The renegades from the Church of England were looking for a fresh start, but the newness of their New England was an illusion. No one epitomized the wear and tear that colonization had already wrought on the region and its people better than the Pilgrims’ liaison and interpreter, a man known as Squanto. Kidnapped from his Cape Cod home in 1614 by an English captain, Squanto returned five years later after completing a tour of the Atlantic world that took him from London to Spain to the Caribbean. Prized for his linguistic skills, he jumped ship when an English vessel that had hired him as a translator entered Massachusetts Bay. Squanto returned to his village of Patuxet to find it abandoned. The plague had killed his friends and family. He found a home with the Wampanoags and became an adviser to Massasoit. He used his knowledge of European ways to broker an alliance with Pilgrims through gifts of seed corn and planting instructions.
The Algonquians of southern New England found these settlers considerably different from the French and Dutch traders. Land fired their imaginations, not trade. Through Squanto, Massasoit tried to use the colonists to his advantage. Yet the Pilgrims proved a blunt political instrument. For example, in 1623, Massasoit urged the Pilgrim military commander Miles Standish to attack a group from the Massachusetts tribe, who resided north of Plymouth. Standish obliged and brought back the severed head of the Massachusetts chief, which he jammed on a pike outside the Plymouth gates as a “warning and terror” to all Indians—Wampanoags included. Though voiceless, the head spoke loudly to the natives. “How cometh it to pass,” one asked, “that when we come to Patuxet [using the Wampanoag rather than the English name for the village] you stand upon your guard, with the mouths of your pieces [guns] presented to us?” Soon, their aggressive behavior earned the English a new name, wotowequenage, cutthroats.21
Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Author’s collection.
. . .
Radical English-speaking Protestants came in several varieties. The Pilgrims sought a complete separation from the Church of England. North America put an ocean between them and a state-sponsored religion they considered too Catholic. Soon, other groups of reformers joined the Plymouth colonists. These “Puritans” moderated their spiritual aims. Instead of rejecting the Anglican Church, they hoped to restore and purify it. Large numbers immigrated to shores north of Cape Cod. The Massachusetts Bay colonists occupied abandoned Indian fields and village sites, thanking their God for clearing the premises for them. Although the official seal of the Bay Colony featured the figure of a native asking the English to “Come Over and Help Us,” the Puritans were actually more interested in helping themselves to “unused” land. “The country lay open,” wrote their leader John Winthrop, “to any that could and would improve it.” To bolster their own legal claims, settlers bargained with Indians and drew up bills of sale and contracts. These documents often masked the bullying, fraud, and shadiness that prompted land transfers. The Puritans allowed their livestock to graze Indian fields, rendering them useless; they fined Indians for violations to English law, such as working on the Sabbath, then demanded land as payment; they made deals with an assortment of fraudulent “chiefs.” As disease and social dislocation crippled the coastal tribes along the bay, many native leaders signed away their fields and hunting grounds and took up residence on the margins of colonial society, trading protection for independence.22
Inland and along the shores of Long Island Sound, however, Indian peoples flexed considerable muscle. They blocked Puritan expansion until another smallpox epidemic, raging in 1633 and 1634, devastated populations from the Saint Lawrence River south to Long Island Sound. The epidemic opened the way for the thousands of new English immigrants packed in coastal towns to venture into the interior. “Without this remarkable and terrible stroke of God upon the natives,” recorded the minutes of one Puritan town meeting, “we would with much more difficulty have found room, and at far greater charge have obtained and purchased land.” As the pox spread across Indian bodies, the English planted towns along the lower Connecticut River.23
The English and the Narragansetts attack and destroy the Pequot village at Mystic, Connecticut. From John Underhill, Newes from America (London, 1638). Author’s collection
Life in these territories, however, was not free and easy. The Pequots, a powerful tribe that had partnered with the Dutch, served as the teeth in the mouth of the Connecticut River. The Puritans offered an alliance, but the Pequots refused the demand for an acknowledgment of English sovereignty. So in 1637 the Puritans joined the Pequots’ traditional enemies, the Narragansetts, and went after the recalcitrant tribe. English soldiers and Narragansett warriors laid siege to the Pequots’ fortified main village on the Mystic River, torching homes and shooting men, women, and children as they ran from the flames. The slaughter alarmed the Narragansetts: “It is too furious, it slays too many men.” Though savage, the Puritans’ butchery was mindful. They intended to send a message to the other tribes in the region. They intended to assert their dominance through terror. The Pequots’ territory became English farmland, a pastoral landscape sprung from the flames of Mystic.24
The English and the Algonquians settled into an uneasy peace that lasted for forty years. Slowly they built relationships, some happy, most not. Roger Williams, who established his own colony for dissidents in Rhode Island, developed a rapport with his new neighbors, the Narragansetts. Overflowing with zeal to bring Christ to the Indians, Williams occasionally went to live with them in their “filthy, smoky holes,” struggling to learn their language and get beyond his sense of superiority. Williams would never appreciate his hosts’ decor or sanction their worldview. Still, he defended with ardor their right to the land. Williams rejected the notion that the Indians vacated their land claims by failing to work their fields like Europeans. The English, he argued, had to respect Indian title and bargain for territory rather than simply take it. Williams, writes historian Edward Morgan, “despised their religion and found many of their customs barbarous, but he was ready to live with them and deal with them on equal terms.” In Massachusetts, clergyman John Eliot learned Indian languages, translated the Bible into Algonquian, evangelized among the tribes on the outskirts of English settlements, and brought together fourteen villages of “praying Indians.” These self-governing communities were the closest the English came to the Spanish missions.25
The slow work of getting to know and trust one another could not match the quickening pace of conflicts brought on by English agricultural expansion. Puritan immigration to the region bottomed out in the 1640s, yet the settler population continued to grow through natural reproduction. Compared to England or Virginia, New England harbored fewer diseases lethal to Europeans. Healthier mothers and safer early childhoods bumped up fertility rates, and the recipients of this baby bounty crowed about their capacity “to beget and bring forth more children than any other nation in the world.” Population growth produced a hunger for new land, Indian land.26
Although still formally allied with the English at Plymouth, the Wampanoags—among the remaining independent and formidable New England Algonquian tribes that also included the Narragansetts and the Abenakis—were ready to alter their foreign policy. English land grabbing and political bullying convinced Metacomet, the English-educated son of Massasoit, that his people had no alternative but armed resistance.
The conflict boiled over in early 1675 when a Christian Indian working as a spy for Plymouth was found murdered. English authorities arrested three of Metacomet’s men, tried, and executed them. Within days, Wampanoag warriors attacked a colonial town and killed several residents. Metacomet appealed to their southern neighbors for a defensive alliance, but before the Narragansetts had a chance to reply, the English pounced on the overture to declare war on the Narragansetts and Wampanoags and any other Indians deemed hostile. They invaded Narragansett country and ransacked villages, burning them to the ground. Metacomet, known to the English as King Philip, recruited a guerrilla army and slipped into the inter
ior. The English singled him out for blame, calling what was to become a general Indian uprising “King Philip’s War.” Fighters from many tribes raided and torched dozens of towns throughout New England. They bashed skulls, disemboweled livestock, and kidnapped women and children. As one strike force left the smoking ruin of what was Medfield, a native scribe tacked a message to a tree. “Thou English man hath provoked us to anger and wrath,” it read. “We have nothing but our lives to loose but thou hast many fair houses, cattell and much good things.”27
Anger and wrath held sway until the beginning of 1676, when the rebels spent a miserable winter in western Massachusetts and the promise of a pan-Indian alliance faded. Metacomet pleaded with the Iroquois for supplies and support. The Mohawks instead attacked and dispersed his army. Metacomet retreated to his Rhode Island homeland, where the English colonial army, aided by Christian Indians and other natives with grudges against the Wampanoags, besieged villages, destroyed crops, and killed hundreds of men, women, and children. Finally, in a battle known as the Great Swamp Fight, the English and their allies defeated the rebels and slew Metacomet. They mutilated his body and marched his head on a pike through their towns. They sold his wife and son, among hundreds of other captives, to slavers in the Caribbean.
The numbers of dead, four thousand Algonquians and two thousand English settlers, appraised the war’s brutality. Measured in relation to the size of the population, King Philip’s War ranked among the most destructive conflicts in American history. Dozens of English and Indian towns lay in ruins. In the closing months of the fight, terrorized Puritan colonists rounded up hundreds of praying Indians and concentrated them on desolate islands in Boston Harbor. Eliot worked hard to protect his converts, but to little avail. Although a few Christian communities remained after the war—in isolated locations on Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard—most of the surviving Christian Algonquians fled west. Even Roger Williams, lame and in his seventies, after finding his own house burned along with most of the others in Providence, led Rhode Island troops against his former friends, the Narragansetts. With few exceptions, English sympathies and imaginations extended two alternatives for Indians—removal or extermination.
The war marked the end of large-scale, organized Indian resistance in southern New England. The population of Indians in the region had slipped far below that of the English, from ten to twenty thousand natives compared with fifty to seventy-five thousand settlers. Yet small communities of Narragansetts, Pequots, and other tribal groups survived for centuries, as anyone who has pulled the lever of a slot machine at the Pequots’ Foxwoods or the Mohegans’ Mohegan Sun casinos in Connecticut can attest. These several thousand native residents tell an alternative history of New England. In the homeland of Metacomet, descendants claim that the ghost of King Philip rises and walks among Indian spirits at night.
. . .
King Philip’s War haunted the larger American culture as well. In its aftermath, commenters spun visions of the frontier as a moral and religious testing ground. Puritans interpreted their defeats and victories as part of God’s plan. One of the most popular and enduring statements on this theme appeared in 1682, when Mary Rowlandson published an account of her captivity among the Indians during Metacomet’s revolt. Torn from her home and family, several of whom she watched die, Rowlandson described a physical and emotional journey into a dark wilderness. At night, her captors celebrated their victory: “Oh the roaring, and singing, and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.” Exhausted and grieving, Rowlandson accepted her torment as a reminder of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the title she and her male sponsor, the influential minister Increase Mather, gave to her narrative. The further Rowlandson moved away from her comfortable life, the closer she came to God. Do not let the trappings of earthly happiness distract you from higher callings: this was the lesson God delivered to New England through King Philip—and Rowlandson and Mather. The book found an eager audience. An immediate best seller, the narrative was reissued in at least fifteen editions before the American Revolution. Success brought imitation. Hundreds of captivity stories appeared in print, but most wallowed in gore instead of reaching for glory.28
American readers clearly found an enthralling version of the frontier in the captivity narratives. Colonial North America was a hotbed of hostage-taking. Human beings stole, traded, and adopted one another across tribes, nations, and religions. Indians kidnapped other Indians as well as Europeans and some Africans. Europeans purchased African and Indian slaves, and they imprisoned and converted one another. The involuntary traffic of people defined the edges of populations and cultures. Captivity was how early modern people understood their differences and sometimes overcame them. Mary Rowlandson, with Increase Mather’s help, drew a sharp line between herself and her captors in her narrative. They were animals—“wolves and bears.” She was a reborn Christian. Still, for all her edge-setting, Rowlandson also revealed some feathered joints between herself and the Indians. To earn extra rations, for example, she mended the Algonquians’ garments. They provided her with needle, thread, and cloth, and they described the outfits they wanted. It turns out that these “dark creatures” preferred English-style shirts. For all their differences, Rowlandson and the Indians shared a sense of fashion.
Title page of the 1773 edition of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. Author’s collection.
Mather and Rowlandson half-buried the collusion of frontier cultures under the rhetoric of Indian savagery and religious fatalism, and other New England authors attempted a similar move, publishing divisive accounts that mainly obscured but occasionally offered glimpses of an entwined past. The memoir of Captain Benjamin Church, a second literary classic spawned by the Puritan-Indian wars, combined admiration and belligerence. American-born, Church was a self-declared wilderness expert and innovative Indian fighter. He ridiculed other officers for their “regular” tactics and argued that to wage an Indian war successfully, one had to do battle like Indians. In the course of his narrative, Church becomes more and more like an Indian himself, actively seeking the amalgamation of European and Indian characteristics. After the final battle he sits up all night with Annawon, one of King Philip’s lieutenants, swapping tales of their adventures, and Church’s narrative implies that a bond of mutual respect and even affection developed between them. Later Church is horrified to find Annawon’s head on a pike at Plymouth. His anger at the dishonorable treatment of a fellow wilderness warrior, reported Church’s son, led to “the loss of the good will and respects of some that before were his good friends.” Church and Rowlandson forged connections to their savage neighbors at gun- and needlepoint. They gave readers a passing glance at the ambivalence and ambiguity that flourished even as relations between Indians and colonists festered.29
. . .
The English exited King Philip’s War ready to mend their ways and placate their deity. After years of bloodshed and woe, they longed to feel the glow of God on their side. But there were too many players with too many motivations to limit colonial conflicts to two sides. They behaved like oil slicks instead of clashes. Groups collided, combined, and dispersed, only to glob into new forms under different conditions. When the Mohawks, for instance, attacked Metacomet instead of supporting him, they did not side with the English. They sought an intermediate space between neighboring Indians and the English colonies. The Mohawks and the other four Haudenosaunee nations sought a dominant position in the middle.
Indian traders from the coast first carried European goods to the peoples of the Five Nations. Archaeologists have found brass, iron, and glass items in Iroquois graves dating from the mid-fifteenth century. The Five Nations first secured direct access to colonial merchandise when Dutch traders established posts along the Hudson River in the 1610s. But the Haudenosaunee had a fur problem. The best source of beaver pelts came from the colder climes to the north. To supply themselves with these valuable items,
the Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Senecas raided their northern neighbors, plundering their stores of furs and bringing the pelts south to trade with the Dutch. These raids began a long series of seventeenth-century conflicts known as the Beaver Wars. Five Nation warriors attacked Indian peoples as far west as the Illinois Country, building the most powerful Indian confederacy on the North American continent in the seventeenth century.
Trade sparked the Beaver Wars, but population losses to epidemics fed the conflagration of raids and counter-raids. European diseases hit the Iroquois hard. By the 1640s epidemics had cut the population of the Five Nations in half. Warfare against their neighbors not only gave the Haudenosaunee access to the thick-pelted beavers of the northern Great Lakes, but the violence brought them captives to replenish their numbers.
The Haudenosaunee directed their most furious attacks against their northern enemy, the French-allied Hurons. “So far as I can divine,” wrote a Jesuit missionary, “it is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Hurons, if it is possible; to put the chiefs and great part of the nation to death, and with the rest to form one nation and one country.” In 1647 and 1648, the Mohawks and Senecas launched a brutal offensive against the Hurons, destroying both Indian towns and Jesuit missions. The Iroquois lost many warriors, yet the Huron lost even more. Many Hurons abandoned their homeland near Georgia Bay, Lake Ontario, and fled westward to the Illinois Country. Hundreds more were taken captive and marched south into Haudenosaunee territory, where they were either butchered or adopted into Iroquois families. Left behind, the bones of the dead marked the end of the Hurons.30
The American West Page 9
