In 1722, a Captain Harman, with 200 men, surprised the Indians at Noridgwoag, and brought off twenty-six scalps, _and that of Father Ralle_, a French Jesuit.[35] The savage atrocities here committed by the New Englanders were frightful. They massacred men, women, and children; pillaged the village, robbed and set fire to the church, and mangled the corpse of Father Ralle most brutally.[36] For these twenty-six scalps, at the then premium, the good people of Massachusets paid 2600_l._ A Captain Lovel, also, seems to have been an active scalper. “He collected,” says Raynal, “a band of settlers as ferocious as himself, and set out to hunt savages. One day he discovered ten of them quietly sleeping round a large fire. He murdered them, carried their scalps to Boston, and secured the promised reward, of course 1000_l._! Who could suppose that the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, the land of the noble Roger Williams, could have become polluted with horrors like these!”
And why were the Indians now so sharply pursued—why such sums given as tempted these Harmans and Lovels? Why the scalp of Father Ralle to be stripped away from him?—Because Father Ralle had proclaimed a very certain, but very disagreeable truth. He preached to the Indians, “That their lands were given to them and their children unalienably and for ever, according to the Christian sacred oracles.” What is so inconvenient as to preach Bible truth in countries flagrant with injustice? The Indians began to murmur; gave the English formal warning to leave the lands within a set time, and as they did not move, began to drive off their cattle. This was declared rebellion, the soldiery were set on them, and 100_l._ a head proclaimed for their scalps.
This is called Governor Dummer’s war; but the most celebrated war was that of Philip of Pokanoket, which occurred between this war and that of the destruction of the Pequods. The cause of Philip’s war, which broke out in 1675, and lasted upwards of a year, was exactly that of this subsequent one, and indeed of every war of New England with the Indians—the dissatisfaction of the Indians with the usurpation of the whites. The New England people, religious people though they were, seem to have been more irritable, more jealous, more regardless of the rights of the Indians, and more quick and deadly in their vengeance on any shew of spirit in the natives, than any other of the North American colonies. The monstrous, and were it not for the testimony of unimpeachable history, incredible sums offered for scalps by these states, testify to the malignant spirit of revenge which animated them. Even towards the Narragansets, their firmest and most constant friends, who lived amongst them, they shewed an irritability and a savage relentlessness that are to us amazing. On the faintest murmur of any dissatisfaction of this tribe on account of their lands, or of any other tribe making overtures of alliance to it, they were up in arms, and ready to exterminate it. So early as 1642, they charged Miantinomo, the great sachem of the Narragansets, with conspiring to raise the Indians against them. The people of Connecticut immediately proposed, without further proof or examination, to fall on the Indians and kill them. This bloody haste was, however, withstood by Massachusets.[37] They summoned Miantinomo before the court. He came, and it is impossible not to admire his sedate and dignified bearing there. He demanded that his accusers should be brought face to face, and that if they could prove him guilty of conspiracy against the colony, he was ready to suffer death; but if they could not, they should suffer the same punishment. “His behaviour,” says Hutchinson, “was grave, and he gave his answers with great deliberation and seeming ingenuity. _He would never speak but in the presence_ of two of _his counsellors_, that they might be witnesses of everything which passed. (No doubt he had seen enough of ‘that pen and ink work,’ of which the Indians so often complained). Two days were spent in treaty. He denied all that he was charged with, and pretended that the reports to his disadvantage were raised by Uncas, the sachem of the Mohegins, or some of his people. He was willing to renew his former engagements; that if any of the Indians, even the Niantics, who, he said, were as his own flesh and blood, should do any wrong to the English, so as neither he nor they could satisfy without blood, he would deliver them up, and leave them to mercy. _The people of Connecticut put little confidence in him, and could hardly be kept from falling upon him_, but were at last prevailed upon by the Massachusets to desist for the present.”[38]