Owenoco lived to an advanced age, becoming, before his death, a helpless mendicant, and subsisting, in company with his squaw, upon the hospitality of the neighboring settlers. His son Cæsar was his successor as sachem.

Ben, the youngest son of Uncas, of illegitimate birth, succeeded Cæsar, to the exclusion of the rightful heir, young Mamohet, a grandson of Owenoco.

Mason now renewed his claims, and, accompanied by his two sons, carried Mamohet to England, that he might present a new petition to the reigning monarch. A new commission was awarded, but both the applicants died before it was made out. When the trial finally came on in 1738, distinguished counsel were employed on both sides, in anticipation of an arduous and protracted contest; but by a singular course of collusion and artifice, which it were too tedious to detail, the decision of 1705, on the first commission, was repealed, and the Connecticut claims supported. This was appealed from by the Masons, and good cause appearing, a new trial was decreed.

Five commissioners, men of note from New York and New Jersey, met at Norwich in the summer of 1743, and the great case brought in auditors and parties in interest from far and near. The claims, and the facts offered in support of them, were strangely intricate and complex: counsel appeared in behalf of four sets of parties, viz.: the Connecticut colony; the two claimants of the title of Sachem of the Mohegans, Ben and John, a descendant of the elder branch; and those in possession of the lands in question.

The decree was in favor of the colony, which was sustained on the concluding examination of the case in England. Two of the commissioners dissented. The Mohegans still retained a reservation of about four thou sand acres.

Their number reduced to a few hundred; distracted by

the uncertain tenure of their property, and the claims of the rival sachems; mingled with the whites in contentions, the merits of which they were little capable of comprehending; with drunkenness and vice prevalent among them; the tribe was fast dwindling into insignificance. Restrictive laws, forbidding the sale of ardent spirits to the Indians, were then, as now, but of little effect.

Of the celebrated and warlike tribes of the Mohegans and Pequots, only a few miserable families now remain upon their ancient territory. These are mostly of mixed blood, and little of the former character of their race is to be seen in them except its peculiar vices. They are scantily supported by the rents of the lands still reserved and appropriated to their use. A number of the Mohegans removed to the Oneida district, in New York, some years since, but a few still remain near the former headquarters of their tribe, and individuals among them retain the names of sachems and warriors noted in the early ages of the colonies.

Much interest attaches to the efforts which have been made for the instruction and improvement of this remnant of the Mohegan nation; especially as connected with the biography of Samuel Occum, their native preacher; one of the few Indians who have been brought under the influence of civilization, and have acquired a liberal education.

In reviewing the character and history of these, as of most of the native tribes, and reflecting upon their steady and hopeless decline before the European immigrants, we cannot but feel influenced by contradictory sympathies.. Their cruelties strike us with horror; their treachery and vices disgust us; but, with all this, we still may trace the tokens of a great and noble spirit. It is painful to reflect that this has more and more declined as their communion with the whites has become the more intimate. They

have lost their nationality, and with it their pride and self-respect; the squalid and poverty-stricken figures hanging about the miserable huts they inhabit, convey but a faint idea of the picture that the nation presented when in a purely savage state; when the vices of foreigners had not, as yet, contaminated them, nor their superior power and knowledge disheartened them by the contrast.

CHAPTER IV.

KING PHILIP'S WAR.

THE INDIANS FURNISHED WITH FIREARMS. SITUATION OF THE COLONISTS.-PHILIP'S ACCESSION. HIS TREATIES WITH THE WHITES.HIS TRUE PLANS. -EMISSARIES SENT TO SOGKONATE. - CAPTAIN BENJAMIN CHURCH.-HIS INTERVIEW WITH AWOSHONKS. — MURDER OF JOHN SASSAMON.

THE events of which we shall now proceed to give a brief synopsis, were of more momentous interest, and fraught with more deadly peril to the New England colonies, than aught that had preceded them. The wild inhabitants of the forest had now become far more dangerous opponents than when they relied upon their rude flintheaded arrows, or heavy stone tomahawks, as the only efficient weapons of offence. Governor Bradford, many years before the breaking out of the hostilities which we are about to detail, had given a graphic description of the effect produced upon their deportment and self-confidence by the introduction of European weapons. We quote from Bradford's verse, as rendered in prose in the appendix to Davis' edition of the New England Memorial.

"These fierce natives," says he, " are now so furnished

with guns and muskets, and are so skilled in them, that they keep the English in awe, and give the law to them when they please; and of powder and shot they have such abundance that sometimes they refuse to buy more. Flints, screw-plates, and moulds for all sorts of shot they have, and skill how to use them. They can mend and new stock their pieces as well, almost, as an Englishman.'

He describes the advantages which they thus obtained over the whites in the pursuit of game; their own consciousness of power, and boasts that they could, when they pleased," drive away the English, or kill them;" and finally breaks out into bitter upbraidings against the folly and covetousness of the traders who had supplied them with arms. His forebodings were truly prophetic : "Many," says he, "abhor this practice," (the trade in arms and ammunition,) "whose innocence will not save them if, which God forbid, they should come to see, by this means, some sad tragedy, when these heathen, in their fury, shall cruelly shed our innocent blood."

The English settlements were small, ill defended, and widely scattered. Whoever is acquainted with the rough nature of the New England soil, must at once perceive how necessary it became for the first settlers to select the spots most favorable for cultivation, and what an inhospitable wilderness must have separated their small and illprotected villages.

The whole number of the European inhabitants of New England, in 1675, when the memorable Indian war broke out, has been computed at about fifty thousand, which would give an effective force of not far from eight thousand men.

It were but wild conjecture to attempt a computation of the number and force of the native tribes who took part in the war. Old historians frequently speak positively, and in round numbers, when enumerating the aborigines;

but, in many instances, we can perceive, with tolerable certainty, that they have been guilty of gross exaggeration, such as the whole circumstances of their intercourse with the savages would naturally lead to.

An enemy whose appearance was sudden and unexpected; who, in secret ambuscade or midnight assault, used every device to increase the terror and bewilderment of their victims, might well be over-estimated by those whose all was at stake, and who were waiting in fearful uncertainty as to where the danger lay, or when they should next be called to resist it.

In 1662, Philip, Metacomet, or Pometacom, as we have already seen, succeeded his brother Alexander, within a few months of the death of their father, Massasoit. Upon the occasion of his assuming the dignity of sachem over the Wampanoags, there was a great collection of sachems and warriors from all parts of the country, to unite in a feast of rejoicing at Mount Hope, where he held his court.

Although the new chief renewed his treaty with the English, and for nine years after his accession made no open demonstrations of hostility, yet his mind appears from the first to have been aliened from the intruders. Whether from anger at the proceedings attendant on the death of his brother, or from sympathy with his injured allies, the Narragansetts, or that his natural sagacity suggested to him the ruin which must fall upon his people by the spread of the whites; certain it is that his feelings of enmity were nourished and brooded over, long before their final exhibition.

Like his father before him, he never inclined an car to the teachings of the Christian religion. Mather mentions a signal instance of his contempt for this species of instruction. The celebrated preacher, Eliot, had expounded the doctrines of Christianity, and urged their acceptance upon Philip, with his usual zeal and sincerity; but the