The Pilgrims were genuinely surprised that the Indians wished to live at peace with them. Their reasons for doing so were doubtless complex. In the first place they were not the fearsome people the Pilgrims had been led to believe inhabited the land. The history of European-Indian relations before the coming of the Pilgrims is marked by trust and friendliness on the Indians’ part, all too often betrayed. Yet, although stories of the Europeans’ actions had circulated among the Indians over all of northeastern North America, it seems that not all Indians were ready to believe the worst. But there was more to it than that. The epidemic of 1617 had upset the balance of power that had prevailed among the native American population for years. The Indians who had suffered most were those along the coast, where the disease had had its most drastic effect. Not far inland were Narragansets and further west Pequots, neither of whom had felt its effects. It would be insulting to the intelligence of Massasoit and his Wampanoags to believe that they did not perceive the advantage English allies would give them in opposition to their western neighbors. In the words of one of the Pilgrim chroniclers of the time: “We cannot yet conceive but that he [Massasoit] is willing to have peace with us, for they have seen our people sometimes alone two or three in the woods at work and fowling, when as they offered them no harm as they might easily have done, and especially because he hath a potent adversary the Narragansets, that are at war with him, against whom he thinks we may be some strength to him, for our pieces are terrible unto them.” [Illustration: Indian walking] And so it was that by the late spring of 1621 the surviving fifty Pilgrims had cause to hope. Their fears of conflict with the Indians had been at least temporarily calmed. Eleven houses had been built along a narrow street. Hardly well appointed, they were sturdy structures built in the timber-framed tradition of their homeland and afforded shelter and comfort to the small band. The sickness had passed, and judging from what William Bradford was to write years later, the food supply did not present a critical problem. By the summer of 1621, nature was favoring the Pilgrims with wild foodstuffs: “... others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want.... And besides waterfowl there was a great store of wild turkey, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person....”