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Updated: May 19, 2025
After this the war did not entirely cease, but the Christian Indians were allowed to creep back to their old settlements at Nonantum, and even at Natick, where Mr. Eliot continued periodically to visit and instruct them; but after this unhappy war there were only four instead of fourteen towns of Christian Indians in Massachusetts, and a blow had been given to his mission that it never recovered.
Eliot, in company with three others, whose names are not mentioned, having implored the divine blessing on the undertaking, made his first visit to the Indians on the 28th of October, 1646 at a place afterwards called Nonantum; a spot that has the honor of being the first on which a civilized and Christian settlement of Indians was effected within the English colonies of North America.
"If you would see" Lowell "aright," as Walter Scott says of Melrose Abbey, one must be here of a pleasant First day at the close of what is called the "afternoon service." The streets are then blossoming like a peripatetic flower-garden; as if the tulips and lilies and roses of my friend W.'s nursery, in the vale of Nonantum, should take it into their heads to promenade for exercise.
After some little time, he thought the Indians ripe for being taught to live a settled life, and obtained for his congregation "the praying Indians," as they were commonly called a grant of the site of his first instructions. The place was named "Rejoicing," in Indian, a word that soon got corrupted into Nonantum; and, under Mr.
The spot, as he believed, had been indicated to him in answer to prayer, and they named it Natick, or the place of hills. The inhabitants of Nonantum removed thither, and the work was put in hand. A bridge, eighty feet long and nine feet wide, had already been laid across the river, entirely by Indian workmen, under Mr.
These creatures, he argued, have a right to their lives and the pursuit of happiness after their own fashion, and he proposed to help them to enjoy that right. He appealed to a few sympathetic friends and gave two or three acres of land from his own estate, near "Nonantum Hill," where the Apostle Eliot preached to the Indians, and where his iodine springs are located.
Eliot's Indians honestly said, they do so little work at any time that a weekly abstinence from it comes very easily. At Nonantum, indeed, they seem to have emulated the Pharisees themselves in their strictness.
Still he made his Indians at Nonantum hedge and ditch, plant trees, sow cornfields, and saw planks; and some good man in England, whose name he never knew, sent him in 1648 ten pounds for schools among the natives, half of which he gave to a mistress at Cambridge, and half to a master at Dorchester, under whom the Indian children made good progress, and he catechized them himself most diligently by way of teaching both them and the parents who looked on.
The Massachusetts general court a week later endorsed the purposes of Eliot by enacting that the church should take care to send two ministers among the Indians every year to make known to them by the help of an interpreter "the heavenly counsel of God." In four years two colonies of Indians were established, one at Nonantum and the other at Concord.
"If you would see" Lowell "aright," as Walter Scott says of Melrose Abbey, one must be here of a pleasant First day at the close of what is called the "afternoon service." The streets are then blossoming like a peripatetic flower-garden; as if the tulips and lilies and roses of my friend W.'s nursery, in the vale of Nonantum, should take it into their heads to promenade for exercise.
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