acres created legal disputes which lasted for seventy years; the Mohegan Land Case actually consisted of several cases and appeals making their way through various courts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and even back in London, England before the Lords Commissioners. Several of the Major's Mason's descendants in the role of the Tribal overseers, went bankrupt and even died in England in the process of defending the Mohegan land rights. During his twelve years in Norwich, John Mason served for nine years as Deputy Governor (1660 to 1669), and he helped to write the Connecticut Charter. He served as acting Governor from 1661 to 1663 while Governor John Winthrop Jr. went to England to obtain approval of the Charter from King Charles II. John Mason was one of the most trusted men in Connecticut during his three and a half decades of residence there, in both civil and military matters. In his latter years, the formal colony records referred to him simply as "the Major," without forename or surname. Later life and death In the summer of 1670, Mason acted as an intermediary between Roger Williams and the Connecticut government regarding a boundary dispute between Rhode Island and Connecticut. In 1669, pleading old age and infirmities, he retired to a revered advisory position, but he suffered painfully in the last years of his life from cancer, which was then referred to as the "strangury". He died on January 30, 1672, from complications related to cancer. He is buried, although unmarked, in the Post-Gager cemetery with the other founders of Norwichtown, Connecticut. Family John Mason married his first wife (name unknown) in 1634 at Dorchester; she died in the spring of 1638 at Windsor. They had a daughter named Israel who was born in the winter of 1635 at Windsor; she married John Bissell Jr. on June 17, 1657 at Windsor. They had nine children. He died in 1693 and it is uncertain when she died. Mason married Anne Peck in July 1639 in Hingham, Massachusetts. Anne was born on November 16, 1619 in Hingham, Norfolk, England and died in 1671 in Norwich, Connecticut. She was the daughter of Rev. Robert Peck, who was born at Beccles, Suffolk, England in 1580. Peck was a talented and influential clergyman and Puritan who had fled his Hingham, Norfolk, England church after the crackdown by Archbishop Laud. Matthew Grant included "Captain Masen" in his list of