The site of Massasoit’s Spring is designated by a bronze tablet at the west end of Baker Street in Warren, Rhode Island, near the banks of the Warren River.1 This was thought to be the location of Sowams, the Wampanoag sachem’s principal village. The marker reads:
THIS TABLET
PLACED BESIDE THE GUSHING WATER
KNOWN FOR MANY GENERATIONS AS
MASSASOITS’S SPRING
COMMEMORATING THE GREAT
INDIAN SACHEM MASSASOIT
“FRIEND OF THE WHITE MAN”
RULER OF THE REGION WHEN THE
PILGRIMS OF THE MAYFLOWER
LANDED AT PLYMOUTH
IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1620
ERECTED BY THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND
1907
There is no spring readily apparent at this location, as a wooden fence and the surrounding buildings sit virtually on the street. Several theories have been advanced throughout the years that Sowams was actually located across the Warren River in Barrington, Rhode Island, or farther south in Bristol, Rhode Island, but tradition favors this site in Warren.2
It is believed that Philip’s primary village was located south of Sowams on the eastern side of the Mount Hope peninsula in present-day Bristol, Rhode Island. This location sat on the western edge of present-day Bristol Narrows and looked directly across at Touisset Point in Swansea, just south of the English settlement. (Some writers refer to this site as Mount Hope, although it is about one and one-half miles north of Mount Hope itself.) Early in the war the colonial army built a fort on or near this site to hold the peninsula after Philip had abandoned it. Writing in 1845, local historian Guy Fessenden claimed that after a careful search he had located the remains of this fort
situated on the top of the most south-western of several hills on the north side of a cove. They consist now chiefly of the remains of the fireplace in the fort. This fire-place was made by preparing a suitable excavation and laying low stone walls at the sides and the end for which flat stones were used, evidently brought from the adjoining beach. The remains of these ruins are now beneath the surface of the ground, which at this place is depressed several inches below the average surface of the ground in the immediate vicinity. The hill is fast wearing away by the action of the water which washes its base. The wearing away has already reached the fire-place from which the charcoal and burnt stones are often falling down the steeply inclined plane beneath.3
By 1906 the sea had eroded the site completely.4
Burr’s Hill Park is located northwest of Philip’s village on present-day Water Street in Warren. The park is built on the remains of a natural gravel bank that overlooked the Warren River. In the mid-nineteenth century, workers mining gravel in the area discovered human remains and a vast array of European and Wampanoag artifacts.5 In the spring of 1913, archaeologists working under local resident and town librarian Charles Read Carr excavated forty-two Wampanoag graves.6
Despite Carr’s careful work and the obvious importance of the site, the destructive gravel mining went on and numerous private individuals unearthed and made off with important artifacts. Carr eventually struck a deal with the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, which owned the gravel bank (and whose abandoned track still lies nearby), to ensure that all artifacts would become the property of Warren’s George Hail Free Library. Over time, pilfered artifacts were repurchased from individuals and the collection eventually came to be held at three primary locations: at the Warren library, at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology in Bristol, Rhode Island, and at the Museum of the American Indian Heye Foundation in New York.
This image of Philip appears to use Revere’s engraving as its model, right down to the designs on the sachem’s belt and crown. (Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress)
The graves at Burr’s Hill were notable for the wealth of material goods they contained, most of which dated to the seventeenth century, and more particularly to the period of Philip’s sachemship.7 The cemetery’s proximity to Sowams also has led to speculation, usually downplayed by archaeologists and historians, that Massasoit, Alexander, or both may have been buried there. One of the graves unearthed was particularly rich in artifacts and contained a copper necklace thought to have been presented by Edward Winslow to Massasoit. Materials detailing the excavation of this grave are held by the Haffenreffer Museum.
Burr’s Hill was purchased by Warren in 1921 and made into a public park. Today, Burr’s Hill Park includes a baseball field, a playground, and parking for Warren residents interested in sunbathing along the river.
In July 1675, as Massachusetts forces were engaged in negotiations in Narragansett country and Plymouth’s troops were building a fort on the Mount Hope peninsula, Captain Matthew Fuller, Benjamin Church, and three dozen men crossed the Sakonnet river into Pocasset territory in present-day Tiverton, Rhode Island. There they hoped to meet with Weetamoe, and perhaps Awashonks to the south, to head off any agreement they might make to join Philip.
After a fruitless night spent attempting to trap unsuspecting Wampanoag, the band split into two groups of about twenty each under the commands of Fuller and Church. Fuller’s group quickly met up with Wampanoag warriors, retreated, and was ferried back to Aquidneck Island. Church’s troops marched south, probably along a Wampanoag trail east of Nannaquaket Pond where Main Road now runs.8 There they found tracks that turned inland.9 The small group followed these until they met with a rattlesnake (which were common in New England at the time), probably near Wildcat Rock.10 More afraid of snakes than Wampanoag, the men abandoned the tracks and returned to the main trail, heading south once again. Church later wrote, “Had they kept the track to the pine swamp, they had been certain of meeting Indians enough, but not so certain that any of them should have returned to give [an] account [of] how many.”11
After crossing onto Punkatees Neck (also called Pocasset Neck), probably west along the present-day Neck Road from Tiverton Four Corners,12 they proceeded south along the neck. Soon, they discovered more tracks heading up a hillside near an abandoned field of peas on land owned by John Almy. Shortly thereafter they spotted a pair of Wampanoag warriors, but when they attempted to follow, the English were caught in a thunderous volley “of fifty or sixty guns”13 from the hillside above. Church and his men, surprised and outgunned but unhurt, retreated “immediately into the pease field . . . But casting his eyes to the side of the hill above them, the hill seemed to move, being covered over with Indians, with their bright guns glittering in the sun, and running in a circumference with a design to surround them.”14 On the precise location of the peas field, James E. Holland, a lawyer whose longtime practice had its offices at the Old Grist Mill at Tiverton Four Corners, observed in a 1995 issue of Old Rhode Island that
the exact location of the peasefield on the Neck is the subject of speculation especially among those now living in its purported vicinity vying to attach some historical significance to their land holdings. However it appears from Church’s account that the field was somewhere on the hillside between the present Neck Road and the River, a short distance north of the road leading to Fogland Point.15
This nineteenth-century illustration re-creates Benjamin Church’s defense along the shore of Fogland Point in Tiverton, Rhode Island. (From Indian History for Young Folks, Francis S. Drake, 1885)
Church’s men retreated to the beach on the neck of land between Punkatees and Fogland Point, where they hastily constructed a barricade of rocks. Here they fought throughout the afternoon, holding off their attackers as a rescue attempt launched by men from present-day McCurry Point16 failed. Finally, Captain Roger Goulding, whose sloop was anchored at present-day Gould Island,17 spotted the battle and sailed south. Finding the sloop too large to beach, Goulding anchored so close that the ship’s “sails, colours and stern were full of bullet holes.”18 He then let a canoe over the side, allowing the tide to wash it onto the beach. There, two of Church’s men grabbed on and were pulled back to the sloop by rope. This rescue went on—two by two—until Church and his entire band were safely on board.
A check at day’s end revealed that two of Captain Fuller’s men had been wounded but—miraculously—not a single man under Church was hurt.
The precise location where Church and his troops mounted their defense was lost for some years by an error in a 1772 edition of Church’s History. When Church originally described the scene of the battle, he noted that “the Indians also possessed themselves of the ruins of a stone-house that over look’d them, and of the black rocks to the southward of them.”19 For some unknown reason, reference to these black rocks was omitted from the 1772 edition, and all subsequent editions. While editing an 1865 edition of Church’s History, Henry Martyn Dexter discovered the error, and armed with this new information, visited Punkatees Neck. Dexter wrote:
I found on the edge of the shore the remains of an outcropping ledge of soft black slaty rock, which differs so decidedly from any other rocks in the vicinity, and which—making allowance for the wear of the waves for near 200 years—answers so well to the demand of the text, as to incline me to the judgment that they may identify the spot. If this be so, the peasefield must have been on the western shore of Punkatees neck, a little north of the juncture of Fogland Point with the main promontory, and almost due east of the northern extremity of Fogland Point.20
Dexter also discovered the spring at which Church’s men quenched their thirst, “a spring stoned round like a well, and sending a tiny rivulet down to the sea, a few rods south of these remains of what were once ‘black rocks.’ ”21 In 1906, Ellis and Morris noted that “the spring at which Church records himself as quenching his thirst, has disappeared, and it is most probable the shore on which Church’s force actually stood has been encroached upon and swallowed up by the sea.”22
The Pocasset Swamp Fight was frustrating for the English, but the battle at Nipsachuck was disheartening. As Philip and Weetamoe crossed Seekonk Plain (the land around modern-day Route 1 in East Providence) they were pursued by men from Old Rehoboth, who chased them across the Pawtucket River into the town of Providence. From there the chase headed north, and at dawn on August 1, 1675, a battle was fought at a place called Nipsachuck, located in present-day Smithfield, Rhode Island. Philip’s men fought 130 English and fifty Mohegans, taking heavy losses in the exchange. Several of his chief captains were lost, and in all twenty-three Wampanoag died.23
By 9 AM the sides had disengaged, with Philip and his men fleeing into the nearby Nipsachuck Swamp. At 10 AM Captain Daniel Henchman arrived to take command with an additional sixty-eight English and seventeen friendly Indians, making the combined force 265 men. Philip cowered some three-quarters of a mile away, outnumbered three or four to one, low on ammunition, and prepared to surrender.24 Inexplicably, Henchman rested until the following day, allowing Philip to slip away into Nipmuc country and Weetamoe to advance south into the open arms of the Narragansett.
It is easy to criticize many of the actions of colonial military commanders in King Philip’s War. It is also generally unfair, since such criticism is the result of far greater information than the commanders had and is made from the security of three centuries’ distance. However, in the case of Henchman at Nipsachuck, both modern historians and Henchman’s contemporaries agree on his poor judgment. The captain was immediately and roundly criticized by his own troops anxious to pursue Philip. William Hubbard, whose work had to pass muster with Massachusetts Bay censors, noted: “But what the reason and why Philip was followed no further, it is better to suspend, than to critically enquire.”25 Later in the year the General Court reappointed Henchman to lead one hundred men gathered at Roxbury, but the men refused to serve under him. He was eventually assigned command of the garrison at Chelmsford and served ably in military activities throughout Nipmuc country. The episode at Nipsachuck, however, would dog Henchman throughout the remainder of his military service.
The precise location of the Battle of Nipsachuck is unknown. The Nipsachuck Swamp runs north to south across the border of North Smithfield and Smithfield, about ten miles north of Providence.26 Nipsachuck Hill, rising over five hundred feet, sits to the northeast of the swamp. Captain Nathaniel Thomas, who was present with Henchman, wrote an account of the battle on August 10, 1675. Thomas described a party of English and Mohegan scouting on the evening of July 31
who made some discovery of the enemy, by hearing them cut wood, and we left our horses there upon the plain, with some to keep them, and in the night marched on foot about 3 miles to an Indian field belonging to Philip’s men, called Nipsachuck, and at dawning of the day marched forward, about 40 rods, making a stand to consult in what form to surprise the enemy, without danger to one another, and in the interim, while it was so dark as we could not see a man 50 rods, within 30 rods of us, there came up towards us five Indians from Witamoes camp, (we supposed to fetch beans, &c. from the said field) perceiving nothing of us, at whom we were constrained to fire, slew two of them, the others fled, whereby Wittamas and Philip’s Camp were alarmed. Wittama’s camp then being within about an 100 rod of us, whom we had undoubtedly surprised, while they were most of them asleep and secure, had it not been for the said alarm; who immediately fled and dispersed, whom we pursued, slew some of them, but while we were in pursuit of them, Philip’s fighting men showed themselves upon a hill unto us, who were retreated from their camp near half a mile to fight us. Philip’s camp was pitched about 3 quarters of a mile beyond Witamas. Philip’s men upon our running towards them dispersed themselves for shelter in fighting, and so in like manner did we, the ground being a hilly plain, with some small swamps between us, as advantageous for us, as for them, where we fought until about 9 of the clock.27
Assuming that the hill upon which Philip’s men showed themselves was Nipsachuck Hill, Thomas’ description would place Weetamoe’s camp and the scene of the battle about one-quarter mile from the hill (i.e., Philip’s men camped three-quarters of a mile from Weetamoe, came one-half mile toward the English, and showed themselves upon a hill). The direction is less clear, though the English were pursuing Philip from the south and probably caught Weetamoe south or southeast of Nipsachuck Hill.
Henchman took up pursuit of Philip the following day, trailing him “till they had spent all their provision, and tired themselves, yet never coming within sight of Philip.”28
After a month of travel and three dramatic escapes from Mount Hope, Pocasset, and Nipsachuck, the sachem had successfully rendezvoused with his Nipmuc allies at Menameset in present-day New Braintree and Barre, Massachusetts.
The single bloodiest day of King Philip’s War was Sunday, December 19, 1675, when more than 1,150 English and Mohegan soldiers attacked the fortified camp of the Narragansett, sometimes called Canonchet’s Fort, located in the Great Swamp in present-day South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Tales of the attack would become the stuff of New England folklore, and the site of the fort itself a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
The Narragansett campaign was set in motion on November 2 when the commissioners of the United Colonies assembled in Boston and accused the Narragansett, officially neutral to that point in the war, of being
deeply accessory in the present bloody outrages of the Barbarous Natives; That are in open hostilities with the English. This appearing by their harboring the actors thereof; Relieving and succoring their women and children and wounded men; and detaining them in their custody Notwithstanding a Covenant made by their Sachems to deliver them to the English; and as is credibly Reported they have killed and taken away many Cattle; from the English their Neighbors; and did for some days seize and keep under a strong Guard Mr. Smith’s house and family;29 and at the News of the sad and lamentable Mischief that the Indians did unto the English at or Near Hadley; did in a very Reproachful and blasphemous manor triumph and Rejoice thereat; The Commissioners doe agree and determine that besides the Number of soldiers formerly agreed upon to be Raised and to be in constant Readiness for the use of the Country; there shall be one thousand more Raised and furnished; with their armies and provisions of all sorts to be at one hour’s warning, for the public service the said Soldiers to be raised in like proportions in each Colony as the former were.30
The covenant referenced by the commissioners took the form of two agreements signed between the English and the Narragansett in July and October 1675. Both documents promised that the Narragansett would deliver to the English all Wampanoag in their midst, with the October agreement specifically obligating the Narragansett “at or before the 28th day of this Instant month of October to deliver . . . every one of the said Indians; whether belonging unto Philip; the Pocasset Squaw or the Saconet Indians Quabaug Hadley or any other Sachems; or people that have bin or are in hostility with the English.”31 The Narragansett were disdainful of both documents, which carried as little weight as Philip’s agreement at Taunton four years earlier.
Resistance by the Narragansett to English demands and the increasingly volatile state of affairs in Rhode Island was reported by Richard Smith Jr. in a series of letters to his friend, Governor John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut. Smith operated the oldest and most active English trading post in Narragansett country and had as much at stake as any colonist in preserving peace with his Indian neighbors. In an August 5 letter, Smith noted that the Narragansett had brought in seven heads of the Wampanoag. More ominously, he added, “Many straggling Indians are abroad for mischief, some Nip Nap Indians joined with Philip, some Indians in Plymouth Patan are come into the English, about 120 in all as I here.”32 On September 3 he explained the source of the seven heads and his unease with the Narragansett, which was
that we are in jealousy whether the Narragansett will prove loyal to the English; if they pretend favor and hath lately brought in to me seven of the enemies heads, they being surprised by the Nipnaps first and delivered up to the Narragansett Sachem Conanicus. Here are very many inland Indians lately come in hither, and some of the enemy amongst them, which they, I judge, will not deliver. I believe yt Conanicus of him self & some others inclines to peace rather then war, but have many unruly men which cares not what becomes of them. These Indians hath killed several cattle very lately . . . It will be good to be moderate as regards the Narragansett at present I humbly conceive, for that a great body of people of them are here gathered together, may doe much mischief, and it if not brought into better decorum, here will be no living for English.33
Nine days later he sent another mixed message to Winthrop, who had now traveled to Boston to confer with commissioners of the United Colonies. Smith accused the Narragansett of hiding Philip’s people—“which these doe obscure all they can, and will not confess how many”34—but of also bringing in additional heads. Again Smith pled for moderation:
Cononocous hath brought in to me in all 14 heads, seven of which was lately, & some of them Phillips chief men. These being a great number it will be good to be moderate with them as it; for should we have war with them they would doe great damage . . . I should be sad if I could not be active in any respect whereby I might promote any thing that would tend to the peace & welfare of the Country.35
Finally, on October 27, just a day before the Narragansett deadline to deliver Wampanoag to the English, Smith wrote to Winthrop in Boston explaining that the Narragansett were “forward and willing to doe it, but say it is not feasible for them to doe at present, many of them being out a hunting, and their owne men being not so subordinate to their commands in respect of affinity, being allies to them, so that if by force they go about to seize them, many will escape.”36 Smith also reported that most of the English inhabitants in the area had fled, “the report common amongst Indians and English is at present of an army coming up. I request your favor to given me timely notice if any expedition be higherward.”37
This last point is remarkable in several respects. Smith and his fellow colonists—far from the flow of Boston politics—appeared to anticipate the Narragansett campaign several days before it was officially announced and nearly two months before the actual Great Swamp Fight. The same rumors had undoubtedly reached the Narragansett, who may have been well along in fortifying their Great Swamp village (about seventeen miles from Smith’s garrison), protecting their food stores, and readying their arms. If so, Canonchet would have had almost two full months to prepare his defensive strategy against the English prior to the December battle. However, if the Narragansett were steeling themselves for an English assault, Smith apparently did not learn of it and failed to report the existence of any kind of fort construction to the commissioners. The chance of hiding such a concentration of people and activity from English eyes might seem unlikely, until we recognize that neither Smith nor any of his countrymen ever discovered the Queen’s Fort (see below), a Narragansett installation located less than four miles from Smith’s trading post.
By the first week of December 1675, rumor became fact when troops from all over New England began to assemble. The Massachusetts militia, 527 men led by Major Samuel Appleton, gathered at Dedham, Massachusetts, on December 8. Many of the officers from earlier campaigns—Samuel Moseley, Benjamin Church, and Thomas Prentice, who headed seventy-five troopers—were pressed back into service. Plymouth assembled 159 men at Taunton under William Bradford. Major Robert Treat advanced 300 Connecticut soldiers, supplemented by 150 Mohegan, northward from New London, Connecticut. Governor Josiah Winslow was named general in chief and would soon assume command of the combined armies.
It seems unlikely that even now colonial officials suspected the existence of the Narragansett fort. Smith had still made no mention of such an installation. On November 19 the commissioners ordered that “provisions of all sorts and Ammunition shall be provided and sent to the place of their Rendezvous sufficient for two months,”38 a clear indication that they anticipated a campaign of skirmishes similar to what Major Samuel Appleton had conducted in the Connecticut River Valley the previous fall.
On November 2 when the commissioners had officially instructed the army to “compel . . . [the Narragansett] thereunto by the best means they may” to honor the terms of their agreements, colonial policy appeared somewhat equivocal in its goal for the Narragansett campaign. However, the commission to the commander in chief, written about the same time, was direct in its message:
You are accordingly to Instruct command & order all your inferior officers & soldiers in all respects with full power for the treating surprising fighting killing & effectual subduing & destroying of the Narrowganset Enemy & all their accomplices & Assistants as well the former open enemy or any others that you shall meet with in hostility against the English.39
On November 28, still several weeks before the army would march, the Council at Hartford reported their appointment of Major Treat to lead Connecticut forces, “desiring of them to engage the Pequot and Moheags to destroy the enemy, what they could.”40 With military leaders receiving orders like these, there could have been little doubt in any soldier’s mind as he assembled with his comrades in December that the army’s mission was to engage and destroy the Narragansett.
William Harris, a longtime foe of both Roger Williams and moderation with the Narragansett, perhaps best summed up the official colonial position regarding the campaign when he wrote to Sir Joseph Williamson:
The war was also just with the Narragansetts, many of whom were with Philip in the first fight about Mounthope, and on Philip’s flight thence were received back with a great woman of Philip’s party [probably Weetamoe] and her men; the Narragansetts, at the demand of the English, entered into articles to deliver them but did not, making large pretenses of peace so as to delay the war until after the harvest, and receiving rewards from the English for the heads of persons said to be of Philip’s party, but all in deceit, the heads being those of men killed by the English or of Narragansett deserters, or of certain of Philip’s men against whom they had a grudge . . . The Narragansetts had then many of Philip’s men whom they did not deliver up, and all about Hadley and Deerfield they aided Philip’s men against the English.41
With such strong sentiments commonly held against the Narragansett, the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth troops marched south. Along the way, General Winslow ordered his men to kill or capture any Narragansett encountered, attempting to ensure that word of the march would not reach the main body of Indians. Winslow sought especially the capture of Pumham, a Narragansett sachem whose territory included much of present-day Warwick, Rhode Island. Pumham had declared his independence from the Narragansett in 1644, allying himself with Massachusetts Bay officials who helped the sachem construct a fort on the eastern shore of Warwick Cove. The fort protected the entrance to the cove and was itself protected by an impenetrable marshy thicket42 to its rear. Pumham’s fort, occupied for a time by English soldiers, secured the interests of both Pumham and Massachusetts Bay.
The site of Pumham’s fort may still be viewed in Warwick on the north side of present-day Paine Street, at the bend in the road. The remains of the fort once formed a large and small oval in the earth but are now covered by brush and an accumulation of trash. The marshy thicket has been replaced by paved roads and graded home lots. The marker designating the site has been stolen, although its base is still standing.43
Despite his friendship with the English, Pumham allied himself with Philip once the war began and was now considered by the English to be a shrewd and dangerous opponent. Winslow’s attempt at his capture proved fruitless; Pumham was far too resourceful to be taken by surprise in his own fort. Winslow and his troops settled for the capture of thirty-five prisoners44 and continued their march.
Seven months later, on July 25, 1676, Pumham was attacked and killed at Dedham Woods.45 Hubbard described Pumham as
one of the stoutest and most valiant sachems that belonged to the Narragansett; whose courage and strength was so great, that after he had been mortally wounded in the fight, so as himself could not stand: yet catching hold of an English man that by accident came near him, had done him a mischief, if he had not been presently rescued by one of his fellows.46
Mather is more direct when he says that Pumham, mortally wounded, would still have killed an English soldier had the soldier not been rescued by his comrades.47
Richard Smith Jr.’s garrison and trading post at Wickford, Rhode Island, sometimes called Smith’s Castle, was chosen as the base of operations for the United Colonies’ combined troops. The location was ideal from the standpoint of being the center of political, social, and religious activity in the developing Narragansett area,48 having excellent access by water, and having a proprietor whose knowledge of the territory and enemy had been gathered through years of close contact with the Narragansett. In September 1684, nine years after the Great Swamp Fight, Richard Smith Jr. petitioned the commissioners of the United Colonies for compensation for the use of his trading post during the Narragansett campaign. His letter illustrates the activity that went on at his Wickford garrison in its role as headquarters for a poorly provisioned thousand-man army:
The humble petition of Richard Smith of Wickford, in the Narragansett, showeth, that your petitioner in the time of the late troubles and ware with the Indians here at Narragansett did suffer much in his estate by entertaining the many companies of soldiers, at his cost and charge, sent up by the Colonies; for which no recompense has yet been done to your petitioner.
1st. Major Savage and companies, with about 6 hundred, and Connecticut forces with him under command of Capt. Winthrop, they had horse shoes and nails to value 3lb 12sh, besides their entertainment 8 or 10 days, never pd. one farthing. After which, the entertainment of the whole army, myself and six of my servants being one service, one of which was slain at the swamp fight, had no allowance for our service. Also 26 head of cattle killed and eaten by the soldiers, with 100 goats at least, and at least 30 fat hogs; all the copper, brass and wooden vessels for the army used spoiled, stole and lost, to the value of near 100li sterling; great part of my post and rail fences being fetched and burnt for the soldiers; my oxen and cart and utensils being all lost, after the garrison went away; and lastly my housing burnt, being of great value. All which is too much for one particular man to bare; I having been to my utmost power ready to serve the Country always in what I could, nor even had anything allowed me for all above expressed, only for what the commissaries kept an account of, which was most salt provisions kept by me by order, for use of the army. Other men have had satisfaction in some measure; and when I last petitioned your Honors at Boston, I had a promise of consideration; wherefore this 2d time I doe request your Honors to take the premises into your judicious and wise consideration, to allow me in your wisdom what you shall think requisite, and your petitioner shall pray etc. and subscribe.49
Today, Smith’s Castle is located on Richard Smith Drive off Route 1 (Post Road) in North Kingstown and is maintained as a museum and gift shop by the Cocumscossoc Association. The present structure has gone through substantial alterations over the years. Smith’s original blockhouse, possibly set on the site of Roger Williams’ first trading post or on an adjoining tract of land,50 was burned to the ground by the Narragansett in 1676, as was every Rhode Island structure south of Warwick.51 In 1678 Smith’s son used some of the undamaged wood from the first house to build a three-room structure on the same site. Some of the 1678 building remains today, protected by an eighteenth-century expansion.52 On the north lawn of the house a burial ground holds the remains of forty English soldiers killed in the Great Swamp Fight. A tablet marks the spot of burial. No remains have been discovered at the site, though this may be due to the shallowness of the graves and rapid decomposition. A second graveyard at Burying Point, a short walk northwest of the house, is the final resting place of Richard Smith Sr.
Samuel Moseley’s troops, accompanied by Benjamin Church, had been sent ahead of the main army to secure Smith’s garrison and begin scouting activities. As the troops assembled at Wickford, a number of natives were captured, including a Narragansett named Peter. Peter immediately proved his worth to the English, alerting Winslow to two nearby Narragansett villages, which the English attacked and burned. However, Peter’s true value would come a few days later when he led the colonial army directly to the Narragansett’s fortified village hidden in the Great Swamp.
One of the deserted villages destroyed by the English was probably that of Queen Magnus, also called Quaiapen, Natantuck, the Saunk Squaw, and the “Old Queen” of the Narragansett. Not far from this village, in present-day Exeter, Rhode Island, was Quaiapen’s more famous “Queen’s Fort,” a natural stone fortification never discovered by the English during the war.
Signs of the Queen’s Fort still exist today, as does a longstanding mystery surrounding the site. The fort is located about three and one-half miles northwest of the Smith garrison, west of Route 2 on the south side of Stony Lane in Exeter. A fire trail about two hundred yards west of a barn and stone wall owned by Stonehaven Farm leads to the site, which is perhaps best described as a “geological trash pit” of huge glacial rocks. These rocks were thought to have been connected in a defensive pattern by the erection of stone walls, said to be the work of Stonewall John, a skilled Narragansett mason employed for a time by Richard Smith. The fort also appears to have two structures, perhaps bastions or flankers, on the northeast corner and west side.
The Narragansett sachem Pumham had such courage and strength, according to William Hubbard, that he nearly killed an English soldier despite being fatally wounded and unable to stand. (Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University)
According to the legend, Quaiapen occupied an underground chamber situated about one hundred feet outside the western perimeter of the fort. This chamber was described by Elisha R. Potter in his 1835 History of Narragansett, and again in detail in 1904 by Sidney S. Rider in The Lands of Rhode Island as They Were Known to Canounicus and Miantunnomu. Rider reported that the chamber
consists of an open space beneath an immense mass of boulder rocks; the tallest men can stand within it; the “floor” is fine white sand; the entrance is so hidden that six feet away it would never be suspected; the boulders piled about it represent a thickness of fifty or sixty feet.53
Despite these detailed descriptions and its appearance on several maps, the queen’s chamber can no longer be visited because—careful searches notwithstanding—its precise location is no longer known.
Quaiapen and her people occupied the fort after the Great Swamp Fight. In June 1676, sensing the end of the war, Quaiapen’s hungry band headed north, only to be attacked and massacred by forces under Connecticut’s Major John Talcott on July 2 in a cedar swamp at Nipsachuck. Both Quaiapen and Stonewall John lost their lives in the attack. Talcott wrote:
These may acquaint you that we made Nipsaichooke on ye first of July and seized 4 of ye enemy, and on the 2d instant being ye Sabbath in ye morning about sun an hour high made ye enemies place of residence, and assaulted them who presently in swamped them selves in a great spruce swamp, we girt the said swamp and with English and Indian soldiers: dressed it, and within 3 hours slew and took prisoners 171.54
Ellis and Morris called the spot of the massacre “Nacheck” and wrote that “this was on the south bank of the Pawtucket River, below Natick. The exact place of the massacre is not known. It was seven miles from Providence.”55 However, the correct location was determined by members of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, who placed it “in Nipsachuck Swamp near Tarkin Station in North Smithfield.”56
The Narragansett fort located in the Great Swamp, probably built under Canonchet’s direction, was much different from the Queen’s Fort. It consisted of a complete village situated on four to five acres of highland, surrounded by swamp and enclosed by a wall of thick wooden stakes driven into the ground, earth, and brush. This fort contained some five hundred wigwams and was undoubtedly overcrowded due to the Narragansett policy of accepting any and all Wampanoag and Nipmuc refugees from the war.57 The English were not unaccustomed to seeing fort construction done by New England’s Native Americans; in fact, certain features of this fort strongly suggested the influence of European engineering.58 However, the Narragansett fort about to be assaulted was thought to be larger and more elaborate than anything in the colonists’ experience.59
The intent of both English and Narragansett became clear on December 15. Stonewall John appeared at Wickford allegedly to sue for peace.60 He was accompanied by a band of warriors hidden in the woods, suggesting that his real goal may have been to assess English military preparations. In any case, neither side proved flexible and Stonewall John was sent on his way. Shortly thereafter several English soldiers were attacked, including an assault on the hated Moseley, and the first English blood of the Narragansett campaign was spilled.
About this same time, nine miles south of Wickford, Jireh Bull’s stone garrison on Tower Hill in present-day Narragansett was attacked and destroyed by the Narragansett, who killed fourteen or fifteen English.61 While this assault is usually expressed as a tragedy for the English, Ebenezer Peirce wrote from the Narragansett perspective when he called it “a daring feat on the part of the Indians, with so large an [English] army not far distant and large reinforcements to that army daily and hourly expected.”62 What also made the feat daring was the apparent impregnability of the Bull garrison, described in a letter Captain Wait Winthrop wrote to his father, Governor John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut, on July 9, 1675, as being a “convenient large stone house with a good stone wall yard before it which is a kind of small fortification to it.”63 Increase Mather would surmise that the structure was fortified well enough to withstand an outright attack, and must have been taken by stealth: “A body of the enemy did treacherously get into the house of Jerem. Bull (where was a garrison,) and slew about fourteen persons.”64
In 1918 the site of the garrison was positively identified through archaeological work undertaken by the Society of Colonial Wars of Rhode Island:
Part way up the eastern slope of Tower Hill on that portion of the “Bull-Dyer farm,” which is now owned by Mr. Samuel G. Peckham, here has been for many years a series of mounds, betrayed as stone heaps by the outcropping fragments, and marked, in part, as a rectangle by an old growth and buckthorns. The spot thus indicated has always been the traditional site of what is generally called Bull’s Garrison or Block House.65
Excavations at this site uncovered a wealth of artifacts and the existence of a stone house measuring thirty feet wide by forty feet long, with two fireplaces at its western end and the remains of a paved court on its eastern side. (A silver bodkin marked MB, perhaps for Mary Bull, was discovered at the site along with fragments of glass and tinned brass and iron spoons.) When the workers began digging westward in search of the wall Wait Winthrop had described, they found instead, about ten feet away, the outer wall of an even larger building. This second structure was divided into two rectangles by a heavy partition wall; the western rectangle—at twenty-seven feet wide and sixty-five feet long—was itself larger than the first building uncovered in the excavation. Remains of a heavy central chimney were discovered near the south wall and, on the eastern side of the chimney, a hearth made from blue slate. Among the objects uncovered in this second building were a pair of cock’s head hinges, a pair of H hinges, glass, part of a gun barrel, a flintlock, a dripping pan, and bits of various tools.66 About twenty feet south of this second structure workers discovered a third rectangular building that measured sixteen feet from north to south and showed evidence of a fireplace.
Historians believe that it was the second and largest of the structures that Wait Winthrop described and that fell to the Narragansett in December 1675. The first structure excavated was probably built by Jireh Bull or his son after King Philip’s War ended, perhaps after 1684. The small, southern structure is perhaps the oldest building on the property, though a fourth structure may yet be uncovered. All of the buildings on the property undoubtedly served as a ready supply of stones for the building of walls and foundations at nearby farms; “the outer wall of which Winthrop speaks was probably the first to go. Then the stones from the others were taken till the masonry was cut down to the level of the ground where it was soon covered by earth and grass.”67
In 1925 the Society of Colonial Wars published a further account of the objects discovered at the site. The account noted:
It is possible that in all there may have been three homes in this small clearing . . . and it is therefore impossible now to determine in which of the ruins some of the objects were discovered, as the laborers were not careful in reporting the exact locations of their finds . . . Some of the objects are undoubtedly from the house that was burned in 1675, others are certainly of a later period and from the house that Bull built after the war. Some of the objects may be still later, as the ruins of the houses may have been occasionally used as dumps for refuse . . . It is understood that practical jokers have recently buried skulls, bones and bottles containing messages, in the ruins in the hope of deceiving future excavators.68
Two years later, in 1927, the Society of Colonial Wars published A Plat of the Land of Capt. Henry Bull at Pettaquamscutt, Drawn by James Helme, Surveyor, January 8, 1729. This plat was prepared for the grandnephew of Jireh Bull by the grandson of Jireh’s northern neighbor, Rouse Helme, giving the document a strong basis in tradition69 and substantiating work done by archaeologists. The site of the Bull garrison, landlocked by private property, can be found today on the west side of Middle Bridge Road in Narragansett.70
Stonewall John’s visit, the destruction of Jireh Bull’s garrison, and the lack of adequate food supplies convinced Winslow that the war must be taken immediately to the Narragansett. On December 18, Massachusetts and Plymouth forces marched south to join Treat’s Connecticut troops; the combined army spent a wretched winter’s night camped around the darkened shell of the Bull garrison.71 At about 5 AM on the morning of December 19, with Peter in the lead, the colonial army trudged stiffly through the cold and snow:
What route they took to reach the fort—whether they went over Tower Hill, as some suppose, thence westerly by Dead Man’s Pool of the Saugatucket, over Kingston Hill and across the plains of Queen’s River; or by the Pequot Path southerly from Wickford, along the ridge of Tower Hill through Wakefield to what is now Sugar Loaf Hill, and so northerly again to the Swamp fort—perhaps never may be accurately known. Not one of the present roads was then in use except the Pequot path. But tradition has it that the Indian Peter, who was forced to be their guide under penalty of being hanged, was taken prisoner near the smoking ruins of Jireh Bull’s house on Tower Hill. If this may be accepted, the shortest path to the fort led across the Saugatucket, over Kingston Hill, and to it Canonchet’s hiding-place, full seventeen miles from Wickford.72
Some mystery remains in the distance and direction of this morning march. The Jireh Bull garrison is between seven and eight miles (on a straight line) from Canonchet’s fort. Joseph Dudley reported that the army’s march was “without intermission” and that the time of arrival at the Swamp was “about two of the clock afternoon.”73 (Captain James Oliver placed the arrival time “between 12 and 1.”)74 If the army were able to march straight to the fort, that would assume a speed of one mile per hour or less. Compare this to their retreat march when, burdened by the dark of night, frozen limbs, the walking wounded, and conveyance of the dead, the army would cover seventeen to eighteen miles between the fort and Smith’s Castle in ten hours between 4 PM and 2 AM, or nearly twice the speed of their first march. We are left to wonder what happened to so dramatically slow the march on the morning of December 19. Many historians exaggerate the mileage to rationalize the time, confusing the forward march with the retreat.75 Hubbard wrote that “they marched from the break of the next Day, December 19th, till one of the Clock in the Afternoon . . . thus having waded fourteen or fifteen Mile.”76 Thomas Hutchinson (perhaps repeating Hubbard) stated that “at the break of day, the 19th, they marched through the snow fourteen or fifteen miles, until one o’clock afternoon, when they came to the edge of the swamp where the enemy lay.”77 Ellis and Morris allowed that the fort was “sixteen miles to the west, by a circuitous route.”78 George Bodge solved the problem by assuming that the colonial troops marched north along the high ground to McSparren Hill and then turned west, crossing the Chippuxet River between Larking Pond and Thirty Acre Pond.79 It is only through this roundabout march via McSparren Hill that any distance close to the assumed fourteen to sixteen miles can be calculated, and even this assumes that the army would have marched almost as if it were lost, stumbling in a random pattern to the swamp. (Even if Peter were leading the troops so as to avoid a Narragansett ambush, the additional distance is still extraordinary.) It also assumes that Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth troops were required to march to the Jireh Bull garrison on the 18th—when word of its destruction had already reached them on December 16,80—only to retrace their steps the following morning. This would have added four difficult miles to their total march. It seems more probable that General Winslow chose the Bull garrison as a convenient rendezvous point with Connecticut troops and assumed that a direct westerly route to the fort could be taken from Pettaquamscutt. How or why the army would take as much as nine hours to reach a fort seven miles away remains a question.
Sometime after noon the lead colonial troops reached a “position on rising land some two miles beyond the present village of West Kingston.”81 There, at the edge of the Great Swamp, they traded fire with an advance party of Narragansett. It was then that the English discovered that the swamp, which was impassable most of the year, had frozen solid and would allow their advance to the fort.82 This factor, along with Peter’s knowledge of the fort’s weakness, would prove decisive for the English.
Benjamin Church, who would enter the fort only after the most intense fighting was over, reported that the English infiltrated the swamp “next the upland.”83 Writing in 1906, George Bodge interpreted this to mean “the rising land in front of the ‘Judge Marchant’ house,” which lay north of the supposed battlefield.84
The entrance to the fort used by the Narragansett consisted of a long tree spanning a “place of water.”85 This spot was well protected and would have been almost impossible for the English to breach. However, one small area remained unfinished along the fort’s lengthy stockade. This gap in the defense had been barricaded with a large tree trunk, about five feet off the ground. Most accounts record that Peter led the English directly to this spot, where the attack began. The fighting was vicious and went well at first for the Narragansett, who killed two English captains and drove the colonial force back into the swamp. Captain Moseley, near the front of the charge, drew particular interest from the Indians, who knew him well; he afterward told the general that he saw “50 aim at him.”86 The second wave ordered by Winslow breached the barricade, however, and the intense fighting moved in and around the tightly clustered wigwams. It was then that the order to set fire to the wigwams was given. As the afternoon wore on, many Narragansett men, women, and children were driven by flames and muskets to their deaths.
While Peter’s ability to lead the English directly to Canonchet’s Fort is unquestioned, the issue of the fort’s unfinished section deserves scrutiny. Peter was captured by Moseley’s men around December 16; this would have been the extent of preparations he would have witnessed at Canonchet’s fort. If a large segment of the fortifications were undone on the 16th, Peter could hardly have known the precise location of the last “chink” in Narragansett armor three days later when the English attacked. Conversely, if he knew about this specific spot of weakness—a single large tree trunk—on the 16th, the Narragansett would have had two or three days to repair this relatively minor deficiency before the assault occurred. A more logical conclusion would be that this spot was intentionally planned by the Narragansett, as was Peter’s capture, to ensure that the English would attack at a well-defended point and to discourage a search for other ways into the fort (which may have been plentiful, as they were intended as easy exits for Narragansett women and children). Perhaps this spot was intended to allow Narragansett reserves in if the English had attacked at another point in the palisade. Perhaps it served some other unknown military use. In any event, it presented a deadly passage for the English. Had the Narragansett not run out of gunpowder during the fight and instead pursued the decimated English troops, this contrived entrance might have been viewed not as a weakness but as a brilliant military tactic by Canonchet in a smashing Narragansett victory. The argument that it was the single unfinished and weakest point in the fortification either underestimates or misconstrues the Narragansett defensive strategy.
Other aspects of Canonchet’s leadership in the Great Swamp Fight are less brilliant. One wonders why the English were not harassed by the Narragansett at the Bull garrison or along the route of their march to the fort. The English had overextended their supply lines, were marching on unfamiliar terrain, had undoubtedly lost all element of surprise, and were attacking a fortified defensive position with numbers that would have been held vastly inadequate by modern military thinking. The Narragansett had two months to prepare their defenses and held almost every advantage in the Great Swamp Fight. Yet, by allowing the English to reach the swamp essentially unmolested, and then relying entirely upon the fort’s defenses, Canonchet committed perhaps the Indians’ single worst military blunder of the war. In addition, he failed to mount a flanking attack against the English position from outside the fort or even to send a small band to harass Winslow’s position, which most certainly would have distracted the English from the fort. He also failed to place an ambush along the retreat route of the English, a tactic employed brilliantly by the Nipmuc at other battles in King Philip’s War.87 Such tactics might have saved the lives of countless Narragansett women and children, who should have been able and encouraged to flee the fort before the worst of the fighting began and long before the decision by the English to set fire to the village was made. Indeed, stronger leadership could well have saved hundreds of lives and turned the English victory into a Narragansett rout, perhaps changing the course of the entire war.
About a month after the Great Swamp Fight the Narragansett were camped in the Misnock Swamp at present-day Coventry, Rhode Island, where they continued to be plagued by a shortage of gunpowder. A frustrated Canonchet is alleged to have said that “had he known they were no better furnished, he would have been elsewhere this winter.”88 One wonders if this wasn’t a more general self-assessment of his decision to defend the Great Swamp fort.
Joseph Dudley served as chaplain to the army (and later governor of Massachusetts) and provided one of the few firsthand accounts of the battle. In a letter written from Smith’s garrison to Governor Leverett on December 21, just two days after the fight, Dudley gave the following details:
Saturday [December 18] we marched towards Petaquamscot, through the snow, and in conjunction about midnight or later, we advanced; Capt. Mosely led the van, after him Massachusetts, and Plimouth and Connecticut in the rear; in tedious march in the snow, without intermission, brought us about two of the clock afternoon, to the entrance of the swamp, by the help of Indian Peter, who dealt faithfully with us; our men, with great courage, entered the swamp about twenty rods [about 110 yards]; within the cedar swamp we found some hundreds of wigwams, forted in with a breastwork and flankered, and many small blockhouses up and down, round about; they entertained us with a fierce fight, and many thousands shot, for about an hour, when our men valiantly scaled the fort, beat them thence, and from the blockhouses. In which action we lost Capt. Johnson, Capt. Danforth, and Capt. Gardiner, and their lieutenants disabled, and many other of our officers, insomuch that, by a fresh assault and recruit of powder from their store, the Indians fell on again, recarried and beat us out of the fort, but by the great resolution and courage of the General and Major, we reinforced, and very hardily entered the fort again, and fired the wigwams, with many living and dead persons in them, great piles of meat and heaps of corn, the ground not admitting burial of their store, were consumed.89
Benjamin Church says he entered the fort “that the English were now possessed of” with about thirty men, only to watch Captain Gardiner stumble toward him and fall, mortally wounded. Church also discovered and reported back to General Winslow that “the best and forwardest of his army, that hazarded their lives to enter the fort upon the muzzle of the enemy’s guns, were shot in their backs, and killed by them that lay behind.” He and his men then left the fort, found “a broad and bloody track where the enemy had fled with their wounded men,”90 and proceeded to skirmish with the retreating Narragansett. Church was wounded three times, once severely, and would retire soon after to Rhode Island to nurse his wounds during the winter months.
Indian losses in the Great Swamp Fight were thought to be significant but have never been accurately determined, in large part because contemporary English observers contradicted one another and had reason to inflate the figures, while later historians were careless in quoting these conflicting numbers. On December 21, 1675, just two days after the fight, the Reverend Joseph Dudley wrote that “we generally suppose the enemy lost at least two hundred men; Capt. Mosely counted in one corner of the fort sixty four men; Capt. Goram reckoned 150 at least.”91 Dudley was with General Winslow throughout the fight and spoke with many of the men in the days following the battle. He chose as his sources two soldiers, Captains Moseley and Goram, who were in the thick of the fight from the start. However, their assessment might have been influenced by several factors: Like all victors, the two men would have had reason to exaggerate the numbers of their enemy slain. In addition, both Moseley and Goram would have had to contend with the confusion and shock of the battle itself. Also, the English departed shortly after the fighting stopped and were never able to make a thorough accounting of casualties. However, less than a month later (January 14) Joshua Tefft92 gave credence to Goram and Dudley’s estimate of 150 to 200 Algonquian killed. Tefft, an Englishman, had been living in the fort with the Narragansett prior to the fight and fled with the sachems during the battle to a secure position away from the fort. After the English had retreated, the Narragansett returned to the fort to assess their losses. Tefft told Roger Williams that “they found 97 slain & 48 wounded.”93
James Quanpohit, a Christian Indian who spied for the English during the war, visited with Nipmuc and Narragansett warriors at their camps at Menameset not long after the Great Swamp Fight. Quanpohit probably would have been killed by the Narragansett (for his suspected friendship with the English) had not his longtime friend, Monoco, intervened; “he said he was glad to see me; I had been his friend many years, and had helped him kill Mohaugs; and said, nobody should meddle with me.”94 Despite being suspected as a spy, Quanpohit would hear and pass on to colonial authorities a wealth of accurate information concerning native plans to conduct the remainder of the war. In addition, Quanpohit would report that the Narragansett lost “but forty fighting men, and three hundred old men, women and children.”95 Among Tefft, Dudley, and the Narragansett themselves (through Quanpohit), the estimate of Indian dead ranged from 100 to 340 people.
Despite having listened to a month of wild speculation surrounding the fight, Captain James Oliver wrote on January 26 that the English had killed “300 fighting men.”96 This number of warriors killed is the upper limit of the estimates given by participants in the battle.
Nevertheless, contemporary reporters were either insistent on magnifying the English victory or simply willing believers of the many proud veterans returning from the fight. In 1676, merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall wrote to London that “our Men, as near as they can judge, may have killed about 600 Indian Men, besides Women and Children. Many more Indians were killed which we could have no account of, by reason that they would carry away as many dead Indians as they could.”97 Here Saltonstall introduces the idea, readily embraced by future historians, that whatever the number of Indian dead the English could confirm, there must be many more who were whisked away by the Narragansett in the heat of the battle. With this speculative start, another contemporary writer could report that “we have great reason to bless God we came off so well, our dead and wounded not a Mounting to above 220, and the enemies by their own Confession to no less than 600.”98
By the time Mather and Hubbard published their official accounts of the event, the numbers had grown again and the Puritan victory was even more glorious. Mather not only inflated the number but misquoted Joshua Tefft:
Concerning the number of Indians slain in this Battle, we are uncertain, only some Indians, which afterwards were taken prisoners (as also a wretched English man [Joshua Tefft] that apostatized to the Heathen, and fought with them against his own Country-men, but was at last taken and executed) confessed that the next day they found three hundred of their fighting men dead in this Fort, and that many men, women and children were burned in their Wigwams, but they neither knew, nor could they conjecture how many: it is supposed that not less then a thousand Indian Souls perished at that time. Ninigret whose men buried the slain, affirmeth that they found twenty & two Indian captains among the dead bodies.99
Hubbard, who was a more careful observer and accurate reporter than Mather, still chose his sources in a way that would glorify the English victory. Hubbard wrote:
What Numbers of the Enemy were slain is uncertain; it was confessed by one Potock a great Councilor amongst them, afterwards taken at Road-Island, and put to Death at Boston, that the Indians lost seven hundred fighting Men that Day, besides three hundred that died of their Wounds the most of them; the Number of old Men, Women and Children, that perished either by Fire, or that were starved with Hunger and Cold, None of them could tell.100
Benjamin Church is silent on the number of dead at the Great Swamp Fight. Hence, later historians who tended to rely on some combination of Church, Hubbard, and Mather for their information could easily establish that as many as seven hundred warriors perished in the Great Swamp Fight, and more than one thousand Indians in total lost their lives. Neither number squares with the few firsthand accounts remaining to us nor with the smaller numbers typical in New England colonial warfare.
It has generally been assumed that the English, by setting fire to the Narragansett wigwams, destroyed the better part of the Narragansett winter food stores. This rests on reports from Dudley, who noted that the fire consumed “great piles of meat and heaps of corn, the ground not admitting burial of the store”;101 from Captain James Oliver, who wrote that “we burnt above 500 houses, left but 9, burnt all their corn, that was in baskets, great store”;102 and from Church, who recorded that “the wigwams were musket proof; being all lined with baskets and tubs of grain and other provisions, sufficient to supply the whole army.”103 The extent of the damage to the Narragansett has been called into question by modern ethnohistorians, however. The Narragansett traditionally dried and stored their corn in the ground before an expected war,104 and there is no reason to expect that corn stored aboveground and burned at the Great Swamp Fight was more than a fraction of their total supply. The English did not dig for corn after the fight and, as far as we know, did not return to investigate the fort after the battle.105 We know from Joshua Tefft, however, that the Narragansett visited the fort a short time after the English departed; they may have uncovered and removed great stores of food.106
The same food and shelter destroyed by the English were also lost to the English, forcing them to return to Wickford in a march that began about 4 PM and did not end at Smith’s garrison until 2 AM the following morning. (One contemporary reported that “they marched above three miles from the fort by the light of the fires.”)107 General Winslow and a small group of men were separated and lost on the return march, traveling some thirty miles and not arriving at Smith’s garrison until 7 AM.
English losses at the Great Swamp Fight are well-known. Captain James Oliver reported that
we lost, that are now dead, about 68, and had 150 wounded, many of which are recovered. That long snowy cold night we had about 18 miles to our quarters, with about 210 dead and wounded. We left 8 dead in the fort. We had but 12 dead when we came from the swamp, besides the 8 we left. Many died by the way, and as soon as they were brought in, so that Dec. 20th were buried in a grave 34, next day 4, next day 2, and none since here. Eight died at Rhode Island, 1 at Petaquamscot, 2 lost in the woods and killed, Dec. 20, as we heard since, some say two more died.108
With some revision, modern historians have confirmed these numbers.109 Major Treat’s Connecticut soldiers took such severe losses that he deemed it necessary to return home immediately. Half of the combined officer corps had fallen, and four hundred soldiers who escaped wounds were so incapacitated by exposure and lack of proper care that Winslow’s army was incapable of continuing the winter campaign.110 Only the lack of gunpowder—“which Captain Oliver estimated at “but 10 pounds left”111—kept the Narragansett from pursuing the English and, despite their tactical errors during the battle, changing the outcome of the Great Swamp campaign completely.
With one notable exception, firsthand and other contemporary accounts are unusually silent on the role Connecticut’s Mohegan contingent played in the Great Swamp Fight. Numbering between 150 and 200 warriors, these allies of the English represented a fighting force equal in size to the Plymouth Colony regiment. If they had rushed the fort with the other Connecticut soldiers, they would have played a greater role in the battle than the Plymouth troops—who were held back as reserves by General Winslow—and taken even greater losses. Indeed, Connecticut historian Henry Trumbull believed the Mohegan suffered fifty-one dead and eighty-two wounded.112 The Mohegan under Oneko had already distinguished themselves in the war, having trapped and nearly annihilated Philip and his men at Nipsachuck in the previous summer campaign. Yet when Captain Oliver recounted the fight in January, he reported that the “Monhegins and Pequods proved very false, fired into the air, and sent word before they came they would so, but got much plunder, guns and kettles.”113 In this claim Oliver reflected not only the institutional bias of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth Colonies against the use of friendly Indians in warfare, but appeared to simply repeat the testimony of Joshua Tefft, who might have his own reasons for discounting Mohegan contributions to the fight. Tefft, soon to be executed as a traitor, told Roger Williams in January 1675/76 that “if the Monhiggins & Pequts had been true, they might have destroyed most of the Nihaggonsiks; but the Nahigonskis parleyed with them in the beginning of the fight, so that they promised to shoot high, which they did, & killed not one Nahigonsik man, except against their wills.”114 Old feuds between the Mohegan and Narragansett, the prior record of the Mohegan in King Philip’s War, their losses suffered at the Great Swamp Fight, and the assumed biases of Oliver and Tefft notwithstanding, the story that the Mohegan deceived the English at the Great Swamp Fight was picked up by Samuel Drake in the Old Indian Chronicle and has been repeated without further substantiation by historians throughout the years.
The Great Swamp Fight ensured that the roused Narragansett would now prosecute the war against the English with great vengeance. A series of peace talks were held throughout the end of December and on into early 1676, but it seems in retrospect that both sides were stalling for time to recoup and plan their next moves. It is also possible that the Narragansett were paying for their neutrality with the Nipmuc and Wampanoag. James Quanpohit reported that “the Narragansett sent up one English head to them by two of their men; and they shot at the Narragansett, told them they had been friends to the English, and that head was nothing. Afterwards they sent up two men more, with twelve scalps; they received them, and hung the scalps on trees.”115 The delaying tactics used by the Narragansett may well have been an indication that they were, at least temporarily, caught between sides of the conflict. The English themselves were trying to deal with desertions brought about by the harsh weather and poor care following the battle. Authorities in Massachusetts Bay were forced to pass a law making it illegal for a man “to conceal or hide himself or armes from the country service.”116 A new request for the raising of one thousand men went out to the colonies while Winslow tried desperately to prepare his remaining army for a new campaign. Only in late January did the situation brighten for colonial troops when fresh English and friendly Indian recruits arrived at Wickford.
For the last century the site of the Great Swamp Fight has been subject to great debate. Nineteenth-century antiquarians wrote with confidence about its precise location. The Memorial History of Boston, published in 1882, claimed that the fort was near “Kingston hill, by which the Stonington railroad closely passes; the only vestiges to be found to-day are here and there a grain of Indian corn burned black in the destruction.”117 In 1885, J. R. Cole noted that “the Great Swamp above referred to is situated on a farm now owned by John G. Clarke . . . Mr. Clarke, who has given the subject much consideration, has, he says, plowed up charred corn, the relics of the battle.”118 George Madison Bodge noted in 1886 that the scene of the battle was well identified:
It is situated in West Kingston, R.I., and belongs to the estate of the late J. G. Clark, whose residence was about one mile north-easterly from the old battlefield. Many relics of the battle are in possession of Mr. Clarke’s family. Saving changes incident upon the clearing and cultivation of contiguous land, the place could be easily identified as the battlefield, even if its location were not put beyond question by traditions and also by relics found from time to time upon the place. It is now, as then, an “island of four or five acres.” Surrounded by swampy land, overflowed except in the driest part of the year. The island was cleared and plowed about 1775, and at that time many bullets were found deeply bedded in the large trees; quantities of charred corn were plowed up in different places, and it is said that Dutch spoons and Indian arrowheads, etc. have been found there at different times.119
In 1906 Ellis and Morris located the fort at the same site as Bodge, on an island “between the Usquapaug River and Shickasheen Brook.”120
The site described by Ellis and Morris, by Bodge, and in the Memorial History of Boston represents the present-day location of the Great Swamp Fight Monument, placed in 1906 at a ceremony sponsored by the Societies of Colonial Wars of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. A roadside marker located one and one-third miles south of the intersection of Route 2 and Kingstown Road (Route 138) points to the location of the monument, which is found by walking or driving about one mile south from the marker along an unpaved road. The Great Swamp Fight Monument is made of solid granite, weighs eleven tons, and sits twenty-six feet high in the center of an upland “island.”121 Surrounding the shaft are four large boulders bearing the names of the three United Colonies and Rhode Island. The inscription at the base of the monument is badly damaged and, in any case, inaccurate when it suggests that the NARRAGANSETT INDIANS MADE THEIR LAST STAND in the Great Swamp Fight. The monument draws a large number of tourists and is an important site for descendants of both the English and Narragansett, who meet there annually to commemorate the battle.
Despite the certainty of nineteenth-century antiquarians, most modern historians and archaeologists disagree that the correct site of the Great Swamp Fight has been identified. Firsthand descriptions were vague and inconclusive. Benjamin Church said simply that the army marched “to a swamp which the Indians had fortified with a fort.”122 Another contemporary account noted that “our whole Army . . . went to seek out the enemy, whom we found (there then happening a great fall of Snow) securing themselves in a dismal swamp, so hard of access that there was but one way for entrance.”123 A third contemporary account described the following: “In the midst . . . [of the swamp] was a piece of firm land, of about three or four acres of ground, whereon the Indians had built a kind of fort, being palisado’d round, and within that a clay wall, as also felled down abundance of trees to lay quite round the said fort.”124 Joshua Tefft reported that once the battle began he “stayed 2 volleys of shot, & then they fled with his master, & passed through a plaine, & rested by the side of a spruce swamp.”125 Such descriptions are remarkable for the paucity of detail they leave for modern historians and archaeologists.
An eighteenth-century diary entry and sketch by the Reverend Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, is the slim piece of evidence most often used to bridge the gap between firsthand accounts and the site of the twentieth-century monument. Stiles visited the Great Swamp on May 28, 1782, and wrote:
The swamp Islet is surrounded every way with a hideous Swamp 40 Rds to one mile wide, & inaccessible but at a SW Entrance & there a deep Brook or Rivulet must be passed. All the Narrag. Indian Tribe with the Indians of Mt. Haup or Bristol were assembled there in the Winter of 1675, when they were attacked by our Army of about a thousand men, who rushed over the narrow passage of Entrance & set fire to the Wigwams—a great Slaughter!
The burnt Corn remains to this day, & some of the Bones are yet above ground, as I saw at this time. The owner of the Land Mr. Clark is now clearing up the Land, has cut down the Timber & Brush, and will plow it up this Summer.126
Stiles also sketched and measured the area on which he believed the fort was located. His map shows a kidney-shaped area of upland some four acres in size consistent with firsthand accounts. Stiles also noted two Narragansett burying places and two oak trees, cut down the same year of his visit, 1782. One of the oaks was found to have a bullet lodged near its center, which was surrounded by one hundred rings (presumed to indicate the correct period between Stiles’ visit and the Great Swamp Fight).
Stiles’ account, so detailed in some respects, fails on three counts. First, we are unable to place his location precisely within the Great Swamp. Second, Joseph Granger has pointed out that “it is unlikely that such trees [as the two oaks] would have been left standing in a village moved specifically for firewood availability as much as for protection.”127 None of the firsthand accounts mention trees within the fort, which might have been used as defensive positions by the Narragansett, or as badly needed material for the palisade, and in any case, would have been remarkable landmarks in an otherwise cleared village site. The third weakness in Stiles’ description is what is left unsaid; the minister fails to mention the kind of substantial discovery of artifacts and “footprints” that would be left behind by a large, densely populated Narragansett village.
Since placement of the monument in 1906, historical and archaeological work has essentially confirmed skeptics’ beliefs that the fort is mismarked. In the 1930s and 1940s, the memorial site itself was pockmarked with random holes left by visitors, many of whom paid local owners twenty-five cents a day to dig for artifacts. By the mid-1940s one local resident digging at the memorial site found nothing but sand.128
A promising start in identifying the fort was made in 1959 when professional anthropologists from the University of Rhode Island, Columbia, and Yale excavated a site on the southern end of Great Neck, about two miles from the monument. (Great Neck is one of the pieces of high ground within the swamp that some think may have been the site of the fight.) A newspaper account reported that
in two weeks of painstaking digging and sifting, reaching about two feet under the surface of a rock shelter that served as an Indian home for centuries, the scientists have found nearly 2,000 pieces of bone, pottery, sea shells, ornaments and stones . . . Erwin H. Johnson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Rhode Island . . . said some of the relics and artifacts “almost certainly” go back to the postglacial period . . . Professor Johnson cautiously avoided appearing too confident that the search would definitely establish the site of the Great Swamp Fight. “It will take more studying and we’ll have to do some digging at the place where the fight is supposed to have taken place” . . . Thomas J. Wright, chief of the Rhode Island division of fish and game and a student of Indian lore, suggested the site to Professor Johnson on the basis of his studies . . . He said that a number of persons have had doubts over the years that the Swamp Fight was fought where some historians say it was . . . Professor Johnson does not discount the fact that the rock shelter where he and his associates are digging might have served as an ideal fort. It stands on high ground, backed up by more rocks, and overlooking a valley.129
Sometime after this activity, Johnson wrote in the URI Alumni Bulletin:
Old writings specify an island as the site of the fort and a first trip over the swamp in a helicopter this fall showed an island now filled in on one side and a line of differentiation in the foliage which could indicate a ditch or fortification. This possible location is one and a half or two miles from the monument. Any disturbance of the earth such as an old foundation is much more readily visible from the air. We plan to take aerial photographs of the area, because these often show a perceptible change in the type and shade of foliage where there were habitations and burial areas even centuries ago. The next step will be to reach the spot on foot and then dig test trenches to look for evidence of palisades of the old fort and charcoal left from its burning.130
One of the students working with Johnson, Joseph Granger, conducted additional archaeological work around the site in 1960. Digging several test pits within 150 feet of the monument, Granger found the pits sterile and concluded that “no case may now be made for the Monument Site as the location of the Great Swamp Site of the Narragansett village of 1675.”131 Additional test area sites throughout the Great Swamp yielded intriguing but inconclusive evidence as to where the fort might have been located. Granger did conclude, however, that there were “traditional selective forces which governed [the fort’s] placement . . . [and that] topographic and environmental factors once isolated and combined with ethnohistoric data may show that, far from being a defensive reaction to Colonial encroachment, the 1675 winter village was merely a typical seasonal settlement in a consistently used refuge area.”132
Like Johnson and Granger, both professional and avocational archaeologists believe that there are pieces of high ground in the swamp away from the memorial site and not detailed on topographic maps that may indicate alternative sites for the fort.133 Many of these sites, suitable for traditional woodlands camps, are located on the northern perimeter of the swamp, around which bullets and burned corn have been found.134 It is also likely, according to historian William Simmons, that the Great Swamp has dried up since the seventeenth century so that “the fort site may be not in the present-day swamp but somewhere outside it, under plowed fields.”135
The Great Swamp Fight Memorial is designated by a state marker along South County Road in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Many colonial Rhode Islanders, whose homes would later be destroyed by the Narragansett, might well have questioned the “decisive” nature of the Narragansett’s defeat. (Eric Schultz)
The most recent and thorough archaeological study of the Great Swamp was completed in 1993 for the town of South Kingstown by the Public Archaeology Survey Team sponsored by the town and the Rhode Island Historic Preservation Commission. A reconnaissance-level archaeological survey (background research, surficial walkover, and subsurface testing) was conducted, including a study of Native American settlement patterns and resource procurement strategies.136 Archaeological teams inspected all of the plowed fields within the Great Swamp Wildlife Reservation, nineteen in total, and discovered probable prehistoric artifacts in sixteen of those fields. In addition, the team located nine archaeological sites through subsurface testing, two of which included historic period components.137 Many of the sites yielded valuable information about settlement patterns within the Great Swamp, but one in particular yielded artifacts that might finally indicate the location of the Great Swamp Fight:138
These artifacts include 62 fragments of green bottle glass, four carbonized corn fragments, one calcined European gunflint fragment, one graphite stone, and charcoal fragments of varying size. The bottle glass fragments have been mended and crossmended and include base, body, neck and mouth fragments including a string type rim. It is not conclusive, but the bottle fragments reflect the bottle morphology of the period of the fort’s occupation (Noel Hume 1991: 60–71). The carbonized corn fragments correlated with the primary accounts describing the Narragansetts’ wigwams being “all lined with baskets and tubs of grain and other provisions sufficient to supply the whole army until the spring of the year . . .” (Hubbard 1971: 151; Church 1975: 100). The presence of charred or parched corn revealed by plowing at the fort site has been noted by 19th-century historians, including Elisha Potter in 1835 and Samuel Drake in 1841. One calcine gunflint fragment has been recovered and demonstrates wear patterns on the blade’s edge reflective of firing use.139
The authors of the report concluded that the find, while intriguing, would require additional archaeological research to substantiate. If it were to prove conclusive, however, then one of the premier colonial historical mysteries will be solved, and the real work of interpreting the site and adding to our knowledge of the Great Swamp Fight and King Philip’s War will begin.
At the time of King Philip’s War, Simsbury was a scattered settlement of about forty homes, stretching seven miles along both sides of the Farmington River.140 Connecticut officials were keenly aware of the settlement’s exposed position, and in October 1675 ordered its inhabitants to evacuate the town within one week.141 Taking whatever crops and personal possessions they could gather, residents left for Windsor or Hartford, probably with thoughts of never seeing their homes again. However, when the expected attack did not materialize over the fall and winter, most returned to begin life anew.
By March 1676 the Narragansett had entered the war; Lancaster, Medfield, and Groton had all been recently attacked, and the threat of assault on Simsbury was more acute than ever. On March 3, the settlers at Simsbury were ordered to evacuate forthwith.142 With little time, poor travel conditions, and the need to herd livestock before them, residents could take few personal possessions. When warriors struck on March 26, they
destroyed by fire nearly every building in the town, as well as every thing else left by the English, which could be found, and which the invaders could not appropriate to their own use. The ruin was complete—nothing but utter desolation remained.143
Simsbury lay deserted for almost a year before residents began straggling back. After two evacuations and the settlement’s complete destruction, many had no reason to return, and never did.144
Simsbury’s destruction was barely touched upon by the Puritan historians of Massachusetts; Hubbard fails to mention it at all, and Mather notes that Connecticut “hath been in a manner untouched, saving that one small deserted plantation therein was burnt by the Indians.”145
According to tradition, when the settlers at Simsbury evacuated the town, they hid many of their personal possessions by burying them in swamps, or placing them in wells that were then covered over. When the town was reoccupied, so the story goes, its residents were unable to find these possessions because the landmarks of the town had been so completely obliterated. Local historian Noah Phelps, writing in 1845, dismissed this tradition, saying that it would have been impossible for every landmark to have been lost, and noting that it is more likely the warriors discovered the goods and destroyed them.146
The ambush of Captain Michael Pierce and his Plymouth Colony soldiers occurred on Sunday, March 26, 1676, in the present-day city of Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sometimes attributed to the Narragansett sachem Canonchet,147 this ambush was in many respects a textbook military operation. Several friendly natives escaped the engagement, but only nine English survived, and these nine men were later discovered dead several miles north of Central Falls in present-day Cumberland, Rhode Island, a site now known as Nine Men’s Misery. Not only was the ambush deadly for Pierce and his men, but it was devastating to the morale of the colonies which, on the very same day, witnessed the murder of settlers in Longmeadow, Massachusetts; the burning of Marlboro, Massachusetts; and the destruction of Simsbury, Connecticut.
Pierce, a resident of Scituate, Massachusetts, had gathered in Plymouth a force of Englishmen from Scituate, Marshfield, Duxbury, Eastham, and Yarmouth, supported by twenty friendly natives from Cape Cod. Together, this band marched to Taunton, then along the Old Seacuncke Road (Tremont Street) to Rehoboth148 (now East Providence, Rhode Island). There, they were joined by several men from Rehoboth, expanding their total number to sixty-three English and twenty friendly natives.
Reports indicated that a large group of the enemy had gathered in the area of Pawtucket Falls, an ideal location from which to catch alewives, salmon, and shad, and a natural fording spot in the river.149 Pierce and his men set out in pursuit. On Saturday, March 25, they skirmished with the Narragansett, perhaps north of the falls,150 where, historian Leonard Bliss concludes, Pierce “met with no loss, but judged he had occasioned considerable to the enemy.”151
It is not unreasonable to think that Pierce had skirmished with a small patrol sent intentionally to meet and test the English—an exercise broken off by the natives once they had gathered information on the size and strength of their opponent. In any event, Pierce met no other natives and returned for the night to the garrison at Old Rehoboth. Meanwhile, armed with information from the skirmish, native leaders undoubtedly set to work devising a trap for the English troops.
On Sunday, March 26, Pierce and his troops returned to the field, probably marching from present-day East Providence, north along the Seekonk River (which becomes the Blackstone River), back toward Pawtucket Falls. It is said that as they marched, they were watched by Narragansett from Dexter’s Ledge, now the site of Cogswell Tower in Jenks Park, Central Falls (rough distance and heavily wooded terrain make this questionable).152 Somewhere close to the Blackstone, perhaps near a fording spot where Roosevelt Avenue now crosses the river,153 in what Bliss describes as an “obscure woody place,”154 they spotted four or five Narragansett fleeing as if wounded or hurt. Had a more experienced commander witnessed this show, he might have immediately fallen back. However, Pierce and his troops charged after the bait, suddenly finding themselves surrounded by “about 500 Indians, who, in very good order, furiously attacked them.”155
Pierce apparently met the ambush on the eastern side of the Blackstone, but crossed to the western side, where the natives were engaged in force. A contemporary account of the battle by an anonymous Boston merchant, paraphrased by Bliss, made the English out to be as heroic as possible, but the devastation was complete:
Our men had made the enemy retreat, but so slowly, that it scarce deserved the name; when a fresh company of about 400 Indians came in, so that the English and their few Indian friends, were quite surrounded and beset on every side. Yet they made a brave resistance for above two hours, during all which time they did great execution upon the enemy, whom they kept at a distance, and themselves in order. For Captain Pierce cast his 63 English and 20 Indians into a ring and fought back to back, and were double-double distance all in one ring, whilst the Indians were as thick as they could stand thirty deep: overpowered with whose numbers, the said captain, and 55 of his English, and 10 of their Indian friends were slain upon the place; which, in such cause, and upon such disadvantages, may certainly be styled the bed of honour.”156
It is unlikely, of course, that nine hundred natives participated in the ambush. Nor does it seem logical that eighty-three men, disadvantaged by surprise, terrain, and numbers, would have much chance of forcing even four hundred warriors to retreat. (Contemporary writers reported that Pierce and his men killed 140 of their enemy,157 a figure undoubtedly inflated.) However, if Pierce and his troops crossed the Blackstone near present-day Roosevelt Avenue, the battle may have moved northward along the river to a spot near present-day Macomber Field on High Street, where a commemorative marker was placed in 1907. The marker reads:
PIERCE’S FIGHT
NEAR THIS SPOT
CAPTAIN MICHAEL PIERCE
AND HIS COMPANY OF
PLYMOUTH COLONISTS
AMBUSHED AND OUTNUMBERED WERE
ALMOST ANNIHILATED
BY THE INDIANS
MARCH 26 1676
ERECTED BY THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND
IN 1907
A visit to this site today places the traveler in a heavily industrialized area surrounded by factories and baseball fields. It is worth remembering, however, that Central Falls was once the “North Woods” of Providence and remained only sparsely settled throughout the eighteenth century.158 Marching along, Pierce would have seen a wooded land of oak, walnut, chestnut, and birch trees with three falls (Pawtucket to the south, Valley to the north, and Central near the crossing at Roosevelt Avenue) supplying the Narragansett with rich fishing grounds.159 By contrast, present-day Central Falls is so densely built that the Blackstone River is all but invisible from nearby Cogswell Tower.
Not far from the former Cistercian Monastery on Diamond Hill Road in Cumberland, Rhode Island, sits a stone memorial long known to local residents as Nine Men’s Misery. Dedicated in the early twentieth century, this cairn locates the gravesite of nine English soldiers under Captain Michael Pierce who were taken prisoner and executed by Narragansett in March 1676. (Eric Schultz)
Not all of Pierce’s troops died in the ambush. Several of the friendly natives devised ingenious means of escape. One blackened his face with powder like the enemy and passed through their lines without incident.160 Another pretended to chase his comrade with a tomahawk, the two running past their enemies and on to safety.161 It appears also that nine English soldiers escaped death during the ambush, though the details of their story are conjecture only. One tradition holds that they had gone ahead of the main body of troops and were chased into present-day Cumberland, where they made their stand against a large rock and all perished.162
A more plausible explanation is that these nine survived the ambush, were taken prisoner, and were marched northward about three miles to a piece of upland surrounded by swamp known as Camp Swamp. Here, upon a large rock, they were executed. It was several weeks before their bodies were found, scalped and uncovered, on this rock. The men were buried some seventy yards northeast of the rock in a common grave. Above this grave a heap of small stones was used to construct a fourteen-foot-long stone wall, some three feet high and one foot wide at the base.163 To this day, residents know this place as Nine Men’s Misery.
In the early twentieth century a cairn of stones (since damaged) was placed over the spot, and in 1928 a granite marker was set by the Rhode Island Historical Society.164 The marker reads:
NINE MEN’S MISERY
ON THIS SPOT
WHERE THEY WERE SLAIN BY
THE INDIANS
WERE BURIED THE NINE SOLDIERS
CAPTURED IN PIERCE’S FIGHT
MARCH 26, 1676
The cairn and marker can be found near the former Cistercian Monastery on Diamond Hill Road, about six-tenths of a mile south of Route 295 in Cumberland. (These grounds are now home to the Cumberland Hayden Center Library, the Northern Rhode Island Collaborative School, the Cumberland Senior Citizens Department, and other city services.) A dirt road, heading north-northeast from the northeast corner of the grounds, leads directly to the site, which requires about a quarter-mile walk. (Many residents walk and jog in this area and are able to point a visitor in the right direction.)
Around the time of the American Revolution a physician dug up remains from the grave, identifying one skeleton as that of Benjamin Buckland of Rehoboth by its large frame and double set of teeth.165 When the Catholic Order of Monks purchased the land, remains of the men killed at Nine Men’s Misery were dug up and given to the Rhode Island Historical Society. During the 1976 bicentennial celebration, after the land had been turned over to the town of Cumberland for its use, the bones were reburied at their original site.166
In 1676 Providence, Rhode Island, was a small farming and fishing village set along the eastern shore of the Providence River and the Old Cove. The Old Cove (or Great Salt Cove) was an important feature of early Providence that occupied the present-day railroad terminal and municipal parking lot to its north. The Providence and Worcester Railroad renovated the area around the cove in the 1840s, building an eighty-foot walkway known as Cove Promenade around the basin; this lent its name to present-day Promenade Street.167 By the early 1890s the cove was completely filled and converted to railroad yards.
Providence’s main thoroughfare was Towne Street, a dirt road that followed present-day North and South Main Street (between Olney and Wickenden Streets). In 1650, fifty-two five-acre home lots had been laid out from Towne Street, across College Hill to Hope Street.168 Houses were constructed at the front of the lots, with gardens and burial plots set in the rear. By 1659, Providence encompassed 380 square miles,169 or most of the area in present-day Providence County west of the Blackstone River.170 Providence could boast about five hundred residents prior to King Philip’s War, though by early 1676 news of native victories had reduced the population to less than thirty men.171 Among the town’s remaining residents was seventy-seven-year-old Roger Williams, captain of the local militia and a long time friend and trading partner of the Narragansett.
On March 29, 1676, Canonchet and his warriors appeared on the highlands north of the great Cove, where, tradition holds, Roger Williams took his staff and went out alone to try to pacify them. A traditional account of the exchange has been preserved by historian Samuel Greene Arnold:
“Massachusetts,” said he, “can raise thousands of men at this moment, and if you kill them, the King of England will supply their place as fast as they fall.”
“Well, let them come,” was the reply, “we are ready for them. But as for you, brother Williams, you are a good man; you have been kind to us many years; not a hair of your head shall be touched.”172
The location of this meeting was along the Old Cove near the present-day intersection of Canal and Smith Streets, looking west to the State Capitol from the Roger Williams National Memorial at North Main and Smith Streets.
In the subsequent attack, Providence lost fifty-four houses.173 Others were destroyed after the town was abandoned. Many of the dwellings along Towne Street, including Williams’ own, were lost.174 The aging patriarch was forced to flee, and in a striking portent of the impact King Philip’s War would have on old Puritan strictures, was given permission by Massachusetts Bay to seek safety in that colony. The house where Providence’s town records were kept was plundered and the records thrown into the millpond, though some were recovered.175
Roger Williams’ house was located near the northeast corner of North Main and Howland Streets;176 across the street was the spring of fresh water used by the Williams family and now marked by the Hahn Memorial. Williams died in 1683 and was buried with martial honors in his family burying ground located to the rear of his home lot.
One of only two houses177 in Providence to survive King Philip’s War was the Roger Mowry House, built in the 1650s and located on the north side of Abbott Street near North Main Street. Built originally as a one-room structure, it was eventually expanded to two stories. It served as Providence’s first inn and was used for town meetings. The Mowry House was destroyed by fire in 1900.178 In the mid-eighteenth century foundation walls of several of the original buildings were still visible, but by the mid-nineteenth century these had disappeared.179 No structures—or remains—from the time of King Philip’s War now stand in Providence.
The men of Rehoboth who pursued Philip before the Nipsachuck Swamp Fight in August 1675 were instigated by the Reverend Noah Newman, minister of Rehoboth, whom Hubbard viewed as deserving “not a little Commendation for exciting his Neighbors and Friends.”180 Newman’s house, a new parsonage built for him just before the outbreak of hostilities, was used as a principal garrison by the English throughout the war. It stood on the north side of Newman Avenue between the Congregational Church and the Meeting House pond181 in the present-day Rumford section of East Providence. This area, called Seacunke until 1645, was the Rehoboth of King Philip’s time, and for several centuries would spin off new towns, like Attleboro, Massachusetts, and Cumberland, Rhode Island, from its initial grant. East Providence would finally become annexed to Rhode Island in 1862.
Old Rehoboth was parceled into six-, eight-, and twelve-acre lots according to the wealth of its proprietors. These lots, most long and narrow, all faced a two-hundred-acre town common known as the “Ring of the Greene” or the “Ring of the Towne.” The exact shape of the Ring is unknown, but it probably coincided with present-day Greenwood Avenue, Elm Street, Bourne, Hoyt, Pawtucket, and Bishop Avenues, and Pleasant Street.182 The town’s principal garrison sat on the southeast side of the common,183 though other garrison sites are also known.184
At the northeast corner of the Ring of the Greene, near the intersection of Route 114 (Pawtucket Avenue) and Route 1A (Newport Avenue), began a long, flat expanse of land known historically as the “great plaine,” Seekonk Plain, or Rehoboth Plain. It was over this terrain, running about four miles to the Attleboro, Massachusetts, line,185 that Philip and his band were spotted after fleeing the Pocasset Swamp. (An old Indian path probably bisected the plain along where Route 1A now runs.)186 Descriptions of the Seekonk Plain—prior to the construction of Route 1A and such landmarks as the Gansett Shopping Center, Narragansett Race Track, and Slater Memorial Park—indicate that it was an awe-inspiring topographic feature. In 1750 it was described as being “about 3 miles over without a scrub and quite level, surrounded with woods.”187 In 1833, local historian Ebenezer Peirce (then eleven years old) passed over the Seekonk Plain en route from Freetown to Pawtucket to see President Andrew Jackson and Vice President Martin Van Buren, who were both visiting Pawtucket. In 1878 Peirce wrote about the experience:
The writer of this book has a very distinct recollection of the time that his eyes first beheld the great Seekonk Plain, and the wonder and astonishment with which he regarded the level unenclosed and barren-looking waste land. I have seen nothing like it since, save in some locations at the South where armies had long been quartered during the late war. Tradition says that a hot fire which consumed much of the wood and timber that formerly stood on Seekonk Plain, also burned the vegetable mould in the soil, thus rendering it unproductive. Large portions of this plain have within a few years been fenced in, so that its former novelty in appearance has in great measure ceased.188
On the morning of March 28, 1676, fifteen hundred natives189 attacked Rehoboth, burning thirty barns and almost forty dwellings190 around the common and in outlying areas. John Kingsley, an elderly resident of the town, wrote pathetically of the attack:
They burnt our mills, brake the stones, ye, our grinding stones; and what was hid in the earth they found, corne & fowles, killed catel & took the hind quarters & left the rest . . . We are shut up in our garrisons & dare not go abroad far to our outlandes, without some strength. Some of our souldieres are removed, nobody comes to say, how doe ye.191
Other, smaller attacks followed, so that only two buildings in the old village of Rehoboth were said to survive King Philip’s War. Today, no traces of any structure from the original settlement can be found.
The area we know today as Rehoboth was first settled by the English in the mid-1660s, about twenty years after the East Providence area of Old Rehoboth was established. By 1675, six or eight families occupied homes along the Palmer River, from present-day Summer Street to the current Swansea line.192 Two garrisons were located within the bounds of this settlement, and both were documented by local resident Dr. William Blanding (1773–1857). Blanding prepared a notebook in which he sketched and wrote about many of the town structures standing when he was a boy. Among these was “Blockhouse #2,” which even in 1782 was in “a decayed state and inhabited by some poor family or families.”193 This “simple thatched roof cottage . . . surrounded by a palisade-type fence”194 was located on the southwest side of Providence Street, at the head of Reed Street. A visitor today will see only a small empty field.
A second garrison, known as “Blockhouse #1,” was located “about a mile north of Blockhouse #2 between the Palmer River and Wheeler Street near where the present power line right of way is located.”195 This site, subsequently built on, is near present-day 144 Wheeler Street. In 1975 archaeologists dug at the site, discovering artifacts that suggested the presence of at least one earlier house dating from the seventeenth century.196
On April 3, 1676, Captain George Denison of Connecticut was heading a force of some forty-seven soldiers197 accompanied by eighty friendly Niantic, Pequot, and Mohegan198 through the Narragansett country around present-day Pawtucket, Rhode Island. There they captured a squaw who informed them that Canonchet’s camp was not far away. Canonchet, with thirty men, had returned to his homeland from Nipmuc country to seek seed corn for the spring planting. He was also actively prosecuting the war, having ambushed Captain Michael Pierce and destroyed Providence on March 26 and 29 respectively.
The news of Canonchet’s whereabouts, William Hubbard suggests, “put new Life into the wearied Soldiers, that had traveled hard many Days, and met with no Booty till now.”199 Pushing rapidly onward, Denison’s force spotted two warriors on the crest of a hill; pursuing them, they came upon a small group of natives that fled in all directions. Canonchet, “having no Time to consult, and but little time to attempt an Escape, and no Means to defend Himself,”200 bolted to the back side of the hill, throwing off his blanket, his silver-trimmed coat, and his belt of wampum. This only encouraged his pursuers, who suddenly realized they were closing in on the Narragansett sachem himself.
Racing to the river, Canonchet waded in and slipped, falling into the water and soaking his gun. At this, his spirit seemed to dissolve—for, as Hubbard reported, “his Heart and his Bowels turned within him, so as he became like a rotten Stick,”201 and he surrendered, upon which
one of the first English that came up with him was Robert Stanton, a young man that scarce had reached the twenty second Year of his Age, yet adventuring to ask him a Question or two, to whom, this manly Sachem looking with a little Neglect upon his youthful Face, replied in broken English; you much Child; no understand Matters of War; let your Brother or your Chief come, him I will Answer.202
Canonchet was sent to Stonington, Connecticut, where he was offered his life in return for an end to hostilities. He refused, and when told he would die, Canonchet said “he liked it well, that he should dye before his Heart was soft, or had spoken any thing unworthy of himself.”203 The sachem was executed and his head carried to Hartford.
The site of Canonchet’s capture is not known positively, though some historians conjecture that the hill where Denison spotted the sentinels was Study Hill, northeast of Pierce’s Fight, along the Blackstone River.204 Study Hill, located in the section of present-day Cumberland known as Lonsdale, was home to William Blackstone (the first settler of Boston, who left after a quarrel with later arrivals). The site can no longer even be investigated; the hill was leveled in the nineteenth century to fill and grade the nearby railroad yards.
On August 6, 1676, Weetamoe died, and the following day troops under Benjamin Church captured a number of men in the camp of the Wampanoag sachem Totoson, driving Totoson to his death. Everywhere, English soldiers and friendly Indians combed the countryside for Philip, thought to be fleeing southward toward Narragansett country.
On August 9, Church and his troops departed from Plymouth, searched the woods around Pocasset, and then crossed the narrows of the Sakonnet River to Aquidneck Island on August 11. There, Church received the information that would cost Philip his life. A Wampanoag had fled Philip’s camp, telling the English that Philip had killed his brother for having suggested peace with the English.205 This same native wanted to exact his revenge by leading Church and his men to the camp, which Church in his History says was located “upon a little spot of upland, that was in the south end of the miry swamp, just at the foot of the mount [Mount Hope], which was a spot of ground that Captain Church was well acquainted with.”206
Church’s force crossed the water at Tripp’s Ferry (where the present-day Mount Hope Bridge crosses from Portsmouth to Bristol) and arrived “a little upland in the northern end of a miry swamp at the foot of Mount Hope.”207 At daybreak on August 12, Captain Roger Goulding—the same man who had rescued Church and his troops from Almy’s Pease Field the prior July—and a small group closed in silently on Philip’s camp, hoping to surprise and drive the sachem into the ring of Church’s men surrounding the camp. Goulding’s men were told to shout once the battle began; anyone running silently from the camp would be shot.
The scheme was ruined when Goulding suddenly came face-to-face with one of Philip’s men, at whom he fired. There followed immediately a volley by the English, but Philip’s camp had barely enough time to respond to the first shot, so few were standing and few were hit. Confusion erupted. Benjamin Church wrote:
They were soon in the swamp, and Philip the foremost, who starting at the first gun, threw his petunk and powderhorn over his head, catched up his gun, and ran as fast as he could scamper, without any more clothes than his small breeches and stockings; and ran directly on two of Captain Church’s ambush. They let him come fair within shot, and the Englishman’s gun missing fire, he bid the Indian fire away, and he did so to [the] purpose; sent one musket bullet through his heart, and another not above two inches from it. He fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him.208
Ironically, although thousands of English soldiers had been tracking him for months, King Philip, shown here fleeing from his camp, was fatally shot by Alderman, another Native American. (Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University)
The Englishman whose gun failed was thought to be Caleb Cook. The native who killed Philip was known as Alderman, a disenchanted Pocasset.209 When news of Philip’s death was reported to Church’s men, “the whole army gave three loud huzzas.”210
Five of Philip’s men were killed, but most of the sachem’s band, including Philip’s war chief, Anawan, escaped. Church pulled Philip’s body from the mud, describing him as “a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast.”211 Saying that Philip had caused many an Englishman’s body to lie unburied, Church called upon a native to behead and quarter Philip. Each section of Philip’s body was hung from a tree.
Historian Henry Dexter reminds us that some believed Philip was a traitor to King Charles II and that he should be treated as such under English law. This law, barbaric by modern standards, lasted in England until 1790.212 It included being hung by the neck and cut down alive, having the entrails cut out and burned while still alive, being beheaded, and then having the body cut into four quarters. Dexter added that the colonies were simply part of the mother country, which had (less than twenty years before) disinterred Oliver Cromwell, hung his decayed remains, and stuck his head on a pole on the top of Westminister Hall fronting the palace yard.213
Philip’s head was carried to Plymouth and set on a pole on August 17, where it remained for a generation. Philip’s “one very remarkable hand, being much scarred, occasioned by the splitting of a pistol in it formerly,”214 was given to Alderman, who kept it in a pail of rum and earned his livelihood by exhibiting it at taverns for a fee.215 Church’s troops returned to Plymouth, where each received four shillings and sixpence for their labors.216
The traditional site of Philip’s death is located on the grounds of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology in Bristol, Rhode Island. Also at this site is the Seat of Metacom, or King Philip’s Chair, a natural rock depression formed on the northeast slope of Mount Hope, where tradition says Philip met with his people. The site can be located on a map provided at the museum and is within easy walking distance of the main buildings.
This photograph of King Philip’s Chair in Bristol, Rhode Island, suggests that the chair, while providing an impressive view of Narragansett Bay, was less a piece of outdoor furniture and more a creation of Anglo-America’s imagination. (Michael Tougias)
The place of King Philip’s death, also shown on the Haffenreffer map, is harder to reach. The spot is located on a private paved road that splits south from Tower Road at a sharp bend about two miles from the museum. From the split, a walk of about one hundred yards along an overgrown path and around a gate on land marked NO TRESPASSING is necessary. There, the path forks to the west and a covered spring and block of granite can be seen about forty yards beyond, designating the site. The marker, referred to as the Cold Springs Monument, reads:
IN THE “MIERY SWAMP,”
166 FEET W.S.W. FROM THIS
SPRING, ACCORDING TO TRADITION,
KING PHILIP FELL, AUGUST 12
1676, O.S.
THIS STONE PLACED BY
THE R.I. HISTORICAL SOCIETY
DECEMBER, 1877
Church described the location of Philip’s camp as being “upon a little spot of upland, that was in the south end of the miry swamp, just at the foot of the mount [Mount Hope].” This site clearly matches Church’s account. However, how the Rhode Island Historical Society could place the spot of Philip’s death so accurately, two centuries after the event, is a tribute to power of tradition and a delight to skeptical historians.
One of the best known of King Philip’s would-be artifacts, said to have been taken from Philip by Benjamin Church at the sachem’s death, is a war club held by the Fruitlands Museums in Harvard, Massachusetts. Carved from maple, the club is twenty-two inches long and weighs one pound, twelve and a half ounces. Wielded with one hand, it must have been a formidable weapon, and brings into sharp relief what Mary Rowlandson meant when she said her Lancaster neighbors were “knocked on the head”217 during the February 1676 attack on that settlement.
King Philip’s war club was inlaid with fifty-eight white and twenty-eight violet beads, and two triangular-shaped pieces of purple shell.218 Tradition holds that the beads represent the number of English and natives Philip killed, though this should be viewed skeptically: Historians suggest that Philip was rarely in a position during King Philip’s War to engage in direct combat with the English, and one has to wonder if the time or materials existed to continually update the club in the heat of war.
King Philip’s war club was purchased for Clara Endicott Sears, founder of the Fruitlands Museums, in May 1930 by Warren K. Moorehead of Phillips Academy in Andover. Moorehead had first heard of the club in 1913 while investigating various archaeological sites in Maine, and had attempted unsuccessfully to purchase it for the Haffenreffer Museum in July 1929. When rumor circulated that it was about to be sold in New York, he again approached the club’s owner, Laura Anne Daniels of Union, Maine, and this time managed to strike a deal.
While inscribed with great precision by nineteenth-century antiquarians, this memorial to King Philip’s death, set in the woods of Bristol, Rhode Island, marks at best the general location of Philip’s death. (Michael Tougias)
The history of the club is recorded in the files of the Fruitlands Museums: The club was considered a precious family treasure and had been handed down to Mrs. Daniels through her great-aunt, Angelica (Gilbert) James, originating with a distant ancestor, the Reverend John Checkley. Checkley was the rector of the Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island, and family stories indicated that he had accompanied Benjamin Church on the expedition that would lead to Philip’s death in the swamp at Bristol, Rhode Island. The club was said to have been taken from the body of Philip by Alderman, the Indian credited with shooting Philip. An 1842 newspaper report in the museum files says that Church had assisted Checkley with purchasing the club from Alderman, as well as a “large, heavy and handsomely wrought” pipe, and a belt “covered with various colored beads, made as in the Indian mode, of shells and bones.”219 All three objects, said to belong to Philip, were given in exchange for Checkley’s gold watch.
In 1846, Angelica (Gilbert) James loaned the club, belt, and pipe, along with a boot that belonged to John Checkley, to the Historical Society of Connecticut in Hartford. The objects remained in the possession of the historical society for at least three decades,220 and probably until the turn of the century,221 when the club was eventually returned to James’ family. The belt and pipe have since dropped from sight; whether they were returned from Hartford is unknown. To prove their existence, we have only the 1842 newspaper account describing them, and a receipt from a representative of the Historical Society of Connecticut who delivered them from Mrs. James’ home in Utica, New York, to Hartford.
For forty years King Philip’s war club was exhibited at Fruitlands until, on July 2, 1970, it was stolen in broad daylight during visiting hours. Two men driving a tan 1963 Chevrolet parked directly in front of the door to the museum, allowed only because one pretended to be an invalid. A third man may have assisted in distracting the two attendants on duty, who shortly thereafter discovered the club missing from its Plexiglas case.222 No significant clues or leads were ever discovered, and the trail grew cold until October 1994 when Ned Jalbert, an interior designer and collector of Native American artifacts, paid $125 for the club at a Worcester, Massachusetts, yard sale. The Fruitlands Museum director Robert Farwell told the Boston Globe that serendipity played an important part in the war club’s recovery:
“We didn’t know who he [Jalbert] was,” Farwell said. “However, once we saw the club, there was no doubt it was King Philip’s.” . . . Over the years, Farwell said, tips about the club’s fate come in periodically. None panned out. After Jalbert bought the club, he learned it was part of an estate sale held on behalf of a Worcester man whose wife had died recently. Jalbert called the seller back and came away convinced the man knew nothing of the club’s value, historical or otherwise.223
On June 19, 1995, Jalbert, Farwell, and members of several Wampanoag groups were on hand at a ceremony marking the return of the artifact to the museum.
Had the war club held by Fruitlands today really belonged to King Philip? A short time after the club was purchased, a descendant of John Checkley wrote to Clara Endicott Sears to correct the story regarding the purchase of the club. Checkley, it seems, was born in Boston in 1680, four years after Philip’s death. He served as a missionary to the Indians of southeastern New England after his ordination in 1738, two generations after the end of King Philip’s War, and almost twenty years after the death of Benjamin Church in 1717. Checkley’s memoirs, published in 1897, stated that he spent time with Benjamin Church, though how much and under what conditions is unknown; he was most certainly not present when Alderman shot Philip. The Memoirs do mention that Checkley was “something of an archaeologist, and took a great interest in Indian implements and relics,”224 but nowhere does it relate that Church was involved in any transaction for Philip’s possessions. Checkley died at Providence in 1754, where his inventory of estate listed only “Indian toys.”
Church is also quite clear in his History that Philip, startled in his camp by the English, “threw his petunk and powderhorn over his head, catched up his gun, and ran as fast as he could scamper, without any more clothes than his small breeches and stockings.”225 Nowhere is there mention of a war club, or the discovery of one after Philip’s death.
Among the original papers said to accompany the club—all lost before its sale to Fruitlands—was a receipt from the Indian who sold the club, belt, and pipe to Checkley. (Whether this Indian was really Alderman or not is questionable.) Also lost was an affidavit from a number of prominent men, probably Checkley’s neighbors in Providence, who knew and swore to the history of the club. Warren Moorehead attempted to locate these papers from Mrs. Daniels on several occasions after the sale but was unsuccessful.
Finally, the issue of the missing pipe and belt remains. In the early 1980s Fruitlands was offered for purchase an item purported to be “Philip’s peace pipe,” but rejected it as being probably nonauthentic. Whether this was the same pipe purchased by John Checkley that eventually made its way to another New England family is unknown. As for the second item, it seems probable that whatever Checkley purchased, it was not Philip’s belt. The Pokanoket belts were passed to Benjamin Church by Anawan a short time after Philip’s death, and never fell into the hands of Alderman. The story of Philip’s belts (detailed in Chapter 4, “Anawan’s Capture”) would imply that whatever Checkley purchased, it could not have been the genuine article.
As much as romantics wish that King Philip’s war club was actually owned and used by Philip, firm evidence is difficult to assemble. That John Checkley accumulated important and perhaps unique Native American artifacts is likely, that he bought them from Alderman with Benjamin Church’s assistance unlikely, and that he traded for them at the time of Philip’s death impossible. The loss of critical documents and the accumulation of hopeful family tradition obscure the war club’s true story.
At the start of his Entertaining History of King Philip’s War, published in 1716, Benjamin Church writes through his son, Thomas:
In the year 1674, Mr. Benjamin Church of Duxbury, being providentially at Plymouth in the time of court, fell into acquaintance with Captain John Almy of Rhode Island. Captain Almy with great importunity invited him to ride with him and view that part of Plymouth colony that lay next to Rhodeisland, known then by their Indian names Pocasset and Sogkonate. Among other arguments to persuade him, he told him the soil was very rich and the situation pleasant . . . He accepted his invitation, views the country and was pleased with it, makes a purchase, settled a farm . . . and being himself a person of uncommon activity and industry, he soon erected two buildings upon his farm, and gained a good acquaintance with the natives; got much into their favor, and was in a little time in great esteem among them.226
Church, nothing if not immodest, had high hopes of attracting others to the area, but when rumors of war arose the settlement’s growth came to a halt. Not until 1682 was Little Compton formally established as a town.227 In 1747, the town became part of Rhode Island. Due to Little Compton’s relative isolation, no part of King Philip’s War was fought there.
Benjamin Church, shown here killing an Indian chief, gained fame as both a friend of New England’s natives and as a relentless Indian fighter. (Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University)
The natives to which Church referred were the Sakonnet, who lived on the present-day site of Little Compton, bordered to the north by the Pocasset of modern-day Tiverton, Rhode Island, and Fall River, Massachusetts. Punkatees was located on upland in Tompe Swamp, north of the present-day Swamp Road, in or near Wilbour Woods.228 This site is the traditional burial site of Awashonks, the Sakonnet’s squaw sachem, though this is purely speculation, as is her fate. Awashonks’ camp at Tompe Swamp was sold before King Philip’s War began, and the new reservation given to her at the time, south of Taylor’s Lane, “was lost, in ways unknown, by 1681,” according to a 1988 report published by the Little Compton Historical Society. “She and her daughter Betty disappeared from history in 1683.”229
Most of the area now called Sakonnet Point, at the southwest extremity of Little Compton overlooking the Sakonnet River and Rhode Island Sound, once belonged to Benjamin Church and his descendants.230 It was here, in June 1676, near the war’s end, while returning home from Plymouth, that Church happened upon several natives engaged in fishing. “They urged Mr. Church to come ashore, for they had a great desire to have some discourse with him.”231 In a short time Church had arranged a meeting with Awashonks, “two days after, at a rock at the lower end of Captain Richmond’s farm, which was a very noted place.”232
At the appointed time—much to the chagrin of his “tender and now almost broken hearted wife”233—Church met with Awashonks and her people. The meeting began poorly when Awashonks’ men, dressed for battle, jumped from the grass and surrounded Church. After convincing them to lay down their guns “at some small distance, for formality’s sake,”234 Church offered Awashonks a rum drink; she would taste it only after Church drank first, for fear of poison. The icy meeting continued for a time, with Church slowly convincing the Sakonnet that peace with the English was a better course than maintaining their alliance with Philip. Eventually, perhaps realizing that an English victory was inevitable, the Sakonnet promised to fight Philip.
Treaty Rock, the site of this famous meeting, is on private property off Treaty Rock Road, near Treaty Rock Farmhouse. This structure, built around 1865, replaced a seventeenth-century house on the site destroyed by fire. John Richmond first settled the land surrounding this house, and his family lived there until the late twentieth century.235 (The site is often referred to as the Richmond Farm.) Treaty Rock may only be accessed with permission.
The location of Benjamin Church’s first home is unproved, though tradition indicates a site on the south slope of Windmill Hill, at the north end of Little Compton near the Tiverton line.236 Several years after the end of King Philip’s War, Church returned to Little Compton and built a home near the Sakonnet River. Markers along West Main Street, on the west side near the intersection of Swamp Meadow Lane, commemorate this site. The house of Church’s son, Thomas, is located in the same area, closer to West Main Road. Thomas Church’s house is referred to as the Nelson or Wilbour house and is also known today as Blue Flag Farm.
Benjamin Church, the founder and favorite son of Little Compton, Rhode Island, is commemorated by a memorial in the town’s central graveyard. (Eric Schultz)
Little Compton Commons, on Meeting House Lane, is the site of the United Congregational Church and its burial ground, laid out in 1675–1677. Benjamin Church, who died in November 1718, is buried here. Church’s tombstone inscription reads:
Here lyeth interred the [body]
of the Honorable
Col. Benjamin Church, Esq.,
who departed this life, January 17, 1717–8 in
the 78 yeare of his age.
Standing next to the tombstone is a tablet that reads:
THIS TABLET
ERECTED BY THE RHODE ISLAND SOCIETY
OF COLONIAL WARS
IN RECOGNITION OF THE EXCEPTIONAL
SERVICE RENDERED BY
COL. BENJAMIN CHURCH
HIS FEARLESS LEADERSHIP
AND EFFECTIVE COMMAND DURING
KING PHILIP’S WAR
1675–1677
Church’s son, Thomas, who transcribed his father’s book from dictation, is buried nearby.
Captain Frost narrowly escaped from his dwelling near Maine’s Piscataqua River. His home was, in William Hubbard’s words, “neither fortified, nor well manned, yet was far from Neighbors,” a situation typical of many residences in this sparsely populated region of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University)
