easily drive several hundred Indians in panic over the
plains. Unprincipled men perpetrated the grossest outrages upon the
families of the Indians, often insulting the proudest chiefs.

The colonists were taking up lands in all directions. Before their
unerring rifles, game was rapidly disappearing. The Indians became fully
awake to their danger. The chiefs met in council, and a conspiracy was
formed, to put, at an appointed hour, all the English to death, every
man, woman and child. Every house was marked. Two or three Indians were
appointed to make the massacre sure in each dwelling. They were to
spread over the settlement, enter the widely scattered log-huts, as
friends, and at a certain moment were to spring upon their unsuspecting
victims, and kill them instantly. The plot was fearfully successful in
all the dwellings outside the little village of Jamestown. In one hour,
on the 22nd of March, 1622, three hundred and forty-seven men, women and
children were massacred in cold blood. The colony would have been
annihilated, but for a Christian Indian who, just before the massacre
commenced, gave warning to a friend in Jamestown. The Europeans rallied
with their fire-arms, and easily drove off their foes, and then
commenced the unrelenting extermination of the Indians. An arrow can be
thrown a few hundred feet, a musket ball more than as many yards. The
Indians were consequently helpless. The English shot down both sexes,
young and old, as mercilessly as if they had been wolves. They seized
their houses, their lands, their pleasant villages. The Indians were
either slain or driven far away from the houses of their fathers, into
the remote wilderness.

The colony now increased rapidly, and the cabins of the emigrants spread
farther and farther over the unoccupied lands. These hardy adventurers
seemed providentially imbued with the spirit of enterprise. Instead of
clustering together for the pleasure of society and for mutual
protection, they were ever pushing into the wild and unknown interior,
rearing their cabins on the banks of distant streams, and establishing
their silent homes in the wildest solitudes of the wilderness. In 1660,
quite a number of emigrants moved directly south from Virginia, to the
river Chowan, in what is now South Carolina, where they established a
settlement which they called Albermarle. In 1670, a colony from England
established itself at Charleston, South Carolina. Thus gradually the
Atlanti