Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/371

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AND CHRISTIANITY.
355

on a fast-day by the Indians, and were compelled to leave their devotions to defend tliemselves, when they were surprised by seeing a grave and commanding personage, whom they had not before noticed, assume the command, lead them to victory, and as suddenly again disappear. This person was afterwards found to be Goffe, one of the English regicide judges, then hiding in that neighbourhood. These facts Mr. Cooper has made good use of in his story of "The Borderers."

But the facts of more importance to our history are, that in this war 3000 Indians were said to be destroyed. The Narragansets alone, were reduced from 2000 to about 100 men. After the peace was restored 400 Indians were ordered to assemble at Major Walker's, at Catchecho, 200 of whom were culled as most notorious, some of them put to death, and the rest sent abroad and sold as slaves. Yet all these severities and disasters to the Indians did not extinguish their desire to resist the aggressions of the whites. On all sides, the Tarrateens, the Penobscots, the Five Nations, and various other tribes, continued to harass them; filling them with perpetual fears, and inflicting awful cruelties and devastations on the solitary borderers. These were the necessary fruits of that rancorous spirit with which the harshness and injustice of the settlers had inspired them. Randolph, writing to William Penn from New England in 1688, says—"This barbarous people, the Indians, were now evilly treated by this government, who made it their business to encroach upon their lands, and by degrees to drive them out of all. That was the grounds and the beginning of the last war." And that was the ground of all the wars waged in the country against this unhappy people.