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Sagamore John; so that the English were enabled to break it up. He had ever been extremely courteous to the English, and tried to learn their language, and imitate their customs. Convinced of the superiority of their religion, he even desired to adopt it, and live among them as a fellow Christian but was hindered by the bitter opposition of the heathen Indians. In the year 1632 he was seized by a disease then most terrible, and which has not lost all its terrors now,-the small-pox. This fatal malady had never been known among the natives before the arrival of Europeans. Poor Sagamore John now sadly lamented his want of decision. At his own desire, he was removed among the English; and promised, if he recovered, to live with them, and serve their God. He soon relinquished the hope of recovery. "Now," said he, "I must die. The God of the English is much angry with me, and will destroy me. Ah, I was afraid of the scoffs of the wicked Indians. .Yet my child shall live with the English, and learn to know their God when I am dead." Mr. Wilson visited this forlorn and perishing creature, and with christian tenderness ministered to the wants of his body and his soul. To his care the dying chieftain committed his only child, saying;"Mr. Wilson is much good man, and much love

me." This son of the forest, once the savage lord of these peopled hills, expired soon after, on the fifth day of December. Governor Winthrop says; "He died in a persuasion that he should. go to the Englishman's God." It may be, he is known in a better world, as "the first fruits of" New England "unto Christ."

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He gave to the governor a good quantity of wampumpeague, a sort of current-coin among the Indians. It was composed of beads, made from various colored marine shells, and often arranged in very tasteful figures on belts, and other articles. of dress. In old times it served, in part, as a currency in the dealings of the English with each other, as well as with the Indians. dying sagamore gave gifts to several other Englishmen and took order for the payment of his own debts, and the debts of his men. His will was, that all the wampum and coats left, should be given to his mother: and his land about Powder-horn Hill, in Chelsea, which was probably his usual residence, was to go to his son; and in case of his son's decease, it was to pass to his brother George, the sachem of Naumkeag or Salem, and ultimately the claimant of all the domain of his father Nanepashemet.

Mr. Wilson cheerfully accepted his difficult charge. He took into his family the fatherless

child, of whom we only know, that he was dead some time, perhaps a considerable time, before the eleventh of May, 1651, when his uncle George petitioned the General Court for the land conditionally left him by his brother. Almost the whole tribe perished about the same time with sagamore John, and with the same fell disease. Mr. Maverick of Winnesimmet, who, with his whole family, made the most honorable exertions to relieve the sufferers, had the melancholy task of burying thirty of them in one day. Many of the orphan children were distributed among families in the towns on the Bay: but most of them died soon after of the same wasting plague, which had proved so fatal to their pa rents. But three of these poor children survived to maturer age. One of them, taken by the governor, was called Know-God; because it was the Indians usual answer, when questioned on the subject of their knowledge of a Supreme Being:-"Me no know God."

Many of them, in their last sickness, owned that the Englishmen's God was a good being; and professed a resolution to serve him, if life should be spared. As to the cause of this impression, "it wrought much with them," writes Winthrop, "that when their own people forsook them, yet the English came daily, and minis

tered to them and yet few, only two families, took any infection by it." How often has it been found that a courageous benevolence is also the safest. How often too has the key of kindness unlocked the heart which was firmly fastened against the entrance of force or persuasion.

Among the neighboring tribes, civilization and religion went hand in hand. Mr. Wilson, with three other ministers and some of the brethren, visited the "praying Indians" at Nonantum in 1647, for the twofold purpose of instructing them and supplying their necessities. Here they had built with their own hands a house of worship fifty feet by twenty-five, which Mr. Wilson says, appeared like the workmanship of an English housewright."

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Our fathers have been very unjustly taxed with neglecting the spiritual welfare of the Indians. Whoever informs himself as to the life and labors of John Eliot, will see, that the charge is utterly groundless and that they labored in this field. with great zeal, and success. perseverance blessing of God has never rested on Indian missions more largely than it did in their day. They were, many of them, the more ready to engage in this holy undertaking, in their eager ness to disappoint the devil. For "finding it difficult to account for the first peopling of the

western hemisphere, many in New England ascribed it to the aid of the devil, who thought by removing a part of the human race thither, they would be forever placed out of the reach of the gospel." This explanation will not seem to us very plausible: but it has the poor merit of being quite as much so as almost any that has been propounded by the learned.

Our ancestors have been heavily charged with injustice in dispossessing the Indians of the soil.

The Massachusetts settlers found the country, in a manner, depopulated by a wasting pestilence which swept away some entire tribes, about the year 1618. Most of the remnants of the people were very few and feeble, who cultivated but a very small portion of the country, of which, by far the greater part lay waste, and without inhabitant. King James' charter specifies this as one of the reasons for planting a region, which our forefathers, in legal phrase, called a 66 vacant domicile."

However contrary it may be to the prevailing impression, it is still the fact, that the coming of the pilgrims served to prolong the existence of these enfeebled tribes. John Cotton has made the following record;"The Indians in these parts being by the hand of God swept away, many multitudes of them, by the plague, the

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