Excerpt from Henry S. Nourse’s “History of the Town of Harvard Massachusetts 1732–1893,” written in 1894.

It didn’t take long after the Pilgrims settled on the shores of Massachusetts for settlements of white immigrants to start springing up further inland. Explorers began investigating the upper Nashaway valley sometime around 1640, finding Indians, at that time encamped “between the Washacum lakes,” eager to trade assorted trinkets for pelts of otter and beaver. Through the traders, word spread among residents of the bay settlements about the attractions of the Nashaway valley region. Traders brought back stories of fertile, gently rolling hillsides, streams abundant with trout and salmon, groves of nut trees, grapes, and berries, and “park-like woodlands” and dense swamp thickets where deer, turkeys, waterfowl and other game were plentiful. They told of the hospitality of the Indian sagamore, or chief, Sholan, whom they described as a “gentle-mannered sachem.” But, according to Nourse, “what stirred their land-greedy hearers to restlessness more than all else … was their description of the broad and almost treeless intervales, stretching for miles along the rivers,” clad in summer with flowering herbs and tall grasses—as desirable a place as any in the country for the pioneer husbandman and his herds.

Soon, immigrants from Dorchester, Charlestown, Boston, and Watertown began settlements in the valley, after buying title to the land from the Indians. For 20 years the white men and Indians lived in apparent harmony, helping each other in many ways. The two races enjoyed a peaceful coexistence until sometime in the late 17th to early 18th century.

While some of the early settlers were “unselfishly devoting their lives to the intellectual and spiritual instruction” of the Indians, “land-grabbers and traders, in their sordid greed, were teaching them all the vices of civilization.” Despite colonial laws, which strictly forbade the sale of alcohol and weapons to the Indians, unscrupulous traders pursued these exchanges with the Natives. As Nourse says, “The contact of the two races then, as always resulted in a degradation of standard in each—a mutual demoralization.” Colonists, rapidly growing in numbers and encroached upon year by year by the reserved rights of the tribe, began to openly show dislike and contempt for the Natives, whom they began to view as “dirty, shiftless, and often besotted.” For their part, it was part of the Indians’ religion never to forget or forgive an injury or an insult. Out of this bad blood grew drunken brawls and skirmishes. The bad feeling was fueled by the indifference of the colonial authorities to the ongoing warfare between the Massachusetts Indians and the Mohegans and Mohawks, which was seen as an affront to the hospitality Sholan and his people had shown to the first settlers in Nashaway valley.

Nourse says that “The final struggle of the combined New England tribes to recover their birthright began in June of 1675,” with the start of King Philip’s War. According to Nourse, it is doubtful that the Indian leader King Philip ever led the clans in the actual conflict, but the war was so-named because “his shrewd policy and artful eloquence … made the contest a desperate one for existence between the two races.”