the local Indians. Holmes brought to the Connecticut
River in his vessel the local sachems, who had been driven away by the
Pequots, and made his purchases from them. The English policy will
account for the unfriendly disposition of the Pequots, and, when
followed up by the tremendous overthrow of the Pequots, for
Connecticut's permanent exemption from Indian difficulties. The
Connecticut settlers followed a straight road, buying lands fairly
from the Indians found in possession, ignoring those who claimed a
supremacy based on violence, and, in ease of resistance by the latter,
asserting and maintaining for Connecticut an exactly similar
title,--the right of the stronger. Those who claimed right received
it; those who preferred force were accommodated.

One route to the new territory by Long Island Sound and the
Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland
route through Massachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1633,
by one John Oldham, who was murdered by the Pequots two years
afterward. He found his way westward to the Connecticut River, and
brought back most appetizing accounts of the upper Connecticut Valley;
and his reports seem to have suggested a way out of a serious
difficulty which had come to a head in Massachusetts Bay.

The colony of Massachusetts Bay was at this time limited to a district
covering not more than twenty or thirty miles from the sea, and its
greatest poverty, as Cotton stated, was a poverty of men. And yet the
colony was to lose part of its scanty store of men. Three of the eight
Massachusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (now
Cambridge), had been at odds with the other five towns on several
occasions; and the assigned reasons are apparently so frivolous as to
lead to the suspicion that some fundamental difference was at the
bottom of them. The three towns named had been part of the great
Puritan influx of 1630. Their inhabitants were "newcomers," and this
slight division may have been increased by the arrival and settlement,
in 1633, of a number of strong men at these three towns, notably
Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dorchester, Watertown, and
Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling: the two
former led the way, in October, 1633, in establishing town governments
under "selectmen;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less,
the fundamental feature of Massachusetts policy,--the limitation of
office-holding and t