Mayflower

attempted to attach a stipulation to one of his final land sales: that the missionaries stop converting his people. Not surprisingly, the English refused to agree to his terms, and in the end, the aged sachem decided not to “further urge it.”
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    When it came to borrowing from the English, the Indians had demonstrated tremendous creativity and enthusiasm. The English, on the other hand, were much more reluctant to borrow from the Indians. The American wilderness, they thought, was inimical to the godly virtues of order and control.
    Yet despite their best efforts to keep the Indians and their culture at arm’s length, the English inevitably began to adopt Native ways, particularly when it came to food. Ever since the Pilgrims stumbled across a cache of seed on Cape Cod, maize had become an essential part of every New Englander’s diet. It has been estimated that the Indians consumed between 280 and 340 pounds of corn per person per year, and the English were not far behind. Hominy and johnnycakes were adaptations of Native recipes. Over the years, the English pottage that Massasoit had craved on his sickbed had become more like the Indians’ own succotash: a soupy mishmash of corn, beans, and whatever fish and meat were available. When it came to harvesting corn, the English adopted the Native husking bee, a communal tradition in which a young man who came across a red ear of corn was allowed to demand a kiss from the girl of his choosing.
    Following the lead of the Dutch in New Netherland, the English used the Indians’ finely crafted shell beads as a form of currency. Wampum consisted of strings of cylindrical beads made either from white periwinkle shells or the blue portion of quahog shells, with the purple beads being worth approximately twice as much as the white beads. To be accepted in trade, wampum had to meet scrupulous specifications, and both the Indians and the English became expert in identifying whether or not the beads had been properly cut, shaped, polished, drilled, and strung. A fathom of wampum contained about three hundred beads, which were joined to other strands to create belts that varied between one and five inches in width. When credit became difficult to obtain from England during the depression of the 1640s, the colonies eased the financial burden in New England by using wampum as legal tender. In this instance, the Indians had provided the English with a uniquely American way to do business.
    When the Pilgrims had first settled at Plymouth, there had been forty miles between them and Massasoit’s village at Sowams. By 1655, there were just a few miles between the Pokanokets’ headquarters and the closest English homes clustered at Wannamoisett. There was no “frontier,” no clear-cut division between civilization and wilderness. Instead, the boundaries were convoluted and blurred—particularly in Plymouth, the smallest of the Puritan colonies, where the towns tended to be more “straggling” than in Massachusetts-Bay and Connecticut and where there was a higher concentration of Native Americans. An intimacy existed between the English and Indians that would have been almost unimaginable to subsequent generations of Americans. The English hired their Indian neighbors as farm hands; they traded with them for fish and game. Inevitably, a pidgin of English-Indian languages developed, and it became second nature for an Englishman to greet a Native acquaintance as “netop” or friend.
    But Plymouth Colony was, by no means, a utopia of cross-cultural exchange and cooperation. Intermarriage between the two races was virtually nonexistent, and without children to provide them with a genetic and cultural common ground, the Indians and English would always have difficulty understanding each other’s point of view. In the end, the two peoples remained enigmas to one another.
    In 1638, Arthur Peach, a veteran of the Pequot War, and three indentured servants attacked and robbed an Indian returning from a trading expedition to Boston. Peach stabbed the Indian with his rapier, and after taking his wampum and cloth, he and his friends left their victim for dead. The Indian lived on for a few days, however, and identified his attackers, who were brought to Plymouth for trial.
    According to Roger Williams, the murder put the region in a “great hubbub.” Many of the Narragansetts feared that the attack heralded the beginning