USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 10
USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 10
USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 10
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Princess Wontonskanuske receives a pension of $300 a year from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
How Treaty of Peace Read-The treaty of peace between the Plym- outh Colonists and Massasoit, the Great Sachem of the Wampanoags, made on Watson's Hill, was substantially as follows:
1. That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people.
2. That if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him.
3. That if any of our tools were taken away, when our people were at work, he would cause them to be restored; and if ours did any harm to any of his, we would do the like to them.
4. If any did unjustly war against him, we would aid him; if any did war against us, he should aid us.
5. He should send to his neighbor confederates to certify them of this, that they nright not wrong us, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of peace.
6. That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and ar- rows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them.
Lastly, that doing thus King James would esteem of him as his friend and ally. All which the King seemed to like well, and it was applauded of his followers. All the while he sat by the governor he trembled with fear. In his person he is Plym-6
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a very lusty man, in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance and spare of speech; in his attire little or nothing different from the rest of his followers, only in a great chain of white bone beads about his neck; and at it, behind his neck, hangs a little bag of tobacco, which he drank, and gave us to drink. His face was painted with a sad red like murrey, and oiled both head and face, they looked greasily. All his followers likewise were in their faces, in part or in whole painted, some black, some red, some yellow, and some white, some with crosses, and other antic works; some had skins on them, and some naked; all strong, tall men in appearance.
So after all was done, the governor conducted him to the brook, and there they embraced each other, and he departed; we diligently keeping our hostages.
This visit of the great sachem was returned by Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins and the story goes: "They slept the first night at Namasket, now Middleborough, and arrived at Pockanoket the next day. The king was short of provision, but procured a couple of fish, of which he gave them part. They lodged upon a bed of plank, raised a foot from the ground, with a mat upon them; and upon the same lay also Massasoit, his wife, and two of his men, and so crowded them that they were more weary of their lodging than their journey. They set out for home the next day, fearing lest fasting, hard lodging, lice, fleas and moschetoes, would render them unable to return."
It is said that the brother of the Indian who had betrayed Philip to the whites had advised the sachem to submit to the English, as further flight and resistance would be of no avail and that he had been killed for his counsel. July 30, Philip's uncle had been killed and his sister captured. The next day his wife and son and one hundred and fifty of his followers were taken. Three days later his band was further decreased by death and the loss of forty men taken as prisoners, but Philip well knew his death would come in the open or through legal execution and he resolved to go to the Happy Hunting Ground as an unconquered sachem of the Wampanoags, regardless of how few of them remained. With his death the Indian war in this sec- tion was at an end. As a rebel against Charles II, in which class the Plymouth Colony authorities chose to place him, consistent with his "Submission" document, his body was quartered as the English pen- alty for treason. The head was cut off and exposed upon a pole at Plymouth, and his wife and son sold as slaves, presumably in Bermuda.
In Philip's War half the towns in Plymouth County were partly or wholly destroyed and there was a debt upon the inhabitants larger than the intrinsic values of all their possessions, which took years of in- dustry and frugality to pay, but the debt was finally extinguished.
From the English king came no expressions of sympathy and no as- sistance, but "divers Christians in Ireland" sent nearly a thousand pounds. It was at this time of Plymouth's worst extremity since the
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first winter after the arrival of the "Mayflower" that England added an attack upon the chartered rights of the people and there came the dispute between Massachusetts and the mother country in regard to New Hampshire and Maine, and later King Charles II entered upon the execution of a purpose to annul all the New England colonial charters. James II appointed Joseph Dudley to take charge of the government of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Plymouth, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Then came the infamous Sir Edmund Andros and the incident of the "charter oak."
The overthrow of James II and the succession of William and Mary brought news of great joy to New England. In Plymouth Colony, Clark, agent for Andros, was put in prison, and Thomas Hinckley, former governor, was restored to office. In 1691 a new charter was granted to the colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth and they be- came incorporated into one, Pilgrim and Puritan united. At that time the population of Plymouth was approximately seven thousand and that of Massachusetts about forty thousand. The district of Maine was also embraced in the same charter.
Plymouth Colony had its share in the witchcraft frenzy; the great snowstorm of February 24, 1717, when, according to Cotton Mather the snow was in some places sixteen feet deep "covering many cot- tages over the tops of their chimneys;" the first display of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, ever witnessed in the colony since the landing of the Pilgrims, December 11, 1719; the great earthquake, Oc- tober 29, 1727, and other upheavals, political and seismic.
The only indictments in Plymouth County for witchcraft were against two persons of Scituate and in both instances the persons accused were found not guilty. Dinah Sylvester, in 1660, accused Mrs. William Holmes of having bewitched her, saying she "saw a beare about a stone's throw from the path," intimating that Mrs. Holmes had turned herself into a bear for purposes disastrous to the accuser. Just such absurd accusations made elsewhere had brought death or ducking to those accused, but in this case it was evidently only given the consideration which it deserved as Mrs. Holmes was discharged. At the next session of the court, as shown by the records: "Dinah Sylvester was summoned before the court and sentenced to be whipt or to make publicke acknowledgement (paying costs of prosecution) for false accusation against William Holmes' wife." She chose the latter.
Mary Ingham, in March, 1676, was charged with having "maliciously procured much hurt, mischieff and paine unto the body of Mehitabel Woodworth" of Scituate. Twelve good men and true brought in a verdict of not guilty.
CHAPTER VI "LO! THE POOR INDIAN."
John Eliot and Roger Williams Were His Friends, For Which They Were Hated by Red Men and White Men Alike-Struggle of Civilization Against Savagery With No Quarter From Either Side- Indian a Deist With No Idolatry in His Religion-Natural Lover of Liberty With No Fear of Death-Opechanganough's Massacre Matched by Atrocities by White Men at Pequot Fort and in Narra- gansett Village-French and English Both Incited Savages to Scalp Colonists-Nobleman Who Had Six Indian Wives.
The history of Plymouth County and this whole section has been so interlinked with that of the Indian tribes, that the story of the In- dians and some effort to arrive, so far as white men can, at the Indians' point of view, is desirable, if not absolutely necessary. Most histories, early and late, have entered into minute details concerning the Pil- grims and the Puritans and the ancient background, and have referred to the Indians merely as presenting obstacles to progress of civilization.
Plymouth and vicinity was covered with a dense growth of pines, oaks and other forest trees, and lurking in this wilderness were sav- ages. And so the tale runs, to the effect that the forests had to yield to the settlers' axes and the savages to their firearms and swords. Com- paratively little attempt was made, by otherwise fair-minded writers, to chronicle how death and annihilation was visited upon the Indians by the stronger race, in return for having been saved from starvation by this inferior race, in the colony's earliest days. Most people have read that there were Indians in this section at the landing of the Pilgrims and that they were, from the European standpoint, a men- ace; but how the Indians were concerned in subsequent history, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and so long as there were any considerable number of Indians hereabouts, most histories give merely negligible mention. This volume will attempt to include some facts concerning the Indians gleaned from apparently unprejudiced auth- orities.
It is undoubtedly true that the Indians were offended at the intro- duction of civilization and the Gospel, because of their tendency to subvert Indian society.
The Indians were half hunters and half ictyophagi. Before the days of the Pilgrims, when, for instance, the scholar Herriot showed the Virginia Indians the Bible and explained to them its contents, as well as he could, they imagined
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it to be some great talisman, and fondled, hugged and kissed it with great rever- ence, rubbing it against their heads and breasts, as they would any relic for which they had great veneration or from which they hoped to receive some benefit. They were not impressed with its doctrines as the embodiment of its virtues because this was something they did not understand.
It is true that the efforts of the Pilgrims seemed to have a decided effect in what was considered the conversion of the Indians. We are informed by the record of Cotton Mather that within thirty years from the time organized efforts were made to preach the Gospel to the Indians, there were six churches and eighteen assemblies of cate- chumens, or converted natives, within the boundaries of the colonies. John Eliot translated the Bible into the Indian language in 1682. This was a stupendous and perhaps as brave and unselfish an undertaking toward the Indians as was ever attempted in America.
John Eliot emigrated from England in 1631, and was chosen min- ister at Dorchester, where his attention was directed to the Indian tribes. He was a graduate of Cambridge, a student of considerable education, and the Indian language was a challenge to him. He began its study and found therein, it is inferred, some elements of the He- brew. He realized, three hundred years before many people in this country, that the best way to live peaceably with a people is to under- stand them, get their point of view. He also realized that it was quite as important for the Indians to understand the new settlers as vice versa, and believed they would be impressed with the ability to find the white man's Bible was something for them as well as for the pale- faces.
There was at that time an Indian of the Massachusetts stock named Nasutan, whom Cotton Mather called "a pregnant-witted young man," whatever that might mean. Nasutan had learned to speak the English language and became Eliot's principal aid. Eliot invited the Indians to meet him October 28, 1646, at a place which was afterward called Nonantum (God's word displayed). On that occasion Eliot preached to the Indians from the text, "Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind : thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." (Ezekiel XXXVII-9.)
Two weeks later they met again at the same place and, on this occasion, Eliot addressed the Indians in their own language, which greatly impressed them. The Indians who attended agreed to settle at that place, to adopt the rules, observe the practices of civilization, and faithfully adhere to the precepts of Christianity. This established the first settlement of "praying Indians."
Of course the Indians had promised far beyond their understanding,
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but they were regularly catechised and instructed, they labored dili- gently in agricultural pursuits and there was a promising congrega- tion of converts to encourage their learned apostle. Meetings were held at Neponset, in John Eliot's parish; at Pawtucket, at Concord and on Cape Cod. This spread of the Gospel and use of agricultural im- plements and the arts of peace and husbandry found favor in the sight of the Association of Colonial Ministers, who gave Eliot the endorse- ment and comfort of resolutions adopted and, possibly, some other assistance.
But the reaction to this missionary work, so far as the native priests and pow-wows were concerned, was not as favorable. It was the same sort of reaction which has always come to any new religious move- ment, on the part of a people with an established religion, white, red or any other hue. The Indian pow-wows were exasperated. They saw their ancient power over their less crafty brethren about to depart, and they struck their necromantic drums, at their secret meetings, with the great energy which they wished to beat upon the head of the newcomer in religious teachings with a tomahawk.
It has been said that John Eliot was brave and unselfish. He realized that his philanthropic labors were so hateful to these Indians who adhered to their own teachers, as well as the teachers themselves, that his life might be the forfeit, but he hoped, at least, that his labors would obtain a certain impetus before the fatal visitation came. He was aware that Father Legard was burned at the stake by the Hurons, and his colleague, together with his son, were hurled from a canoe into the seething waters of the rapids below Lachine on the St. Law- rence River, for interfering with the established superstitious systems. The same was true of every phase in the establishment of civilization. The Indians detested a life of labor and the stern virtues and personal responsibility which went with the new doctrine, as much as they were wedded to their necromancy, their magic ceremonies and forest rites.
In spite of the opposition and the dangers involved, Eliot published a translation of the Old Testament in the dialect of Massachusetts, called by him the Natic, because he deemed that to be the generic language, from his inquiry into the affinities of nations, a research far in advance of the age in which he lived. This was in 1661. Much later it was followed by a translation of the Gospels. In 1684, the two parts were published in one volume at Cambridge, in cooperation with the London Society for Propagating the Gospel. It still retains its posi- tion as the most considerable and important monument of our Indian philology. The years which Eliot and his Indian assistant, Nasutan, spent upon it were years filled with great labor and much danger.
Concerning this labor Eliot wrote to a friend in 1659: "Pity for the
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poor Indian and the desire to make the name of Christ chief in these dark ends of the earth, and not the rewards of men, were the very first and chief movers, if I know what did first and chiefly move in my heart, when God was pleased to put upon me that work of preach- ing to them."
It was his maxim that the Indians must be civilized in order to be Christianized. He drew up for them a simple code of laws, urged the necessity for industry, cleanliness, good order, good government and a feeling of personal responsibility toward the Great Spirit, newly in- terpreted by his teachings. In his frequent journeyings in the wil- derness to meet his engagements with the "praying Indians," at various places all the way from Dorchester to the country of the Nipmuks in northern Connecticut, he experienced many dangers and privations. He wrote of one of these expeditions: "It pleased God to exercise us with such tedious rains and bad weather that we were extremely wet, insomuch that I was not dry, day or night, from the third day of the week to the sixth, but so travelled and at night pull off my boots, wring my stockings, and on with them again." It was not an easy task to keep the Indians industrious. One season of hunting, he said, undid all his missionary work.
Following the Bible in the Indian dialect, Eliot translated or wrote new primers, grammars, psalters, catechisms, Baxter's "Call," and other books in the Indian tongue. The New England version of the Psalms, known as the "Bay Psalm Book," remained in use more than a cen- tury. The efforts to teach the Indians to read and write were zealously pursued, and in 1673 six Indian churches had been established and 1,100 apparently converted.
It is true that some of the "praying Indians" joined with King Philip in his war and this so exasperated the colonists that a "praying In- dian" was from that time on under suspicion, as much as those who had never professed conversion. In all charity, however, it is well to remember that there were other "praying Indians," and a large pro- portion of them who were friendly Indians during that life and death struggle, and they were of great assistance to the colonists. Perhaps Eliot's converts remained as true of the faith in as commendable pro- portions as the converts among white people, aroused by latter-day evangelists, a conspicuous leader of them being Rev. William Sun- day. The Eliot converts, however, who hit the warpath after hitting the "sawdust trail," as "Billy" Sunday calls it, created a breach be- tween them and the colonists which never healed.
In addition to being the friend and instructor to the Indians, Eliot was the first to befriend the Negro in New England and to offer to teach as many of them as would be sent to him once a week. After the
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King Philip War, when other clergymen were so zealous to have the widow and little son of Philip put to death, Eliot's voice was raised in their behalf. In this attitude he was opposed by Cotton Mather who quoted Scripture abundantly in his efforts to make the mother and child victims of the white man's vengeance, although Mather wrote of Eliot: "He that would write of Eliot must write of charity or say nothing."
Eliot died May 20, 1690, at the age of eighty-six.
Little Journey to the Aborigines-Before judging too harshly the Indians of Eastern Massachusetts for not flocking to the Christian standard and remaining faithful to their confessions of faith; before agreeing too well with Cotton Mather, a quaint historian of that period, that they were "the veriest ruins of mankind," let us see what they had that they were expected to give up, and whether their be- liefs were so "heathenish" as we have been led to believe. More- over, let us contemplate the family life and community affiliations of the Indians with whom the Pilgrims became acquainted and see how hard it was for an Indian to become a white man in his convictions and actions.
While Cotton Mather would not be selected impartially as the fairest witness for the Indians, we have his description as worthy of study, in which he says: "Their wigwams consist of poles, lined with mats, where a good fire supplies the warmth of bed-clothes in cold seasons. The skins of animals furnish exclusively their clothing. Sharp stones are used for knives and tools. Wampum, a kind of bead made from sea shells, is a substitute for money. Indian corn constitutes their staple of vegetable food; the forest supplies them precariously with meat. Fish are taken in their streams. The hot-house is their cath- olicon for a large class of their diseases. Their religion is a confused and contradictory theism, under the rule of a class of priests called pow-wows, who offer incense by the fumes of tobacco."
From their historians, who wrote contemporaneously with the In- dians, we know of their skill in manufacturing bows and arrows, war- clubs, bowls, pipes, fishing rods and nets, clay pots, tempered with siliceous stones ; mats of flags, baskets of split cortical layers of wood, and nets for various uses fashioned from native hemp. Wood was used in making some utensils such as onagons, or bowls. Canoes were made from trunks of trees, hollowed by being burned over a fire and finished with a rude axe, made of stone.
The forests provided a supply of deer and other meat for the skillful hunter. Fish were abundant in the numerous lakes and purling streams, also in the salt water of the bay, easy for the Indians to negotiate by
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means of a canoe. Twice in twenty-four hours the flats were laid bare and oysters and clams were in abundance on those tables spread before them. Clam shells were often used as spoons and oyster shells had their uses in various ways. When the hunters returned with a supply of meat, the squaws boiled or roasted it over a camp fire, using three poles tied together at the top and spread out around the fire as a tri- pod, a plan which the white men have never been able to improve upon when, in these days, they go camping. When the hunt was not successful, there was always the cawheek and succotash from pounded corn and beans. Birds and animals were skillfully caught by means of snares. These were some of the things which he was expected to abandon, to a certain extent, and assume the harder work of sowing and reaping.
So far as his religion is concerned, the white man was unable to un- derstand it because he was a white man, and the Indian was equally as unable to understand the white man's religion, because he was a red man. Each one thought his own the best, at least sufficient for his needs, but the Pilgrims determined that one platform of religious freedom should serve for both the red and the white men, and they in- tended to built that platform. When the Indians smoked tobacco, in addition to the solace of the smoke, they offered it as incense to the Great Spirit. They saw the Pilgrims use tobacco and naturally thought that something of the same feeling possessed the whites but they could not understand why the newcomers did not make use of the dances to express their religious feelings.
It was the conviction of the Pilgrims and Puritans, as it was, and is, of civilized people in general, that man was created "not a savage, a hunter or warrior, but a horticulturist and a raiser of grain, and a keeper of cattle, a smith, a musician ; a worshipper, not of the sun, moon and stars, but of God. The savage condition is a declension from this high type; Greece and Rome were in error on this point. The civil and social state was the original type of society for man, and it was just, therefore, to require a return to it."
Indians' Belief in the Great I Am-It has also been written :
The Indians having produced no historian, have never had the advantage of stating their side of the question. The native-born philosopher of the woods averred that God had made him exactly as he ought, and had given him arts and knowledge suited to his sphere. He was prone to refer to his past history as a golden age. The Great Spirit in his view was exclusively a God of kind- ness, not of holiness.
All the red man's cogitations were of the past. His sages represented the future as a sphere of rewards, not of punishments; deeming this life to be a scene of such vicissitude, that the future was designed to be a theatre of com-
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pensations. It never entered into the Indian theory that justice was an attribute of the Deity. He did not fear, but rather loved death, and he sang his funeral song at the stake, with an assurance that he was on the eve of departing to a land of bliss. It is necessary to comprehend the Indian before we declare him to be void of reason. The Christian philosophy stood counter to all this. He hated Christianity, because he neither understood nor believed it. He denied that he had worshipped stocks and stones, the sun, moon and stars, but affirmed that he had employed them merely to exhibit his offerings to a higher power. He avowed his belief in the Great I AM-the Great IAU, (the Algonquin verb "to be").
Resting in the conviction that his state was, in every respect, precisely that which the Overruling Power had designed, he turned a deaf ear to other theories, and modes of life and obligations. He did not believe that his forefathers were not wise, and had not worshipped the Great Spirit aright. He could not com- prehend that he himself was a savage. There is no word in the Indian language which means savage. They had no use for such a word. Christian philosophy taught that he lived in a state of very great declension from his original state; and that knowledge and ignorance, instead of being prejudged or fated conditions of men, as he believed, were but the mere results of human exertion, under the benign and universal law of original mental freedom of act and thought.
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