Savage Indians or Puritan Assimilators?

In 1675 there raged a great war between two powerful countries. It was your basic Indian-cowboys wars that you see throughout history well depicted by our western movies. But this time it was a war between the New England settlers and not your typical cowboys of the west. This war was called the King Philips war. In our beloved westerns we have always seen the cowboys as the good guys and the Indians as the bad guys, yet if we really looked into history we find it is more the opposite way around. The cowboys pushed there way into Indian territories and started all the trouble and this is what exactly happened in the King Philips war. The puritans of New England pushed there way into the Pequot lands and forced this war upon them. Limerick, a famous writer has taught us to look into something with both perspectives and see who really is wrong and I hopefully can make you see this point in my essay. Hopefully you will make the distinction of was it the savage Indians or the graceful Indians? Or was it the loving puritans or the puritan assimilators?

When there is a war there is always two different points of views and usually we always listen to the victor because they are the victors and they get to write the history. But sometimes we do get to see the loser’s point of view also. Mary Rowlandson was a clergyman’s wife who was captured in a raid by a band of Pequot Indians. She describes for us in her first person narrative about her ordeal that she has gone through. In Rowlandson’s book we see the brutality of the Indian people through her eyes. In the opening paragraphs she describes the attack on her home and the killing of her family members. She describes how the Indians savagely go killing people and scalp their heads:

"My eldest sister [Elizabeth] being yet in the house and seeing those woeful sights, the infidels hailing mothers one way and children another and some wallowing in their blood, and her elder son telling her that her son William was dead and myself was wounded, she said, 'And Lord, let me die with them.’ Which was no sooner said, but she was struck with a bullet and fell down dead over the threshold.' (Rowlandson, Page 34-35)

Mrs. Rowlandson describes atrocious acts of the Indians and how they spare no one and are always referring them to as savages yet she never realizes how they might appear to the Indians. They decide to take Mrs. Rowlandson captive and we see what she goes through. During her travel she tells of an unspeakable act done by Indians that can only be described by her own words:

"Amongst them also was that poor woman before mentioned who came to a sad end, as some of the company told me in my travel. She, having much grief upon her spirit about her miserable condition, being so near her time, she would be often asking the Indians to let her go home; they, not being willing to that and yet vexed with her importunity, gathered a great company together about her and stripped her naked and set her in the midst of them. And when they had sung and danced about her (in their hellish manner) as long as they pleased, they knocked her on [the] head and the child in her arms with her. When they had done that, they made a fire and put them both into it and told the other children that were with them that if they attempted to go home they would serve them in like manner." (Rowlandson, Page 42)

These are the cruel things she describes and we ask ourselves how these people can be so cruel. They must be the enemy since they are so evil and they do such horrible acts. But are they that evil? Or is it just one person experiencing the savages of war?

But are the Indians so bad or are they just so described as bad by the victors who turn out to be the English? Mr. Easton was the governor of Rhode Island and he tells us his story of the war through his own eyes as the governor in his book A Relacion of the Indyan Warre. We get a descriptive view from a bipartisan of the conflict because during the war Rhode Island wasn’t considered part of the New England states and stayed neutral throughout the conflict. We understand that the Indians attacked because one of their people was killed and no justice would be done for that Indian. We also understand that they were tired of the English taking over their land and that something had to be done to stop them from taking up all of their lands:

"a nother grivanc was when ther kings sold land the English wold say it was more than thay agred to and a writing must be prove against all them, and sum of ther kings had dun rong to sell so much he left his peopell none and sum being given to drunknes the English made them drunk and then cheted them in bargens, but now ther kings wear forewarned not for to part with land for nothing in Cumpareson to the valew therof." (Easton, page 11)

Before the war broke out, the governor of Rhode Island who was not involved in the war went out to speak with King Philip to persuade him not to lead his people to a war. It is describe that King Philip did not want a war with the English but he knew it was inevitable. They wanted to work out a peace treaty and get the king of England involved but the Indians tell of how treaty after treaty has been broken and that they don’t trust the court system of the English or the word of the king no more. It tells of how chiefs are said to sell only this amount of land and later the treaties are amended to sell almost all of their lands leaving the people with nothing. It is also told of how they get chiefs drunk and then persuade them to sell all of their lands while they are intoxicated. Now from this point of view we get that the English are bad and they do sneaky things to get what they want. We understand now why the Indians started the war. We understand that their people are starving because they have no more land because the Englishmen have tricked them out of their lands and there is nothing they can do except fight for their lands back.

From these two books we understand that there is a fine line between the truth and that we shouldn’t always hear it from one side of the view. Even though the Indians attacked and destroyed many things and killed many people we understand why they did it. We understand why they raid settlements, it is merely a scare tactic to get the white people to leave and it also is a move to obtain resources. We are told of the cruel acts they do to prisoners like burning them alive but we also know what the English did with their captives. They sold them to be slaves in Europe. How would we like it if we were sold to be slaves in a foreign land we know nothing about. We know now that the English were wrong in this event just like we know the United States was wrong in the dealings of the Modoc people described to us by Limerick in Haunted America. Limerick tells us of how something is not so simple and there are many things in between. We all thought that because of the Indians attacked us that they were wrong and we were right yet it is proven to us by example that we are always wrong for we stole their lands and forced them to attack us because they knew nothing else to do but violence.

Things aren’t always as simple as they appear. We get many things when we look past the fine line and realize that there are always two sides to a story. Sometimes there might be even more than two sides but there is always a minimum of two sides. So do not always listen to something and not challenge the validity of what that statement is. But was this just two sides in this war or was there more? I say yes because there were neutrals in this war like Rhode Island which decided not to participate in this war and many of the other Indian tribes which also didn’t contribute. Then there were the people who were on both sides:

"It appears that one of the whites had married one of Philips countrymen; and they, the pilgrims, said he was a traitor, and therefore they said he must die. So they quartered him; and as history informs us, they said, he being a heathen, but a few tears were shed at his funeral. Here, then, because a man would not turn and fight against his own wife and family, or leave them, he was condemned as a heathen." (Eulogy on King Philip, page 123)

We can see how these people were treated and what happened to them. Yet we also realize that sometimes history repeats itself and we are always doing the same mistakes of the past generations. In example is the fact that the Modoc wars between the white settlers and the Modoc people is that the war started due to a misunderstanding and it ended with the annihilation of one side. Hopefully we can learn from our past and not repeat the same steps but next time to look carefully at something and not come to a rush judgment.

Works Cited List:

• Apess, William. "Eulogy on King Philip" from Negotiating Difference. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Heizbug. Boston: Bedford, 1996. 107-132
  
  
• Easton, John. "A Relacion of the Indyan Warre" from Narratives of the Indian Wars. Ed. Charles H. Lincoln, Ph.D. New York: Barnes and Noble Inc, 1913. 1-17
  
  
• Rowlandson, Mary. "The Sovereignty and Goodness of God" from Puritans among the Indians. Eds. Alden Vaughn and Edward W. Clark. Boston: Bedford, 1968. 31-75
  
  
• Limerick, Patricia Nelson. "Haunted America." From Ways of Reading 6^th Edition. Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 469-507