“The Indians will often travel thus three or four hundred miles singly, or two or three in company, and lurk about their enemy’s borders for several weeks, in hopes to revenge the death of a near relation or dear friend. Indeed they give themselves so very much up to revenge, that this passion seems to gnaw their souls, and gives them no rest till they satisfy it. It is this delight in revenge, that makes all barbarous nations cruel; and the curbing such passions is one of the happy effects of being civilized.”

                                                                        – Cadwallader Colden

The HISTORY of the FIVE INDIAN NATIONS Of Canada ( LONDON: T. Osborne 1747 )

         1704, the North American colonies of New England and New France are a hotbed of religious zeal and vitriolic hatred. (The sparsely populated French colonies of Canada from Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of Mexico and the settlements along the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to New Orleans are called New France. The English colonies along the Atlantic coastline from Maine to Georgia are called New England; Florida is part of New Spain) It is a time of hand to hand combat with hatchet, knife and club, and a time when heroic incursions into primeval forests are daily occurrences. A time when two ancient and very conservative cultures - Stone Age Amerind and aristocratic European - come into contact, clashing incessantly as they mingle in a kind of human chemistry that will become a wholly new civilization; and while immersed in the violent agitation of continuous warfare, the robust trade and social intercourse between the combatants never stops for an instant. The strong pull of mutual dependency draws them ever together, and the uncomfortable closeness sparks flashpoints. At the core of this all encompassing love-hate relationship, an astonishing variety of new cultural strains congeal. Three centuries later, the Space Age American civilization is hardly aware of the tumultuous process from which it springs.