Boston to
re-enforce the encampment at Wickford. Their march, in the dead of
winter, over the bleak and frozen hills, was slow, and their
sufferings were awful. Eleven men were frozen to death by the way, and
a large number were severely frostbitten. Immediately after their
arrival there came a remarkable thaw. The snow nearly all disappeared,
and the ground was flooded with water. This thaw was life to the
Indians. It enabled them to traverse the forests freely, and to gather
ground-nuts, upon which they were almost exclusively dependent for
subsistence.

The army at Wickford now numbered sixteen hundred. They decided upon a
rapid march to attack Philip again in his new intrenchments. There
were _friendly Indians_, as the English called them--_traitors_, as
they were called by King Philip--who were ever ready to guide the
colonists to the haunts of their countrymen. There were individual
Indians who had pride of character and great nobility of nature--men
who, through their virtues, are venerated even by the race which has
supplanted their tribes. They had their Washingtons, their Franklins,
and their Howards. But Indian nature is human nature, with all its
frailty and humiliation. The great mass of the common Indians were low
and degraded men. Almost any of them were ready for a price, and that
an exceedingly small one, to betray their nearest friends.

An Indian would sometimes be taken prisoner, and immediately, in the
continuance of the same battle, with his musket still hot from the
conflict, he would guide the English to the retreats of his friends,
and engage, apparently with the greatest zeal, in firing upon them. In
the narrative given by Colonel Benjamin Church, one of the heroes of
these wars, he writes, speaking of himself in the third person,

"When he took any number of prisoners, he would pick out
some, and tell them that he took a particular fancy to
them, and had chosen them for himself to make soldiers of,
and if any would behave themselves well he would do well by
them, and they should be his men, and not sold out of the
country.

"If he perceived they looked surly, and his Indian soldiers
called them treacherous dogs, as some of them would
sometimes do, all the notice he would take of it would only
be to clap them on the back and say, 'Come, come, you look
wild and surly, and mutter; but that signifies nothing.
These, my soldiers, we