ssume the
right to acquire lands here, and they had this right. The Indians were
not in any proper sense owners of New England. They were few--by 1660
not more numerous than the pale-faces--and, far from settling or
occupying the land, roamed from place to place. Had it been otherwise
they, as barbarians, would have had no such claim upon the territory as
to justify them in barring out civilization. However, the colonists did
not plead this consideration. Whenever districts were desired to which
Indians had any obvious title, it was both law and custom to pay them
their price. In this, Roger Williams and William Penn were not peculiar.
If individual white men sometimes cheated in land trades, as in other
negotiations, the aggrieved side could not, and did not, regard this as
the white man's policy.

Yet little by little the Indians came to distrust and hate the rival
race. It did not matter to the son of the forest, even if he thought so
far, that the neighborhood of civilization greatly bettered his lot in
many things, as, for instance, giving him market for corn and peltry,
which he could exchange for fire-arms, blankets, and all sorts of
valuable conveniences. The efforts to teach and elevate him he
appreciated still less. As has been said, he loved better to disfurnish
the outside of other people's heads than to furnish the inside of his
own. What he felt, and keenly, was that the newcomers treated him as an
inferior, were day by day narrowing his range, and slowly but surely
reducing his condition to that of a subject people. Dull as he was, he
saw that one of three fates confronted him: to perish, to migrate, or to
lay aside his savage character and mode of life. Such thoughts frenzied
him.

The beautiful fidelity of Massasoit to the people of Plymouth is already
familiar. His son Alexander, who succeeded him, was of a spirit
diametrically the reverse. Convinced that he was plotting with the
Narragansets for hostile action, the Governor and Council of Plymouth
sent Major Winslow to bring him to court--for it must be remembered that
Massasoit's tribe, the Pokanokets, had through him covenanted, though
probably with no clear idea of what this meant, to be subject to the
Plymouth government. Alexander, for some reason, became fatally ill
while at Plymouth under arrest, dying before reaching home. The Indians
suspected poison.

His brother Philip now became sachem. Philip already had a grudge
against the whites, a