Practice questions: Interactions Between American Indians and Europeans

Answer: (B) English farms and roaming livestock spread onto lands Native people farmed.

1. John Eliot's praying towns did gather converts by the 1670s, but they did not bring English cattle into Wampanoag cornfields.
2. As English towns multiplied, their cattle and hogs roamed into unfenced Native fields, and land disputes like this one helped cause Metacom's War in 1675.
3. The Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663 regulated colonial shipping; they had nothing to do with livestock on Native land.
4. By the 1670s beaver were scarce in southern New England and the fur trade had moved north and west, so trade debt was not the issue here.

Answer: (C) He was a Quaker from a colony that was left out of the alliance fighting the war.

1. Easton held office in Rhode Island, which had no authority over Plymouth's courts or its land dealings.
2. Puritan ministers such as Increase Mather wrote of the war as God's judgment; Easton was a Quaker official who also faulted English conduct.
3. Quakers opposed war, and Rhode Island stood outside the New England Confederation, so Easton could urge a peace that protected Native and English property alike.
4. Edward Randolph came from London in 1676 to report on New England's trade; Easton was an elected officer of Rhode Island.

Answer: (A) Plymouth was claiming the power to try and execute Wampanoag men.

1. By trying and executing Wampanoag men for a killing among Native people, Plymouth claimed authority over Metacom's people, a direct challenge to Wampanoag sovereignty.
2. Mount Hope remained Wampanoag land until the war; Plymouth gained it only after Metacom's defeat.
3. It was Plymouth, not the confederation, that made Metacom surrender guns in 1671, four years before this trial.
4. Plymouth began selling Native captives overseas later in 1675, after the fighting had started.

Answer: (D) Native groups joined colonists to fight Native rivals for their own reasons.

1. The Anglo-French wars that drew in Native allies began with King William’s War in 1689, and no French force fought in New England’s war of 1675–1676.
2. Many Native nations, including the Mohegan, Pequot and Mohawk, fought against Metacom, so there was no single united front.
3. New England did sell captives overseas, but that was a punishment imposed on enemies, not an alliance Native people chose.
4. The Mohegan under Uncas had fought the Narragansett for decades and joined the English to defeat an old rival, as many Native nations allied with Europeans against Native enemies.

Answer: (B) show that Christian Native people had suffered unjustly in the war

1. Gookin opposed the internment and was threatened by other colonists for defending the converts.
2. Gookin had overseen the Christian Indian towns since 1656 and wrote to defend converts whom Massachusetts interned in 1675, most of whom had stayed loyal to the colony.
3. Gookin had supported John Eliot's missions for two decades and wrote to defend the converts' loyalty, not to call the missions a failure.
4. Captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson's described English captives; Gookin wrote about Native converts held by Massachusetts.

Answer: (C) Native numbers fell sharply, and English towns spread onto land survivors lost.

1. Plymouth took Mount Hope and sold or confined many Wampanoag; it did not recognize their independence.
2. The New England Confederation dated from 1643, had already coordinated this war, and was dissolved in 1684.
3. Thousands of Native people died, were sold into slavery or fled north and west, and the survivors could no longer stop English settlement.
4. England revoked the charter in 1684 because Massachusetts defied royal trade laws and authority, not as a penalty for the war.

Answer: (A) Frontier farmers wanted Native land and resented the governor's planter allies.

1. Poorer frontier settlers wanted war on Native peoples and their land, and they blamed Governor Berkeley, who governed for the wealthy planters, for failing to protect them.
2. Planters disliked the Navigation Acts, but Bacon's rising targeted Berkeley's Native policy and his favorites, not trade law.
3. Virginia had an established church, but religion played little part in a revolt over frontier defense, land and power.
4. Flight to Spanish Florida is linked to South Carolina and the Stono Rebellion of 1739, not to Virginia in 1676.

Answer: (C) Encomienda demands for tribute and labor, and raids on Pueblo kivas

1. The New Laws were meant to protect Native subjects and dated from more than a century earlier; they do not explain the Pueblo grievances of the 1670s.
2. The casta system shaped status in Spanish cities, but Pueblo grievances centered on tribute, forced labor and attacks on their religion.
3. Even during the famine, colonists collected corn and cloth under the encomienda and officials drafted Pueblo labor, while friars raided kivas, and these pressures drove the revolt.
4. Native peoples did adopt Spanish animals, but that exchange did not cause the revolt; horses spread far more widely after it.

Answer: (A) suppress Pueblo religious leaders and the ceremonies they led

1. In 1675 Governor Juan Francisco Treviño had forty-seven Pueblo religious leaders arrested for sorcery and hanged three before armed Tewa men forced the others' release.
2. Encomienda tribute was collected from households in corn and cloth; these arrests targeted religious leaders, not unpaid tribute.
3. Spanish governors did use Pueblo fighters against Apache raiders, but these men were jailed and punished, not enlisted.
4. No French traders reached New Mexico in 1675; France's posts lay far to the north and east.

Answer: (D) Leaders got towns that spoke different languages to rise together.

1. The rising began in the towns on August 10 and Santa Fe was besieged afterward, so it was planned, not a spreading riot.
2. Friars and governors did quarrel over Pueblo labor before 1680, but Pueblo leaders organized the revolt against both and killed twenty-one friars.
3. Po'pay planned from Taos with other leaders, but each Pueblo town kept its own government and there was no hereditary king.
4. Runners carried the plan from Taos south to Isleta, so towns that spoke Tewa, Tiwa, Keres and other languages rose together on August 10.

Answer: (B) Spanish colonists withdrew south, and Spain lost the Pueblo towns until 1692.

1. Po'pay was never captured; the Spanish fled, and the Pueblo towns ran their own affairs for twelve years.
2. After breaking out of Santa Fe, Otermín led about a thousand survivors south, and Spain did not rule the northern Pueblos again until Diego de Vargas returned in 1692.
3. France did not found Louisiana until 1699 and never controlled Santa Fe.
4. Spain made no treaty with the rebels; it tried to return in 1681 and reclaimed the province under Vargas in 1692.

Answer: (B) Complaints about forced labor recorded in New Mexico before 1680

1. Reports on the 1693 reconquest describe events after the revolt and cannot show how officials treated Pueblo workers before 1680.
2. Records made before 1680 by people other than the accused officials could independently confirm whether such beatings, seizures and unpaid labor were common.
3. Who returned after 1692 says nothing about how officials treated Pueblo workers in the 1670s.
4. A chronicle built on the same declaration only repeats it, so it cannot check it independently.

Answer: (C) colonial demands on Native labor than by settlers taking Native farmland

1. No rival empire was involved in New Mexico in 1680; in both regions Native people fought the colonists who lived among them.
2. The fur trade mattered little in New Mexico, and raids on kivas were a major Pueblo grievance.
3. New England's fast-growing settler population mainly wanted Wampanoag land, while New Mexico's few colonists lived on Pueblo labor and crops, which Po'pay told the towns to stop providing.
4. The burdens Pueblo people resented came from local colonists, officials and friars, not from royal taxes set in Spain.

Answer: (D) Mohegan and Pequot warriors fought for the English against Metacom.

1. The Deer Island internment came from colonial suspicion of Native people, not from a Native leader choosing to fight beside colonists.
2. Easton's plan for arbitration was an English attempt at mediation, not a Native alliance against other Native people.
3. The Sassamon trial extended Plymouth's courts over the Wampanoag, the kind of pressure that caused the war.
4. Like the Mohegan and Pequot, longtime rivals of the Wampanoag, Juan de Ye's Pecos fighters joined a colonial army against other Native towns for reasons of their own.

Answer: (A) Pueblo towns could defend their lands through Spanish courts and officials.

1. Spanish rule returned in a less harsh form, and Pueblo towns used legal channels such as this protector’s petition to defend their land.
2. A petition asking the Spanish governor to act shows a town working inside Spanish law, not outside it.
3. In the early 1700s colonists in New Mexico were still fewer than Pueblo people and depended on them for labor and defense.
4. After 1692 missionaries tolerated more Pueblo ceremonies than before the revolt, not fewer.

Answer: (A) New France had few colonists and relied on Native allies for furs and defense

1. In 1681 New France had fewer than ten thousand colonists, so it depended on Native hunters and warriors, and a general peace protected that trade and alliance system.
2. Large tobacco farms marked the English Chesapeake; New France's small farms along the St. Lawrence did not drive this treaty.
3. Forced Native labor in silver mines was a pattern of New Spain; New France had no such mines.
4. Jesuit missionaries sought converts by persuasion among allied nations, and the treaty dealt with war and trade, not baptism.

Answer: (D) Native nations used rivalry between empires to protect their own interests.

1. English officials read the deed as a surrender of land, but the Haudenosaunee kept dealing with France and largely stayed out of Queen Anne's War (1702–1713).
2. No such Anglo-French agreement existed; the two empires were at war again by 1702.
3. French and allied attacks in the 1690s had cost the Haudenosaunee heavily, which pushed them toward peace.
4. By seeking English protection for their hunting grounds at Albany while making peace with France at Montreal, the Haudenosaunee kept both empires as partners and neither as master.

Answer: (C) Lenape leaders protested the walk and refused to leave the land it claimed.

1. Penn's earlier purchases were the background the proprietors cited; they do not show that the Lenape accepted the 1737 boundary.
2. Selling the land shows what the Penns gained, not whether the Lenape agreed to the walk's result.
3. Lenape observers objected that the walkers ran on a cleared path, and Lenape families stayed on the land until Pennsylvania brought in the Haudenosaunee in 1742 to order them out.
4. New Sweden and New Netherland traded on the Delaware decades before 1737, which says nothing about this deed.

Answer: (B) A Native confederacy used its English alliance to command other Native peoples.

1. Canasatego sided with Pennsylvania and ordered the Lenape off the land, so the two peoples were divided, not united.
2. Through the Covenant Chain, the Haudenosaunee claimed to speak for the Lenape and enforced the Walking Purchase, gaining standing with Pennsylvania at the Lenape's expense.
3. Pennsylvania's officials invited the Haudenosaunee to Philadelphia to pressure the Lenape into leaving.
4. The order came from an ally of the English at a council in Philadelphia; France had no part in it.

Answer: (D) New France relied on Native trade partners, while New England took Native land.

1. France barred Huguenots and other Protestants from New France, while New England was itself a Protestant society.
2. Drafting Native labor for missions was a Spanish pattern, as in New Mexico; New France depended on Native hunters as trading partners.
3. Few French families emigrated, which is why New France stayed far smaller than New England.
4. With fewer than ten thousand colonists, New France lived by the fur trade and needed Native partners, while New England's sixty thousand settlers spread onto Native land.

Answer: (A) tolerating more Pueblo ceremonies while still drafting Pueblo workers

1. After 1692 Spain did not restore the encomienda and missionaries allowed more Pueblo ceremonies, though labor drafts went on: a limited accommodation of Pueblo culture.
2. The encomienda was not restored in New Mexico after the reconquest, although officials continued to draft Pueblo labor.
3. Removal to reserved lands was a later U.S. policy; the Pueblo towns stayed in place and defended their land in Spanish courts.
4. Spain did bring colonists back in 1693, but they remained few and depended on Pueblo food, labor and soldiers.

Answer: (B) a Puritan account that presented captivity as a trial and mercy from God

1. That describes John Easton's relation of the war; Rowlandson was a Puritan minister's wife writing about her own captivity.
2. Rowlandson titled her book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and read her suffering and ransom as God’s testing and mercy; it went through four editions in 1682.
3. Daniel Gookin wrote that defense of the Christian Indians interned on Deer Island; Rowlandson wrote about her own captivity.
4. That describes Nathaniel Bacon's Declaration of 1676 against Governor Berkeley; Rowlandson wrote a religious account of her captivity.

Answer: (C) Wampanoag complaints that the English cheated sachems in land deals

1. Bacon's followers in 1676 wanted war on Native peoples; Teedyuscung was a Native leader protesting the loss of his people's land.
2. Encomienda tribute took goods and labor, while Teedyuscung protested the loss of land through a disputed deed.
3. Metacom's council told Easton in 1675 that the English cheated sachems and claimed more land than they had agreed to sell, as the Lenape said of the Walking Purchase.
4. The 1701 Albany deed asked for English protection of hunting grounds, an alliance request rather than a protest against fraud.

Answer: (D) the Mohawk's alliance with New York, built on years of trade at Albany

1. Horses spread onto the Plains mainly after 1680 and played no part in Mohawk warfare in the Northeast.
2. The Mohawk had fought New France and its Native allies for decades in the Beaver Wars; their trading partners were the Dutch and then the English.
3. Praying towns were Puritan missions for southern New England Algonquians; the Mohawk lived in New York, outside Eliot's missions.
4. The Mohawk had traded furs for Dutch and then English guns at Fort Orange, now Albany, and were New York's allies when they struck Metacom's camp.