Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/492

Gookin's History of

ing to an eye of reason been as a wall of defence to the western frontiers of Massachusetts Colony ; where most of our danger lay, and where most mischief was afterwards done. But the counsel of the Lord must stand, and his purpose to chastise the poor English very sharp, and Indians also, must be accomplished ; therefore good counsel was hid from us, and jealousies and animosities increased and fomented among us. I shall not here recite the reasons moving the instigators unto this action, though I have seen and could produce the copy of the petition of Senonatt unto the Council, about this time. But there are some ready to conjecture that the occult and main reason inducing some of them to desire to be rid of the neighbourhood of those Indians, was in respect of a fair tract of land, belonging to them (near Marlborough) not only by natural right but by a grant from the General Court in the Massachusetts Colony ; and this is more latent now than heretofore, for some of the people of those parts have very lately, in the spring 1677, not only taken away the fencing stuff from about the Indians' lands, but taken away some cart-loads of their young apple trees and planted them in their own lands. And when some of those Indians made some attempts to plant (by order from authority) upon their own lands in the spring 1677, some person of that place expressly forbid them, and threatened them if they came there to oppose them, so that the poor Indians being put into fears returned, and dared not proceed ; and yet those Indians that went to plant were such as had been with the English all the war, and were not at all obnoxious. But I have been longer than I intended in the preface to that matter, fain to relate ; the pretence for seizing these fifteen Marlborough Indians and sending them down as prisoners was this, that eleven of them had committed a notorious murder upon seven English persons at Lancaster upon a Lord's day, August 22d ; the next and immediate accuser of these Indians was one David, an Indian, one of the fifteen, who being suspected for shooting at a lad belonging to the English of Marlborough that was sent out by his master to look up some sheep, this David being apprehended by the aforesaid captain upon the former suspicion, and fastened to a tree to be shot to death, and fearing to drink of the same cup as his brother Andrew had done a fortnight before, being shot to death by some soldiers at the same place. Indeed An-