A large body of Indians, assembled at Dover to treat of peace, were
treacherously made prisoners by Major Waldron, who commanded there. Some
two hundred of these Indians, claimed as fugitives from Massachusetts, were
sent by water to Boston, where some were hanged and the rest shipped off to
be sold as slaves. Some fishermen of Marblehead having been killed by
the Indians at the eastward, the women of that town, as they came out of
meeting on a Sunday, fell upon two Indian prisoners who had just been
brought in, and murdered them on the spot.
The same ferocious spirit of revenge which governed the contemporaneous
conduct of Berkeley in Virginia toward those concerned in Bacon's rebellion
swayed the authorities of New England in their treatment of the conquered
Indians. By the end of the year the contest was over in the South, upward
of two thousand Indians having been killed or taken. But some time elapsed
before a peace could be arranged with the Eastern tribes, whose haunts it
was not so easy to reach.
In this short war of hardly a year's duration the Wampanoags and
Narragansetts had suffered the fate of the Pequots. The Niantics alone,
under the guidance of their aged sachem Ninigret, had escaped destruction.
Philip's country was annexed to Plymouth, though sixty years afterward,
under a royal order in council, it was transferred to Rhode Island. The
Narragansett territory remained as before, under the name of King's
Province, a bone of contention between Connecticut, Rhode Island, the
Marquis of Hamilton, and the Atherton claimants. The Niantics still
retained their ancient seats along the southern shores of Narragansett Bay.
Most of the surviving Narragansetts, the Nipmucks, and the River Indians,
abandoned their country and migrated to the north and west. Such as
remained, along with the Mohegans and other subject tribes, became more
than ever abject and subservient.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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