A Brief History of the United States

by John Bach McMaster

But in 1644 Opekankano (then an old and grizzled warrior) again led forth his tribes, and in two days killed several hundred whites. Once more the settlers rallied, swept the Indian country, captured Opekankano, and drew a boundary across which no Indian could come without permission. If he did, he might be shot on sight. [10]

EARLY INDIAN WARS IN NEW ENGLAND.—In New England the experience of the early settlers was much the same. Murders by the Pequot Indians having become unendurable, a little fleet was sent (1686) against them. Block Island was ravaged, and Pequots on the mainland were killed and their corn destroyed. Sassacus, sachem of the Pequots, thereupon sought to join the Narragansetts with him in an attempt to drive the English from the country; but Roger Williams persuaded the Narragansetts to form an alliance with the English, and the Pequots began the war alone. In the winter (1636-37) the Connecticut River settlements were attacked, several men killed, and two girls carried off.

DESTRUCTION OF THE PEQUOTS.—In May, 1637, a force of seventy-seven colonists from Connecticut and Massachusetts, led by John Mason and John Underhill, marched to the Pequot village in what is now the southeast corner of Connecticut. Some Mohicans and Narragansetts went along; but when they came in sight of the village, they refused to join in the attack. The village was a cluster of wigwams surrounded by a stockade, with two narrow openings for entrance. While some of the English guarded them, the rest attacked the stockade, flung torches over it, and set the wigwams on fire. Of the four hundred or more Indians in the village, but five escaped.

[Illustration: DESTRUCTION OF THE PEQUOTS.]

KING PHILIP'S WAR.—For thirty-eight years the memory of the destruction of the Pequots kept peace in New England. Then Philip, a chief of the Wampanoags, took the warpath (1675) and, joined by the Nipmucks and Narragansetts, sought to drive the white men from New England. The war began in Rhode Island, but spread into Massachusetts, where town after town was attacked, and men, women, and children massacred. Roused to fury by these deeds, a little band of men from Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut in the dead of winter stormed the great swamp fortress of the Narragansetts, destroyed a thousand Indians, and burned the wigwams and winter supply of corn. The power of the Narragansetts was broken; but the war went on, and before midsummer (1676) twenty villages had been attacked by the Nipmucks. But they, too, were doomed; their fighting strength was destroyed in two victories by the colonists. In August Philip was shot in a swamp. These victories ended the war in the south, but it broke out almost immediately in the northeast, and raged till the summer of 1678.

During these three years of war New England suffered terribly. Twelve towns had been utterly destroyed, forty had been partly burned, and a thousand men, besides scores of women and children, had perished. As for the New England Indians, their power was gone forever. [11]

INDIAN WARS IN NEW NETHERLAND.—The Dutch in New Netherland were on friendly terms with the Iroquois, to whom they sold fire-arms; but the Tappans, Raritans, and other Algonquin tribes round about New Amsterdam were enemies of the Iroquois, and with these the Dutch had several wars. One (1641) was brought on by Governor Kieft's attempt to tax the Indians; another (1643-45) by the slaughter, one night, of more than a hundred Indians who had asked the Dutch for shelter from their Mohawk enemies. Many Dutch farmers were murdered, and a great Indian stronghold in Connecticut was stormed one winter night and seven hundred Indians killed. [12] After ten years of peace the Indians rose again, killed men in the streets of New Amsterdam, and harried Staten Island; and again, after an outbreak at Esopus, there were several years of war (1658-64).

IN NORTH CAROLINA some Algonquin tribes conspired with the Tuscarora tribe of Iroquois to drive the white men from the country, and began horrid massacres (1711). Help came from South Carolina, and the Tuscaroras were badly beaten. But the war was renewed next year, and then another force of white men and Indians from South Carolina stormed the Tuscaroras' fort and broke their power. The Tuscaroras migrated to New York and were admitted to the great Iroquois confederacy of the Five Nations, which thenceforth was known as the Six Nations. [13]

IN SOUTH CAROLINA.—Among the Indians who marched to the relief of North Carolina were men of the Yam'assee tribe. That they should turn against the people of South Carolina was not to be expected. But the Spaniards at St. Augustine bought them with gifts, and, joined by Creeks, Cherokees, and others, they began (in 1715) a war which lasted nearly a year and cost the lives of four hundred white men. They, too, in the end were beaten, and the Yamassees fled to Florida.

The story of these Indian wars has been told not because they were wars, but because they were the beginnings of that long and desperate struggle of the Indian with the white man which continued down almost to our own time. The march of the white man across the continent has been contested by the Indian at every step, and to-day there is not a state in the Union whose soil has not at some time been reddened by the blood of both.