one reporter that he met Passaconaway when the latter was 120 years old). During his lifetime English colonial settlement in New England began in earnest, intersecting with an ongoing series of socio-political and demographic changes arising from warfare over the fur trade and the introduction of Eurasian diseases. In particular, an epidemic in 1616 ravaged the Native American populations in southeast New England, and that event's demographic consequences clarify the willingness of sachems to allow the settlement of English colonists in their territories, usually under the framework of "land sales", to bolster their ability to engage in inter-group raids and warfare with other Native communities. He was a powerful and widely respected powow (a ritual expert and mediator between humans and spirits similar to a shaman); English accounts by figures like Thomas Morton and John note that he was allegedly able to make water burn, produce ice in the summer, make trees dance, call up thunderstorms, make dried leaves turn green, and make living snakes out of dead snake skin. Prior to, and during the early period of, colonial encroachment Passaconaway presumably followed traditional New England Native lifeways in the Pennacook territories around the Merrimack River, moving among established village sites like Amoskeag and Pawtucket seasonally, which accounts for his historical association with several places in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Colonial records specify that Passaconaway lived at the top of the Pawtucket Falls (today's Lowell, Massachusetts). Local New Hampshire history says that he lived and moved seasonally among various fishing and planting spots along the Merrimack River, including the Amoskeag Falls in present-day Manchester, several fertile islands, present-day Horseshoe Pond, and sites along the nearby coast. There are no records about the earlier part of his career beyond his reported abdication speech, which said that he had fought against the Mohawk as a younger man. At some point prior to the Pilgrims' arrival he became sachem (chief) of the Pennacook, and eventually bashaba (chief of chiefs) of a multi-tribal confederation in parts of today's New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine, members of which originally drew together for mutual protection from attacks by other Native groups. Passaconaway was one of the first native chieftains to lease land to English settlers in New England, and the 1629 Wheelwright Deed (the authenticity of which is debated, but which is generally accepted as legitimate) specifies that Passaconaway and other sachems were willing to sell