New England’s Indians had always been a hunting people, a way of life that required wide forests and small populations; the white men, on the other hand, were primarily farmers, whose agriculture demanded cleared areas and the sacrifice of forest lands. As the white population of New England expanded and their farms and villages penetrated ever farther into the Indians’ hunting grounds, problems between these two adverse systems of life became commonplace. By 1675, nearly 50,000 people had settled in the northern colonies, a population far larger than that of the natives, and the majority of them were farmers whose clearings encroached relentlessly on the Indians’ ancestral lands. The Algonquians were not even able to retreat into the vast lands to the west, where the Appalachian Mountains stopped them as effectively as did the savage Iroquois.
The losses of their ancient hunting grounds had long bred resentment among the Indians everywhere, and the shady practices of many of the English fur traders did little to improve the situation. White settlers in general regarded the native populations as mere obstacles in their westward progress, and repeated incidents of violence on both sides closed all doors to any sort of understanding. The Indians were often punished cruelly for violations of colonial laws, most of which they did not even know existed, and which they never would have understood had they been known to them. Thus Indians were punished for hunting and fishing on Sundays, jailed if they stole – whatever it was the white man considered stealing – and they were fined if they became drunk on the alcoholic drink sold to them by the white men.
Still, amazingly enough, for nearly 40 years serious problems between the white men and the Indians had been avoided. The Pequots’ total annihilation in 1637 had accomplished exactly what the English had had in mind; even now it was still very much in Indian memory and helped restrain whatever war fever there might have been among them. The missionary work of such men as Roger Williams, Thomas Mayhew, and John Eliot had also done much to relieve tensions; perhaps a thousand converted – or praying – Indians had come to live in the Puritan communities, adopting white men’s ways and all but severing ties with their own people. The “heathen savages” still roamed the forests, of course, and they grumbled as settlers appropriated ever more of their territory and trampled across their hunting grounds. But they did little more than grumble; they, too, had become dependent on the white man’s civilization. They bought blankets and kettles and trinkets, and of course the ever-present fire water from the traders, and firearms and ammunition had long since replaced the bow and arrow as their weapon.
Actually, however, most colonial governments had already prohibited the sale of guns and ammunition to Indians, though neither laws nor consideration for public safety would keep fur traders from bartering whatever was profitable. Governor John Winthrop, deep in the fur trade himself, complained as early as the 1630s that the Dutch and the French on New England’s frontiers got the bulk of the Indians’ beaver skins by offering guns and powder in spite of formal renunciations of such trade. Some colonists also thought it clever to make the Indians dependent on firearms; since they could not produce the necessary ammunition themselves, the white men thereby hoped to increase their hold over the peltry trade – never mind that a potential enemy was given a superior weapon in the process. Such attitudes had occasional tragic-comic consequences; the Pequots in 1637 carried off two white girls from a Connecticut settlement – not, as it turned out after they had been rescued, to do them any harm, but in the belief that any white person could teach them how to make gunpowder.