rative with substantial detail regarding major events in American history
as seen from the perspectives of several influential Native Americans, as
well as non-Indians who helped shape the same aspects of history. The
account includes excerpts from some of the greatest oratory in American
history; it is presented in the participants' own words as often as possible.

Our journey begins with one of the earliest and most controversial im-
migrants to America from England, Roger Williams. Immigrating to the
Puritan settlements in and near Boston within little more than a decade
after the first arrivals, Williams came to America from England as a Puritan
clergyman intent on proselytizing the native peoples. Errands in the wil-
derness changed the way Williams looked at his own culture and contrib-
uted to his dissent from Puritan doctrines. When Williams was asked by
Puritan clerics to compose a treatise on who owned America, he contested
Puritan assumptions that God had made the land available for the immi-
grants by striking many of the native inhabitants dead of disease. (The
immigrants had no understanding of how they themselves were vectors for
smallpox and other illnesses.) Williams held that the Indians owned the
land by right of prior occupancy, and that the Puritans had no superior
right to native land.

Soon thereafter, Williams was ordered deported from the Puritan colony.
The Puritan authorities meant to ship Williams and his intellectual "infec-
tions" back to England. Instead, Williams, with significant aid from local
native peoples, escaped Puritania to found Providence Plantations, later
renamed Rhode Island. The land to which Williams and his followers es-
caped was donated to them by its native owners.

Williams became a major diplomatic negotiator between Puritan author-
ities and local native peoples and came to know most of the major native
leaders of his day. Williams was able to communicate with most of these
leaders in their own languages. One of the most notable was Williams'
friend Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. Metacom led the
remnants of several New England native nations in a final explosion of
violence that ended with his own death in 1676. Before he was drawn and
quartered by the colonists, Metacom described to Williams how the loss of
land was destroying his people. He likened the land to a canoe in which
his people were riding on stormy seas. Before the war was over, Williams
and Metacom had reason to reflect on the cost of war to friendship: Meta-
com was unable to prevent Indians from burning much of Providence, in-
cluding Williams' own home.

Three-quarters of a century after Metacom died, English and French en-
claves were firmly established on most of the Atlantic seaboard and along
the Saint Lawrence River, respectively. The major Native American power
in the contest for the land between Britain and France was the Haudeno-
saunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, located in upstate New York along the fu-
ture route of the Erie Canal. This volume's second chapter describes how

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