%65.  The English and the Indians.%—­How, meantime, did the English act toward the Indians?  In the first place, nothing led them to form close relationship with the tribes.  The fur trade—­the source of Canadian prosperity—­and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of the heathen, which sent the traders, the coureurs de bois, and the priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists.  Farming and commerce were the sources of their wealth.  Their priests and missionaries were content to labor with the Indians near at hand.

In the second place, the policy of the French towards the Indians, while founded on trade, was directed by one central government.  The policy of the English was directed by each colony, and was of as many kinds as there were colonies.  No English frontier exhibited such a mingling of white men and red as was common wherever the French went.  Among the English there were fur traders, but no coureurs de bois.  Scorn on the one side and hatred on the other generally marked the intercourse between the English and the Indians.  One bright exception must indeed be made.  Penn was a broad-minded lover of his kind, a man of most enlightened views on government and human rights; and in the colony planted by him there was made a serious effort to treat the Indian as an equal.  But the day came when men not of his faith dealt with the Indians in true English fashion.

Remembering this difference of treatment, we shall the better understand how it happened that the French could sprinkle the West with little posts far from Quebec and surrounded by the fiercest of tribes, while the English could only with difficulty defend their frontier.[1]

[Footnote 1:  A fine account of the Indians, and the French and English ways of treating them, is given in Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol.  I., pp. 16-25, 41-45, 46-56, 64-80.]

%66.  Early Indian Wars.%—­Again and again this frontier was attacked.  In 1636 the Pequots, who dwelt along the Thames River in Connecticut, made war on the settlers in the Connecticut River valley towns.  Men were waylaid and scalped, or taken prisoners and burned at the stake.  Determined to put an end to this, ninety men from the Connecticut towns, with twenty from Massachusetts and some Mohegan Indians, in 1637 marched against the marauders.  They found the Pequots within a circular stockade near the present town of Stonington, where of 400 warriors all save five were killed.

%67.  King Philip’s War.%—­During nearly forty years not a tribe in all New England dared rise against the white men.  But in 1675 trouble began again.  The settlers were steadily crowding the Indians off their lands.  No lands were taken without payment, yet the sales were far from being voluntary.  A new generation of Indians, too, had grown up, and, heedless of the lesson taught their fathers, the Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Wampanoags, led by King Philip and Canonchet, rose upon the English.  A dreadful war followed.  When it ended, in 1678, the three tribes were annihilated.  Hardly any Indians save the friendly Mohawks were left in New England.  But of ninety English towns, forty had been the scene of fire and slaughter, and twelve had been destroyed utterly.