Prelude

Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor
William Halsall 

It is difficult to say what the New World looked like before the arrival of large numbers of Europeans. It was not the pristine Eden beloved of so many writers, no place populated by the human species has ever been so, except perhaps the original Garden. We know how that turned out.

Our species is clever, adaptable, curious, and often loving and caring. We are also extraordinarily violent when the mood strikes us. This will be a story of two alien cultures, clashing in the forests and farm fields of that corner of the United States now known as New England. Of course, as warfare and other forms of human endeavor are not easily contained, the story will spill into New York, Pennsylvania, and Canada.

The goal is to tell a story involving characters drawn from four main groups of people. First, of course, were the people who lived in the northeast of what we now know as the United States and the southeastern part of Canada (Quebec) when the Europeans arrived in the area of which two main groups stand out: the Wyandot (Huron) and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Then there were the Europeans: those from England and from France. While the Dutch were in possession of the New Netherlands (what we know as parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), though I don't foresee any of the main characters being from that colony, it could happen. 

No, I haven't forgotten the Abenaki, the Micmac, the Pennacook, the Pequot, the Mohegan, the Nauset, the Narragansett, the Nipmuc, the Woronoco, and the Wampanoag - or any of the other tribes from the region I now inhabit. How could I, many of the place names here came from the language of those peoples. While I don't envisage any of the main characters being from those peoples, you never know what The Muse will decide.

The following wars were fought in this area from 1609 until 1783:

• Beaver Wars 1609-1701
• Pequot War 1636-38
• Kieft's War 1643–45
• Peach Tree War 1655
• Esopus Wars 1659–63
• King Philip's War 1675–78
• Dummer's War 1722–25
• French and Indian War 1754–63
• American Revolutionary War 1775–83

It was a bloody time. I hope to portray the peoples of that time accurately and objectively. I have ancestors in three of the four camps, Haudenosaunee, French, and the "English" (which I use as a generic term for the colonists from Great Britain).

Research is ongoing (I even have a pretty good source for Indian names) and I'm still cogitating on plot lines. One of the characters will have descendants who return to the Old World and fight under Napoléon. Which would, of course, lead into a book on the Napoleonic wars. Am I being too ambitious? Maybe, only time will tell. I'm still thinking of a prequel and a sequel to the just finished book (for which I still need a title, feel free to suggest one in the comments). I have lots of ideas, I only need the time to make them happen.

Be prepared to travel back with me to the days when the frontier was not far from Boston and the people on that frontier had harsh lives.

Here's a taste:

Europeans had been visiting what is now New England for at least a century prior to the

landing of the Pilgrims in 1620, drawn there by the plentiful amounts of fish along the coast. The English and French fishermen were shorter than the natives, dressed in strange garb and were generally unbearably dirty, many having never had a bath in their entire lives, as opposed to the natives, who were scrupulously clean. The natives found the newcomers often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to them like basic tasks, but they also made useful and beautiful goods such as copper kettles, glittering colored glass and steel knives and hatchets. Moreover, they were willing to exchange these goods for furs that the natives looked upon as cheap and useful only for blankets.

On March 22, 1621, a Native American delegation walked through what is now southern

New England to meet with a group of foreigners who had taken over a recently deserted Indian settlement. The party was led by Massasoit, the sachem of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose coalition of several dozen villages that controlled most of southeastern Massachusetts. Accompanying him was Samoset, sachem of an allied group to the north, and Tisquantum, a distrusted captive, whom Massasoit had brought along as an interpreter.

Massasoit was an able politician, but he faced a thorny dilemma. About five years

before, most of his subjects had died as a result of contacting European diseases. Whole villages had been depopulated. Adding to this disaster was the fact that the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west, had been spared because of a lack of contact with the Europeans. As a result, Massasoit believed that it was just a matter of time before their enemies would realize their weakness and overrun them. The only solution he saw was to court the Europeans and form an alliance with them. This alliance between the Wampanoag and the English colonists marked a crucial moment in American history. (PDF)

That bit about many of Massasoit's subjects having succumbed to disease? According to one source I've read, the coast for 200 miles and 40 miles inland had been scourged by diseases brought by European fishermen.

A once vibrant set of communities brought low by disease.

Damn.

What a setting for a story!