Mayflower

come to America not to conquer a continent but to re-create their modest communities in Scrooby and in Leiden. When they arrived at Plymouth in December 1620 and found it emptied of people, it seemed as if God had given them exactly what they were looking for. But as they quickly discovered during that first terrifying fall and winter, New England was far from uninhabited. There were still plenty of Native people, and to ignore or anger them was to risk annihilation. The Pilgrims’ religious beliefs played a dominant role in the decades ahead, but it was their deepening relationship with the Indians that turned them into Americans.
    By forcing the English to improvise, the Indians prevented Plymouth Colony from ossifying into a monolithic cult of religious extremism. For their part, the Indians were profoundly influenced by the English and quickly created a new and dynamic culture full of Native and Western influences. For a nation that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.
    By the midpoint of the seventeenth century, however, the attitudes of many of the Indians and English had begun to change. With only a fraction of their original homeland remaining, more and more young Pokanokets claimed it was time to rid themselves of the English. The Pilgrims’ children, on the other hand, coveted what territory the Pokanokets still possessed and were already anticipating the day when the Indians had, through the continued effects of disease and poverty, ceased to exist. Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.
    For years Philip had used the promise of war as a way to appease his increasingly indignant warriors. Whenever pushed to an actual confrontation, however, he had always backed down, and it appears that as late as June 23, 1675, he held out hope that war might once again be averted. But instead of providing Philip with the support he so desperately needed to control his warriors, Governor Winslow only made matters worse. Indeed, it was his callous prosecution of Tobias and the others, for Sassamon’s murder, that triggered the outbreak of violence. By refusing to acknowledge that Philip’s troubles were also his troubles, Winslow was as responsible as anyone for King Philip’s War.
    In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others. But from the moment Massasoit decided to become the Pilgrims’ ally, New England belonged to no single group. For peace and for survival, others must be accommodated. The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors—and all of the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed—they risked losing everything. It was a lesson that Bradford and Massasoit had learned over the course of more than three long decades. That it could be so quickly forgotten by their children remains a lesson for us today.
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    King Philip’s War officially ended with the sachem’s death in 1676, but for Benjamin Church the fighting had just begun. Between 1689 and 1704, Church led five different “eastern expeditions” against the French and Indians in Maine. Joining him on these forays into the wilderness were many of the Sakonnets who had fought at his side against Philip, as well as Church’s literal child of war, Constant, who served as one of his captains. By the outbreak of Queen Anne’s War in 1702, Church had grown so fat that he required the help of two assistants as he waddled over the forest trails he had once bounded across as a young man.
    In 1716, with the help of his son Thomas, he published Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War. By that time Mary Rowlandson’s book about her Indian captivity had gone through multiple editions. But another book, William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, still remained in manuscript. After being consulted by a variety of historians working on books about New England, including King Philip’s War chroniclers Increase Mather and William Hubbard, the calfskin-bound manuscript was lent by Bradford’s grandson Samuel to the Reverend Thomas Prince, who in 1728 placed it in his library in the steeple of the Old South Church in Boston. There it was to remain for the next four