Peaceful Neighbors

When the Pilgrims select Plymouth as their landing site, they find it free of Indians. This is surprising, as Indian villages are scattered elsewhere all over the region. Those along the coast, however, are strangely vacant.

In fact, the Plymouth site should have been bustling with Indian activity, but a terrible European disease has just ravaged the entire shoreline. Many villages are so devastated that the remaining survivors simply leave.

The disease comes from contact with English fishermen, whose vessels have been showing up sporadically along the coast for years. Without time to build up natural immunity, the Indians die in horrifying numbers.

The shoreline around the Indian village at Plymouth is particularly hard hit, and is completely wiped out. Badly weakened, the Indian tribe in the surrounding area wants no trouble, and seeks peace with the new English arrivals.


	Indian Villages The ORANGE dots on the main map above are Indian villages at the time the Pilgrims arrive. The BROWN lines, which look like roads, are actually Indian trails linking a well-developed Indian culture. The smaller map of the harbor (at right) shows the Plymouth site just a few years before the arrival of the Pilgrims. It shows active Indian settlements all over the site where the Pilgrims now live. The Indian corn fields are now abandoned, leaving the harbor shoreline vacant. Lucky for the Pilgrims.



	Meeting the Neighbors Three months after landing at Plymouth, the Pilgrims are startled by a solitary Indian walking right into their settlement. This is the first Indian they have seen, which is amazing enough. Then the Indian says 'Welcome,' in English. He has learned a little English by talking with captains of English fishing vessels, who have been coming each spring for many years to fish the waters off the Maine coast. A week later, the local Indian chief arrives to offer peace. The interpreter this time is an Indian who has learned passable English during several years of captivity in England, after being caught by an earlier English expedition. He shows the Pilgrims how to plant corn (right), beginning a long period during which Indians and settlers live in peace.


	Keeping the Peace The period of relative peace between settlers and Indians begins with what has been called the 'First Thanksgiving.' This is an October meeting between Pilgrims and Indians over a feast of fish, deer, vegetables and wildfowl (top left). It may also have included turkey. Indians and settlers each have something the other needs. Indians are well supplied with food, while settlers have desirable items for trade, including cooking pots and metal-bladed tools. These are major upgrades for the Indians, and the peace lasts 50 years, until the old chief dies. There are plenty of squabbles in-between, however, as more colonists continue to arrive, especially in the nearby port of Boston, with its good harbor.


	Puritan New England Shortly after the Pilgrims land at Plymouth, a second group of religious dissidents arrive at Salem, just north of Boston. Salem will be the site of the famous witch trials, 60 years later. A much larger group of settlers lands in Boston soon thereafter, called the Puritans (who are sometimes mistakenly confused with the Pilgrims). They are the beginning of a huge new flood of religious dissenters leaving England, which brings 20,000 new settlers in just a dozen years. They soon spread south to Rhode Island and Connecticut, and north to New Hampshire. Meanwhile, former Dutch estates along the Hudson River, to the west, are gradually converted into English manors. English settlements now occupy all the areas highlighted on the map in GREEN. Dots are towns.


	Too Late By 1675, English towns (GREEN dots) already outnumber Indian villages (ORANGE dots). As the English continue tightening their grip on former Indian territory, Indians begin retaliating with hit-and-run raids (RED highlights). The growing conflict spreads to many areas, but is centered in the hotly-contested area between Rhode Island and Plymouth. The Indians are led by the son of the Indian chief who had kept the peace for so long, but the effort comes too late to save the Indian homeland. The English assemble an army of 1,000 settlers, which sets off in vengeful pursuit of the raiders. There are just too many English, and the Indian effort collapses after three years. The Indian population is decimated, and many Indians are sold off as slaves.


	Tiny Settlements By 1680, English settlers dominate the East Coast, with pockets of Dutch remaining in the Hudson River Valley. Parts of coastal Canada are thinly settled by the French, while inland areas are travelled by other Frenchmen more interested in trapping beaver than establishing homes. Beyond that, America is still mostly blank, hidden behind the mountains and largely unexplored. Total population is less than two million, not including perhaps five million American Indians, living mostly west of the Appalachian Mountains. On the far side of the Mississippi River, America is also home to uncounted millions of buffalo. Modern estimates of the size of the herds are roughly centered on a figure of 60 million.