Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/214

Rh English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.”

It is no doubt true that for the most part the lands were purchased, and, according to the idea of the English, honorably purchased, yet the natives could not fail to foresee the result of these cessions of territory. There were English settlements at Bridgewater, Middleboro’, Taunton, Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Swanzey, all within the ancient jurisdiction of Massasoit. And as a perpetual monitor to Philip of his limited domains, though in obedience to a different and highly honorable motive, the people erected a fence quite across the neck of land on the south of Swanzey, and thus confined the Pokanokets by metes and bounds.

That Philip was annoyed by applications for land is evident from his letter, without date, addressed to Governor Prince of Plymouth:

“Philip would intreat that favor of you, and any of the magistrates, if any English or Indians speak about any land, he pray to give them no answer at all. This last summer he made that promise with you, that he would sell no land in seven years’ time, for that he would have no English trouble him before that time. He has not forgot that you promise him.”

The apostle Eliot, in a letter to the Massachusetts government, dated in 1684, asking that certain fraudulent purchases of the Indians might be annulled, puts this suggestive inquiry: “Was not a principal cause of the late war about encroachments on Philip’s lands at Mount Hope?”

The third disturbing cause was the desire of our ancestors to convert the Indian chiefs and tribes to Christianity. This was a primary and chief object of the settlement of the country. Governor Craddock, in a letter of February, 1629, to Endicott and his Council, says: “You will demean yourselves