the banks of the Mystic River inhabited by several hundred members of the Pequot tribes, most of them civilians. The attack took place during the Pequot War, a struggle between 1636 and 1638 that pitted colonial settlements in New England and their Native American allies against the Pequot tribe. Aggressively expanding onto lands inhabited by the Algonquin and Mohegan tribes in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1630s, a period of unrest due in large part to a succession of devastating epidemics, the Pequots sought to have greater control over the fur trade with Dutch colonists. A series of violent altercations between the Dutch and Pequots heightened tensions in New England and resulted in the deaths of several English colonists at the hands of Native Americans, including John Oldham, a well-known merchant and trader from Connecticut, who was killed on his ship by what was likely a group of marauding Narraganset.