AN UNSETTLED LAND

New England was a haunted land before the first European settlers arrived in the early 1600s. Native American trading relations with visitors from the northernmost reaches of the continent along the Charles and Taunton Rivers, as well as Mount Hope Bay, had occurred as far back as the fourteenth century. Trading with the Dutch, French and the English along Narragansett and Massachusetts Bay had occurred for nearly a century before those religious refugees from England rowed ashore. Some early traders had stayed, integrated themselves and even married into the Algonquian tribes that lived along the New England coastlines and inland along the rivers.

By the time of the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620, many tribes were already acquainted with household wares, the pots and pans and utensils brought by European traders, along with tools and even clothing. These goods were exchanged for beaver and, to a lesser extent, other animal pelts, as well as pottery in the form of dishes and bowls and clay pipes of easy manufacture by Narragansett, Massachusetts and Wampanoag craftswomen. In the course of trade, New England's tribes adapted European goods into their own culture for both practical and spiritual purposes.

On a coasting journey in the dead of winter, a band of Pilgrims hoping to trade for provisions from whatever Indians they found walked inland some distance and circled back again, to come upon "a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen. It was also covered with boards, so we mused what it should be, and resolved to dig it up."

The men, in their slow dismantling of the grave, found "bowls, trays, dishes, and such like trinkets" between the mats placed above the body found inside. Roger Williams would write of the Narragansett ritual of Nickommo, a great feast and dance where "they give I say a great quantity of money, and all sort of their goods ... to one person: and that person that receives this Gift, upon the receiving of it goes out, and hollowes thrice for the health and prosperity of the Party that gave it."

Edward Winslow would write in astonishment of the ceremony he witnessed, where a great fire was lit, and those in the gathering, including visitors from neighboring tribes, would come forward and throw pots, bowls, dishes and silverware into the cauldron. During the early attacks on white settlements in what is now Maine and Vermont during King George's War, almost all of the English goods that filled the great houses the marauding natives burned were left for archaeologists to unearth three hundred and some years later.

What Europeans brought most to the Native Americans on New England's shores were diseases unfathomable to the native healers. Narragansett oral historians speak of a great plague among their people in the late sixteenth century. The first recorded incident of what seventeenth- century historians have called a plague occurred between 1616 and 1619. Elderly survivors described the symptom of yellowed skin and the remaining scars to the Reverend Daniel Gookin. While the cause of the plague has long been debated, there is no doubt about the toll it took on the Native American population. As historian Karen Bragdon would write, "This terrible epidemic reduced populations among the Ninnimissinuok of the northern and central Massachusetts Bay by as much as 90 percent."

Indeed, when the pilgrims came to realize the full measure of the tragedy that had befallen the Wampanoag, they were astonished that there were but sixty men under Massasoit's command.

William Bradford would write of the "sad spectacle" of bones left above ground and unburied. The pilgrims found in their coasting journeys abandoned fields and villages along the Massachusetts shore. Edward Winslow pondered the empty fields and thought of the "thousands of men ... which died in a great plague not long since, and pity it was, and is, to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same." Roger Conant would write some years later, as he reached Cape Ann, "Though all the countrey bee as it were a thicke wood for the generall, yet in divers places there is much ground cleared by the Indians ... I am told that about three miles from us a man may stand on a little hilly place and see divers thousands of acres of ground as good as need to be, and not a Tree in the same."

What Native Americans the Pilgrims did meet were remnants of once- thriving communities or transitional Native Americans like Squanto, who vacillated between the remnants of his own tribe on the Weir River and the larger Pokanoket (Wampanoag) tribe.

Conant would write of his native American neighbors in 1628, saying, "Upon the River of Mistick is seated sagamore John, and upon the River Saugus sagamore James ... The elder brother, John, is a handsome young man ... conversant with us, affecting English apparel and houses, and speaking well of our God. His brother James is of a far worse disposition, yet repaireth often to us. Both these brothers command not above thirty to forty men."

By 1630, the sachem Chickataubot, living near what became Quincy, Massachusetts, was said to have only fifty to sixty subjects, and the great empire of Nanepashmet, which extended from Chelsea to Marblehead, was now controlled by his sons, Wonouaham and Montowomsate, who between them "commanded not above thirty or forty men." In 1633–34, smallpox ravaged the tribes along the Rhode Island and Connecticut coastlines, as well as the riverside communities inland.

Samuel Drake would write that illness began that year, among Native Americans in Plymouth: "During the autumn of this year the small pox destroyed great numbers of the Indians ... about Pascataqua River nearly all perish ... About Plymouth too, many are carried off by a malignant distemper; with which about twenty of the pilgrims die also ... In January of 1634 it was reported that the small pox had swept over the Narragansett country, destroying in its course seven hundred of that nation, and that it was extending among the westward of them."

Indeed, some native communities along the lower and middle Connecticut River were wiped out entirely. It was a plague that the sachem Canonicus never forgot. Years later, in rebuking the overtures of John Winthrop, he would complain to Roger Williams that the English had brought the disease to his people and that the Narragansett had mistrusted the English from the beginning.

This mistrust began to grow among neighboring tribes, a fact not lost on Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, who, to frighten Massasoit and his leaders, told them that the English at Plymouth harbored a great plague that they could unleash with a volley of their cannon upon the natives. The suspicion that white settlers were capable of poisoning the native populations did not deter trade, but neither was it ever discounted, and it was ultimately at the heart of events that led to the outbreak of King...