![]() Indeed, until the plague it had been a town. Pilgrims simply took them over-in particular, Plymouth, with its “beautiful cleared fields, planted in corn, and its useful harbor and its ‘brook of fresh water.’ It was a lovely site for a town. ![]() “John Winthop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague ‘miraculous.’” He was amazed that the land had been emptied of Indians by smallpox, attributing this blessing to God, who ‘hath thereby cleared our title to this place.’” Indians had already readied lands for farming. The Pilgrims who landed in New England met with little resistance from the native Indian population because the Indians had been infected with European diseases (usually thought to have been mainly smallpox) first by itinerant British and French fishermen in the decades before 1620 and then by the Pilgrims themselves. ![]()
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