And the Natives needed the English. Patuxet, the Indian town that stood on what became Plymouth, was completely deserted from a plague just half a decade before the Pilgrims arrived.
The same plague wiped out much the Massachusetts and Wampanoag nations—about 2/3rd to 3/4s! Massasoit, king of the Wampanoags, was very vulnerable because the plague did not decimate the Narragansetts, who were their local rivals who became very emboldened by the Wampanoags loses.
Do these “historians” know that before the colonists came, the different tribes were often at each other’s throats taking scalps, food and slaves in raiding parties? This went on more often than not.
To the North of Plymouth, in Massachusetts bay, the local Massachusetts tribe, who were also decimated by the same plaque, were at constant war with the Tarrantines, a Micmak tribe from Southern Maine, who didn’t suffer in the plague. The Tarrantines killed the Massachusetts Sachem, and the new Sachem made an alliance with the English for protection. The English didn’t even have to make raiders of their allies behave, just the alliance was enough to stop the raids.
So, the tribes closet to Plymouth had some very important reasons to love the Pilgrims and their just in time settlement in Plymouth. It was a life or death struggle for them.
Had the English not survived, the Wampanoags and Massachusetts would have been wiped out.
Yes! Excellent history, FRiend.
thanks Babylon.
Pilgrims (and Puritans) had iron. Indians had furs. Thus the basis for trade for the first hundred of so years of the colonial period.
Bigger picture, white people brought horses and guns to North America, changing life completely for the Indians of the mid-west and of the plains.
With regard to the nonsense that that white people bad and red people good, whites and reds fought with and against each other during the early colonial period. Some white with some reds (e.g., the French and their Indian allies), and some other whites and some other reds (the English and their Indian allies). Stir in the Dutch in New Holland and Indian on Indian conflicts, and it all looks rather typically and tragically human.