Richard R. Johnson

The Search for a Usable Indian: An Aspect of the Defense of Colonial New England

THE enduring characterization that pits white man against Indian has a satisfying simplicity that has too often obscured a more complex reality. In particular, the widespread assumption that such stereotyped rivalries were a prompt and inevitable consequence of a meeting of the races has distorted our understanding of the formative years of English settlement in North America. It is true that a few early instances of a happier cooperation remain part of the folklore of colonization as testimony to an Indian hospitality that often ripened into active friendship. Yet the descent from coexistence to the incessant hostilities of frontier warfare and western expansion is seemingly all but instantaneous, the product of a few decades of settlement or of half a century at most. Explanations of this change have ranged from contemporary belief in the innate barbarism of the Indians to recent accounts of the equally innate racism, rapacity, and self-righteousness of the whites and more impersonal analyses suggesting a conflict of dissimilar cultures. The changing image of the Indian in literature, from hospitable primitive to treacherous savage, has often been taken as an index of changing white attitudes and actions.1 Antagonisms between the races did undoubtedly form and harden in these years. Yet they did not become absolute, and the harsh rhetoric of white conquest should not be taken as conclusive evidence