Chapter 21 - Page 2

be starved into submission.

The warfare of the first summer was, as might be expected, attended by
various degrees of success, fortune quite as often favoring the red-men,
in their desultory attempts at annoyance, as their more disciplined
enemies. Instead of confining his operations to his own circumscribed and
easily environed districts, Metacom had led his warriors to the distant
settlements on the Connecticut; and it was during the operations of this
season, that several of the towns on that river were first assailed and
laid in ashes. Active hostilities had in some measure ceased, between the
Wampanoags and the English, with the cold weather, most of the troops
retiring to their homes, while the Indians apparently paused to take
breath for their final effort.

It was, however, previously to this cessation of activity, that the
Commissioners of the United Colonies, as they were called, met to devise
the means of a concerted resistance. Unlike their former dangers from the
same quarter, it was manifest, by the manner in which a hostile feeling
was spreading around their whole frontier, that a leading spirit had given
as much of unity and design to the movements of the foe, as could probably
ever be created among a people so separated by distance and so divided in
communities. Right or wrong, the Colonists gravely decided that the war on
their part was just. Great preparations were therefore made to carry it
on, the ensuing summer, in a manner more suited to their means, and to the
absolute necessities of their situation. It was in consequence of the
arrangements made for bringing a portion of the inhabitants of the Colony
of Connecticut into the field, that we find the principal characters of
our legend in the warlike guise in which they have just been re-introduced
to the reader.

Although the Narragansetts had not at first been openly implicated in the
attacks on the Colonists, facts soon came to the knowledge of the latter,
which left no doubt of the state of feeling in that nation. Many of their
young men were discovered among the followers of Metacom, and arms taken
from whites, who had been slain in the different encounters, were also
seen in their villages. One of the first measures of the Commissioners,
therefore, was to anticipate more serious opposition, by directing an
overwhelming force against this people. The party collected on that
occasion was probably the largest military body which the English, at
that early day, had ever assembled in their Colonies. It consisted of a
thousand men, of whom no inconsiderable number was cavalry--a species of
troops that, as all subsequent experience has shown, is admirably adapted
to operations against so active and so subtle a foe.

The