Praying Indians

To Christianize the native people in Massachusetts Bay Colony was one of the purposes set forth by the founders. Indians who converted to Christianity were called Praying Indians.

When John Eliot, a Puritan minister in Roxbury, Massachusetts Bay Colony,  accepted the post of missionary to the Indians, he
immediately set about learning the language of the natives and compiling a translation of the Old and New Testaments, the Algonquin Bible. 1000 copies of the Bible were printed in Boston, but because of the destruction of these Bibles during the War, there is no complete extant Bible although individual pages still remain. These Bibles were used to teach the native converts not just the Bible, but how to read and write their own language.

By 1675 there were one thousand Christian Indians living in 12 praying villages in Massachusetts Bay Colony and 2 in Plymouth Colony.


Conversion came about for many reasons. The survivors of the epidemics noted that the English did not suffer nearly so many deaths as the native people. Their logic, therefore, told them that the Englishman's god must be a stronger god than theirs. Others converted because they saw many advantages of living under English protection. By 1640 the English settlers began to outnumber the native population; the tribes were getting weaker as the English were getting stronger. The natives who converted felt safer living under English laws. Gathered into "praying" villages with ample land for hunting and planting, the Praying Indians ensured themselves a liberal and free land base.

This, of course, was devastating to the tribes who were already decimated from the epidemics of European diseases. Losing a tribal family to Christianity was like losing a family to the English. The sachems did their best to keep their people from abandoning their tribe by continuing to obtain the English goods - clothes, pots, knives, tools, etc. - that they all desired. In order to do this, however, sachems were forced to sell off their land to the English. It was this issue, as well as the ever-increasing control that the English were exerting over the native people, that caused them to try to reclaim their land in King Philip's War.

The Praying Indians were caught between the two combatants. Half of them remained loyal to their new beliefs and the English; others defected to the hostile natives. How were the English to tell them apart? A great many colonists saw every native as an enemy and persecuted the Praying Indians in their communities.

To "protect" the Praying Indians from these prejudicial colonists in Massachusetts, most of the loyal Praying Indians in the colony were sent to Deer Island in Boston Bay in late 1675 and early 1676. There they were left to fend for themselves in one of the most brutal winters ever seen in New England. Their food was scavenged at the beach - clams, mussels, crabs. They were not allowed boats to fish from. Over half of the Praying Indians died that winter from cold and starvation. Others were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Those who survived returned to the colony in May, 1676. Their descendants now form the Historical Nipmuc Tribe in Webster, Massachusetts.

Return Home