Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/358

338 and fifty fathoms of wampum, “two ankers of liquors, or something equivalent, and three troopers' coats.” This formidable inventory indicates either that the Indians had become more appreciative of their land and better skilled in bargaining, or that the white purchasers had become more conscionable.

In 1670 Staten Island passed to a white owner for four hundred fathoms of wampum and a number of guns, axes, kettles, and watch-coats.

The first settlers of Boston, besides buying out the right of the lonely first English occupant, paid a trifle to a survivor of the tribe killed off by the plague, and again to his grandson, in 1685.

The sea-shore town of Beverly, with an Indian village and “improvements,” was purchased for £6 6s. 8d. The famous “Walking Purchase” of Pennsylvania land by the Quakers is variously viewed, as a fair transaction, or as an adroit trick of slyness against simplicity.

To one who should care to pursue and probe to the bottom any single case of controversy between the colonists and the Indians, which after being aggravated ended in ruthless slaughter, each side complaining that the other was the first aggressor, that of King Philip's war, in 1675 — involving, relatively, the most formidable conspiracy ever formed among the natives, and at one time threatening the absolute extermination of the whites — would furnish the most suggestive instance. Indeed this war, with its provocations, suspicions, and wrongs on either side, has been made a signal example of pleading and championship in our local histories. No Indian historian has left us the relation of its conduct and causes, from his point of view. But though the whites had the whole field for self-justification at the time, and find their side well argued in most of our sober and elaborate histories from their day to our own, there are not wanting vigorous, fair-minded, and effective pleaders who have told the story from the Indian point of