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tivity, "but one poor wounded babe. Down I must CHAP. sit in the snow, with my sick child, the picture of death, in my lap. Not the least crumb of refreshing 1676 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."1

Nor were such scenes of ruin confined to Massachusetts. At the south, the whole Narragansett country was deserted by the English. Warwick was burned; Providence was attacked and set on fire. There was no security but to seek out the hiding-places of the natives, and destroy them by surprise. 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 day-break upon the wigwams. May 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. Such 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;

1 M. Rowlandson's Narrative, 12-25

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KING PHILIP'S WAR.

CHAP. those of Connecticut charged their sufferings upon XII. Philip; and those who had been his allies, became 1676. suppliants for peace. Some surrendered to escape

starvation. In the progress of the year, between two and three thousand Indians were killed or submitted. 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 the tribes of Canada. Did they there nourish the spirit of revenge, and remember their ancient haunts, that they might one day pilot fresh hordes of invaders from the north, to renew the work of devastation? Philip himself, a man of no ordinary elevation of character, 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 the absence of a year, he resolved, as it were, to meet his destiny; and returned to the beautiful land where were the graves of his forefathers, the cradle of his infancy, and the Aug. nestling-place of his tribe. Once 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. The captive orphan was transported. So perished the princes of the Pokanokets. Sad to them had been their acquaintance with civilization. The first ship that came on their coast, kidnapped men of their kindred; and now the harmless boy, that had been cherished as an only child, and the future sachem of their tribes, the last of the family of Massasoit, was sold into

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XII.

bondage, to toil as a slave1 under the suns of Bermuda. CHAP. Of the once prosperous Narragansetts, of old the chief tribe of New England, hardly one hundred men re- 1676 mained. The sword, fire, famine, and sickness, had swept them from the earth.

During the whole 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. More than six hundred men, chiefly young men, the flower of the country, of whom any mother might have been proud, perished in the field. As many as six hundred houses were burned. Of the able-bodied men in the colony, one in twenty had fallen; and one family in twenty had been burnt out. The loss of lives and property was, in proportion to numbers, as distressing as in the revolutionary war. There was scarcely a family from which death had not selected a victim.

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, now furnished the houseless with more than a thousand bushels of corn. "God will remember and reward that pleasant fruit." Boston imitated the example, for "the grace of Christ," it was said, "always made Boston exemplary" in works of that nature.

The eastern hostilities with the Indians had a different origin, and were of longer continuance. The news of the rising of the Pokanokets was, indeed, the

1 Davis, in Morton, 453, &c.