of the one race may have marauded, and members of the other showed
themselves highhanded, impatient, and unjust, but the majority on each side
appeared to have settled into a kind of amity. Indians came singly or in
parties from their villages to the white men's settlements, where they
traded corn and venison and what not for the magic things the white man
owned. A number had obtained the white man's firearms, unwisely sold or
given. The red seemed reconciled to the white's presence in the land; the
Indian village and the Indian tribal economy rested beside the English
settlement, church, and laws. Doubtless a fragment of the population of
England and a fragment of the English in Virginia saw in a pearly dream the
red man baptized, clothed, become Christian and English. At the least, it
seemed that friendliness and peace might continue.

In the spring of 1622 a concerted Indian attack and massacre fell like a
bolt from the blue. Up and down the James and upon the Chesapeake,
everywhere on the same day, Indians, bursting from the dark forest that was
so close behind every cluster of log houses, attacked the colonists. Three
hundred and fortyseven English men, women, and children were slain. But
Jamestown and the plantations in its neighborhood were warned in time. The
English rallied, gathered force, turned upon and beat back to the forest
the Indian, who was now and for a long time to come their open foe.

There followed upon this horror not a day or a month but years of organized
retaliation and systematic harrying. In the end the great majority of the
Indians either fell or were pushed back toward the upper Pamunkey, the
Rappahannock, the Potomac, and westward upon the great shelf or terrace of
the earth that climbed to the fabled mountains. And with this westward move
there passed away that old vision of wholesale Christianizing.