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300 terrors of the pestilence, which was resistless as fate to the children of the forest, was the fear and dread of their implacable enemies, the fierce Mohawks of the west. The spirit of the Indian was broken. In 1644, Passaconaway renounced his authority as an independent chief, and placed himself and his tribe of several thousand souls under the protection of the colonial magistrates. The Indian villages at Pawtucket Falls, on the Merrimack, and Wamesit Falls, on the Concord, the Musketaquid of the aborigines, were first visited in 1647 by the Reverend John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians. In 1652, Captain Simon Willard and Captain Edward Johnson made their

tour up the Merrimack River to Lake Winnipiseogee, and marked a stone near the Weirs as the northern boundary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The following year the work of settlement swept onward, crowding