Between 1616 and 1619 and 1619 in the years immediately before the Mayflower

brought the pilgrims to land on Plymouth Rock a great plague decimated the

native populations of what became New England.

Some estimates reckon that between 75 and 90 percent of the indigenous population died, depopulating

village after village, leaving no one alive to bury the bodies.

The disease itself remains a mystery, but there's universal agreement it came from Europeans, probably

French traders who shipwrecked on Cape Cod a few years earlier and were taken prisoner.

Europeans were not vulnerable to it, whatever it was, and didn't recognize it either.

It wasn't intentional despite what you might have heard.

But the pilgrims didn't mind that it had decimated the Algonquin tribes and left the land

depopulated.

They attributed it to the benevolent hand of God, somewhat stretching the definition of

benevolent.

But the mass dying in the disruptive presence of a still tiny

British colony upset the delicate pre-existing political balance between the tribes of the region.

And now competitors were encroaching on Massachusetts and Rhode Island from the south and the west.

The Dutch and the French were mucking about too, and of course God was still in the game knocking people off here and there when someone besieged him in just the right way.

Trade was developing, an uneasy balance was established, but it wasn't exactly like the

pictures of Thanksgiving.

The native population recognized that if you gave the English an inch they took a mile and a half and all the corn as well.

By 1636, 16 years after the pilgrims arrived, all this came to a head.

In the first large-scale armed conflict between English colonists and native tribes in New England,

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