This kind of war was alien to the Indigenous peoples.18 According to their ways of war, when relations between groups broke down and conflict came, warfare was highly ritualized, with quests for individual glory, resulting in few deaths. Colonial wars inevitably drew other Indigenous communities in on one side or the other. During the Pequot War, neighboring Narragansett villages allied with the Puritans in hopes of reaping a large harvest of captives, booty, and glory. But after the carnage was done, the Narragansetts left the Puritan side in disgust, saying that the English were “too furious” and “slay[ed] too many men.” After having made the Pequots the enemy, the settlers set out to complete the destruction. Fewer than two hundred half-starved Pequots remained of the two thousand at the beginning of the war. Although they had ceased fighting and were without any means of defense, the settlers started a new attack on the Pequots. The colony commissioned the mercenary Mason and his murderous crew of forty men to burn the few remaining homes and fields.19 Puritan William Bradford wrote at the time in his History of Plymouth Plantation:

Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.20

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 145975