This episode begins in March 1621, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, when Massasoit, the leading sachem of the Wampanoag, negotiated with a ragged group of English colonists. The pale-skinned Pilgrim foreigners were in desperate need of Native help. Massasoit’s people had been decimated by unexplained sickness, and he calculated that an alliance with the foreigners could help protect them. A half-century later, as war flared between the English colonists and a confederation of New England Indians, the wisdom of Massasoit’s diplomatic gamble seemed less clear. English immigration, mistreatment, lethal epidemics, and environmental degradation had brought the Indians’ way of life to the brink of disaster. ​​