Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/360

340 but the darkness was the time for the Indian's revelry in horrors. The Indian, in his warfare with the English, availed himself of all those resources of his own which compensated his lack of the white man's means. The patience with which the savage would lie in the covert of the thicket, perhaps for one or several days, to watch the husbandman who might pass to his field or clearing, made the whole space around a settlement, and long reaches between the settlements, haunted as with imps of mischief. The savages, soon learning of the Sunday habits of the English in their rude temples, would steal upon the cabins, where only infants and the infirm were left, and ply the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, and the torch. They dashed the infants against rock or tree before the eyes of their mothers; they maimed and slaughtered the cattle; they bore their prisoners off for unnamed tortures. But it was their onset by night, or before the gray of morning, on an unsuspecting group of sleepers in the rude dwellings on the edge of the wilderness, with their yells and whoops, that heaped the dreads of their warfare. This experience, with all the variations of ferocity, malignity, and atrocity, was especially harrowing for those who shared the realities of Philip's dark conspiracy, and it struck deeply and burned sharply into their hearts and minds their hate of the Indian as an enemy.

I have selected King Philip's war in 1675, rather than the earlier Pequot war in 1636, as affording the specimen case for presenting all the elements which enter into a historical examination and discussion of the causes and occasion and conduct of a bitter strife between the English colonists and those upon whose lands and rights they were trespassing. Whatever was the territorial tenure of the natives here, they were justified in maintaining it, certainly against those who with no claim at all were evidently bent upon dispossessing them. The most significant and distinguishing quality in that war was, that the readiness with which