he Wampanoags, who started King Philip's War, remained peaceful until 1675 under the leadership of their sachem, Massasoit or Osamequin. They found their alliance with the settlers a useful counterbalance to the depredations of their more numerous traditional enemy, the Narragansetts.
The Pilgrim's successors, the Puritans, arrived in greater numbers in the 1630s and later and cleared large portions of the eastern parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut. The indians had not bargained for such a large influx. By the early 1670s, the colonists outnumbered the indians by 60,000 to 18,000 (Drake 142). "From the day when the first English settlers landed on New England shores and built permanent homes there, King Philip's War became virtually inevitable. Here in the wilderness two mutually incompatible ways of life confronted each other" (Leach 1).
Until 1637, the indians in the New England colonies and the settlers co-existed with only relatively minor incidents of violence. Mutually beneficial trade in furs and other items flourished. Some of the colonial leaders, such as the Reverend John Eliot and Roger Williams of Rhode Island, attempted to convert the indians to Christianity and urged tolerance on their compatriots; however, the dominant attitude of the Puritans toward the indians was a mixture of fear and contempt. Leach says that they looked "down upon them as complete savages, little better than wild beasts, perhaps even children of the Devil" (6). Edmonds says that "unlike the Frenchman, the English settler was temperamentally unable to accept the Indian for what he was . . . he [the Englishman] was too race-conscious and . . . instinctively antagonistic" (145).
The most serious conflict arose over the possession of the land, large portions of which were need to support the indians' pastoral economy. The Puritans basically regarded the land in the wilderness as free for the taking. They rejected the view expressed by Ro...