On one side of the ledger may be set innumerable generous records—­of Squanto and Samoset teaching the Pilgrims the ways of the wilds; of Roger Williams buying his lands from the friendly natives; or of William Penn treating with them on his arrival in America.  On the other side of the ledger must be recorded many a cruel and bloody conflict as the frontier rolled westward with deadly precision.  The Pequots on the Connecticut border, sensing their doom, fell upon the tiny settlements with awful fury in 1637 only to meet with equally terrible punishment.  A generation later, King Philip, son of Massasoit, the friend of the Pilgrims, called his tribesmen to a war of extermination which brought the strength of all New England to the field and ended in his own destruction.  In New York, the relations with the Indians, especially with the Algonquins and the Mohawks, were marked by periodic and desperate wars.  Virginia and her Southern neighbors suffered as did New England.  In 1622 Opecacano, a brother of Powhatan, the friend of the Jamestown settlers, launched a general massacre; and in 1644 he attempted a war of extermination.  In 1675 the whole frontier was ablaze.  Nathaniel Bacon vainly attempted to stir the colonial governor to put up an adequate defense and, failing in that plea, himself headed a revolt and a successful expedition against the Indians.  As the Virginia outposts advanced into the Kentucky country, the strife with the natives was transferred to that “dark and bloody ground”; while to the southeast, a desperate struggle with the Tuscaroras called forth the combined forces of the two Carolinas and Virginia.

[Illustration:  From an old print.

VIRGINIANS DEFENDING THEMSELVES AGAINST THE INDIANS]

From such horrors New Jersey and Delaware were saved on account of their geographical location.  Pennsylvania, consistently following a policy of conciliation, was likewise spared until her western vanguard came into full conflict with the allied French and Indians.  Georgia, by clever negotiations and treaties of alliance, managed to keep on fair terms with her belligerent Cherokees and Creeks.  But neither diplomacy nor generosity could stay the inevitable conflict as the frontier advanced, especially after the French soldiers enlisted the Indians in their imperial enterprises.  It was then that desultory fighting became general warfare.

[Illustration:  ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND SPANISH POSSESSIONS IN AMERICA, 1750]

=Early Relations with the French.=—­During the first decades of French exploration and settlement in the St. Lawrence country, the English colonies, engrossed with their own problems, gave little or no thought to their distant neighbors.  Quebec, founded in 1608, and Montreal, in 1642, were too far away, too small in population, and too slight in strength to be much of a menace to Boston, Hartford, or New York.  It was the statesmen in France and England, rather than the colonists in America, who first grasped the significance of the slowly converging empires in North America.  It was the ambition of Louis XIV of France, rather than the labors of Jesuit missionaries and French rangers, that sounded the first note of colonial alarm.