Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/361

Rh the master mind of the great Indian chieftain succeeded in engaging in his conspiracy so comprehensive a body of the natives — many of them not of his own tribe — showed how widespread was the hatred of the English, and how easily the Indians could be banded against them. Another exceptional incident in that war was that the whites had no Indian allies, saving only a few individual informers, spies, and guides who were faithless to their own race. Some of the more melancholy complications and consequences of King Philip's war, as thwarting the best intentioned schemes formed by the most humane of the Massachusetts people for the civilization and security of the natives, will present themselves in our dealing with another theme.

The Pequot war of 1636, which was the first in the series of bloody and well-nigh exterminating campaigns of the New Englanders against the natives, involved some peculiar elements, which at least in their own judgment relieved the former of all blame for what they did, and even gave them the honorable merit of avengers of wrong. The Pequots — inhabiting the finest spaces in Connecticut, extending to the Hudson River — were a fierce and numerous tribe, who had driven off the former occupants of the territory in a series of conflicts, and so held by recent conquest. The English had consented to their own proffers of amity. A feud existed between them and their neighbors the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, who instigated the whites, upon provocations which they soon received, to accept them as allies against the Pequots. Even Roger Williams became the adviser and efficient helper of the magistrates and soldiers of the other colonies in the exterminating campaign which was soon opened against them. The Pequots had committed a succession of murders, on the land and river and bay, of individuals and small parties of the whites who had first ventured for trade or settlement upon their territories. They had accompanied these deeds with mutilations of the bodies of their victims, and with defiances and taunts