Mayflower

longer than the living man would be.” Like all the Pilgrims, Standish was taller in death than he had ever been in life.
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    With the Civil War a memory and the Indian wars of the Wild West drawing to a close, U.S. citizens at the turn of the century could look with romantic nostalgia toward America’s Native population. Instead of the Rock and the compact, Thanksgiving and its reassuring image of Indian-English cooperation became the predominant myth of the Pilgrims. Despite strong regional interest in King Philip’s War throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the conflict attracted little attention beyond New England. In the American popular imagination, the nation’s history began with the Pilgrims and then leapfrogged more than 150 years to Lexington and Concord and the Revolution.
    Out of the tumult of the 1960s a new sense of Native identity emerged that challenged the nation’s veneration of Thanksgiving. In 1970, Native activists declared Thanksgiving a National Day of Mourning, and Plymouth was selected as the natural place for it to be observed. In recent decades, Native New Englanders—once regarded as a “vanished people”—have undergone a resurgence. Many of the tribes that participated in King Philip’s War have been granted federal recognition, with the Pequots and Mohegans making the most highly visible comebacks thanks to extraordinarily profitable gambling casinos.
    The Pilgrims’ descendants have proven to be, if nothing else, fruitful. In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the United States, which represents roughly 10 percent of the total U.S. population.
    Today Plymouth is a mixture of the sacred and the kitsch, a place of period houses and tourist traps, where the Mayflower II sits quietly beside the ornate granite edifice that now encloses the mangled remains of Plymouth Rock. A few miles from downtown Plymouth on the north bank of the Eel River is Plimoth Plantation, a re-creation of the Pilgrim settlement as it looked in 1627, the last year the original settlers all lived within the confines of the palisade wall. The design and construction of the buildings have been painstakingly researched; the interpreters have been immersed in the language and customs of early seventeenth-century England, as well as everything that is known about the historical characters they are depicting. After the honky-tonk tackiness of the Plymouth waterfront, Plimoth Plantation is a wonderfully satisfying and self-contained evocation of a distant time.
    Outside the palisade wall is the re-creation of a small Native settlement known as the Wampanoag Homesite. The interpreters make no attempt to pretend they are anything but people living in the here and now of twenty-first-century America. But even here, beyond the gates of 1627, ghosts from the past intrude.
    Archaeological research has revealed that Clark’s garrison, where Benjamin Church almost lost his wife and son, was situated on the grounds of Plimoth Plantation between the Wampanoag Homesite and the re-created Pilgrim settlement. On Sunday, March 12, 1676, the building was the scene of a brutal massacre that claimed the lives of eleven Plymouth residents, most of them women and children. In retaliation, Plymouth authorities executed four Indians accused of participating in the attack. Today the site is a parking lot, with no historic marker.
    But no matter how desperately our nation’s mythologizers might wish it had never happened, King Philip’s War will not go away. The fourteen bloody months between June 1675 and August 1676 had a vast, disturbing impact on the development of New England and, with it, all of America.
    It is easy to mock past attempts to venerate and sanctify the Pilgrims, especially given what their sons and grandsons did to the Native Americans. And yet we must look with something more than cynicism at a people who maintained more than half a century of peace with their Native neighbors. The great mystery of this story is how America emerged from the terrible darkness of King Philip’s War to become the United States. A possible answer resides in the character of the man who has been called America’s first Indian fighter, Benjamin Church.
    In the years after King Philip’s War, as the country came to be defined by its relentless push west, a new American type came into being: the