When Dorcas Morse was a tender twenty three, the French explorer Robert La Salle journeyed down the Ohio, led by the words of the local Seneca Indians, who claimed to have seen a river that flowed into the sea. Could this be the legendary Northwest Passage? pondered La Salle. He started at Lake Ontario, journeyed down the Ohio River, followed it down into the Mississippi, at which time he realized he was traveling south, not west. Thus, he stopped abruptly just as he was about to reach the Gulf of Mexico. However, he did see its shores in April of 1682 after more than two years of hard travel. He died in 1687, on his third expedition, when his group members rebelled and killed him at the Brazo River. La Salle was a man of many accomplishments, among them being the first to define the Louisiana Territory.

In the prime of Dorcas’ life, when she was thirty-one, Bacon’s Rebellion broke out in 1676. The frontier Virginian farmers complained of low tobacco prices, which were driving many tobacco farmers to ruin. They also complained of the high taxes and hefty political power wielded by the royal governor William Berkeley and his cronies. There had been no election in fourteen years and Indian raids were killing frontiersmen, but Berkeley still refused to fight the Indians. Finally, Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy landowner, took up the farmers’ cause, organized them, and killed the first Indians they saw. Berkeley decided to allow an election, but Bacon forced him to flee and burned the town. However, Bacon soon became ill and died, and English soldiers subsequently quickly crushed the Rebellion. Berkeley was installed back in power, and twenty-three of Bacon’s followers were sentenced to hang.

Probably one of the greatest tragedies for Dorcas was King Philip’s War. Benjamin Clark, her husband, was the first whose house burned to the ground in the entire War. The War itself was a series of attacks by the Native Americans on the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine colonists, resulting in the destruction of twenty-five settlements. It was named after and organized by the Wamponoag Chief Metacomet. Even after the end of the conflict, fighting continued. Their house destroyed, Dorcas’ husband was forced to build another one in its place.

       

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