colonists of Connecticut
and Massachusetts as servants.

The Narragansets and the Mohegans now became very valiant, and eagerly
hunted through the woods for the few straggling Pequots who remained.
Quite a number they killed, and brought their gory heads as trophies
to Windsor and to Hartford. The Pequots had been so demoniac in their
cruelty that the colonists had almost ceased to regard them as human
beings. The few wretched survivors were so hunted and harassed that
some fled far away, and obtained incorporation into other tribes.
Others came imploringly to the English at Hartford, and offered to be
their servants, to be disposed of at their pleasure, if their lives
might be spared.

Such is the melancholy recital of the utter extermination of the
Pequot tribe. Deeply as some of the events in this transaction are to
be condemned and deplored, much allowance is to be made for men
exasperated by all the nameless horrors of Indian war. A pack of the
most ferocious of the beasts of the forest was infinitely less to be
dreaded than a marauding band of Pequots. The Pequots behaved like
demons, and the colonists treated them as such. The man whose son had
been tortured to death by the savages, whose house and barns had been
burned by the midnight conflagration, whose wife and infant child had
been brained upon his hearthstone, and whose daughters were, perhaps,
in captivity in the forest, was not in a mood of mind to deal gently
with a foe so fiendlike. We may deplore it, but we can not wonder, and
we can not sternly blame.

This destruction of the Pequots so impressed the New England tribes
with the power of the English, and struck them with so much terror,
that for nearly forty years the war-whoop was not again heard. The
Indian tribes had conflicts with each other, but the colonists,
blessed with ever-increasing prosperity, slept in peace and safety.

In view of the exploits of the Pequot warriors, Dr. Dwight, with some
poetic license, exclaims:

"And O, ye chiefs! in yonder starry home,
Accept the humble tribute of this rhyme.
Your gallant deeds in Greece or haughty Rome,
By Maro sung, or Homer's harp sublime,
Had charm'd the world's wide round, and triumph'd over
time."

CHAPTER V.

COMMENCEMENT OF THE REIGN OF KING PHILIP.

1640-1674

Continued prosperity.--Establishment of Harvard College.--Acts of
violence.--Death of Miantunnomah.--The war-whoop resumed.--The
Un