In the early seventeenth century, when Englishmen began to plant permanent settlements in the New World, Captain John Smith made the acquaintance of some impressive Indians who lived on the Susquehanna River above Chesapeake Bay. Smith portrayed them to an astonished bookbuying world as giants. One of them, he wrote, was so huge that the calf of his leg was "three quarters of a yard about.¹

In the midnineteenth century, when Americans were driving Indians of every tribe farther and farther west, Boston brahmin Francis Parknian made the acquaintance of some historical sources that mentioned the Susquehannock's. With characteristic artistry, Parkman exterminated those Indians in a conflict with the Iroquois Five Nations, thus enabling the Iroquois to extend "their conquests and their depredations from Quebec to the Carolinas.^"2

There have been more valid accounts since, but the power of art over fact has never been better demonstrated. Though Parkman's extermination had exactly the same existence in reality as Smith's giants, both Smith and Parkman can be purchased readily today in many editions. The works of the men who corrected them circulate in small numbers among specialists.³

Though scholars now reject the myths of Smith and Parkman, little has been done to find out what the actual facts were. The effort should be made, simply in order to get the story right. However, there is an extra reward for the job. In negative terms an archaeologist writes, "The major events of Susquehannock history were mere byproducts of the history of the Iroquois and of the European settlements."⁴   His "mere" is debatable; when his remark is put positively it means that Susquehannock history is part of colonial history. The seventeenth century was a period of ethnocultural adaptation and conflict for all the peoples of the New World, white and red alike, and their histories were mutual and reciprocal. Lack of understanding of the Susquehannock's prevents us from properly understanding the colonies. Knowledge of the Susquehannocks affords explanations, for example of the strange behavior of New York's governors as they watched with apparent unconcern the raids of the Iroquois into Maryland and Virginia. We discover why Pennsylvania escaped the raids even before William Penn appeared. We come upon the scene in which the "covenant chain" of Indians under Iroquois leadership was forged, and we see the roles played by Europeans in its creation. We learn how empires and provinces made undeclared and unrecorded war upon each other through Indian instrumentalities.

And, of course, there are the Susquehannock's themselves. No one has yet explained satisfactorily the strange circumstances under which they were attacked and dispersed from their homeland. The thesis of this study is that they were dispersed as the consequence of Lord Baltimore's efforts to seize and annex the Delaware Bay colony to Maryland. The Iroquois, far from conquering the Susquehannock's, provided sanctuary and support for them. Baltimore's aggressions boomeranged: his attacks on the Susquehannock's brought bloody reprisals against his province's settlers and a weakening of his political controls; his attacks on the Delaware Bay colony alienated the provinces that might have prevented the reprisals or cut them short; his selfcreated isolation weakened his claims in the boundary dispute that came into being with the chartering of Pennsylvania, effectually truncating instead of expanding his province. After the overthrow of Baltimore's government by revolution, the Susquehannock's reconstituted their "nation," and were recognized by treaty once again.

This study traces the varying relations of power and dependency among specific Indian peoples and specific European colonies. It relies on no "laws" of nature or history, and it recognizes no such ideological abstractions as "savagery" or "civilization." The study proceeds by identification and analysis of critical issues and events, together with description of the initiatives and responses of particular persons and groups. The moment of greatest mystery, the period from 1673 to 1677, is at the climax, but it is put in perspective in the time span from about 1640 to about 1685. Brief notice is also taken of earlier and later years.

This is the first time that a consecutive narrative has put into one context the superficially disparate phenomena mentioned above. Accordingly it may be helpful to say a word here about the sources and method I have used. Except for one or two happy accidents, I lay no claim to discovering new sources of information. A limited corpus of documents has survived from the seventeenth century, and most of my references will be recognized by specialists. What I have tried to do is to compare hitherto unrelated sets of data and read fresh meaning into them. Having earlier made the discovery that political papers of the colonial era were often written deceitfully, especially those dealing with Indian affairs, I have tried to read between the lines as well as on them.5 Not many historians of the period have been willing to venture far in that direction, and their hesitation is understandable. A considerable amount of hypothesizing is sometimes required to hook together a few fragments of information. Nevertheless, I have taken the risks of imaginative error because the alternative, it seems to me, is to remain enslaved to the deceptions and purposes of the source writers. Rather than repeat ancient error, I would prefer to originate my own. Lest depreciation be overdrawn, let me suggest that this method has more to recommend it than personal eccentricity. There is too much of going around in circles in what is loosely and inaccurately called frontier history. At the least, my theses get out of some wellworn ruts; if they are wrong, perhaps they will stimulate a very necessary rethinking by other scholars. I have aimed at much more than this least goal, and I have presented my narrative without diffidence because I think it hangs together. In the circumstances, readers are entitled to demand all the evidence available, so documentation is given with some fullness. I suggest that the article will read most easily if reference to the notes is postponed until after completion of the narrative text.