In 1636, the newly formed militias in the New England colonies,
known as “trainbands” and organized into regiments of several towns to
give them overwhelming force, stormed the main Pequot town and massa-
cred the inhabitants, burning some alive. They then hunted down and
killed or sold as slaves all the Pequot they could find. Metacomet (whom
the New Englanders called King Philip), the leader of the Wampanoag of
southern New England, is reported as saying in 1675: “Brothers, these
people from the unknown world will cut down our groves, spoil our hunt-
ing and planting grounds, and drive us and our children from the graves of
our fathers and our council fires, and enslave our women and children.” It
did not take long for his prophecy to be borne out, in one of the bloodiest
wars in American history, King Philip’s War.
King Philip’s War was virtually inevitable from the day the settlers first
landed. Each Indian society had to learn for itself the lesson of this war.
None learned until much too late from what happened to their neighbors.
A few tried to resist, but the odds were always against them. The incoming
whites, generation after generation, not only wanted the Indians’ land but—
regarding Indians as “little better than wild beasts, perhaps even children
of the Devil”; “poor, brutish barbarians... not many degrees above
beasts”; “barbarous scum and offscourings of mankinde”; “wilde and sav-
age people, that live... like heards of Deare in a Forrest”—violated every
truce and treaty. Philip’s people, the Wampanoag, had entered into an
alliance to help defend the Pilgrims against their Narragansett enemies.
Later, they stood aside while the Puritans massacred the Pequots. Their
own turn came next. On behalf of the whites, the Mohawks and Mohegans
attacked them.
Farther south, the Tuscaroras first tried to leave their ancestral lands
and migrate northward to join their distant relatives, the Iroquois. They
begged for asylum in Pennsylvania but were refused. Finally, driven to des-
peration by raids in which Carolinian whites kidnapped Indian women and
children for slaves, they retaliated in the fall of 1711 while the colony was
in the midst of what amounted to a minor civil war (Cary’s Rebellion) and
killed 130 colonists in just a few hours.
The whites quickly counterattacked. They killed thousands of Indians;
burned villages; and destroyed crops, food stores, and orchards—the work
198 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA