Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/347

Rh War, which left us an independent people. It is to be limited in the main to the relations established by the colonists themselves with the natives, as it will be convenient to deal with the relations of the mother country, as a government with the same people and over the same held, in a separate chapter. A dividing-line might be drawn — at first sharp and distinct, afterwards becoming blurred — between the periods and the circumstances within which the English colonists, unrecognized and not interfered with in this matter by the mother country, disposed of all their relations with the savages, whether hostile or peaceful, by their own judgment, at their own charges, and the period and circumstances when foreign interference or help came in as a new element in those relations. The whole force of the distinction between these times and circumstances will present itself to us when we set in the strong contrast of the facts in either case the earliest with the latest relations of the colonists with the Indians, — the mother country in the former being an outside, indifferent, and unconcerned observer, if even so much as that; while in the latter she was the principal party, actor, and contributor of ways and means.

In the early wars of the New England colonists — and the same might be said of those of Virginia — with the natives, the whole brunt of the strife, in loss of life and goods, and in charges for military stores and operations, came upon the actual settlers. The three desolating “massacres,” wrought by conspiring Indian tribes in Virginia, found the colonists unaided from abroad, and uncompensated for their losses of property. In the Pequot war the New England colonists assessed themselves for all its charges. In the crushing and almost exterminating ravages of the conspiracy for their destruction by King Philip, we find that nearly two thirds of the plantations and towns were either wholly or partially destroyed; that one in ten of the men of military age were victims; while the expenses