The doomed chief, or, Two hundred years ago Thompson Daniel P. The public mind, for the last few months, had been laboring under a very unusual, and a constantly increasing excitement. Among all classes of men there evidently existed a deep, though unacknowledged consciousness, that the calculations of selfishness, craft, and fraud, instead of obedience to the simple dictates of justice and honesty, had latterly characterized their intercourse with the Indians.
This, as in most other cases of conscious wrong doing, had made them, especially the leading men of the colony, peculiarly sensitive respecting the relations in which they stood with the red men, filling them with jealousies, suspicions, and apprehensions, lest the latter, impressed doubtless with the same or livelier convictions of their wrongs, should be secretly nourishing thoughts and schemes of redress and retribution. The colonists were also fully conscious that the injured race were now no longer the comparatively harmless and contemptible foes they were in times past, when bows and arrows and war-clubs were their most formidable weapons, whole scores of which were scarcely good against a single musket in battle; but that they had, at this period, almost universally supplied themselves with fire arms, in the fatal use of which, when occasion required, they had no superiors, even among the most expert sharp-shooters of the old world.
And especially and painfully conscious were likewise the leading colonists, that in addition to the advantages thus possessed by their apprehended foes, there had now sprung up among them a Master Spirit who was believed to be fully capable of combining, and giving direction to all the various elements of their disaffection with fearful effect.
And it was not without reason they feared that he, insulted, fined, and dragooned as he had been into hollow treaties of peace, would not long remain inactive or foregoβunless prompt and decided measures were taken to prevent the execution of what was believed to be his bold and settled designβa war of extermination against the colonists of New England.
Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia. The doomed chief, or, Two hundred years ago doomed chief, or two hundred years ago by the author of "The Green Mountain boys" Thompson Daniel P. Daniel Pierce p. Evans G. Philadelphia Boston , PS Original decorated brown cloth, faded. Forms part of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library. Sponsored by the Andrew W. The electronic text does not contain normalizations of non-standard forms.
