Three Episodes of Massachusetts History Author:Charles F. Adams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. A STUDY OF CHURCH AND TOWN GOVERNMENT. chapter{Section 4those points where alone it was possible to cross the swamps. While a forlorn remnant of the M... more »assachusetts, the stricken survivors of plague aixl small-pox, haunted the forest, between the Neponset and the Mon- atoquit there were absolutely no white inhabitants. First Morton and the Merry-Mount company had been rooted out by the magistrates, who afterwards hunted Gardiner into the wilderness; and, so far as those two earliest attempts at settlement were concerned, axe and fire had done the work of obliteration with all possible thoroughness, as Alderman, the pioneer settler at Hingham, found when, in 1634, having had occasion to be in Boston, he undertook to return home by trail instead of by boat. His experience has already been referred to,1 and it was even more severe than that of Phinehas Pratt eleven years earlier ; for, losing his way, Alderman, during three days and nights, wandered through woods and swamps without falling in with a habitation, either house or wigwam, or a human being, white or red. Then, at last, exhausted and starved, with torn clothing and bruised body, he struggled out of the wilderness to find himself in Scituate. The Neponset was the southern limit of the Massachusetts settlement, and the region beyond it remained a wilderness, through which, and beneath the dense tangle of the primeval forest, the sluggish streams that had their sources among the Blue Hills worked their slow way by clogged and crooked channels into the coast-indenting tidal creeks, whose wide margins of spongy salt-marsh were submerged at times of flood. Of the original settlers thereabouts, — the " old planters," as they were called, — the widow of David 1 Supra, 337, 3tJ4. 103-1. "THE MOUNT." 583 Thomson on...« less