Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

towns, not to be deserted, Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester, Windham, Mansfield, and Plainfield.

Thus about the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier line for New England. The line passing through these enumerated towns represents: (1) the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the Merrimac and its tributaries, a region threatened from the Indian country by way of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian Indians by way of the Lake Champlain and Winooski River route to the Connecticut; (3) boundary towns which marked the edges of that inferior agricultural region, where the hard crystalline rocks furnished a later foundation for Shays' Rebellion, opposition to the adoption of the Federal Constitution, and the abandoned farm; and (4) the isolated intervale of Brookfield which lay intermediate between these frontiers. Besides this New England frontier there was a belt of settlement in New York, ascending the Hudson to where Albany and Schenectady served as outposts against the Five Nations, who menaced the Mohawk, and against the French and the Canadian Indians, who threatened the Hudson by way of Lake Champlain and Lake George.13 The sinister relations of leading citizens of Albany engaged in the fur trade with these Indians, even during time of war, tended to protect the Hudson River frontier at the expense of the frontier towns of New England.

The common sequence of frontier types (fur trader, cattle

13 Convenient maps of settlement, 1660-1700, are in E. Channing, "History of the United States," i, pp. 510-511, ii, end; Avery, "History of the United States and its People," ii, p. 398. A useful contemporaneous map for conditions at the close of King Philip's War is Hubbard's map of New England in his “Narrative" published in Boston, 1677. See also L. K. Mathews, “Expansion of New England," pp. 56-57, 70.

raising pioneer, small primitive farmer, and the farmer engaged in intensive varied agriculture to produce a surplus for export) had appeared, though confusedly, in New England. The traders and their posts had prepared the way for the frontier towns, and the cattle industry was most important to the early farmers. But the stages succeeded rapidly and intermingled. After King Philip's War, while Albany was still in the furtrading stage, the New England frontier towns were rather like mark colonies, military-agricultural outposts against the Indian enemy.

14

[ocr errors]

The story of the border warfare between Canada and the frontier towns furnishes ample material for studying frontier life and institutions; but I shall not attempt to deal with the narrative of the wars. The palisaded meeting-house square, the fortified isolated garrison houses, the massacres and captivities are familiar features of New England's history. The Indian was a very real influence upon the mind and morals as well as upon the institutions of frontier New England. The occasional instances of Puritans returning from captivity to visit the frontier towns, Catholic in religion, painted and garbed as Indians and speaking the Indian tongue,16 and the half-breed children of captive Puritan mothers, tell a sensational part of the story; but in the normal, as well as in such exceptional relations of the frontier townsmen to the Indians,

* Weeden," Economic and Social History of New England," pp. 90, 95, 129 132; F. J. Turner, "Indian Trade in Wisconsin," p. 13; Mcll"Wraxall's Abridgement," introduction; the town histories abound idence of the significance of the early Indian traders' posts, transiIndian land cessions, and then to town grants.

[ocr errors]

\eeden, loc. cit., pp. 64–67; M. Egleston, "New England Land Syspp. 31-32; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 37, 206, 267-268; Connectilonial Records, vii, p. 111, illustrations of cattle brands in 1727. Lutchinson, "History" (1795), ii, p. 129, note, relates such a case Groton man; see also Parkman, "Half-Century," vol. i, ch. iv, citing urault, "Histoire des Abenakis," p. 377.

there are clear evidences of the transforming influence of the Indian frontier upon the Puritan type of English colonist.

In 1703-4, for example, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered five hundred pairs of snowshoes and an equal number of moccasins for use in specified counties "lying Frontier next to the Wilderness." 17 Connecticut in 1704 after referring to her frontier towns and garrisons ordered that "said company of English and Indians shall, from time to time at the discretion of their chief comander, range the woods to indevour the discovery of an approaching enemy, and in especiall manner from Westfield to Ousatunnuck.18 . . . And for the incouragement of our forces gone or going against the enemy, this Court will allow out of the publick treasurie the sume of five pounds for every mans scalp of the enemy killed in this Colonie." 19 Massachusetts offered bounties for scalps, varying in amount according to whether the scalp was of men, or women and youths, and whether it was taken by regular forces under pay, volunteers in service, or volunteers without pay.20 One of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton in the fall of 1703, urging the use of dogs "to hunt Indians as they do Bears." The argument was that the dogs would catch many an Indian who would be too light of foot for the townsmen, nor was it to be thought of as inhuman; for the Indians " act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves." 21 In fact Massachusetts passed an act in 1706 for the raising and increasing of dogs for the better security of the frontiers, and

17 Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 4, 84, 85, 87, 88.

18 Hoosatonic.

19 Connecticut Records, iv, pp. 463, 464.

20 Massachusetts Colony Records, v, p. 72; Massachusetts Province Laws, i, pp. 176, 211, 292, 558, 594, 600; Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 7, 89, 102. Cf. Publications of this Society, vii, 275–278.

21 Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 290.

both Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1708 paid money from their treasury for the trailing of dogs.22

Thus we come to familiar ground: the Massachusetts frontiersman like his western successor hated the Indians; the "tawney serpents," of Cotton Mather's phrase, were to be hunted down and scalped in accord with law and, in at least one instance by the chaplain himself, a Harvard graduate, the hero of the Ballad of Pigwacket, who

many Indians slew,

And some of them he scalp'd when bullets round him flew. 23

Within the area bounded by the frontier line, were the broken fragments of Indians defeated in the era of King Philip's War, restrained within reservations, drunken and degenerate survivors, among whom the missionaries worked with small results, a vexation to the border towns,24 as they were in the case of later frontiers. Although, as has been said, the frontier towns had scattered garrison houses, and palisaded enclosures similar to the neighborhood forts, or stations, of Kentucky in the Revolution, and of Indiana and Illinois in the War of 1812, one difference is particularly noteworthy. In the case of frontiersmen who came down from Pennsylvania into the Upland South along the eastern edge of the Alleghanies, as well as in the more obvious case of the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee, the frontier towns were too isolated from the main settled regions to allow much military protection

22 Judd, "Hadley," p. 272; 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, ii, p. 235.

23 Farmer and Moore, "Collections," iii, p. 64. The frontier woman of the farther west found no more extreme representative than Hannah Dustan of Haverhill, with her trophy of ten scalps, for which she received a bounty of £50 (Parkman, “Frontenac,” 1898, p. 407, note).

24 For illustrations of resentment against those who protected the Christian Indians, see F. W. Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 145-155.

by the older areas. On the New England frontier, because it was adjacent to the coast towns, this was not the case, and here, as in seventeenth century Virginia, great activity in protecting the frontier was evinced by the colonial authorities, and the frontier towns themselves called loudly for assistance. This phase of frontier defense needs a special study, but at present it is sufficient to recall that the colony sent garrisons to the frontier besides using the militia of the frontier towns; and that it employed rangers to patrol from garrison to garrison.25

These were prototypes of the regular army post, and of rangers, dragoons, cavalry and mounted police who have carried the remoter military frontier forward. It is possible to trace this military cordon from New England to the Carolinas early in the eighteenth century, still neighboring the coast; by 1840 it ran from Fort Snelling on the upper Mississippi through various posts to the Sabine boundary of Texas, and so it passed forward until to-day it lies at the edge of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean.

A few examples of frontier appeals for garrison aid will help to an understanding of the early form of the military frontier. Wells asks, June 30, 1689:

1 That yo' Hon's will please to send us speedily twen-
ty Eight good brisk men that may be serviceable as
a guard to us whilest we get in our Harvest of Hay
& Corn, (we being unable to Defend ourselves & to
Do our work), & also to Persue & destroy the
Enemy as occasion may require

2 That these men may be compleatly furnished with

66

[ocr errors]

25 For example, Massachusetts Archives, lxx, p. 261; Bailey, Andover," p. 179; Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 63; Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 504-519. Parkman, "Frontenac (Boston, 1898), p. 390, and "Half-Century of Conflict" (Boston, 1898), i, p. 55, sketches the frontier defense.

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »