"What Has Become of Your Praying to God?": Daniel Gookin's Troubled History of King Philip's War

Daniel Gookin is a well-known figure to historians of seventeenth-century New England, but scholars of early American literature will probably be less familiar with him. As the primary lay colleague of John Eliot in Massachusetts Bay Colony's mission to convert the Indians to Christianity, Gookin supervised the praying Indians' judicial and governmental affairs, and, like Eliot, Gookin was also a dedicated writer on behalf of the mission. But if Eliot has come to be recognized by some as a major Puritan author, Gookin's writerly accomplishments have not yet received much critical attention, despite the fact that two of his extant works—Historical Collections of the Indians in New England and An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England—have long served historians as invaluable resources for an understanding of the mission just before, and during, King Philip's War.¹ Most literature students (and perhaps many nonspecialists) who know about King Philip's War first learn about it by reading Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, a book that I and many other teachers of American literature survey courses assign our students every semester. When I want to impress my own students as efficiently as possible with the value of Daniel Gookin's Doings and Sufferings, I refer them back to the powerful opening of Rowlandson's narrative: "On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about sun-rising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning, and the smoke ascending to heaven" (33). So forceful is the forward momentum of the book that Rowlandson's beginning in medias res hardly seems odd, and students almost never ask what happened before February 10, 1675/6. When I then give students a page or two from Daniel Gookin's history, in which he describes how colonial authorities had received intelligence about the assault on Lancaster from one Christian Indian—James Quannapohit—about three weeks beforehand, and then again from another Christian Indian—Job Kattenanit—only a day or two before the assault,² they begin asking critical questions about King Philip's War that Rowlandson's text does not address; questions such as: Why didn't the Massachusetts Bay authorities do anything with the intelligence about Lancaster? How did the Christian Indians gather this intelligence? Who were these Christian Indians anyway, and why was Rowlandson so "harsh" about them in her narrative?

But if Gookin's text is not much taught in English classes, this is only partly because it offers a less vivid or gripping narrative than Rowlandson's. It may also be that Gookin's book is difficult to "place" or categorize. Even though Doings and Sufferings has had its scholarly advocates, it is not always clear that they are championing the same book. Earlier commentators praised the author of Doings and Sufferings for seeming more modern and rational than his fellow Puritan historians. In 1951, for example, Kenneth Murdock wrote that Gookin's Doings and Sufferings was "admirable both for its liberal and humane ideas and for its sound structure and its even and direct style" (80).³ In Murdock's estimate, "Gookin wrote with the calmness of the true historian and made his case convincing by the impressive marshalling of facts in orderly, dignified, and often moving form" (80). But more recent readers have put the emphasis elsewhere. Louise Breen, in a 2001 study, claims that Gookin's providentialism, rather than his professionalism, is the most powerful aspect of his work. As Breen correctly states, Gookin "placed Christian Indians at the center of the war's providential meaning. In writing [Doings and Sufferings], Gookin effected a jarring reversal of the roles traditionally ascribed to Indians and Englishmen" (192). In particular, Gookin tried to show how "God used the hardships of war to test and strengthen the spiritual mettle of Indian as well as English saints" (192); in doing so, Gookin...