Sleep—but to dream of brand and steel;
Wake—but to deal in blood and fire."
C. Sherry.
Although fierce and determined when once aroused, no doubt Philip was hurried into this war against his best judgment and feelings, for his sagacity must have forewarned him of failure. The English were well armed and provisioned; the Indians had few guns, and their subsistence was precarious. "Phrensy prompted their rising. It was but the storm in which the ancient inhabitants of the land were to vanish away. They rose without hope, and therefore they fought without mercy. For them as a nation there was no to-morrow."
Bancroft has given a condensed, yet perspicuous and brilliant narrative of this war. "The minds of the English," he says, "were appalled by the horrors of the impending conflict, and superstition indulged in its wild inventions. At the time of the eclipse of the moon, you might have seen the figure of an Indian scalp imprinted on the center of its disk. The perfect form of an Indian bow appeared in the sky. The sighing of the wind was like the whistling of bullets. Some distinctly heard invisible troops of horses gallop through the air, while others formed the prophecy of calamities in the howling of the wolves. **
"At the very beginning of danger, the colonists exerted their wonted energy. Volunteers from Massachusetts joined the troops from Plymouth, and, within a week from the commencement of hostilities, the insulated Pokanokets were driven from Mount Hope, and January 29, 1675 in less than a month Philip was a fugitive among the Nipmucks, the interior tribes of Massachusetts. The little army of the colonists then entered the territory of the Narragansets, and from the reluctant tribe extorted a treaty of neutrality, with a promise to give up every hostile Indian. Victory seemed promptly assured; but it was only the commencement of horrors. Canonchet, the chief sachem of the Narragansets, was the son of Miantonômoh; and could he forget his father's wrongs? And would the tribes of New England permit the nation that had first given a welcome to the English to perish unavenged? Desolation extended along the whole frontier. Banished from his patrimony,
* Bancroft, ii., 101.
** Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, ii., 486, says, "Yea, and now we speak of things ominous, we may add, some time before this [the execution of three Indians for the murder of Sassamon], in a clear, still, sunshiny morning, there were divers persons who heard in the air, on the southeast of them, a great gun go off, and presently thereupon the report of small guns, like musket shot, very thick discharging, as if there had been a battle. This was at a time when there was nothing visible done in any part of the colony to occasion such noises; but that which most of all astonished them was the flying of bullets, which came singing over their heads [beetles? See page 574, vol. i.], and seemed very near to them; after which the sound of drums, passing along westward, was very audible; and on the same day, in Plymouth colony, in several places, invisible troops of horse were heard riding to and fro." No credence is to be attached to this book of Mather's.
Indian Method of Warfare.—Destruction of New England Villages.—Terrible Retaliation by the Whites.
where the Pilgrims found a friend, and from his cabin, which had sheltered the exiles, Philip and his warriors spread through the country, arousing their brethren to a warfare of extermination.