Many
European colonists believed that it was their mission to convert people to Christianity. They
often regarded believers in other faiths as heathens whose souls were endangered because they
had not been baptized. More extreme interpretations assumed that non-Christian meant
anti-Christian and associated all people of other faiths with the devil. In s story, Goodman
Brown frequently refers to Indians in such terms. The descriptions by the third-person
narrator, however, often indicate that the devil may take the form of people like Brown
himself. In their conversation, the old man he meets tells Brown of the Puritans attacks on
Native American villages and mentions King Philips War.
As Brown begins his
walk through the woods, he fears that he might encounter Native people there and calls them
devilish Indians. However, the first person he encounters is an old man who strongly resembles
him and is dressed like his Puritan neighbors.
There may
be a devilish Indian behind every tree, said Goodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully
behind him . . .
Meeting the simply dressed old man
who resembles him, Brown tell him that he is from a race of honest men and good Christians,
which the other traveler challenges. He says that he himself gave Browns father a torch with
which to burn an Indian village.
And it was I that
brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian
village, in King Philip's war.
King Philip, or Metacom,
was a Wampanoag chief who led the last prolonged resistance against British control of the New
England colonies in contemporary Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The war lasted
for more than three years; Metacom was killed in 1676, but the concluding treaty was not signed
until two years later. Metacom ruled from his base near Bristol, Rhode Island.
Later, Brown sees a group who resemble his neighbors gathered in the woods. While he
cannot see them clearly in the dark, he hears a voice similar to the deacons say that several
of the Indian powows . . . know almost as much deviltry as the best of us. By powwows he
refers not to ceremonies but to spiritual leaders, often called sachems. Later, Brown himself
uses this term.
When Brown believes that his wife, Faith, is lost to the
satanic forces, he grows manic with despair and calls to the devil to take him. The woods become
terrifying, but the narrator clearly states that Brown is scaring himself, as he was the chief
horror of the scene.
The whole forest was peopled with
frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians
. . .Ha! ha! ha! roared Goodman Brown, when the wind laughed at him.
Let us hear which will laugh loudest! Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch,
come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil himself! and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as
well fear him as he fear you!
As he moves forward into
the satanic assembly, he thinks he sees familiar faces, but among the pious are people of
dissolute lives and . . . spotted fame. Again, Indians are invoked.
Scattered, also, among their pale-faced enemies, were the Indian priests, or powwows,
who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to
English witchcraft.
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