Chapter VII: Introduction (2)

With all his tact, Champlain had committed one act of indiscretion, the effects of which were left as an ill-fated legacy to the little colony which he otherwise nursed so well. Seeking to please his Algonquian neighbors upon the St. Lawrence, and at the time eager to explore the country, the commandant, with two of his men-at-arms, accompanied (1609) one of their frequent war-parties against the confederated Iroquois, who lived, for the most part, in New York state and northeastern Pennsylvania. Meeting a hostile band of two hundred and fifty warriors near where Fort Ticonderoga was afterward constructed, Champlain and his white attendants easily routed the enemy by means of firearms, with which the interior savages were as yet unacquainted.[21] His success in this direction was, through the unfortunate importunity of his allies, repeated in 1610; but five years later, when he invaded the Iroquois cantonments in the company of a large body of Huron, whose country to the east of Lake Huron he had been visiting that summer, the tribesmen to the southeast of Lake Ontario were found to have lost much of their fear for white men’s weapons, and the invaders retreated in some disorder.

(From an old print)]

The results were highly disastrous both to the Huron and the French. The former were year by year mercilessly harried by the bloodthirsty Iroquois, until in 1649 they were driven from their homes, and in the frenzy of fear fled first to the islands of Lake Huron, then to Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, finally to the southern shores of Lake Superior, and deep within the dark pine forests of northern Wisconsin. In the destruction of Huronia, several Jesuit missionaries suffered torture and death.

As for the squalid little French settlements at Three Rivers, Quebec, and Tadoussac, they soon felt the wrath of the Iroquois, who were the fiercest and best-trained fighters among the savages of North America. Almost annually the war-parties of this dread foe raided the lands of the king, not infrequently appearing in force before the sharp-pointed palisades of New France, over which were waged bloody battles for supremacy. Fortunately logs could turn back a primitive enemy unarmed with cannon; but not infrequently outlying parties of Frenchmen had sorry experiences with the stealthy foe, of whose approach through the tangled forest they had no warning. Champlain’s closing years were much saddened by these merciless assaults which he had unwittingly invited; in the decade after his death the operations of his successors were largely hampered thereby. Montreal, founded by religious enthusiasts in 1642, during its earliest years served as a buffer colony, in the direction of the avenging tribesmen, and supped to the dregs the cup of border turmoil.

Not only were Frenchmen obliged to huddle within their defences, but far and near their Indian allies were swept from the earth. The Iroquois practically destroyed the Algonquin tribes between Quebec and the Saguenay, as well as the Algonquins of the Ottawa, the Huron, and the Petun and Neutrals of the Niagara district. The fur-trade of New France was for a long period almost wholly destroyed; English and Dutch rivals to the south were friendly to the Iroquois, furnished them cheap goods and abundant firearms and ammunition, and egged them on in their northern forays; while toward the Mississippi, and south of the Great Lakes, Iroquois raiders terrorized those tribes which dared to entertain trade relations with the French.

In 1646, however, the blood-stained confederates, after nearly a half-century of opposition, consented to a peace which lasted spasmodically for almost twenty years; until in 1665 the French government found itself strong enough to threaten the chastisement of the New York tribesmen, and thereafter the Iroquois opposition, while not altogether quelled, was of a far less threatening character.

SYNOPSIS OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS, CHIEFLY MILITARY, BETWEEN CHAMPLAIN’S BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS, 1609, AND THE CONQUEST OF THE PEQUOTS, 1637

1609. Henry Hudson ascends the Hudson River.

1610. Henry Hudson explores Hudson Bay.

1614. The Dutch erect a Fort on Manhattan Island.

1619. A colonial assembly is convened at Jamestown. Negro slavery is introduced into Virginia.

1620. Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

1622. The Dutch West India Company take possession of New Netherlands. Indian massacre in Virginia.

1623. Settlement of New Hampshire.

1624. Dissolution of the London Company. Virginia becomes a Crown Colony.

1626. The Dutch purchase Manhattan Island from the Indians.

1628. Settlement of Salem by the Massachusetts Bay Company.

1629. The English take Quebec.

1630. Foundation of Boston.

1631. Settlement of Maryland by Clayborne.

1632. Canada is restored to France by England. Lord Baltimore receives a charter for a colony in Maryland.

1634. Settlement of St. Mary’s, Maryland, by Calvert.

1634–36. Settlement of Connecticut by the English. Settlement of Rhode Island by Roger Williams.

1636. Foundation of Harvard College.

1637. Conquest of the Pequots by the New England colonists.

III

THE CONQUEST OF THE PEQUOTS, 1637

In 1636 the Massachusetts colony, under Vane’s administration, became involved in new troubles--a violent internal controversy and a dangerous Indian war. The most powerful native tribes of New England were concentrated in the neighborhood of Narragansett Bay. The Wampanoags, or Pocanokets, were on the east side of that bay within the limits of the Plymouth patent, and the Narragansets, a more powerful confederacy, on the west side. Still more numerous and more powerful were the Pequots, whose chief seats were on or near Pequot River, now the Thames, but whose authority extended over twenty-six petty tribes, along both shores of the Sound to the Connecticut River, and even beyond it, almost or quite to the Hudson. In what is now the northeast corner of the State of Connecticut dwelt a smaller tribe, the enemies, perhaps the revolted subjects, of the Pequots, known to the colonists as Mohegans--an appropriation of a general name properly including all the Indians along the shores of Long Island Sound as far west as the Hudson, and even the tribes beyond that river, known afterward to the English as the Delawares. The Indians about Massachusetts Bay, supposed to have been formerly quite numerous, had almost died out before the arrival of the colonists, and the smallpox had since proved very fatal among the few that remained. Some tribes of no great consideration--the Nipmucks, the Wachusetts, the Nashaways--dwelt among the interior hills, and others, known collectively to the colonists as the River Indians, fished at the falls of the Connecticut, and cultivated little patches of its rich alluvial meadows. The lower Merrimac, the Piscataqua, and their branches were occupied by the tribes of a considerable confederacy, that of Penacook, or Pawtucket, whose chief sachem, Passaconaway, was reported to be a great magician. The interior of New Hampshire and of what is now Vermont seems to have been an uninhabited wilderness. The tribes eastward of the Piscataqua, known to the English by the general name of Tarenteens, and reputed to be numerous and powerful, were distinguished by the rivers on which they dwelt. They seem to have constituted two principal confederacies, those east of the Kennebec being known to the French of Acadie as the Abenakis. All the New England Indians spoke substantially the same language, the Algonquin, in various dialects. From the nature of the country, they were more stationary than some other tribes, being fixed principally at the falls of the rivers. They seem to have entertained very decided ideas of the hereditary descent of authority, and of personal devotion to their chiefs. What might have been at this time the total Indian population of New England it is not very easy to conjecture; but it was certainly much less than is commonly stated. Fifteen or twenty thousand would seem to be a sufficient allowance for the region south of the Piscataqua, and as many more, perhaps, for the more easterly district. The Pequots, esteemed the most powerful tribe in New England, were totally ruined, as we shall presently see, by the destruction or capture of hardly more than a thousand persons.

The provocation for this exterminating war was extremely small. Previous to the Massachusetts migration to the Connecticut, one Captain Stone, the drunken and dissolute master of a small trading vessel from Virginia, whom the Plymouth people charged with having been engaged at Manhattan in a piratical plot to seize one of their vessels, having been sent away from Boston with orders not to return without leave, under pain of death, on his way homeward to Virginia, in 1634, had entered the Connecticut River, where he was cut off, with his whole company, seven in number, by a band of Pequots. There were various stories, none of them authentic, as to the precise manner of his death, but the Pequots insisted that he had been the aggressor--a thing in itself sufficiently probable. As Stone belonged to Virginia, the magistrates of Massachusetts wrote to Governor Harvey to move him to stir in the matter. Van Cuyler, the Dutch commissary at Fort Good Hope, in fact revenged Stone’s death by the execution of a sachem and several others. This offended the Pequots, who renounced any further traffic with the Dutch, and sent messengers to Boston desiring an intercourse of trade, and assistance to settle their pending difficulties with the Narragansets, who intervened between them and the English settlements. They even promised to give up--at least so the magistrates understood them--the only two survivors, as they alleged, of those concerned in the death of Stone. These offers were accepted; for the convenience of this traffic a peace was negotiated between the Pequots and the Narragansets, and a vessel was presently sent to open a trade. But this traffic disappointed the adventurers; nor were the promised culprits given up. The Pequots, according to the Indian custom, tendered, instead, a present of furs and wampum. But this was refused, the colonists seeming to think themselves under a religious obligation to avenge blood with blood.

Thus matters remained for a year or two, when, in July, 1636, the crew of a small bark, returning from Connecticut, saw close to Block Island a pinnace at anchor, and full of Indians. This pinnace was recognized as belonging to Oldham, the Indian trader, the old settler at Nantasket, and explorer of the Connecticut. Conjecturing that something must be wrong, the bark approached the pinnace and hailed, whereupon the Indians on board slipped the cable and made sail. The bark gave chase, and soon overtook the pinnace; some of the Indians jumped overboard in their fright, and were drowned; several were killed, and one was made prisoner. The dead body of Oldham was found on board, covered with an old seine. This murder, as appeared from the testimony of the prisoner, who was presently sentenced by the Massachusetts magistrates to be a slave for life, was committed at the instigation of some Narraganset chiefs, upon whom Block Island was dependent, in revenge for the trade which Oldham had commenced under the late treaty with the Pequots, their enemies. Indeed, all the Narraganset chiefs, except the head sachem, Canonicus, and his nephew and colleague, Miantonimoh, were believed to have had a hand in this matter, especially the chieftain of the Niantics, a branch of the Narragansets, inhabiting the continent opposite Block Island.

Canonicus, in great alarm, sent to his friend and neighbor, Roger Williams, by whose aid he wrote a letter to the Massachusetts magistrates, expressing his grief at what had happened, and stating that Miantonimoh had sailed already with seventeen canoes and two hundred warriors to punish the Block Islanders. With this letter were sent two Indians, late sailors on board Oldham’s pinnace, and presently after two English boys, the remainder of his crew. In the recapture of Oldham’s pinnace eleven Indians had been killed, several of them chiefs; and that, with the restoration of the crew, seems to have been esteemed by Canonicus a sufficient atonement for Oldham’s death. But the magistrates and ministers of Massachusetts, assembled to take this matter into consideration, thought otherwise. Volunteers were called for in August, 1636; and four companies, ninety men in all, commanded by Endicott, whose submissiveness in Williams’ affair had restored him to favor, were embarked in three pinnaces, with orders to put to death all the men of Block Island, and to make the women and children prisoners. The old affair of the death of Stone was now also called to mind, though the murder of Oldham had no connection with it, except in some distant similarity of circumstances. Endicott was instructed, on his return from Block Island, to go to the Pequots, and to demand of them the murderers of Stone, and a thousand fathoms of wampum for damages--equivalent to from three to five thousand dollars--also, some of their children as hostages; and, if they refused, to employ force.

The Block Islanders fled inland, hid themselves, and escaped; but Endicott burned their wigwams, staved their canoes, and destroyed their standing corn. He then sailed to Fort Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut, and marched thence to Pequot River. After some parley, the Indians refused his demands, when he burned their village and killed one of their warriors. Marching back to the Connecticut River, he inflicted like vengeance on the Pequot village there, whence he returned to Boston, after a three weeks’ absence and without the loss of a man.

The Pequots, enraged at what they esteemed a treacherous and unprovoked attack, lurked about Fort Saybrook, killed or took several persons, and did considerable mischief. They sent, also, to the Narragansets to engage their alliance against the colonists, whom they represented as the common enemy of all the Indians. Williams, informed of this negotiation, sent word of it to the Massachusetts magistrates, and, at their request, he visited Canonicus, to dissuade him from joining the Pequots. This mission was not without danger. In the wigwam of Canonicus, Williams encountered the Pequot messengers, full of rage and fury. He succeeded, however, in his object, and, in October, Miantonimoh was induced to visit Boston, where, being received with much ceremony by the governor and magistrates, he agreed to act with them as a faithful ally. Canonicus thought it would be necessary to attack the Pequots with a very large force; but he recommended, as a thing likely to be agreeable to all the Indians--so Williams informs us--that the women and children should be spared, a humane piece of advice which received in the end but little attention.

The policy of this war, or, at least, the wisdom of Endicott’s conduct, was not universally conceded. A letter from Plymouth reproached the Massachusetts magistrates with the dangers likely to arise from so inefficient an attack upon the Pequots. Gardiner, the commandant at Fort Saybrook, who lost several men during the winter, was equally dissatisfied. The new settlers up the Connecticut complained bitterly of the dangers to which they were exposed. Sequeen, the same Indian chief at whose invitation the Plymouth people had first established a trading-house on the Connecticut River, had granted land to the planters at Wethersfield on condition that he might settle near them, and be protected; but when he came and built his wigwam, they had driven him away. He took this opportunity for revenge by calling in the Pequots, who attacked the town, and killed nine of the inhabitants. The whole number killed by the Pequots during the winter was about thirty.

In December a special session of the General Court of Massachusetts organized the militia into three regiments, the magistrates to appoint the field officers--called sergeant-majors--and to select the captains and lieutenants out of a nomination to be made by the companies respectively. Watches were ordered to be kept, and travellers were to go armed....

The new towns on the Connecticut had continued to suffer during the winter. The attack on Wethersfield has been mentioned already. Fort Saybrook was beleaguered; several colonists were killed, and two young girls were taken prisoners, but were presently redeemed and sent home by some Dutch traders. It had been resolved in Massachusetts to raise a hundred and sixty men for the war, and already Underhill had been sent, with twenty men, to reinforce Fort Saybrook; but, during Vane’s administration, these preparations had been retarded--not from any misgivings as to the justice of the war, but because the army “was too much under a covenant of works.” The expedition was now got ready, and, by a “solemn public invocation of the word of God,” a leader was designated by lot from among three of the magistrates set apart for that purpose. The lot fell on Stoughton, whose adherence to the orthodox party during the late dissensions had restored him to favor, and obtained for him, at the late election, one of the vacant magistrates’ seats. Wilson was also designated by lot as chaplain to the expedition. The people of Plymouth agreed to furnish forty-five men.

The decisive battle, however, had been already fought. The Connecticut towns, impatient of delay, having obtained the alliance of Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, had marched, to the number of ninety men, almost their entire effective force, under the command of John Mason, bred a soldier in the Netherlands, whom Hooker, on May 10, with prayers and religious ceremonies, solemnly invested with the staff of command. After a night spent in prayer, this little army, joined by Uncas with sixty Indians, and accompanied by Stone, Hooker’s colleague, as chaplain, embarked at Hartford. They were not without great doubts as to their Indian allies, but were reassured at Fort Saybrook. While Stone was praying “for one pledge of love, that may confirm us of the fidelity of the Indians,” these allies came in with five Pequot scalps and a prisoner. Underhill joined with his twenty men, and the united forces proceeded by water to Narragansett Bay, where they spent Sunday, May 21, in religious exercises. They were further strengthened by Miantonimoh and two hundred Narraganset warriors; but the English force seemed so inadequate that many of the Narragansets became discouraged and returned home.

The Pequots were principally collected a few miles east of Pequot River, now the Thames, in two forts, or villages, fortified with trees and brushwood. After a fatiguing march of two days, Mason reached one of these strongholds, situated on a high hill, at no great distance from the sea-shore. He encamped a few hours to rest his men, but marched again before daybreak, and at early dawn approached the fort. The Pequots had seen the vessels pass along the sea-shore toward the bay of Narragansett, and, supposing the hostile forces afraid to attack them, they had spent the night in feasting and dancing, and Mason could hear their shoutings in his camp. Toward morning they sunk into a deep sleep, from which they were roused by the barking of their dogs, as the colonists, in two parties, approached the fort, one led by Mason, the other by Underhill, both of whom have left us narratives of the battle. The assailants poured in a fire of musketry, and, after a moment’s hesitation, forced their way into the fort. Within were thickly clustered wigwams containing the families of the Indians, and what remained of their winter stores. The astonished Pequots seized their weapons and fought with desperation; but what could their clubs and arrows avail against the muskets and plate-armor of the colonists? Yet there was danger in the great superiority of their numbers, and Mason, crying out “we must burn them,” thrust a firebrand among the mats with which the wigwams were covered. Almost in a moment the fort was in a blaze. The colonists, “bereaved of pity and without compassion,” so Underhill himself declares, kept up the fight within the fort, while their Indian allies, forming a circle around, struck down every Pequot who attempted to escape. No quarter was given, no mercy was shown; some hundreds, not warriors only, but old men, women, and children, perished by the weapons of the colonists, or in the flames of the burning fort. “Great and doleful,” says Underhill, “was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick you could hardly pass along.” The fact that only seven prisoners were taken, while Mason boasts that only seven others escaped, evinces the unrelenting character of this massacre, which was accomplished with but trifling loss, only two of the colonists being killed, and sixteen or twenty wounded. Yet the victors were not without embarrassments. The morning was hot, there was no water to be had, and the men, exhausted by their long march the two days before, the weight of their armor, want of sleep, and the sharpness of the late action, must now encounter a new body of Pequots from the other village, who had taken the alarm, and were fast approaching. Mason, with a select party, kept this new enemy at bay, and thus gave time to the main body to push on for Pequot River, into which some vessels had just been seen to enter. When the Indians approached the hill where their fort had stood, at sight of their ruined habitations and slaughtered companions they burst out into a transport of rage, stamped on the ground, tore their hair, and, regardless of everything save revenge, rushed furious in pursuit. But the dreaded firearms soon checked them, and Mason easily made good his retreat to Pequot harbor, now New London, where he found not only his own vessels, but Captain Patrick also, just arrived in a bark from Boston, with forty men. Mason sent the wounded and most of his forces by water, but, in consequence of Patrick’s refusal to lend his ship, was obliged to march himself, with twenty men, followed by Patrick, to Fort Saybrook, where his victory was greeted by a salvo of cannon.

In about a fortnight Stoughton arrived at Saybrook with the main body of the Massachusetts forces. Mason, with forty Connecticut soldiers and a large body of Narragansets, joined also in pursuing the remnants of the enemy. The Pequots had abandoned their country, or concealed themselves in the swamps. In July one of these fortresses was attacked by night, and about a hundred Indians captured. The men, twenty-two in number, were put to death; thirty women and children were given to the Narraganset allies; some fifty others were sent to Boston, and distributed as slaves among the principal colonists. The flying Pequots were pursued as far as Quinapiack, now New Haven. A swamp in that neighborhood, where a large party had taken refuge, being surrounded and attacked, a parley was had, and life was offered to “all whose hands were not in English blood.” About two hundred, old men, women, and children, reluctantly came out and gave themselves up. Daylight was exhausted in this surrender; and as night set in, the warriors who remained renewed their defiances. Toward morning, favored by a thick fog, they broke through and escaped. Many of the surviving Pequots put themselves under the protection of Canonicus and other Narraganset chiefs. Sassacus, the head sachem, fled to the Mohawks; but they were instigated by their allies, the Narragansets, to put him to death. His scalp was sent to Boston, and many heads and hands of Pequot warriors were also brought in by the neighboring tribes. The adult male prisoners who remained in the hands of the colonists were sent to the West Indies to be sold into slavery; the women and children experienced a similar fate at home. It was reckoned that between eight and nine hundred of the Pequots had been killed or taken. Such of the survivors as had escaped, forbidden any longer to call themselves Pequots, were distributed between the Narragansets and Mohegans, and subjected to an annual tribute. A like tribute was imposed, also, on the inhabitants of Block Island. The colonists regarded their success as ample proof of Divine approbation, and justified all they had done to these “bloody heathen” by abundant quotations from the Old Testament. Having referred to “the wars of David,” Underhill adds, “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings”; and Mason, after some exulting quotations from the Psalms, concludes: “Thus the Lord was pleased to smite our enemies in the hinder parts, and to give us their land for an inheritance!” The Indian allies admired the courage of the colonists, but they thought their method of war “too furious, and to slay too many.”

SYNOPSIS OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS, CHIEFLY MILITARY, BETWEEN THE CONQUEST OF THE PEQUOTS, 1637, AND THE DEFEAT OF KING PHILIP, 1676

1638. Settlement of Rhode Island. Establishment of the Colony of New Haven. Swedes and Finns settle in Delaware.

1639. Adoption of the Connecticut Constitution.

1642. War between Charles I. and Parliament. Indecisive Battle of Edgehill.

1643. The Colonies of New England form a confederacy.

1644. Battle of Marston Moor, in which the English Royalists are defeated. Roger Williams obtains a patent from Parliament for the United Government of the Rhode Island Settlements.

1645. Defeat of the English Royalists at the Battle of Naseby.

1649. Execution of Charles I.

1653. Cromwell is made Lord Protector of England.

1655. Peter Stuyvesant, Director-General of New Netherlands, dispossesses the Swedish settlers at the mouth of the Delaware.

1660. Restoration of the Stuarts in England.

1662. The Connecticut and New Haven Colonies receive a charter from Charles II.

1664. Charles II. grants the region between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers to his brother James, Duke of York. The English occupy New Amsterdam and take possession of the province of New Netherland. The Colony of New Jersey is established.

1665. The union of the Connecticut and New Haven Colonies is completed.

1668. Father Marquette founds the Mission of Sault Ste. Marie.

1670. Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company.

1673. The Dutch occupy New York and New Jersey.

1674. New York and New Jersey are restored to the English.

1675. King Philip’s War.

IV

THE DEFEAT OF KING PHILIP, 1676

Except in the destruction of the Pequots, the native tribes of New England had, in 1673, undergone no very material diminution. The Pocanokets, or Wampanoags, though somewhat curtailed in their limits, still occupied the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. The Narragansets still possessed the western shore. There were several scattered tribes in various parts of Connecticut; though, with the exception of some small reservations, they had already ceded all their lands. Uncas, the Mohegan chief, was now an old man. The Pawtucket, or Penacook, confederacy continued to occupy the falls of the Merrimac and the heads of the Piscataqua. Their old sachem, Passaconaway, regarded the colonists with awe and veneration. In the interior of Massachusetts and along the Connecticut were several other less noted tribes. The Indians of Maine and the region eastward possessed their ancient haunts undisturbed; but their intercourse was principally with the French, to whom, since the late peace with France, Acadie had been again yielded up. The New England Indians were occasionally annoyed by war parties of Mohawks; but, by the intervention of Massachusetts, a peace had recently been concluded.

Efforts for the conversion and civilization of the Indians were still continued by Eliot and his coadjutors, supported by the funds of the English society. In Massachusetts there were fourteen feeble villages of these praying Indians, and a few more in Plymouth colony. The whole number in New England was about thirty-six hundred, but of these near one-half inhabited the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

Massachusetts held a strict hand over the Narragansets and other subject tribes, and their limits had been contracted by repeated cessions, not always entirely voluntary. The Wampanoags, within the jurisdiction of Plymouth, experienced similar treatment. By successive sales of parts of their territory, they were now shut up, as it were, in the necks or peninsulas formed by the northern and eastern branches of Narragansett Bay, the same territory now constituting the continental eastern portion of Rhode Island. Though always at peace with the colonists, the Wampanoags had not always escaped suspicion. The increase of the settlements around them, and the progressive curtailment of their limits, aroused their jealousy. They were galled, also, by the feudal superiority, similar to that of Massachusetts over her dependent tribes, claimed by Plymouth on the strength of certain alleged former submissions. None felt this assumption more keenly than Pometacom, head chief of the Wampanoags, better known among the colonists as King Philip of Mount Hope, nephew and successor of that Massasoit who had welcomed the Pilgrims to Plymouth. Suspected of hostile designs, he had been compelled to deliver up his firearms, and to enter into certain stipulations. These stipulations he was accused of not fulfilling; and nothing but the interposition of the Massachusetts magistrates, to whom Philip appealed, prevented Plymouth from making war upon him. He was sentenced instead to pay a heavy fine, and to acknowledge the unconditional supremacy of that colony.

A praying Indian, who had been educated at Cambridge and employed as a teacher, upon some misdemeanor had fled to Philip, who took him into service as a sort of secretary. Being persuaded to return again to his former employment, this Indian accused Philip anew of being engaged in a secret hostile plot. In accordance with Indian ideas, the treacherous informer was waylaid and killed. Three of Philip’s men, suspected of having killed him, were arrested by the Plymouth authorities, and, in accordance with English ideas, were tried for murder by a jury half English, half Indians, convicted upon very slender evidence, and hanged. Philip retaliated by plundering the houses nearest Mount Hope. Presently he attacked Swanzey, and killed several of the inhabitants. Plymouth took measures for raising a military force. The neighboring colonies were sent to for assistance. Thus, by the impulse of suspicion on the one side and passion on the other, New England became suddenly engaged in a war very disastrous to the colonists, and utterly ruinous to the native tribes. The lust of gain, in spite of all laws to prevent it, had partially furnished the Indians with firearms, and they were now far more formidable enemies than they had been in the days of the Pequots. Of this the colonists hardly seem to have thought. Now, as then, confident of their superiority, and comparing themselves to the Lord’s chosen people driving the heathen out of the land, they rushed eagerly into the contest, without a single effort at the preservation of peace. Indeed, their pretensions hardly admitted of it. Philip was denounced as a rebel in arms against his lawful superiors, with whom it would be folly and weakness to treat on any terms short of absolute submission.

A body of volunteers, horse and foot, raised in Massachusetts, marched under Major Savage, in June, 1675, four days after the attack on Swanzey, to join the Plymouth forces. After one or two slight skirmishes, they penetrated to the Wampanoag villages at Mount Hope, but found them empty and deserted. Philip and his warriors, conscious of their inferiority, had abandoned their homes. If the Narragansets, on the opposite side of the bay, did not openly join the Wampanoags, they would, at least, be likely to afford shelter to their women and children. The troops were therefore ordered into the Narraganset country, accompanied by commissioners to demand assurances of peaceful intentions, and a promise to deliver up all fugitive enemies of the colonists--pledges which the Narragansets felt themselves constrained to give.

Arrived at Taunton on their return from the Narraganset country, news came that Philip and his warriors had been discovered by Church, of Plymouth colony, collected in a great swamp at Pocasset, now Tiverton, the southern district of the Wampanoag country, whence small parties sallied forth to burn and plunder the neighboring settlements. After a march of eighteen miles, having reached the designated spot, the soldiers found there a hundred wigwams lately built, but empty and deserted, the Indians having retired deep into the swamp. The colonists followed; but the ground was soft; the thicket was difficult to penetrate; the companies were soon thrown into disorder. Each man fired at every bush he saw shake, thinking an Indian might lay concealed behind it, and several were thus wounded by their own friends. When night came on, the assailants retired with the loss of sixteen men. The swamp continued to be watched and guarded, but Philip broke through, not without some loss, and escaped into the country of the Nipmucks, in the interior of Massachusetts. That tribe had already commenced hostilities by attacking Mendon. They waylaid and killed Captain Hutchinson, a son of the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, and sixteen out of a party of twenty sent from Boston to Brookfield to parley with them. Attacking Brookfield itself, they burned it, except one fortified house. The inhabitants were saved by Major Willard, who, on information of their danger, came with a troop of horse from Lancaster, thirty miles through the woods, to their rescue. A body of troops presently arrived from the eastward, and were stationed for some time at Brookfield.

The colonists now found that by driving Philip to extremity they had roused a host of unexpected enemies. The River Indians, anticipating an intended attack upon them, joined the assailants. Deerfield and Northfield, the northernmost towns on the Connecticut River, settled within a few years past, were attacked, and several of the inhabitants killed and wounded. Captain Beers, sent from Hadley to their relief with a convoy of provisions, was surprised near Northfield in September, and slain, with twenty of his men. Northfield was abandoned, and burned by the Indians.

“The English at first,” says Gookin, “thought easily to chastise the insolent doings and murderous practice of the heathen; but it was found another manner of thing than was expected; for our men could see no enemy to shoot at, but yet felt their bullets out of the thick bushes where they lay in ambush. The English wanted not courage or resolution, but could not discover nor find an enemy to fight with, yet were galled by the enemy.” In the arts of ambush and surprise, with which the Indians were so familiar, the colonists were without practice. It is to the want of this experience, purchased at a very dear rate in the course of the war, that we must ascribe the numerous surprises and defeats from which the colonists suffered at its commencement.

Driven to the necessity of defensive warfare, those in command on the river determined to establish a magazine and garrison at Hadley. Captain Lathrop, who had been dispatched from the eastward to the assistance of the river towns, was sent with eighty men, the flower of the youth of Essex County, to guard the wagons intended to convey to Hadley three thousand bushels of unthreshed wheat, the produce of the fertile Deerfield meadows. Just before arriving at Deerfield, near a small stream still known as Bloody Brook, under the shadow of the abrupt conical Sugar Loaf, the southern termination of the Deerfield mountain, Lathrop, on September 18, fell into an ambush, and, after a brave resistance, perished there with all his company. Captain Moseley, stationed at Deerfield, marched to his assistance, but arrived too late to help him. Deerfield was abandoned, and burned by the Indians. Springfield, about the same time, was set on fire, but was partially saved by the arrival, with troops from Connecticut, of Major Treat, successor to the lately deceased Mason in the chief command of the Connecticut forces. An attack on Hatfield was vigorously repelled by the garrison.

Meanwhile, hostilities were spreading; the Indians on the Merrimac began to attack the towns in their vicinity, and the whole of Massachusetts was soon in the utmost alarm. Except in the immediate neighborhood of Boston, the country still remained an immense forest dotted by a few openings. The frontier settlements could not be defended against a foe familiar with localities, scattered in small parties, skilful in concealment, and watching with patience for some unguarded or favorable moment. Those settlements were mostly broken up, and the inhabitants, retiring toward Boston, spread everywhere dread and intense hatred of “the bloody heathen.” Even the praying Indians, and the small dependent and tributary tribes, became objects of suspicion and terror. They had been employed at first as scouts and auxiliaries, and to good advantage; but some few, less confirmed in the faith, having deserted to the enemy, the whole body of them were denounced as traitors. Eliot the apostle, and Gookin, superintendent of the subject Indians, exposed themselves to insults, and even to danger, by their efforts to stem this headlong fury, to which several of the magistrates opposed but a feeble resistance. Troops were sent to break up the praying villages at Mendon, Grafton, and others in that quarter. The Natick Indians, “those poor despised sheep of Christ,” as Gookin affectionately calls them, were hurried off to Deer Island, in Boston harbor, where they suffered excessively from a severe winter. A part of the praying Indians of Plymouth colony were confined, in like manner, on the islands in Plymouth harbor.

Not content with realities sufficiently frightful, superstition, as usual, added bugbears of her own. Indian bows were seen in the sky, and scalps in the moon. The northern lights became an object of terror. Phantom horsemen careered among the clouds or were heard to gallop invisible through the air. The howling of wolves was turned into a terrible omen. The war was regarded as a special judgment in punishment of prevailing sins. Among these sins, the General Court of Massachusetts, after consultation with the elders, enumerated neglect in the training of the children of church-members; pride, in men’s wearing long and curled hair; excess in apparel; naked breasts and arms, and superfluous ribbons; the toleration of Quakers; hurry to leave meeting before blessing asked; profane cursing and swearing; tippling-houses; want of respect for parents; idleness; extortion in shopkeepers and mechanics; and the riding from town to town of unmarried men and women, under pretence of attending lectures--“a sinful custom, tending to lewdness.” Penalties were denounced against all these offences; and the persecution of the Quakers was again renewed. A Quaker woman had recently frightened the Old South congregation in Boston by entering that meeting-house clothed in sackcloth, with ashes on her head, her feet bare, and her face blackened, intending to personify the smallpox, with which she threatened the colony, in punishment for its sins.

About the time of the first collision with Philip, the Tarenteens, or Eastern Indians, had attacked the settlements in Maine and New Hampshire, plundering and burning the houses, and massacring such of the inhabitants as fell into their hands. This sudden diffusion of hostilities and vigor of attack from opposite quarters made the colonists believe that Philip had long been plotting and had gradually matured an extensive conspiracy, into which most of the tribes had deliberately entered, for the extermination of the whites. This belief infuriated the colonists, and suggested some very questionable proceedings. It seems, however, to have originated, like the war itself, from mere suspicions. The same griefs pressed upon all the tribes; and the struggle once commenced, the awe which the colonists inspired thrown off, the greater part were ready to join in the contest. But there is no evidence of any deliberate concert; nor, in fact, were the Indians united. Had they been so, the war would have been far more serious. The Connecticut tribes proved faithful, and that colony remained untouched. Uncas and Ninigret continued friendly; even the Narragansets, in spite of so many former provocations, had not yet taken up arms. But they were strongly suspected of intention to do so, and were accused by Uncas of giving, notwithstanding their recent assurances, aid and shelter to the hostile tribes.

An attempt had lately been made to revive the union of the New England colonies. At a meeting of commissioners, on September 9, 1675, those from Plymouth presented a narrative of the origin and progress of the present hostilities. Upon the strength of this narrative the war was pronounced “just and necessary,” and a resolution was passed to carry it on at the joint expense, and to raise for that purpose a thousand men, one-half to be mounted dragoons. If the Narragansets were not crushed during the winter, it was feared they might break out openly hostile in the spring; and at a subsequent meeting a thousand men were ordered to be levied to co-operate in an expedition specially against them.

The winter was unfavorable to the Indians; the leafless woods no longer concealed their lurking attacks. The frozen surface of the swamps made the Indian fastnesses accessible to the colonists. The forces destined to act against the Narragansets--six companies from Massachusetts, under Major Appleton; two from Plymouth, under Major Bradford; and five from Connecticut, under Major Treat--were placed under the command of Josiah Winslow, Governor of Plymouth since Prince’s death--son of that Edward Winslow so conspicuous in the earlier history of the colony. In December the Massachusetts and Plymouth forces marched to Petasquamscot, on the west shore of Narragansett Bay, where they made some forty prisoners. Being joined by the troops from Connecticut, and guided by an Indian deserter, after a march of fifteen miles through a deep snow, they approached a swamp in what is now the town of South Kingston, one of the ancient strongholds of the Narragansets. Driving the Indian scouts before them, and penetrating the swamp, the colonial soldiers soon came in sight of the Indian fort, built on a rising ground in the morass, a sort of island of two or three acres, fortified by a palisade, and surrounded by a close hedge a rod thick. There was but one entrance, quite narrow, defended by a tree thrown across it, with a block-house of logs in front and another on the flank. It was the “Lord’s day,” but that did not hinder the attack. As the captains advanced at the heads of their companies, the Indians opened a galling fire, under which many fell. But the assailants pressed on, and forced the entrance. A desperate struggle ensued. The colonists were once driven back, but they rallied and returned to the charge, and, after a two hours’ fight, became masters of the fort. Fire was put to the wigwams, near six hundred in number, and all the horrors of the Pequot massacre were renewed. The corn and other winter stores of the Indians were consumed, and not a few of the old men, women, and children perished in the flames. In this bloody contest, long remembered as the “Swamp Fight,” the colonial loss was terribly severe. Six captains, with two hundred and thirty men, were killed or wounded; and at night, in the midst of a snow-storm; with a fifteen miles’ march before them, the colonial soldiers abandoned the fort, of which the Indians resumed possession. But their wigwams were burned; their provisions destroyed; they had no supplies for the winter; their loss was irreparable. Of those who survived the fight, many perished of hunger.

Even as a question of policy, this attack on the Narragansets was more than doubtful. The starving and infuriated warriors, scattered through the woods, revenged themselves by attacks on the frontier settlements. On February 10, 1676, Lancaster was burned, and forty of the inhabitants killed or taken; among the rest, Mrs. Rolandson, wife of the minister, the narrative of whose captivity is still preserved. Groton, Chelmsford, and other towns in that vicinity were repeatedly attacked. Medfield, twenty miles from Boston, was furiously assaulted, and, though defended by three hundred men, half the houses were burned. Weymouth, within eighteen miles of Boston, was attacked a few days after. These were the nearest approaches which the Indians made to that capital. For a time the neighborhood of the Narraganset country was abandoned. The Rhode Island towns, though they had no part in undertaking the war, yet suffered the consequences of it. In March, Warwick was burned, and Providence was partially destroyed. Most of the inhabitants sought refuge in the islands, but the aged Roger Williams accepted a commission as captain for the defence of the town he had founded. Walter Clarke was presently chosen governor in Coddington’s place, the times not suiting a Quaker chief magistrate.

The whole colony of Plymouth was overrun. Houses were burned in almost every town, but the inhabitants, for the most part, saved themselves in their garrisons, a shelter with which all the towns now found it necessary to be provided. On March 26 Captain Pierce, with fifty men and some friendly Indians, while endeavoring to cover the Plymouth towns, fell into an ambush and was cut off. That same day, Marlborough was set on fire; two days after Rehoboth was burned. The Indians seemed to be everywhere. On April 18 Captain Wadsworth, marching to the relief of Sudbury, fell into an ambush, and perished with fifty men. The alarm and terror of the colonists reached again a great height. But affairs were about to take a turn. The resources of the Indians were exhausted; they were now making their last efforts.

A body of Connecticut volunteers, under Captain Denison, and of Mohegan and other friendly Indians, Pequots and Niantics, swept the entire country of the Narragansets, who suffered, as spring advanced, the last extremities of famine. Canonchet, the chief sachem, said to have been a son of Miantonimoh, but probably his nephew, had ventured to his old haunts to procure seed-corn with which to plant the rich intervals on the Connecticut, abandoned by the colonists. Taken prisoner, he conducted himself with all that haughty firmness esteemed by the Indians the height of magnanimity. Being offered his life on condition of bringing about a peace, he scorned the proposal. His tribe would perish to the last man rather than become servants to the English. When ordered to prepare for death, he replied, “I like it well; I shall die before my heart is soft, or I shall have spoken anything unworthy of myself.” Two Indians were appointed to shoot him, and his head was cut off and sent to Hartford.

The colonists had suffered severely. Men, women, and children had perished by the bullets of the Indians, or fled naked through the wintry woods by the light of their blazing houses, leaving their goods and cattle a spoil to the assailants. Several settlements had been destroyed, and many more had been abandoned; but the oldest and wealthiest remained untouched. The Indians, on the other hand, had neither provisions nor ammunition. On May 12, while attempting to plant corn and catch fish at Montague Falls, on the Connecticut River, they were attacked with great slaughter by the garrison of the lower towns, led by Captain Turner, a Boston Baptist, and at first refused a commission on that account, but as danger increased, pressed to accept it. Yet this enterprise was not without its drawbacks. As the troops returned, Captain Turner fell into an ambush and was slain, with thirty-eight men. Hadley was attacked on a lecture day, June 12, while the people were at meeting; but the Indians were repulsed by the bravery of Goffe, one of the fugitive regicides, long concealed in that town. Seeing this venerable unknown man come to their rescue, and then suddenly disappear, the inhabitants took him for an angel.

Major Church, at the head of a body of two hundred volunteers, English and Indians, energetically hunted down the hostile bands in Plymouth colony. The interior tribes about Mount Wachusett were invaded and subdued by a force of six hundred men, raised for that purpose. Many fled to the north to find refuge in Canada--guides and leaders, in after years, of those French and Indian war parties by which the frontiers of New England were so terribly harassed. Just a year after the fast at the commencement of the war, a thanksgiving was observed for success in it.

No longer sheltered by the River Indians, who now began to make their peace, and even attacked by bands of the Mohawks, Philip returned to his own country, about Mount Hope, where he was still faithfully supported by his female confederate and relative, Witamo, squaw sachem of Pocasset. Punham, also, the Shawomet vassal of Massachusetts, still zealously carried on the war, but was presently killed. Philip was watched and followed by Church, who surprised his camp on August 1st, killed upward of a hundred of his people, and took prisoners his wife and boy. The disposal of this child was a subject of much deliberation. Several of the elders were urgent for putting him to death. It was finally resolved to send him to Bermuda, to be sold into slavery--a fate to which many other of the Indian captives were subjected. Witamo shared the disasters of Philip. Most of her people were killed or taken. She herself was drowned while crossing a river in her flight; but her body was recovered, and the head, cut off, was stuck upon a pole at Taunton, amid the jeers and scoffs of the colonial soldiers, and the tears and lamentations of the Indian prisoners.

Philip still lurked in the swamps, but was now reduced to extremity. Again attacked by Church, he was killed by one of his own people, a deserter to the colonists. His dead body was beheaded and quartered, the sentence of the English law upon traitors. One of his hands was given to the Indian who had shot him, and on August 17, the day appointed for a public thanksgiving, his head was carried in triumph to Plymouth.

The popular rage against the Indians was excessive. Death or slavery was the penalty for all known or suspected to have been concerned in shedding English blood. Merely having been present at the “Swamp Fight” was adjudged by the authorities of Rhode Island sufficient foundation for sentence of death, and that, too, notwithstanding they had intimated an opinion that the origin of the war would not bear examination. The other captives who fell into the hands of the colonists were distributed among them as ten-year servants. Roger Williams received a boy for his share. Many chiefs were executed at Boston and Plymouth on the charge of rebellion; among others, Captain Tom, chief of the Christian Indians at Natick, and Tispiquin, a noted warrior, reputed to be invulnerable, who had surrendered to Church on an implied promise of safety. A large body of Indians, assembled at Dover to treat of peace, were treacherously made prisoners by Major Waldron, who commanded there. Some two hundred of these Indians, claimed as fugitives from Massachusetts, were sent by water to Boston, where some were hanged, and the rest shipped off to be sold as slaves. Some fishermen of Marblehead having been killed by the Indians at the eastward, the women of that town, as they came out of meeting on a Sunday, fell upon two Indian prisoners who had just been brought in, and murdered them on the spot. The same ferocious spirit of revenge which governed the contemporaneous conduct of Berkeley in Virginia toward those concerned in Bacon’s rebellion, swayed the authorities of New England in their treatment of the conquered Indians. By the end of the year the contest was over in the South, upward of two thousand Indians having been killed or taken. But some time elapsed before a peace could be arranged with the Eastern tribes, whose haunts it was not so easy to reach.

In this short war of hardly a year’s duration the Wampanoags and Narragansets had suffered the fate of the Pequots. The Niantics alone, under the guidance of their aged sachem, Ninigret, had escaped destruction. Philip’s country was annexed to Plymouth, though sixty years afterward, under a royal order in council, it was transferred to Rhode Island. The Narraganset territory remained as before, under the name of King’s Province, a bone of contention between Connecticut, Rhode Island, the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Atherton claimants. The Niantics still retained their ancient seats along the southern shores of Narragansett Bay. Most of the surviving Narragansets, the Nipmucks, and the River Indians, abandoned their country, and migrated to the North and West. Such as remained, along with the Mohegans and other subject tribes, became more than ever abject and subservient.

The work of conversion was now again renewed, and, after such overwhelming proofs of Christian superiority, with somewhat greater success. A second edition of the Indian Old Testament, which seems to have been more in demand than the New, was published in 1683, revised by Eliot, with the assistance of John Cotton, son of the “great Cotton,” and minister of Plymouth. But not an individual exists in our day by whom it can be understood. The fragments of the subject tribes, broken in spirit, lost the savage freedom and rude virtues of their fathers, without acquiring the laborious industry of the whites. Lands were assigned them in various places, which they were prohibited by law from alienating. But this very provision, though humanely intended, operated to perpetuate their indolence and incapacity. Some sought a more congenial occupation in the whale fishery, which presently began to be carried on from the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Many perished by enlisting in the military expeditions undertaken in future years against Acadie and the West Indies. The Indians intermarried with the blacks, and thus confirmed their degradation by associating themselves with another oppressed and unfortunate race. Gradually they dwindled away. A few sailors and petty farmers, of mixed blood, as much African as Indian, are now the sole surviving representatives of the aboriginal possessors of southern New England.