arising from the total absence in those early days of any personal violence or insult to women. By the general agreement of witnesses from all nations, including the women captives themselves, this crowning crime was then wholly absent. The once famous "white woman," Mary Jemison, who was taken prisoner by the Senecas at ten years old, in 1743-who lived in that tribe all her life, survived two Indian husbands, and at last died at ninety-always testified that she had never received an insult from an Indian, and had never known of a captive's receiving any. She added that she had known few instances in the tribe of conjugal immorality, although she lived to see it demoralized and ruined by strong drink.

The English colonists seem never to have inflicted on the Indians any cruelty resulting from sensual vices, but of barbarity of another kind there was plenty, for it was a cruel age. When the Narraganset fort was taken by the English, December 19, 1675, the wigwams within the fort were all set on fire, against the earnest entreaty of Captain Church; and it was thought that more than one-half the English loss which amounted to several hundred-might have been saved had there been any shelter for their own wounded on that cold night. This, however, was a question of military necessity; but the true spirit of the age was seen in the punishments inflicted after the war was over. The heads of Philip's chief followers were cut off, though Captain Church, their captor, had promised to spare their lives; and Philip himself was beheaded and quartered by Church's order, since he was regarded, curiously enough, as a rebel against Charles the Second, and this was the state punishment for treason. Another avowed rea

son was, that "as he had caused many an Englishman's body to lye unburied," not one of his bones should be placed under ground. The head was set upon a pole in Plymouth, where it remained for more than twenty-four years. Yet when we remember that the heads of alleged traitors were exposed in London at Temple Bar for nearly a century longertill 1772 at least—it is unjust to infer from this course any such fiendish cruelty as it would now imply. It is necessary to extend the same charity, however hard it may be, to the selling of Philip's wife and little son into slavery at the Bermudas; and here, as has been seen, the clergy were consulted and the Old Testament called into requisition.

While these events were passing in the eastern settlements there were Indian outbreaks in Virginia, resulting in war among the white settlers themselves. The colony was, for various reasons, discontented; it was greatly oppressed, and a series of Indian murders brought the troubles to a climax. The policy pursued against the Indians was severe, and yet there was no proper protection afforded by the government; war was declared against them in 1676, and then the forces sent out were suddenly disbanded by the governor, Berkeley. At last there was a popular rebellion, which included almost all the civil and military officers of the colony, and the rebellious party put Nathaniel Bacon, Jr., a recently arrived but very popular planter, at their head. He marched with five hundred men against the Indians, but was proclaimed a traitor by the governor, whom Bacon proclaimed a traitor in return. The war with the savages became by degrees quite secondary to the internal contests among the English, in the course of which Bacon took

and burned Jamestown, beginning, it is said, with his own house; but he died soon after. The insurrection was suppressed, and the Indians were finally quieted by a treaty.

Into all the Indian wars after King Philip's death two nationalities besides the Indian and English entered in an important way. These were the Dutch and the French. It was the Dutch who, soon after 1614, first sold fire-arms to the Indians in defiance of their own laws, and by this means greatly increased the horrors of the Indian warfare. On the other hand, the Dutch, because of the close friendship they established with the Five Nations, commonly called the Iroquois, did to the English colonists, though unintentionally, a service so great that the whole issue of the prolonged war may have turned upon it. These tribes, the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas—afterwards joined by the Tuscaroras held the key to the continent. Occupying the greater part of what is now the State of New York, they virtually ruled the country from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to the Savannah River. They were from the first treated with great consideration by the Dutch, and they remained, with brief intervals of war, their firm friends. One: war, indeed, there was under the injudicious management of Governor Kieft, lasting from 1640 to 1643; and this came near involving the English colonies, while it caused the death of sixteen hundred Indians, first or last, seven hundred of these being massacred under the borrowed Puritan leader Captain Underhill. But this made no permanent interruption to the alliance between the Iroquois and the Dutch.

When New Netherland yielded to the English, the same alliance was retained, and to this we probably owe the preservation of the colonies, their union against England, and the very existence of the present American nation. Yet the first English governor, Colden, has left on record the complaint of an Indian chief, who said that they very soon felt the difference between the two alliances. "When the Dutch held this country," he said, "we lay in our houses, but the English have always made us lie out-of-doors."

But if the Dutch were thus an important factor in the Indian wars, the French became almost the controlling influence on the other side. Except for the strip of English colonies along the sea-shore, the North American continent north of Mexico was French. This was not the result of accident or of the greater energy of that nation, but of a systematic policy, beginning with Champlain and never abandoned by his successors. This plan was, as admirably stated by Parkman, "to influence Indian counsels, to hold the balance of power between adverse tribes, to envelop in the net-work of French power and diplomacy the remotest hordes of the wilderness." With this was combined a love of exploration so great that it was hard to say which assisted the most in spreading their dominion-religion, the love of adventure, diplomatic skill, or military talent. These between them gave the interior of the continent to the French. One of the New York governors wrote home that if the French were to hold all that they had discovered, England would not have a hundred miles from the sea anywhere.

France had early occupied Acadia, Canada, and the St. Lawrence on the north. Marquette rediscov

ered the Mississippi and La Salle traced it, though Alvar Nuñez had crossed it and De Soto had been buried beneath it. A Frenchman first crossed the Rocky Mountains; the French settled the Mississippi Valley in 1699 and Mobile in 1702. The great western valleys are still full of French names, and for every one left two or three have been blotted out. The English maps, down to the year 1763, give the name "New France" not to Canada only, but to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. New France was vast; New England was a narrow strip along the shore. But there was a yet greater difference in the tenure by which the two nations held their nominal settlements. The French held theirs with the aid of a vast system of paid officials, priests, generals, and governors; the English colonists kept theirs for themselves, aided by a little chartered authority or deputed power. Moreover, the French retained theirs by a chain of forts and a net-work of trading posts; the English held theirs by sober agriculture. In the end the spade and axe proved mightier than the sword. What postponed the triumph was that the French, not the English, had won the hearts of the Indians.

This subject has been considered in a previous chapter, and need be only briefly mentioned here; but it should not be wholly passed by. To the Indian, the Frenchman was a daring swordsman, a gay cavalier, a dashing leader, and the most charming of companions; the Englishman was a plodding and sordid agriculturist. "The stoic of the woods" saw men infinitely his superiors in all knowledge and in the refinements of life, who yet cheerfully accepted his way of living, and took with apparent relish to