Anything that happened four hundred years ago will be difficult to reconstruct accurately. Add to that problem that all of the parties involved had different perspectives about what happened and who was to blame when things didn't go so well. But in the story of the famous relationship of Pilgrims and the Native Americans, one of the key differences in the luck of Early European settlers with Native residents was where those colonies happened to be and their own goals for settling, as well as, the attitude of the Natives around them.
RELATIONS BETWEEN PILGRIMS AND INDIANS IN THE VIRGINIA COLONIES
The Pilgrims that settled around today's Virginia had a rough going of things in general, and their relations among the Indians was only one of their big problems. The first attempt at a colony, on Roanoke Island, vanished entirely and their fate is not known to this day. But even though the story of the most famous of these settlements, Jamestown, has been glorified and been made into a theme-park of sorts over the years, some of the experiences here represented the worst of the bunch.
Recent discoveries have placed the settlement of Jamestown in about the year 1607, about 13 years before Plymouth, and its exact location is debated. But what is known is that about 104 made the rough and perilous journey to scout the area during the first voyage, whose Captain described it like being "tossed around in a dark closet." Even though their adventures inspired everything from living history exhibits to Disney movies, the real stories of these men, less than forty of whom would be alive in a year, and those that would come later, involved things as awful as starvation, cannibalism, murder - both within the colony and on the two sides of the conflict with the natives.
With this in mind, it is little wonder that this group's dealings with the natives were perhaps on the bad extreme of the various attempts of the two very different colonial areas to get along with each other. New museums have opened recently that display skeletons in cabin foundations with bullets or arrows in their bodies, and are among the first from beyond the grave to tell the extent of the problem they aced remaining alive at the hands of nearby natives even if they could survive what nature might throw at them.
The biggest problem that the Jamestown residents (naming the settlement and nearby river for King James who had given them the charter) was that several miscalculations had made their own basic survival very important. There were not even very many with practical skills among the group, rather than gentry who were seeking additional opportunity. Some of them had paid for their voyages from the investment of others back home and felt the immediate pressure to produce. So instead of immediately attempting to bolster themselves up for simple aspects of survival, some of the group scouted potential mining sites before even simple shelters were erected or crops were planted.
The fate of the original men, led by John Smith, eventually settled down to the business of staying alive rather than getting rich - mostly as a result of Smith's bullying. And the lucky few who made it were not without some debt to isolated kindness of the natives. This is where some of the famous Pocahontas story may be true, that she taught him some of her language so he could barter with her tribe, the Powhatans, and some tips for living off the land.
One theory about why her people kept the settlers alive as long as they did was that they were attracted by their weapons, both to stockpile enough to kill eventually larger numbers of settlers, but to fight battles with other tribes that were in contest for this coveted area. Any initially positive trading relations started to deteriorate when Smith's men found not gold but something nearly as valuable to be brought home - tobacco. And because it was so easy to grow in this area that they didn't need the Indians' help - only their land - hostilities began to grow and fester.
And despite Smith's efforts, many of Jamestown's first winters were sheer horror. There was murder and betrayal. First they would eat their horses, then pets, then rats, then boots. And one famous example is of a man that killed, salted and ate his pregnant wife. Disease also played its part to prevent the settlers from making headway and decimated their slave population that later groups brought to help them farm the tobacco, and who, like the Indians, had no immunity, particularly to the deadly smallpox.
So you can see that if such atrocities were not taboo among their own people to enable a "lucky" few to stay alive, such methods would not have been ruled out in their interactions with the Native Americans, who were not as tolerant as those up north because the southern seaboard was much more heavily-populated, (due to better climate and soil) and when the Indians learned that the white men were there to stay, they set about to execute their own list of very bad behavior.
It is true, that in an attempt to survive the pilgrims did some very thoughtless things, like steal food from villages and dig up sacred grave sites for usable items. But before there was anything like out and out warfare, settlers were slowly picked off and their horrible fates were designed to make an example to deter future thoughtlessness. One captured man was roasted and skinned alive as his fingers and toes were cut off one by one as the Indians danced around the flames. Others would find loved ones' body parts including their headshung or spitted over a slowly burning flame. These acts were carefully planned to bring about fear from the settlers to encourage them to keep their distance.
It would obviously be very hard to live in an area, even when times are good, when it is possible that a loved one might meet such a fate. So the two parties increasingly declared hostile intentions. The Indians were afraid of the white man's weapons, seemingly magic technology, and fear that more would come for retribution if there was violence committed on a large scale.
On the other side, one thing that severely disadvantaged the Pilgrims was their population, much reduced by starvation, disease, and little hope of reinforcements. They also had an inferior knowledge of resources of the land to create successful fortification or retreat. So they, too, felt that they had to get creative before any direct assault was attempted. Some of them committed what was perhaps one of the first acts of bio-terrorism by Europeans. As a seemingly kind gesture, a blanket of wool was given to a nearby tribe. The blanket had recently swathed an unlucky soul who died of smallpox,. The Pigrims recognized instantly that natural causes of death were the biggest allies on both sides. Some tribes lost all but one in twenty. to the disease.
So because it was impossible for the Virginia colonies to live amongst a new and horrifyingly unpredictable type of violence many of the natives did end up scattered and killed. And though it seems easy for some to portray the European settlers as cold-hearted conquerors only hoping to commit genocide and claim the continent for themselves, things certainly didn't start out as quite that simplistic and was no one's direct intention.
The natives, like many today, mistook the source of the English hostility inflicted upon the indigenous people. They may have considered the natives "savages" in theory, but during the seventeenth century uncultured natives represented all good potential of human beings, and so were never automatically targeted for obliteration. And this belief certainly caused them to bear them no more ill will than against those at home who had denied them political, economic, or religious freedom. The natives miscalculated when they assumed that the white man would not let them survive if that had been an option that didn't threaten even what harsh existence they had. But unfortunately, it came down to a clash of each group's view of what was necessary for their own survival, and there were very few winners in any of these early groups.
RELATIONS AMONG PILGRIMS AND INDIANS IN THE PLYMOUTH AREA
There are many reasons that the Plymouth colony, while it also had its share of hardships and death, fared better with the natives they would encounter. The first was that the general nature of the New England settlers had a different focus. They were not economic opportunists like the Jamestown settlers. Rather, they were only attempting to flee persecution and therefore did not have to quite so aggressively seek to acquire native land to make a profit to send back home.
Another was the sparsely populated land. It is no surprise that, if given a choice, New Englander or Native alike would prefer southern to New England winters, and thus there were vast areas that were completely unpopulated, making it less of an impossibility that the two groups could live side by side without feeling threatened.by any hostility. The spot where the Plymouth settlers put up their dwellings was a site that had been cleared by a former group of Indians that had been wiped out by smallpox given them by a European trading encounter. Not knowing this, the Plymouth group assumed that the easily available land had been left there by God.
Another nearly miraculous bit of good luck for the Plymouth group was their amazing meeting up with Squanto, an obviously rare American Native that had spent time in Europe and had learned English. He himself had also learned that there were differences from cruel and oppressive Englishmen and those who just attempted to survive and evade that persecution, so he did not automatically view the Plymouth colony with suspicion.
Squanto was responsible for what may have been an amalgamated Thanksgiving feast, with a combination of foods and technologies that the Pilgrims had brought from home and much more vital ones that they had learned to glean from the land to survive. Squanto also helped the group to mitigate other meetings with natives that they would eventually have.
Because it would be a long time before hostilities arose between natives and whites with only this type of interaction, it took a group of Puritans settled nearby to the Plymouth colony (mainly separatists and more tolerant of other's differences) fed natives fears (probably spread from the south) that all Europeans would eventually support a scorched earth policy and do not tolerate natives anywhere near the land they claimed. The intolerance and evangelizing attempts of the Puritans likely aggravated this. They dragged their Puritan neighbors into a war that they likely would not have entered otherwise with the Pequot tribe in 1936, marking almost 20 years of peace in the New England region.
CONCLUSION
Just like some racial groups complain of being painted with one broad brush, so were the groups of Europeans that first settled North America from England and other European countries in the early 17th century. Many of them would have been happy to live side by side with natives in peace if it meant that they could have seen their colonies survival without native aggression, which they found to be of a new and distasteful sort that probably caused great overreaction.
Many of them did not even want to settle and reap profitable harvests from the land to send home to England, but wished to merely survive against hostile odds the best they could so that they could isolate themselves from the oppression they experienced in their homeland. They sought the natives' help when they could and returned it in kind also when they could afford to do so.
Ultimately, the bulk of the conflicts in this period and beyond resulted from the unfortunate mixture of Pilgrims and Indians was one that was doomed from many of their differences in philosophies that they found impossible to overcome. It was increasingly becoming a world that viewed it as a totally foreign notion that land could not be owned, and so the Indians' seemingly primitive views on that subject would not be compatible with the millennial-long tradition of staking claim to a territory and fighting to defend it - much as the Indians' ancestors had probably done when they came across the land bridge from China (Native American ancestors with more European-like views on land ownership that go back to the dawn of civilization) and obliterated the previous population. Their cousins in Meso and South America are proof that such views of land ownership from these settlers were maintained elsewhere.
It is very difficult to know how these problems would be solved today, although there would hopefully be a great deal less violence on both sides, and the luxury to avoid it because hopefully it would not seem necessary for day-to-day survival as it did at the time. And certainly many of the early native war customs and their stunning brutality, involving as much torture as actual killing if not more, would have eventually had to have been brought to an end, even if the early Pilgrims hadn't been the ones to have to do it with their lives. As much as existing tribes and textbooks blame Europeans for their difficulties, anthropological evidence has turned up narratives of battles so bloody on both North and South America as to take as much toll on local population as did smallpox. The challenge will be not what we choose to believe, as there are still two sides to this long story, but whether we can now get along in spite of either version any better than did our ancestors.