The war, on the part of the Indians, was one of ambuscades and surprises. They never once met the English in open field; but always, even if eightfold in numbers, fled timorously before infantry. They were secret as beasts of prey, skilful marksmen, fleet of foot, conversant with all the paths of the forest, patient of fatigue, and mad with a passion for rapine, vengeance, and destruction, retreating into swamps for their fastnesses, or hiding in the greenwood thickets, where the leaves muffled the eyes of the pursuer. By the rapidity of their descent, they seemed omnipresent among the scattered villages, which they ravaged like a passing storm; and for a full year they kept all New England in a state of terror and excitement. The exploring party was waylaid and cut off, and the mangled carcasses and disjointed limbs of the dead were hung upon the trees. The laborer in the field, the reapers as they sallied forth to the harvest, men as they went to mill, the shepherd's boy among the sheep, were shot down by skulking foes, whose approach was invisible. The mother, if left alone in the house, feared the tomahawk for herself and children; on the sudden attack, the husband would fly with one child, the wife with another, and perhaps one only escape; the vil lage cavalcade, making its way "to meeting" on Sunday, in files on horseback, the farmer holding the bridle in one hand and a child in the other, his wife seated on a pillion behind him, it may be with a child in her lap, as was the fashion in those days, could not proceed safely; but, at the moment when least expected, bullets would whiz among them, sent from an unseen enemy by the wayside. The forest, that hid the ambush of the Indians, secured their retreat.

On the second of August, Brookfield, a settlement of less than twenty families, the only one in the wilderness between Lancaster and Hadley, was besieged and set on fire, and most gallantly rescued by Simon Willard, then seventy years old, and rescued only to be abandoned; on the first of September, Deerfield was burnt. The plains of Northfield were wet with the blood of Beers and twenty of his valiant associates. On the eighteenth, as Lathrop's company of young men, all "culled" out of the towns of Essex county, were conveying the harvests of Deerfield to the lower towns, they were sud

denly surrounded by a horde of Indians; and, as each party fought from behind trees, the victory was with the far more numerous savages. Hardly a white man escaped; the little stream that winds through the tranquil scene, by its name of blood, commemorates the massacre of that day. For ten weeks of the autumn, the commissioners of the united colonies, which were now but three in number, were almost constantly in session. With one voice they voted that the war was a just and necessary war of defence, to be jointly prosecuted by all the united colonies at their common charge. They directed that a thousand soldiers should be raised, of whom one half should be troopers with long arms. Of the whole number, the quota of Massachusetts was five hundred and twenty-seven; of Plymouth, one hundred and fifty-eight; of Connecticut, three hundred and fifteen. But the war still raged. In October, Springfield was burnt, and Hadley once more assaulted. The remoter villages were deserted; the pleasant residences of civilization in the wilderness were laid waste.

But the English were not the only sufferers. In winter, it was the custom of the red men to dwell together in their wigwams; in spring, they would disperse through the woods. In winter, the warriors who had spread misery through the west were sheltered among the Narragansetts; in spring, they would renew their devastations. In winter, the absence of foliage made the forests less dangerous; in spring, every bush would be a hiding-place. It was resolved to regard the Narragansetts as enemies; and, just before the solstice, a second levy of a thousand men, raised by order of the united colonies, and commanded by the brave Josiah Winslow, a native of New England, invaded their territory. After a night spent in the open air, they waded through the snow from daybreak till an hour after noon, and, on the nineteenth of December, reached the wigwams of their enemies within the limits of the present town of South Kingston. The village, built on about six acres of land which rose out of a swamp, was protected in its entire circumference by thickly set palisades, to which the approach was defended by a block-house. Without waiting to take food or rest, the New Englanders began the attack. Davenport, Gardner, John

son, Gallop, Siely, Marshall, led their companions through the narrow entrance in the face of death, and left their lives as a testimony to their patriotism and courage. But the palisades, strong as they were, could not check the determined valor of the assailing party. Within the enclosure the battle raged hand to hand, till seventy of the New Englanders were killed and twice that number wounded; nor was it decided till the group of Indian cabins was set on fire. Then were swept away the winter's stores of the tribe; their curiously wrought baskets, full of corn; their famous strings of wampum; their wigwams nicely lined with mats-all the little comforts of savage life. Old men, women, and babes, perished in the flames. How many of their warriors fell was never known. The English troops, after the engagement, bearing with them their wounded, retraced their steps, by night, through a snow-storm, to Wickford.

"We will fight," said the Indian warriors, "these twenty years; you have houses, barns, and corn; we have now nothing to lose ;" and towns in Massachusetts, one after another— Lancaster, Medfield, Weymouth, Groton, Marlborough—were laid in ashes.

Early in the morning of the tenth of February, 1676, Philip of Pokanoket, with warriors of the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck tribes, burst upon Lancaster in five several assaults. Forty-two persons had sought shelter under the roof of Mary Rowlandson; and, after a hot assault, the Indians succeeded in setting the house on fire. "Quickly," she writes, "it was the dolefulest day that ever mine eyes saw. Now the dreadful hour is come. Some in our house were fighting for their lives; others wallowing in blood; the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out. I took my children to go forth; but the Indians shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had thrown a handful of stones. We had six stout dogs, but none of them would stir. . . . The bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and through my poor child in my arms." The brutalities of an Indian massacre followed; "there remained nothing to me," she continues, now in captivity, "but one poor wounded babe.

Down I must sit in the snow, with my sick child, the picture of death, in my lap. Not the least crumb of refreshing came within either of our mouths from Wednesday night to Saturday night, except only a little cold water. One Indian, and then a second, and then a third, would come and tell me, 'Your master will quickly knock your child on the head.' This was the comfort I had from them: miserable comforters were they all."

Nor were such scenes of ruin confined to Massachusetts. At the south, the Narragansett country was deserted by the English; Warwick was burnt; Providence was attacked and set on fire. "We will fight to the last man," said the gallant chieftain Canonchet, " rather than become servants to the English." In April, 1676, taken prisoner near the Blackstone, a young man began to question him. "Child," replied he, "you do not understand war; I will answer your chief." The offer of his life, if he would procure a treaty of peace, he refused with disdain. "I know," added he, "the Indians will not yield." Condemned to death, he only answered: "I like it well; I shall die before I speak anything unworthy of myself."

There was no security but to seek out the hiding-places of the natives. On the banks of the Connecticut, just above the falls that take their name from the gallant Turner, was an encampment of large bodies of hostile Indians; a band of one hundred and fifty volunteers, from among the yeomanry of Springfield, Hadley, Hatfield, and Northampton, led by Turner and Holyoke, making a silent march in the dead of night, came at daybreak of the nineteenth of May upon the wigwams. The Indians are taken by surprise; some are shot down in their cabins; others rush to the river, and are drowned; others push from shore in their birchen canoes, and are hurried down the cataract.

As the season advanced, the Indians abandoned every hope. Their forces were wasted; they had no fields that they could plant. Continued warfare without a respite was against their usages. They began, as the unsuccessful and unhappy so often do, to quarrel among themselves; recriminations ensued; those of Connecticut charged their sufferings upon Philip; and his allies became suppliants for peace. Some

surrendered to escape starvation. In the progress of the year, between two and three thousand Indians submitted or were killed. Church, the most famous partisan warrior, went out to hunt down parties of fugitives. Some of the tribes wandered away to the north, and were blended with tribes of Canada. Philip himself was chased from one hiding-place to another. He had vainly sought to engage the Mohawks in the contest; now that hope was at an end, he still refused to hear of peace, and struck dead the warrior who proposed it. At length, after a year's absence, he resolved, as it were, to meet his destiny, and returned to the beautiful land which held the graves of his forefathers, and had been his home. On the third of August, 1676, he escaped narrowly, leaving his wife and only son as prisoners. "My heart breaks," cried the tattooed chieftain, in the agony of his grief; "now I am ready to die." His own followers began to plot against him, to make better terms for themselves, and in a few days he was shot by a faithless Indian. His captive child was sold as a slave in Bermuda. Of the Narragansetts, once the chief tribe of New England, hardly one hundred men survived.

During the war, the Mohegans remained faithful to the English, and not a drop of blood was shed on the happy soil of Connecticut. So much the greater was the loss in the adjacent colonies. Twelve or thirteen towns were destroyed; the disbursements and losses equalled in value half a million of dollars, an enormous sum for the few of that day. than six hundred men, chiefly young men, the flower of the country, perished in the field. As many as six hundred houses were burnt. Of the able-bodied men in the colony, one in twenty had fallen; and one family in twenty had been burnt out.

More

Let us not forget a good deed of the generous Irish; they sent over a contribution, small, it is true, to relieve in part the distresses of Plymouth colony. Connecticut, which had contributed soldiers to the war, furnished the houseless with more than a thousand bushels of corn. "God will remember and reward that pleasant fruit." Boston did the like, for "the grace of Christ always made Boston exemplary" in works of

that nature.

VOL. 1.-27