Inter-Ethnic Relations on New England's Frontier: A Survey of the Formative Period

Abstract

In many respects, the form and progression of the New England frontier reflects a collision, of sorts, between two disparate peoples and their two divergent cultures. As the European confronted the native American in the wilderness setting, it soon became apparent that the demise of the Indian culture was inevitable, the only salient question being as to the nature of its decline. A close examination of early Seventeenth Century relations shows the English as ambitious and militant expansionists who not only rejected the idea of cultural coexistence, but, in regarding the Indian solely from a European frame of reference, failed to make any substantial progress toward a theory of toleration. The English were highly organized, strongly motivated, and eminently successful in their pursuit of the long range goals of settlement; and it is the very cohesiveness of the Puritan frontier which best illuminates the fateful dilemma of the indigenous population. While fragmented by tribal particularism and internecine warfare, the native New Englanders were beset on all sides by enemies, European and Indian. Though willing, at first, to contest a permanent European colonial effort, their cultural resiliency was undermined by disease, and a multiplicity of negative factors which developed as their relationships with the English settlements moved toward interdependency. As the confrontation moved into the climactic period following the Pequot War, the weight of the English presence had already brought about irreversible trends in the Indian way of life. With his lands diminishing under the pressure of two converging lines of frontier settlement, he was finally left, with two impractical options, acculturation or resistance. Both charted a course to futility.