On Thursday, September 1, 1692, the elite of Massachusetts society took a break from the ongoing horror of the Essex County witch trials to celebrate the marriage of Major John Richards and Anne Winthrop. It was the second marriage for Richards, a prominent merchant and member of the Governor's Council whose deceased first wife was the widow of Anne's uncle Adam Winthrop. It was the first marriage for the bride, the daughter of the late John Winthrop Jr., and no less a figure than Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton presided over the ceremony. Though no wedding list survives, one can come up with some of the likely attendees. As the Winthrop family had long awaited the marriage of spinster Anne, presumably much of her family was in attendance, including her brother, Councilor Wait Winthrop. Her sister Margaret would have made the trip from Salem, with her husband John Corwin, and perhaps even brother-in-law Jonathan Corwin. Though it is less likely, Bartholomew Gedney may have been there, for he was the father-in-law of Margaret and John Corwin's son. Councilor Samuel Sewall presumably also attended, for this family friend recorded the ceremony in his diary. The wedding was held at the home of Hezekiah Usher, a kinsman of the Winthrops through several marriages with the Tyng family, so various members of these clans may have been there as well. An outsider observing the wedding might have been struck with several observations. First, as a group the wedding attendees, their families, and business partners represented the principal land owners and speculators in New England, owning tens of thousands of acres of frontier lands scattered from Maine to Connecticut. Many of these families were allied by business as well as marriage. Second, six of the seven judges of the Essex County witchcraft trials may have been in attendance: John Richards, Wait Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, Jonathan Corwin, Bartholomew Gedney, and Chief Justice William Stoughton. Subsequently, there would also be a witchcraft victim in their midst, for soon their host, Hezekiah Usher, would join the growing list of the accused. These seemingly unrelated facts were far from coincidence. An exploration of the overlooked relationship between Indian property transactions and land speculation in Maine demonstrates that Massachusetts residents had pervasive ties to the frontier, a "dark corner" of Puritan society, seen to be occupied by non-Puritan Englishmen in addition to the enemy "heathen" Native Americans and their allies the "papist" French. These connections help to explain the witchcraft outbreak that gripped Essex County in 1692. In the past several decades, historians of the Essex County witchcraft outbreak have turned increasingly to the impact of the frontier, warfare, and Native Americans on the events of 1692. Although there is no single cause responsible for the witchcraft accusations, a growing number of historians view these events as largely the result of a war hysteria, triggered by the abandonment of the Maine frontier in the early years of King William's War. The effects of King Philip's War and King William's War on the people of Essex County have been well documented by these authors and other historians. Numerous participants in the witchcraft trials, including afflicted girls, accused witches, judges and witnesses, had ties to the northern frontier. Some were refugees from that region, and others were absentee Maine landholders. A few participants had family members killed on the frontier during King Phillip's War. Even the new leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Governor William Phips and his wife, Lady Mary Phips, came from Maine. This linkage between witchcraft and frontier war was readily apparent to contemporary observers. In his 1699 Decennium Luctuosum Cotton Mather compared King William's War to the struggle against Satan being waged in Salem and he blamed the Indians for both conflicts. The story of the prodigious war, made by the spirits of the invisible world upon the people of New-England, in the year 1692, hath entertain'd a great part of the English world with a just astonishment. And I have met with some strange things, not here to me mentioned, which have made me often think that this inexplicable war might have some of its original among the Indians, whose chief sagamores are well known unto some of our captives to have been horrid sorcerers, and hellish conjurers, and such as conversed with demons.