The opening of Wequonnoc Moon Casino in September 1992 transformed the economic prospects of eastern Connecticut and brought the Wequonnoc Nation into a new position of regional influence. The casino’s rise followed the decline of Electric Boat, the area’s long-standing defense-industry anchor, and unfolded alongside negotiations that could return former state hospital grounds to the Nation. The event thus joins a dramatic shift in local employment to a longer history of dispossession, assimilation, and Indigenous persistence.

Economic Change and the Casino’s Opening

Electric Boat had been the region’s economic backbone for much of the second half of the twentieth century. In the post–Cold War era, however, the nuclear-submarine manufacturer reduced its workforce to a small fraction of its former payroll. The once-booming shipyard became known locally as the ghost yard; it was also a place where Dominick Birdsey and Thomas Birdsey had earlier witnessed the launching of the Nautilus and posed for a photograph with the First Lady of the United States.

The casino represented an alternative to that shrinking industrial economy. Before it opened, uncertainty about submarine contracts and possible layoffs was already part of local conversation. Leo Blood warned that matters would worsen if the Navy canceled the Seawolf contracts and Electric Boat laid off workers, while pointing to the jobs expected at the casino. The contrast was not abstract: a community whose work and family prospects had long been tied to shipbuilding now looked toward a gaming complex for employment.

Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort opened in September 1992. Its impact on economic revival exceeded even the most optimistic predictions. Expansion continued through its first six years, as casinos and hotels rose in the woods off Route 22. The account gives the complex an employment figure of seventy-five thousand and describes the 415 members of the Wequonnoc Nation as millionaires. Those figures convey the scale of the reversal the opening came to represent: the Nation was no longer described only through losses, but also through the wealth and economic reach associated with the resort.

Land, History, and Public Memory

That economic change sits against the history of the land around Three Rivers. The Indian cemetery beside Three Rivers State Hospital occupies part of territory that had been sacred hunting and fishing land for the Wequonnoc Nation. At its center stands a ten-foot pyramid of fist-sized stones commemorating Samuel, the Great Sachem, whose seventeenth-century alliance with white settlers proved disastrous for his people. As Three Rivers grew after its incorporation in 1653, the reservation contracted and the tribe’s numbers dwindled. The cemetery’s later markers include Wequonnoc war dead, and its final stone, erected during the late 1960s, honors Lonnie Peck, killed in Vietnam in 1969.

The history of loss also appears in the town’s classroom narratives. Mr. LoPresto presents Indigenous people as vanished and treats their history through a hierarchy that elevates Western civilization over Indigenous culture. Ralph Drinkwater challenges that account by identifying himself as a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian and rejecting the suggestion that Indigenous people had disappeared. Rather than engage with his correction, the teacher sends him to the office. The episode makes the casino’s later presence more than an economic turn: the Nation that a classroom lesson renders absent is present in the region’s public life and shaping its future.

Negotiations and Regional Significance

The casino’s opening coincided with negotiations between tribal officials and the Governor of Connecticut over the abandoned state hospital grounds. Because the grounds had once formed part of the Nation’s sacred hunting and fishing lands, the possibility that they might revert to the tribe links contemporary political negotiations to the earlier history of dispossession. The account presents the discussions as ongoing, not as a completed transfer, and does not say that the casino itself settled the land question.

The resort’s rapid growth nevertheless changed the balance of regional economic power. Cars and buses traveled to it around the clock, and planners were considering routes to bring gamblers by river from New York and by private high-speed railroad from Boston. Its champions and detractors disputed the project, but its scale and continuing expansion made it a defining feature of the region’s economic revival. In the novel’s longer view, the opening marks a sharp contrast with the dwindling shipyard and with earlier portrayals of the Wequonnoc as people who had disappeared: the Nation emerges as an employer, a source of wealth, and a party to negotiations over its ancestral land.