Charles A. Nelson , A. M., Waltham, past, present and its industries, with an historical sketch of Watertown from its settlement in 1630 to the incorporation of Waltham, January 15, 1739.

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[60] named Tim Hawkins, to supply his want. They met by appointment on Prospect Hill, where a bargain was made. The Indian received an old fire-lock, a horn of powder, and some bullets, in return for three beaver-skins.

Within a week Cutstomach was seen in possession of a gun, and some of his company acknowledged that he had obtained it of Hawkins. Tim was accordingly taken before the magistrate. The misdemeanor was proven, and he was publicly whipped at the whipping-post beside the block-house, and branded on the cheek with a hot iron. The skins were returned, and the fire-lock was taken from the Indian.

Colby's Notes.

In less than two years after the extermination of the Pequots, forty-four years before William Penn founded Philadelphia, and one hundred years before the incorporation of Waltham, the General Court of Massachusetts, March 12, 1638-9 appointed a Commissioner ‘to agree with the Indians for the land within the bounds of Watertown, Cambridge, and Boston.’¹ In the fall of 1646 John Eliot began his missionary labors with the Indians across the Charles River, and five years later the Indian village and church of Natick were formed by him. After his death the church ceased to flourish, grew weaker and weaker by reason of the death of some of its members, and the treacherous persecution of others, until in 1716, threescore and ten years after the commencement of his labors, there was no church, and but few Indians were resident there.

From 1637 to 1675, the Indians gave little or no trouble to the Massachusetts settlers; but on the 24th of June of the latter year they opened the terrible King Philip's war by attacking the town of Swanzey. August 22, 1675, the first attack was made upon Lancaster, in which William Flagg, probably the son of Thomas Flagg² of Watertown, was slain. Less than a month later, September

2 Mass. Records, 1. 254.

3 Thomas Flagg was the proprietor in 1644 of two lots, one being 20 acres in the 1st Great Dividend, next to the Beaver Brook Plowlands. He was eight times chosen one of the Selectmen of the town previous to and including 1687. He lost his left eye by a gunshot accident. Probably the ancestor of all bearing that name in this country.—Bond.