Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/456

436 in their powwows, feared that if these fell into discredit or disuse, in any case of emergency in the future in which the help of white men should fail them they would be without relief. Eliot wrote to England to invite over doctors and surgeons for them, with appliances and drugs, and thought it desirable that they should have lectures, with the help of an “atomy,” or skeleton. In a letter to Mr. Boyle, he wrote: “I have some thoughts, if God give life and means, to read medicine, and call for such roots — for they altogether use the root, and not the herb — as they have experience of.” His chief difficulty, however, came from the apprehensions, the distrust, and in many cases the positive hostility of most of the sachems, sagamores, and grades of chieftains among the Indians. These apprehended that they would henceforward be deprived of the tribute which they had been wont to receive or to exact from their people. Eliot tried to act as a fair umpire in this matter, enjoining that the tribute due as such to chiefs should be continued, though qualified and reduced according to circumstances. While concentrating his labors at Natick, and dividing them among some half-dozen other Indian settlements soon initiated, he sought to make his movement one of wider compass, at least to other New England tribes; but his success was slight. The famous King Philip, taking hold of one of Eliot's coat-buttons, told him he cared no more for his religion than for that; and Uncas, sachem of the Mohicans, utterly forbade any proselyting work among his Indians. Roger Williams, in a letter to the Commissioners of the United Colonies, in 1654, wrote that in his recent visit to England he had been charged by the Narragansett sachems to petition Cromwell and the Council in their behalf, that they should not be compelled to change their religion.

The Charles River — sometimes fordable, sometimes swollen — ran through “the place of hills,” which Eliot and his guides had chosen for their experiment in