When the Pilgrims had erected cabins enough to house all who were left of them, they built a stockade, or wall of upright logs, around the settlement. In April, 1621, the Mayflower started back to England. Much as they had suffered through the long, dreary winter, none of the Pilgrims wished to return home on their little ship. That plucky band of men and women had come to America to stay.
They marched to their church-fort on the hill every Sunday, led by their governor, minister, and captain. The men carried their muskets to be ready to defend themselves if the Indians tried to surprise them while at their worship. The Pilgrims believed in watching and fighting as well as praying.
After a long time, Massasoit, the great Indian chief, came with a company of his braves to see the Pilgrims, and the white men and the red made a treaty of peace and friendship. Afterwards the chief of a more distant tribe sent an Indian runner to Plymouth with a bundle of arrows tied together with a rattlesnake skin. Captain Standish promptly filled the snake skin with powder and bullets and sent it back. This frightened the Indians, for they thought the white “medicine man” had the power to send a plague among them which would make them all sicken and die.
After a time the people of Plymouth were comfortable and at peace with their Indian neighbors. Then a lad known as “that Billington boy” disobeyed the rules by going outside the limits and was lost. The settlers were alarmed, and Captain Standish took a small company of men and made a search for the lad. They found him with the unfriendly Nausets, the Indians they had fought with at “The First Encounter.”
The Indians around Plymouth laughed at the little red-headed white captain because he was so small. He was so quick-tempered that they named him “Little-Pot-That-Soon-Boils-Over.” Once when a tall, wiry Indian north of Plymouth insulted him, the fiery little captain had all he could do to control himself. Standish and three other white men had gone up to that place for the purpose of punishing the Indians who were threatening the whole colony with death. Watching his chance, the white captain sprang upon the big Indian chief who had sneered at him, snatched the savage’s own knife, and killed him with a single stab. The other white men dispatched their Indians. The account of this brave deed of the Captain of Plymouth was reported among the Indians far and near, and the Pilgrims had long years of peace because the red men had gained a wholesome respect for Myles Standish, whose name they now changed to Sword-of-the-White-Man.
JOHN WINTHROP, A PURITAN MAKER OF MASSACHUSETTS
John Winthrop can not be called a boy’s hero; yet he was a hero, and his life was strange and interesting. He was a son of a good Puritan family in England. When a young man he met Oliver Cromwell, who became Lord Protector of England. He was acquainted with John Milton, the blind Puritan poet who wrote “Paradise Lost,” one of the greatest poems in the English language. John Winthrop had also to transact certain business with Cromwell’s cousin, John Hampden, the great English patriot who opposed King Charles when he sought to impose taxation upon the people without their consent.
