A more comprehensive writer is Samuel Niles, in his French and Indian Wars, 1634-1760. Niles was a Rhode Islander, who came to Harvard College the first from that colony to seek a liberal education, and, having graduated in 1699, he settled in Braintree, Mass., in 1711, where he continued till his death in 1762. Palfrey (vol. iv. 256) has pointed out that Niles did little more than add a sentence, embody a reflection, and condense or omit in the use which he made of the Memorial of Nathaniel Morton, the Entertaining Passages of Church, the Indian Wars of Hubbard, the Magnalia of Mather, and the History of Penhallow; so that for a period down to about 1745, Niles is of scarcely any original value.
Fac-simile from a copy in Harvard College library.
John Adams (Works, x. 361), who knew the author, lamented in 1818 that no printer would undertake the publication of his history. The manuscript of the work was neglected till some time after 1830 it was found in a box of papers belonging to the Mass. Hist. Society, and was subsequently printed in their Collections, vols. xxvi. and xxxv.[932]
Fac-simile slightly reduced from the copy in Harvard College library.
There are two other important contemporary printed accounts of this war.
Col. Benjamin Church furnished the memoranda from which his son Thomas constructed a book, very popular in its day, and which was published in Boston in 1716, as Entertaining Passages,[933] etc.
Cotton Mather, on the restoration of peace, reviewed the ten years’ sorrows of the war in a sermon before the governor and legislature, which was published as Duodecennium Luctuosum—the History of a long war with Indian savages and their directors and abettors, 1702-1714.[934]