ON THE WAR-TRAIL.
“The shout
Of battle, the barbarian yell, the bray
Of dissonant instruments, the clang of arms,
The shriek of agony, the groan of death,
In one wild uproar and continued din,
Shake the still air.”
SOUTHEY’S _Madoc_.
’Tis related of a certain keeper of wild beasts at Florence, that,
after he had entertained the spectators in the amphitheatre with
their encounters on the stage, he had a strange device for forcing
them back into their dens. A wooden machine, painted in the image of
a great green dragon, with two lighted torches protruding from its
sockets as eyes, and vomiting sulphurous flame, was wheeled into the
midst of the herd, and before this onset the fiercest animal crawled
howling to his cell.
’Tis an emblem of despotism; it is government coercing men by fraud
and fear, by appeals to the ignorant and brutish instincts. The
Pilgrim Fathers took a long stride away from that ugly ideal. They
developed a nobler type of civil polity; and in nothing was their
temper and Christianity more firmly shown than in their treatment
of the Indians, whom they regarded as the orphaned wards of
civilization. They were uniformly gentle and obliging to the savage
tribes, and they were invariably and inflexibly just in treatment and
in requisition. Take this for an illustration: In 1636, an Indian
who had been on a trading tour to the pale-face settlements, seated
himself towards evening on the day of his return in the woods on the
edge of a swamp. He had with him a parcel of coats, and five pieces
of wampum, the peaceful trophies of his barter. Soon he was accosted
by four white men who happened to pass. A friendly chat ensued; the
pipe of peace was passed; when suddenly the whites saw the coats and
the wampum. At once that meanest, most unscrupulous imp in Satan’s
brood, the devil of avarice, entered their hearts—avarice, of which
Decker has said,
“When all our sins are old in us,
And go upon crutches, covetousness
Does but then lie in her cradle.”
They determined to assassinate the dusky trader and filch his goods.
Under pretence of shaking hands with him, one of the ruffians stabbed
him in the thigh; this blow was followed by another, and yet another;
whereupon the death-smitten savage fled. The murderers also departed;
and when they were gone the Indian crawled back from his forest
hiding-place and stretched himself across the trail, that he might be
discovered and receive help.
This scene was enacted at Pawtucket, near Providence, but then within
the precincts of Plymouth colony. Some hours after the affray, Roger
Williams learned from an Indian runner that some pale faces were
at Pawtucket almost starved. He at once sent the sufferers food and
spirits, and a cordial invitation to visit his cabin. After some
delay they came, enlisting the sympathy of their kind host by a
pitiful tale of loss of way and hunger in the forest. Towards ten
o’clock all retired. At midnight a loud cry was heard. The Indians
clamored at the door for admittance, and to Roger Williams’ queries
they replied by informing him that one of their brothers lay almost
dead in the woods from wounds inflicted by a party of pale-faces.
“Have you seen them?” they shouted.
Meantime, the murderers, awakened by the cries, had fled. They were
pursued, and three of the four were captured, and arraigned for trial
at Plymouth. A jury was empannelled, and among the twelve “good men
and true” were Bradford, and Standish, and Prince, and Winslow.[924]
No delay was suffered, but the trial was fair and open. The guilt
of the assassins was clearly proved, and they were sentenced to be
hung.[925] Three limp forms suspended from the gallows-tree a little
later, gave most palpable evidence that justice covered even the
tangled wilderness morasses with its ægis. It was as certain death to
kill an Indian in the forests of America, as to slay a noble in the
crowded streets of London.
The effect of this execution was salutary. Its strict impartiality
pleased the shrewd red men. It convinced them of the certainty of
the colonial protection. And kindred acts before had won them to
surrender that most prominent trait in their habits, the avenging of
their personal wrongs; they adjourned their injuries to the justice
of the Pilgrim courts and invoked the statute, sure that
“The good need fear no law;
It is his safety, and the bad man’s awe.”
But now this old epoch was buried: a new one dawned. The Indian
surveyed the incoming pale-face tide which seemed always to flow and
never to ebb. The hunting-grounds of his people began to disappear.
His own domain was restricted—there was no longer free range. A farm
was here; a clearing was there; yonder stood a settler’s cabin. The
“medicines” of the red men grew alarmed. They asked each other:
“Where will this end?” To be sure, the settlers held their estates by
purchase; but the Indians did not always understand the value of a
bargain from which they reaped no benefit; nor did they at all times
recognize the validity of contracts made by their sachems, perhaps
without the knowledge of the tribe, and which alienated the forest
acres of their immemorial inheritance.
Heated by memory and by fear, and kindled by some occasionally
unfriendly acts of the colonists—for in so large a population it was
impossible that all should be just and honest—many of the New England
tribes grew restless and peevish. A human powder magazine yawned
beneath the feet of the Pilgrims; it needed but some bold hand to
drop the spark to cause an explosion which might unhinge a continent.
This the Pequods essayed to do. They had long been fretful. The
Connecticut colonists had befriended a rival and hated tribe, the
Mohegans.[926] Sassacus, the sachem of the Pequods, and Uncas, the
Mohegan sagamore, were at deadly enmity.[927] Yet Uncas was the
frequent and welcome occupant of pale-face cabins from Providence
in the east to the farthest onion rows which troubled the Dutchmen
in the west. The Pequods panted for revenge. They began to intrigue
for a war of extermination. Embassies were despatched to inveigle
neighboring tribes into an alliance against the ever-encroaching
pale-faces. At the camp-fires of the Wampanoags, and in the wigwams
of the Narragansetts, the Pequod orators pleaded their wrongs,
sneered at the whites, and depicted the ferocious pleasures of the
war-path to many a credulous and eager listener.
The forests became pregnant with insurrection, and at last a faint
whisper of the impending peril reached the settlements. White
Massachusetts shivered. Sir Harry Vane, knowing the influence of
Roger Williams with the Indians, wrote him urgently to balk the
Pequod embassadors among the Narragansetts.[928] At once the founder
of Rhode Island set out; alone in his canoe, through a cutting,
stormy wind, he pulled across the bay to the forest haunt of
Canonicus and Miantonomoh.[929]
“The Pequod diplomats were already at work, urging the dark dangers
which hung over their united tribes, reiterating the tale of the
encroachments of the whites, the chicanery, the insolence, the
cruelty, which some had practised, and appealing to the Indian
pride of possession and of race. For three days and nights Roger
Williams, in the sachem’s lodge, mixed with the bloody-minded Pequod
embassadors, and pushed his dangerous opposition to the war; and at
last his old friendship and superior diplomacy prevailed. Canonicus
and Miantonomoh repudiated the Pequod league and refused to dig up
the tomahawk.”[930]
The Pequods, no whit disheartened by this balk, determined to fight
unassisted, thinking, perhaps, that the precipitation of hostilities
would fire the Indian heart.
Sassacus, followed by seven hundred[931] painted and yelling
warriors, plunged into the woods and opened the war-path. Winding
out of their beautiful nest in southeastern Connecticut, between the
rivers Pawcatuck and Thames,[932] they spread consternation and the
most ghastly form of death north, east, south, west.
According to their habit, the Indians were cautious at the outset.
Isolated instances announced their hostility. In 1634, Captains Stone
and Norton sailed up the Connecticut in a coasting smack, manned by
a crew of eight men. They were steering for a Dutch trading station
on the river side, when their vessel was becalmed. In a flash a
fleet of canoes were launched from either bank of the river, and a
swarm of savages surrounded the smack. Suspecting no danger, twelve
of them were permitted to board, and Stone engaged two of these to
pilot a boat higher up the stream. The guides at night murdered
the two sailors in charge of this shallop, and at the same hour
their companions on the vessel assailed the sleeping crew. Stone
was killed secretly in his cabin, and, to conceal the body, a light
covering was thrown over it. Then the massacre extended to the deck
and forecastle. Soon all were dead save Norton. “He had taken to the
cook-room on the first alarm, and here he made a long and resolute
defence. That he might load and fire with the greatest expedition, he
placed powder in an open bowl, just at hand, which, in the hurry of
action, taking fire, so burned and blinded him that he could fight
no longer; whereupon he too was tomahawked.”[933] Then the smack was
pillaged and sunk.[934]
Two years later, John Oldham,[935] while trading fairly on the
Connecticut, was suddenly set upon and brained. His companions, two
Narragansett Indians and a couple of boys, were kidnapped.[936]
A few days after this sad catastrophe, an old English sailor, John
Gallup, floating on the tranquil bosom of the treacherous river in
his little shallop of twenty tons, manned only by himself, his two
sons, and one old salt, espied Oldham’s pinnace off Block Island. He
tacked for it and hailed. No answer; a closer survey showed him a
deck crowded with Indians. Gallup’s suspicion was aroused, and when
the clumsy savages attempted to make sail and get away, he regarded
the movement as a cover to foul play.
Then one of the most remarkable instances of gallantry recorded in
the annals of border warfare occurred. Gallup, with his single sailor
and his two little boys, armed only with a couple of rusty muskets,
two pistols, and some buck-shot, prepared for action, and this though
fourteen savages, heated by carnage and drunk with blood, stood ready
with guns, and pikes, and swords, to repel his assault. The wind was
fresh, and the audacious captain steered directly for the pinnace,
and striking it stem foremost, nearly upset it; which so frightened
the Indians that six of them jumped overboard and were drowned.
Repeating this manœuvre—in unconscious imitation of the Athenian
naval tactics—he came stem on again; for there were still too many
Indians for him to venture to carry the pinnace by boarding. After
this thump, Gallup had the satisfaction of seeing, as he cleared his
vessel and stood off once more, four more savages leap into a watery
grave—for they all sank. Then he steered for the battered craft for
the third time; whereupon the remaining Indians sought refuge in the
hold beneath the hatches. Gallup sprang on the deck of poor Oldham’s
vessel, and there, stretched out before his eyes, was the late owner
himself, still warm, but with cloven skull and amputated hands and
feet.[937]
The savages in the hold were now anxious to surrender. Two of them
at Gallup’s bidding came up and were bound; and then, maddened by
the sight of Oldham’s disfigured corpse, the sailor plunged the
victims into the river. The two remaining savages would not give up
their arms or come up from under the hatches. Gallup could not dig
them out; so he secured the cargo, buried Oldham, and then tying
the pinnace to the stern of his own victorious shallop, he set sail
to tow her to the settlements. But in the night it blew hard; his
capture was detached, and, drifting to the Narragansett shore, the
secreted warriors escaped—two only out of fourteen[938]—a swift and
sweeping retribution.
The knowledge of these dismal tragedies crept slowly into the
colonies. News was carried only by some coastwise vessel, whose
progress, crab-like, was backwards; by some Indian runner often
interested in being sluggish; or by some pale sufferer who,
traversing forest, morass, and mountain, was frequently his own
messenger of woe; for the Pilgrims had no stage-coaches like their
immediate descendants; no good roads, like the men of ’76; no railway
and no steamboat, like ourselves; and above all, no telegraph,
annihilating space, to
“Speed the swift intercourse from soul to soul,
Or waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.”
But eventually the colonists learned of these spasmodic outrages; and
all promptly decided that justice and the common weal alike dictated
punishment. “After consultation with ‘the magistrates and ministers,’
Sir Harry Vane despatched ninety men down Long Island sound, in three
small vessels, to the seat of war—Block island. The expedition was
under the chief command of John Endicott, who was assisted by four
subordinate officers, one of whom, Captain John Underhill, wrote an
account of the foray and of the succeeding and more effective one. A
sort of Friar Tuck—devotee, bravo, libertine, and buffoon—Underhill
takes a memorable place among the eccentric characters who from time
to time broke what has been altogether too easily assumed to have
been the dead level of New England gravity in those days. He had been
a soldier in Ireland, in Spain, and more recently in the Netherlands,
where he ‘had spoken freely with Count Nassau.’ He came over with
Winthrop, who employed him to train the Pilgrims in military
tactics.”[939]
The expedition, spite of Endicott’s skill and Underhill’s bravery
and the number of men engaged in it, was an essential failure. A
few savages were shot; some lodges were burned; several canoes were
staved; and a number of acres of corn were despoiled. Indeed, just
enough was done to madden the savages, but not enough to intimidate
them.[940]
In the summer of 1636, Endicott sailed into Boston harbor in
bloodless triumph. Meantime, his irritating raid was revenged by a
wide-spread assault upon the isolated Connecticut colonists.[941]
Every tree became a covert. In the long grass, in the morasses, in
the out-buildings of the settlers, lurked the envenomed savages. To
step outside those block citadels to which all flocked for safety,
was certain death. Men were kidnapped and roasted alive.[942] Traders
were waylaid on the rivers and tortured to death; and two victims
especially were cut into two parts lengthwise, each half being
hung up on a tree by the bank of the Connecticut.[943] Women and
children were captured and reserved for a fate worse than death.
In the winter of 1637, thirty of the two hundred settlers who had
colonized Connecticut, fell beneath the hatchets of the Pequods.[944]
Everywhere the whites were worsted; even at Saybrook, their chief
fort, the garrison was held in duress by a besieging band of
demoniacal red men.[945]
New England was trembling on the verge of death. For the distressed
and harassed Pilgrims there seemed no alternative but speedy
extermination, or such an exercise of courage and skill as should
effectually overawe the Indians in the full flush of their success.
Measures were at once matured. Massachusetts Bay acted with her
accustomed vigor. It was declared that “the war, since it was waged
on just grounds and for self-preservation, ought to be vigorously
prosecuted.”[946] Six hundred pounds were levied; one hundred and
sixty men were recruited.[947]
At Plymouth similar activity was displayed; and a levy of forty men
was made.[948] But it was in Connecticut, the menaced spot, that
the most herculean exertions were put forth. Hartford, Windsor, and
Wethersfield, placed ninety men in the field, under the command of
stout John Mason—a sometime soldier in the Low Countries under Sir
Thomas Fairfax, who held him in such esteem that in after-years,
when at the head of the parliamentary muster, he wrote his truant
_protégé_ urging his return to England, that he might lend his
skilful sword to the patriot cause.[949]
Mason, with Hooker’s benediction, immediately opened a vigorous
campaign. Saybrook was reinforced.[950] A subsidiary detachment
of Mohegans, under Uncas, was recruited.[951] The mouth of the
Connecticut was made the base of operations, and thither the united
levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, were transported.
Here a council of war was held. After Stone, the chaplain, had sought
the divine direction in prayer, it was decided to march directly upon
the Pequod village off Point Judith.[952] All embarked; the objective
point was safely reached. Then a storm intervened; it was impossible
to land. The next day was Sunday; it was spent devoutly on shipboard;
nor was it until Tuesday evening, the third day after they had
dropped anchor, that the eager Pilgrims touched land.[953]
Mason bivouacked on the sea-shore, and in the gray of the next
morning commenced the memorable march. “Seventy-seven brave
Englishmen—the rest were left in charge of the vessels—sixty
frightened Mohegans, and four hundred more terrified Narragansetts,
entered the war-trail, and went twenty miles westward towards the
Pequod country, to a fort occupied by some suspected neutrals. There
a pause for the night was made, and, lest any Indian should give the
doomed Pequods the alarm, the citadel was girt by the sentries of the
shrewd English captain.”[954]
Before noon, on the following morning, they broke camp, and marched
fifteen miles farther inland, pausing at nightfall under a hill
“which, according to information received from their dusky allies—who
had now all fallen in the rear, ‘being possessed with great
fear’—stood the chief stronghold of the Pequods.”[955]
Mason could hear the savage revelry of the ill-fated and unsuspecting
Indians very distinctly, as the wind wafted the laughter, the yells,
the vaunts, from the village over the little hill. The din sank
and fell till midnight. All were enjoying a general guffaw over
the English, whose ships they had seen sail eastward on the sound,
bearing, as they imagined, the pale-face warriors to tell their
squaws of their discomfiture.[956]
The Pequod fort was a citadel of straw. It “was merely a circular
acre or two enclosed by trunks of trees some twelve feet high, set
firmly in the ground, and so closely ranged as to exclude entrance,
while the interstices served as port-holes for marksmen. Within,
ranged along two parallel lanes, were upwards of seventy wigwams,
covered with matting and thatch. At the two points for entrance or
egress, spaces were left between the timbers, the intervals being
protected only by a slighter structure, or by loose branches.”[957]
Something of all this the curious eyes of the Pilgrims took in as
they patiently waited for the midnight order to advance. At length
it came; the camp was broken; prayers were offered; the Indian
allies fell back to a still safer distance. The drowsy Pequod
stronghold was surrounded; Mason was on one side, Underhill was on
the other. Cautiously the girdling band crept on, on, on, towards the
sally-ports, looking like sheeted phantoms in the ghastly moonlight.
Their hands were on the gates, when a dog barked. The Indians were
aroused. “Owanux! Owanux!” “The Englishmen are here!” came in a
hoarse shout from within. Then, with a wild “Huzza!” the Pilgrims
plunged themselves like an avalanche upon the frail and creaking
fortress, firing the straw in fifty different directions. The rest
was death; for it was not a battle—it was a massacre. Shouting the
watchwords of the Israelites in Canaan, the Pilgrims smote the
Pequods hip and thigh, for they knew that safety and peace dwelt in
every blow—that severity was mercy.
Soon the explosion of a powder-train made the village kick the
heavens. Then the flames began to wink, and at last to go out.
Darkness followed—a darkness made more frightful by the moans
of the wounded, the fierce panting of those wretches who still
struggled against fate, and the vindictive yell of the Mohegan and
Narragansett warriors, now in full cry after the dazed and despairing
fugitives.[958]
At last the sad morning dawned. The dead bodies of seven hundred[959]
Pequods were counted amid the _débris_ of the carnage. There lay the
whole nation,
“In one red burial blent.”
But let us turn from the sickening scene. “Never was a war so just
or so necessary,” remarks Palfrey, “that he who should truly exhibit
the details of its prosecution would not find the sympathy of gentle
hearts deserting him as he proceeded. Between right policy and the
suffering which sometimes it brings upon individuals, there is a
wide chasm, to be bridged over by an argument with which the heart
does not naturally go. When, for urgent reasons of public safety, it
has been determined to take the desperate risk of sending the whole
available force of a community into the field to encounter desperate
odds, and certain to be set on, if worsted, by neutral thousands, the
awful conditions of the venture forbid daintiness in the means of
achieving the victory, or about using it in such a manner as to veto
the chance of incurring the same peril again. At all events, from the
hour of that fatal carnage Connecticut was secure. There could now be
unguarded sleep in the long-harassed cabins of the settlers. It might
be hoped that civilization was assured of a permanent abode in New
England.”[960]
Mason followed up his victory, like an able soldier as he was. After
the fatal night attack, Sassacus and the remnant of his undone
tribe fled westward.[961] They were overtaken, and forced to fight
in a swamp and in a panic. Then there was another massacre; and two
hundred prisoners were captured, besides a booty of trays, kettles,
and wampum.[962] The Pequod chieftain once more baffled fate, and
with a body of twenty warriors sought an asylum among the Mohawks,
on the banks of the Hudson, where the unhappy sagamore, bereaved
of people and of country, was himself treacherously slain, his
scalp-lock being sent as a trophy to the pale-face conquerors.[963]
At the same time two other chiefs were hunted down at a point east of
New Haven. Here they were beheaded; and the spot—now a famous summer
resort—has been called since that day “Sachem’s Head.”[964]
It is sad to relate that this awful slaughter was crowned by the
enslavement of the wretched survivors of the fight. When Mason
returned to Hartford, bringing the retinue of his command with him,
Massachusetts and Connecticut, needing laborers, and blind to the
injustice, divided the human booty; and with Rhode Island, which
purchased some of the victims, they must share the guilt.[965] But
in this the Pilgrims did not sin against the spirit of their age. It
was not an insurrection against the conscience of that epoch, for
the flagitious practice was universal. Human slavery had not yet been
branded as infamous amid the scornful execrations of mankind.
Thus in death and captivity closed the career of a gallant tribe.
They threw themselves before the chariot-wheels of progress, and were
crushed; they essayed to check God, and were overthrown. Like ancient
Agag, they were hewn in pieces. In its first warlike bout with
barbarism, civilization was the victor, and went crowned with bays.