New England colonists feared the Pequot Indians of the Connecticut River Valley more than any other Indians of the area. In 1636, Massachusetts settlers accused a Pequot of murdering a colonist. In revenge, the settlers burned a Pequot village on what is now Block Island, Rhode Island. Then Sassacus, the head Pequot chief, gathered his warriors together. Another chief, Uncas, helped the settlers with his band of Pequot (later called Mohegan). The colonists and their Indian allies attacked a Pequot village near West Mystic, Connecticut, at sunrise on June 5, 1637. They burned alive between 600 and 700 Indians. Cotton Mather, the Puritan scholar, wrote that the colonists thought this "a sweet sacrifice, and ... gave the praise thereof to God." Later that month, the colonists captured most of the remaining Pequot Indians and sold them into slavery in Bermuda.