During the one hundred and forty-seven years of which we speak, sixteen distinct wars with various Indian tribes or confederacies, averaging one every nine years, had been carried on at various points, from the extreme northeast to the farthest southern border. In these wars, formal expeditions were organized, bodies of troops, large for the populations, raised, equipped, and sent out amid the sighs of young ladies and the fears of their mothers, punishing old massacres, and wasting, like prairie fires, whole districts, and of course kindling other Indian resentments that swept back over the settlements. Over nearly all of these combustible war piles it was found that French oil was poured to make the fire take readily, and French bellows were at work to blow the savage flames into a disastrous conflagration. Between these more formidable expeditions were interjected petty skirmishes, midnight attacks, sorties, and reprisals, as numerous and as little regarded by the colonists in general as railroad killings or corporation massacres with us. Guns and swords were as common in farmers’ houses, as spades and hoes to-day. Arrows to the right, left, and in front of them, pointed many colonial morals, and adorned many a sad tale of border life. Bloody Brooks were christened with red water in three different settlements; and poor, indeed, are the annals of that town—whose records reach back beyond the half-way mile-stone of the eighteenth century—that cannot show the garnishments of the bow and arrow. Few, indeed, were the families of New England that could keep the Passover, commemorative of exemptions from the terrible visitations of the Indian smiter. Besides these chronic and almost ceaseless domestic troubles, the great continental wars—those of 1651 and 1664 between England and Holland, in 1656 between England and Spain, King William’s war from 1688 to 1697, Queen Anne’s from 1702 to 1713, and that free European fight for the Austrian succession which closed the half-century, covering in all twenty-nine years on this side the sea—drew between their mailed hands the tender Colonies, wrenched their young and growing interests from them, and hurled their protectors sometimes against the French of Acadia and New France, sometimes against the ever-hostile Indian tribes. The patched-up peaces which followed these great wars, and which covered the European breaches, left the colonial combatants battered and bruised, ragged in clothes, in debt for expenses, and in mourning for the lost, with Frenchmen and Indians irritated by the conflict, and goaded into hot revenges, which even the snows of New France could not cool. In a word, the entire belt of land northwards and westward of the plantations was highly volcanic, some peak almost continually in eruption, while always throughout its whole extent mutterings under the cindered heat threatened wide-shaking action and crimsoned tidal waves.