rious Abenaki tribes, in which, after
prodigious circumlocution, the Boston treaty was ratified, and the war
ended.[272] This time the Massachusetts Assembly, taught wisdom by
experience, furnished a guarantee of peace by providing for government
trading-houses in the Indian country, where goods were supplied, through
responsible hands, at honest prices.

The Norridgewocks, with whom the quarrel began, were completely broken.
Some of the survivors joined their kindred in Canada, and others were
merged in the Abenaki bands of the Penobscot, Saco, or Androscoggin.
Peace reigned at last along the borders of New England; but it had cost
her dear. In the year after the death of Rale, there was an incident of
the conflict too noted in its day, and too strongly rooted in popular
tradition, to be passed unnoticed.

Out of the heart of the White Mountains springs the river Saco, fed by
the bright cascades that leap from the crags of Mount Webster, brawling
among rocks and bowlders down the great defile of the Crawford Notch,
winding through the forests and intervales of Conway, then circling
northward by the village of Fryeburg in devious wanderings by meadows,
woods, and mountains, and at last turning eastward and southward to join
the sea.

On the banks of this erratic stream lived an Abenaki tribe called the
Sokokis. When the first white man visited the country, these Indians
lived at the Falls, a few miles from the mouth of the river. They
retired before the English settlers, and either joined their kindred in
Maine, or migrated to St. Francis and other Abenaki settlements in
Canada; but a Sokoki band called Pigwackets, or Pequawkets, still kept
its place far in the interior, on the upper waters of the Saco, near
Pine Hill, in the present town of Fryeburg. Except a small band of their
near kindred on Lake Ossipee, they were the only human tenants of a
wilderness many thousand square miles in extent. In their wild and
remote abode they were difficult of access, and the forest and the river
were well stocked with moose, deer, bear, beaver, otter, lynx, fisher,
mink, and marten. In this, their happy hunting-ground, the Pequawkets
thought themselves safe; and they would have been so for some time
longer if they had not taken up the quarrel of the Norridgewocks and
made bloody raids against the English border, under their war-chief,
Paugus.

Not far from where their wigwams stood clustered in a bend of the Saco
was the small