Decisive Battles of America

by Unknown

From a drawing by Howard Pyle

INDIANS ON THE WARPATH

The most painful aspect of the whole practice lies in the fact that it was not confined to those actually engaged in fighting, but that the colonial authorities actually established a tariff of prices for scalps, including even non-combatants—so much for a man’s, so much for a woman’s, so much for a child’s. Doctor Ellis has lately pointed out the striking circumstance that whereas William Penn had declared the person of an Indian to be “sacred,” his grandson, in 1764, offered $134 for the scalp of an Indian man, $130 for that of a boy under ten, and $50 for that of a woman or girl. The habit doubtless began in the fury of retaliation, and was continued in order to conciliate Indian allies; and when bounties were offered to them, the white volunteers naturally claimed a share. But there is no doubt that Puritan theology helped the adoption of the practice. It was partly because the Indian was held to be something worse than a beast that he was treated with very little mercy. The truth is that he was viewed as a fiend, and there could not be much scruple about using inhumanities against a demon. Cotton Mather calls Satan “the old landlord” of the American wilderness, and says in his Magnalia: “These Parts were then covered with Nations of Barbarous Indians and Infidels, in whom the Prince of the Power of the Air did work as a Spirit; nor could it be expected that Nations of Wretches whose whole religion was the most Explicit sort of Devil-Worship should not be acted by the devil to engage in some early and bloody Action for the Extinction of a Plantation so contrary to his Interests as that of New England was.”

Before the French influence began to be felt there was very little union on the part of the Indians, and each colony adjusted its own relations with them. At the time of the frightful Indian massacre in the Virginia colony (March 22, 1622), when three hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children were murdered, the Plymouth colony was living in entire peace with its savage neighbors. “We have found the Indians,” wrote Governor Winslow, “very faithful to their covenants of peace with us, very loving and willing to pleasure us. We go with them in some cases fifty miles into the country, and walk as safely and peacefully in the woods as in the highways of England.” The treaty with Massasoit lasted for more than fifty years, and the first bloodshed between the Plymouth men and the Indians was incurred in the protection of the colony of Weymouth, which had brought trouble on itself in 1623. The Connecticut settlements had far more difficulty with the Indians than those in Massachusetts, but the severe punishment inflicted on the Pequots in 1637 quieted the savages for a long time. In that fight a village of seventy wigwams was destroyed by a force of ninety white men and several hundred friendly Indians; and Captain Underhill, the second in command, has left a quaint delineation of the attack.

There was a period resembling peace in the eastern colonies for nearly forty years after the Pequot War, while in Virginia there were renewed massacres in 1644 and 1656. But the first organized Indian outbreak began with the conspiracy of King Philip in 1675, although the seeds had been sown before that chief succeeded to power in 1662. In that year Wamsutta, or Alexander, Philip’s brother—both being sons of Massasoit—having fallen under some suspicion, was either compelled or persuaded by Major Josiah Winslow, afterwards the first native-born Governor of Plymouth, to visit that settlement. The Indian came with his whole train of warriors and women, including his queen, the celebrated “squaw sachem” Weetamo, and they stayed at Winslow’s house. Here the chief fell ill. The day was very hot, and though Winslow offered his horse to the chief, it was refused, because there was none for his squaw or the other women. He was sent home because of illness, and died before he got half-way there. This is the story as told by Hubbard, but not altogether confirmed by other authorities. If true, it is interesting as confirming the theory of that careful student, Lucien Carr, that the early position of women among the Indians was higher than has been generally believed. It is pretty certain, at any rate, that Alexander’s widow, Weetamo, believed her husband to have been poisoned by the English, and she ultimately sided with Philip when the war broke out, and apparently led him and other Indians to the same view as to the poisoning. It is evident that from the time of Philip’s accession to authority, whatever he may have claimed, his mind was turned more and more against the English.

It is now doubted whether the war known as King Philip’s War was the result of such deliberate and organized action as was formerly supposed, but about the formidable strength of the outbreak there can be no question. It began in June, 1675; Philip was killed August 12, 1676, and the war was prolonged at the eastward for nearly two years after his death. Ten or twelve Puritan towns were utterly destroyed, many more damaged, and five or six hundred men were killed or missing. The war cost the colonists £100,000, and the Plymouth colony was left under a debt exceeding the whole valuation of its property—a debt ultimately paid, both principal and interest. On the other hand, the war tested and cemented the league founded in 1643 between four colonies—Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut—against the Indians and Dutch, while this prepared the way more and more for the extensive combinations that came after. In this early war, as the Indians had no French allies, so the English had few Indian allies, and it was less complex than the later contests, and so far less formidable. But it was the first real experience on the part of the eastern colonists of all the peculiar horrors of Indian warfare—the stealthy approach, the abused hospitality, the early morning assault, the maimed cattle, tortured prisoners, slain infants. All the terrors that lately attached to a frontier attack of Apaches or Comanches belonged to the daily life of settlers in New England and Virginia for many years, with one vast difference, arising from the total absence in those early days of any personal violence or insult to women. By the general agreement of witnesses from all nations, including the women captives themselves, this crowning crime was then wholly absent. The once famous “white woman,” Mary Jemison, who was taken prisoner by the Senecas at ten years old, in 1743—who lived in that tribe all her life, survived two Indian husbands, and at last died at ninety—always testified that she had never received an insult from an Indian, and had never known of a captive’s receiving any. She added that she had known few instances in the tribe of conjugal immorality, although she lived to see it demoralized and ruined by strong drink.

The English colonists seem never to have inflicted on the Indians any cruelty resulting from sensual vices, but of barbarity of another kind there was plenty, for it was a cruel age. When the Narraganset fort was taken by the English, December 19, 1675, the wigwams within the fort were all set on fire, against the earnest entreaty of Captain Church; and it was thought that more than one-half the English loss—which amounted to several hundred—might have been saved had there been any shelter for their own wounded on that cold night. This, however, was a question of military necessity; but the true spirit of the age was seen in the punishments inflicted after the war was over. The heads of Philip’s chief followers were cut off, though Captain Church, their captor, had promised to spare their lives; and Philip himself was beheaded and quartered by Church’s order, since he was regarded, curiously enough, as a rebel against Charles the Second, and this was the state punishment for treason. Another avowed reason was, that “as he had caused many an Englishman’s body to lye unburied,” not one of his bones should be placed under ground. The head was set upon a pole in Plymouth, where it remained for more than twenty-four years. Yet when we remember that the heads of alleged traitors were exposed in London at Temple Bar for nearly a century longer—till 1772 at least—it is unjust to infer from this course any such fiendish cruelty as it would now imply. It is necessary to extend the same charity, however hard it may be, to the selling of Philip’s wife and little son into slavery at the Bermudas; and here, as has been seen, the clergy were consulted and the Old Testament called into requisition.

While these events were passing in the eastern settlements there were Indian outbreaks in Virginia, resulting in war among the white settlers themselves. The colony was, for various reasons, discontented; it was greatly oppressed, and a series of Indian murders brought the troubles to a climax. The policy pursued against the Indians was severe, and yet there was no proper protection afforded by the government; war was declared against them in 1676, and then the forces sent out were suddenly disbanded by the governor, Berkeley. At last there was a popular rebellion, which included almost all the civil and military officers of the colony, and the rebellious party put Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., a recently arrived but very popular planter, at their head. He marched with five hundred men against the Indians, but was proclaimed a traitor by the governor, whom Bacon proclaimed a traitor in return. The war with the savages became by degrees quite secondary to the internal contests among the English, in the course of which Bacon took and burned Jamestown, beginning, it is said, with his own house; but he died soon after. The insurrection was suppressed, and the Indians were finally quieted by a treaty.

Into all the Indian wars after King Philip’s death two nationalities besides the Indian and English entered in an important way. These were the Dutch and the French. It was the Dutch who, soon after 1614, first sold firearms to the Indians in defiance of their own laws, and by this means greatly increased the horrors of the Indian warfare. On the other hand, the Dutch, because of the close friendship they established with the Five Nations, commonly called the Iroquois, did to the English colonists, though unintentionally, a service so great that the whole issue of the prolonged war may have turned upon it. These tribes, the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas—afterward joined by the Tuscaroras—held the key to the continent. Occupying the greater part of what is now the State of New York, they virtually ruled the country from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to the Savannah River. They were from the first treated with great consideration by the Dutch, and they remained, with brief intervals of war, their firm friends. One war, indeed, there was under the injudicious management of Governor Kieft, lasting from 1640 to 1643; and this came near involving the English colonies, while it caused the death of sixteen hundred Indians, first or last, seven hundred of these being massacred under the borrowed Puritan leader Captain Underhill. But this made no permanent interruption to the alliance between the Iroquois and the Dutch.

When New Netherlands yielded to the English, the same alliance was retained, and to this we probably owe the preservation of the colonies, their union against England, and the very existence of the present American nation. Yet the first English governor, Colden, has left on record the complaint of an Indian chief, who said that they very soon felt the difference between the two alliances. “When the Dutch held this country,” he said, “we lay in our houses, but the English have always made us lie out-of-doors.”