Fair words, the proverb says, butter no parsnips, but the fair words of the white men had provided the opportunity for performing that process. The description preserved of the Indian chief by an eye-witness is as follows: “In his person he is a very lusty man in his best years, an able body, grave of countenance and spare of speech; in his attire little or nothing differing from the rest of his followers, only in a great chain of white bone beads about his neck; and at it, behind his neck, hangs a little bag of tobacco, which he drank, and gave us to drink (this being the phrase for that indulgence in those days, as is found in Ben Jonson and other authors). His face was painted with a sad red, like murrey (so called from the color of the Moors) and oiled, both head and face, that he looked greasily. All his followers likewise were in their faces, in part or in whole painted, some black, some red, some yellow, and some white, some with crosses and other antic works; some had skins on them and some naked: all strong, tall men in appearance.”[7] All this which Dr. Young tells us would have been a good description of an Indian party under Black Hawk, which was presented to the President at Washington as late as 1837; and also, I can say the same of such a party seen by myself, coming from a prairie in Kansas, then unexplored, in 1856. The interchange of eatables was evidently at that period a pledge of good feeling, as it is to-day. On a later occasion, Captain Standish, with Isaac Alderton, went to visit the Indians, who gave them three or four groundnuts and some tobacco. The writer afterwards says: “Our governor bid them send the king’s kettle and filled it full of pease which pleased them well, and so they went their way.” It strikes the modern reader as if this were to make pease and peace practically equivalent, and as if the parties needed only a pun to make friends. It is doubtful whether the arrival of a conquering race was ever in the history of the world marked by a treaty so simple and therefore noble. “This treaty with Massasoit,” says Belknap, “was the work of one day,” and being honestly intended on both sides, was kept with fidelity as long as Massasoit lived.[8] In September, 1639, Massasoit and his oldest son, Mooanam, afterwards called Wamsutta, came into the court at Plymouth and desired that this ancient league should remain inviolable, which was accordingly ratified and confirmed by the government,[9] and lasted until it was broken by Philip, the successor of Wamsutta, in 1675. It is not my affair to discuss the later career of Philip, whose insurrection is now viewed more leniently than in its own day; but the spirit of it was surely quite mercilessly characterized by a Puritan minister, Increase Mather, who, when describing a battle in which old Indian men and women, the wounded and the helpless, were burned alive, said proudly, “This day we brought five hundred Indian souls to hell.”[10]