THE SCALP HUNTERS—Abenaki Ambush at Lovewell Pond – 1725

Scarcely fifty years after helping the Pilgrims survive their first harsh New England winter; the Original People were disillusioned by the European’s negative impact on the traditional Indian way of life. In 1675 the Wampanoag Chief Metacom initiated a series of atrocities and raids on colonial settlements that was called King Philip’s War. The British response to the Indian depredations was brutal and overwhelming. After Metacom was killed in a Narragansett swamp in 1676, hundreds of his supporters were rounded up and sold in the West Indies slave markets; some died in detention camps on Deer Island, and others found refuge with sympathetic tribes to the north.
The French, who claimed all the land in Maine down to the Kennebec River, cynically
used Jesuit priests living among the Indians to incite their converts to raid the English frontier settlements along the Merrimack River and up the coast of Maine as far as Newfoundland. By heeding the Jesuit counsel, the Abenaki Indians became pawns in a global contest between France and England for control of the North American continent. The British, not to be outdone by the French, quickly formed an alliance with the Iroquois Nation to harass New France from the Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes. The two European antagonists and their American Indian allies then engaged in a series of wars—King William’s War 1689-1697; Queen Anne’s War 1702-1713; Governor Dummer’s War with the Eastern Abenaki Indians 1722-1725; King George’s War 1744-1748; The French and Indian War (The Seven Years War) 1754-1763.