turn of men enlisted in the first
Regiment of Continental troops, in the County of Barnstable,
for three years and during the war, in Col. Bradford's
Regiment," commencing in 1777. Among these volunteers for that
terrible service, are the following names of Marshpee Indians,
proprietors of Marshpee, viz.

Francis Webquish, Samuel Moses, Demps Squibs, Mark Negro,
Tom Caesar, Joseph Ashur, James Keeter, Joseph Keeter, Jacob
Keeter, Daniel Pocknit, Job Rimmon, George Shawn, Castel
Barnet, Joshua Pognit, James Rimmon, David Hatch, James
Nocake, Abel Hoswitt, Elisha Keeter, John Pearce, John Mapix,
Amos Babcock, Hosea Pognit, Daniel Pocknit, Church Ashur,
Gideon Tumpum.

In all twenty-six men. The whole regiment, drawn from the
whole County of Barnstable, mustered but 149 men, nearly
_one-fifth_ of whom were volunteers from the little Indian
Plantation of Marshpee, which then did not contain over one
hundred male heads of families! No white town in the
County furnished any thing like this proportion of the 149
volunteers. The Indian soldiers fought through the war; and as
far as we have been able to ascertain the fact, from documents
or tradition, all but one, fell martyrs to liberty, in the
struggle for Independence. There is but one Indian now living,
who receives the reward of his services as a revolutionary
soldier, old Isaac Wickham, and he was not in Bradford's
regiment. Parson Holly, in a memorial to the Legislature in
1783, states that most of the women in Marshpee, had lost
their husbands in the war. At that time there were _seventy_
widows on the Plantation.

But from that day, until the year 1834, the Marshpee Indians
were enslaved by the laws of Massachusetts, and deprived of
every civil right which belongs to man. White Overseers had
power to tear their children from them and bind them out where
they pleased. They could also sell the services of any adult
Indian on the Plantation they chose to call idle, for three
years at a time, and send him where they pleased, renewing the
lease every three years, and thus, make him a slave for life.

It was with the greatest effort this monstrous injustice was
in some degree remedied last winter, by getting the facts
before the Legislature, in spite of a most determined
opposition from those who had fattened fo