The span of the water between Mount Hope Neck, where Pumetacom’s village stood, and Aquidneck Island, where the English towns of Portsmouth and Newport were located, is barely one mile. To someone on the ground gazing across this channel, it seems even closer. The distance is so short that, by the 1670s, the Wampanoags and English of these places would have been accustomed to seeing the light and smoke from each other’s fires and hearing the sounds of each other’s lives—percussive drumming and hammering, the barking and bellowing of domestic animals, the singing of people taking part in shamanistic rituals and church services. They could also easily track each other’s mishoons and shallops as they crossed back and forth between the two peoples’ settlements carrying traders, diplomats, wage workers, and even friends on social calls. Natives and newcomers were more than just rivals for control of southern New England. They were a constant and sometimes intimate part of each other’s lives.
Yet when John Easton, Rhode Island’s lieutenant governor, and four other colonial delegates ferried across the narrows in June 1675 to meet with Pumetacom at Montaup, tensions between the Wampanoags and English were at an all-time pitch. Plymouth had just arrested, tried, and executed three of the sachem’s followers for the murder of John Sassamon, which in and of itself was an unprecedented colonial breach of internal Wampanoag affairs and disregard of Wampanoag life. The Wampanoags feared, however, that English “justice” would not end there. They knew that Sassamon, just before his death, had informed the Plymouth governor, Josiah Winslow, that Pumetacom was in the final stages of plotting a multitribal anticolonial war. History taught that, at best, the English would use this charge to saddle Pumetacom with enormous fines to extort land cessions from him. Most of them believed the worst: that next “the English would hang Philip … that they might kill him to have his land.”1
Bristol Neck, Rhode Island, 1765. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This mid-eighteenth century painting depicts Montaup (or Mount Hope Neck), the seat of Pumetacom, almost a century after the English seized it from the Wampanoags in King Philip’s War. It was the site where Pumetacom and John Easton discussed Wampanoag-English tensions on the eve of the war. During the seventeenth century, it probably was more forested than it appears here.
However, that was not going to happen without a fight, which Pumetacom showcased by calling in matawaûog from surrounding Wampanoag communities and parading them in arms right up to the very edge of the border of Swansea, the nearest English town. To the colonists of Swansea and other nearby communities, such as Taunton, Rehoboth, and Portsmouth, whose encroachment on Wampanoag land had helped precipitate this crisis in the first place, it no longer seemed to be a question of whether Pumetacom would strike, but where and when. Still, Easton remained confident as he was crossing Mount Hope Bay that good-faith diplomacy could snuff out this fire before it spread out of control. As he explained, “For forty years time, reports and jealousies of war had been so frequent that we did not think that now a war was breaking forth.”2
It took little time before Easton realized that war was indeed happening. Pumetacom signaled his resolve (and mimicked the colonies’ past mistreatment of him) by greeting the Rhode Islanders at the head of forty armed men. The English, though unnerved, maintained enough composure for the two sides to sit “friendly together,” only to discover that Pumetacom intended this meeting as an airing of grievances instead of a negotiation. The conversation began with Easton emphasizing that the purpose of his embassy “was to endeavor that they [the Wampanoags] might receive or do no wrong.” Pumetacom retorted “that was well—they had done no wrong, the English wronged them.” Easton pleaded that he had no interest in rehearsing the old, tired act in which “the English said the Indians wronged them and the Indians said the English wronged them.” He wanted only to settle the Wampanoags’ feud with Plymouth “in the best way, and not as dogs decided their quarrels.” Pumetacom granted that “fighting was the worst way” but went on to explain why it seemed to be the only option left for his people. After all, their lifetime of abuse at English hands spoke louder than Easton’s promises.3
As the sachem told it, the colonies’ forced subjugation of the Wampanoags in 1671 had destroyed what little faith the Natives had in negotiated settlements with the English. He recalled bitterly that when he submitted his grievances with Plymouth to the judgment of Massachusetts and Connecticut, “all English agreed against them [the Wampanoags], and so by arbitration they had had much wrong, many miles square of land so taken from them; for English would have English arbitrators.” Additionally, when the Wampanoags surrendered a portion of their arms “that thereby jealousy might be removed,” the English refused to return them until Pumetacom coughed up one hundred pounds, even though he had already signed their treaty. The need for the Wampanoags to sell off territory in order to meet such fines meant “now they had not so much land or money,” so little in fact “that they were as good to be killed as to leave all their livelihood.” In other words, they had nothing left to lose.4
Trying to be constructive, Easton proposed setting up another arbitration without New England judges, presided over by a mutually acceptable Indian sachem and the royal governor of New York, Edmund Andros. Andros had some credibility in Native circles because his patron, James Stuart, the Duke of York, directed him to check the imperiousness of New England puritans, including their abuse of Indians. The Wampanoags admitted that “they had not heard of that way, and said we honestly spoke,” which provided Easton with a glimmer of hope. Nevertheless, Pumetacom snuffed out that flickering light as he returned to a deeper historical account of why fighting, “the worst way,” was necessary. Historians have characterized the sachem’s talk as the lament of someone pushed by Plymouth from one side, and by his own angry men from the other, into a war he did not want. That interpretation makes sense only if one denies that Pumetacom had been trying to organize a multitribal resistance against the English for more than a decade. But if one subscribes to the view espoused here, that he had a long track record of trying to rally the region’s Indians against the colonies, his words read far differently. They look like a principled declaration of war.5
Pumetacom’s history of English wrongs against his people comes through the fog of translation so clearly that, just as Easton alluded, he must have delivered it before in other diplomatic settings. This time, however, with the threat of violence looming, he succeeded at having an Englishman take his words seriously enough to put them down in writing. The sachem’s take was that fifty-five years of Wampanoag-English relations boiled down to colonists’ failure to live up to the principles of their alliance with Ousamequin. He recalled that when the Mayflower passengers arrived in Wampanoag country in 1620, his father, Ousamequin, “was as a great man and the English as a little child.” Ousamequin could have wiped out the tiny Plymouth colony if he had wished. Instead, he held back its enemies, sustained it with provisions, and granted it ample tracts of land. And how did the English show their gratitude now that they had become the great man? In 1662 Plymouth had taken Ousamequin’s own son, Wamsutta, into custody and, Pumetacom alleged, assassinated him by poisoning because they suspected him of plotting with other tribes. More recently, they had concocted the Sassamon murder trial as a pretense to kill Pumetacom, too. The little child could not have been more ungrateful than to kill the very sons of the great man who had protected it from the world.6
The colonists’ attacks on Ousamequin’s family members were just a few of the many ways they disrespected the Wampanoags as a people. After bilking the Wampanoags of their land through such means as setting up straw sellers, the English released livestock to trespass on what little territory the Indians had left, even when the Natives had moved “30 miles from where the English had anything to do.” When Wampanoags harmed the beasts out of self-preservation, colonists prosecuted them and issued fines to engross more acreage. Wampanoag leaders, starting with Ousamequin, had always thought that “when the English bought land of them, they would have kept their cattle upon their own land.” Additionally, colonists were “eager to sell the Indians liquors,” because they knew that drunk Indians “spent all” on more spirits and trade goods and signed land deeds without regard to the contents. The English did not seem to care about the terrible fallout. Natives in their cups “ravaged upon the sober Indians.” Whenever intoxicated Wampanoags harmed the colonists’ livestock or other personal property, English magistrates went after them instead of the grog dealers, issuing fines and requiring payment in land, even though it was illegal in the colonies to sell alcohol to Indians. Was this how friends treated friends?7
There was also the matter of colonists using Christianity as a stalking horse. It was bad enough that about half of the Wampanoag people had adopted Christianity and sworn off Pokanoket’s authority, without fear of reprisal because the English offered them protection. Now colonists had used the testimony of two false, self-serving praying Indians in the Sassamon murder case to execute three of Pumetacom’s men and implicate the sachem himself in the crime. Pumetacom considered these witnesses and Christian Indians in general to be “in everything more mischievous, only dissemblers,” and “by their lying to wrong their kings [or sachems].” The English gave the praying Indians plenty of assistance in this regard, because in colonial courts “if twenty … honest Indians testified that an Englishman had done them wrong, it was as nothing, and if but one of their worst Indians [meaning praying Indians] testified against any Indian” in disfavor with the English, “that was sufficient.” How did any of these developments represent gratitude toward Ousamequin and his people?8
Clearly, the little child of Plymouth had grown into a thankless, covetous, unprincipled adult. If the Wampanoags who once served as benefactors to the colony allowed this English exploitation to continue, they would be left with nothing, maybe not even their own lives. Why, then, Pumetacom asked rhetorically, would he put any faith in any negotiated settlement? History taught that it would just become a vehicle for the English to use some technical violation as an excuse to kill him.9
Easton’s answer was that Pumetacom was about to start a fight he could not win. Though the colonies were divided over religion, land, trade, and dozens of petty matters, they would unite in a common defense if Indians took up arms against any one of them. Collectively, “the English were too strong for them [the Wampanoags].” Pumetacom had a cutting rejoinder ready for that argument. In that case, he advised, “then the English should do to them [the Indians] as they did when they were too strong for the English.” That was to say, he challenged the colonies to show the same level of generosity and sufferance toward his people as Ousamequin had once displayed toward them. The sachem’s overarching point was that Indians and English alike knew this wish would never come true and, thus, there was nothing left to say. The time for war had come.10
From the perspective of Pumetacom and other Indian militants, war could hardly make things worse. Yet, if doing nothing was resignation to a future of impoverishment, exploitation, and degradation at English hands, warring against the English and their Indian allies put precious lives immediately at risk. Even in the event of a victory—whatever that would mean—Native communities would have to endure killing, disease, famine, captivity, enslavement, and immeasurable stress. People who cared about each other would wind up on opposite sides of the conflict. As in practically all Indian-colonial wars, the colonial side would include thousands of Indians, which in this instance meant the Mohegans, Pequots, Ninigret’s Niantics, Massachusetts praying Indians, and even the Christian Wampanoags of the Cape and islands. It is safe to assume that none of these groups wished for English dominance and that all of them more or less sympathized with Pumetacom’s cause. Yet they saw no prospect of success in battling an English population that could draw on the resources of several colonies and even of an Atlantic empire. Prioritizing the interests of their closest kin and local communities, they sided with the colonies. This kind of choice is what made the colonial regime so sinister. It forced indigenous people either to participate in the destruction of their cousins and friends and, ultimately, a cherished way of life, or else face the deaths of their immediate family members. To Pumetacom and his followers, such concessions had become too much to bear, and so they went to war, despite knowing the terrible possibilities. There were no good alternatives for Native New Englanders in the bloody summer of 1675.
TRYING TIMES
A major source of Pumetacom’s frustration was that Plymouth used its investigation of Sassamon’s death and prosecution of his accused killers to turn the Wampanoags’ formal submission to the colony back in 1671 into a reality. English authorities summoned the sachem to court in late February 1675, shortly after the discovery of Sassamon’s body. However, with Pumetacom denying responsibility and a lack of any firm evidence to the contrary, the magistrates “dismissed him friendly” despite their doubts. Then the following month there was a break in the case. A Christian Indian named Patuckson came forward claiming to have witnessed three of Pumetacom’s men—Mattashunannamo, Tobias, and Tobias’s son Wampapaquan—strangle Sassamon and place him beneath the ice of Assawompset Pond, then carefully arrange his belongings on the surface to make it appear as if he had fallen in and drowned by accident. Another Christian Indian, William Nahauton of the praying town of Punkapoag, soon reported hearsay to the same effect. That was enough for English authorities to renew their inquiry. Unearthing Sassamon’s corpse, Plymouth held a coroner’s inquest and found bruises and other signs that suggested Sassamon’s neck had been broken by the “twisting of his head around; which is the way that the Indians sometimes use when they practice murders.” Furthermore, the Indians who discovered Sassamon’s body said that his lungs did not expel any water as they removed his corpse from the pond, meaning that probably he had not drowned. The clincher came when English magistrates ordered Tobias to approach Sassamon’s corpse whereupon it began “bleeding afresh, as if it had newly been slain,” which the English considered a supernatural way to identify murderers. It was sufficient proof for Plymouth’s magistrates to authorize the arrest and trial of the three suspects, apparently without consulting Pumetacom.11
Nothing in the colonists’ prosecution of this case followed what the Wampanoags, or even some English, would have considered justice. We do not know how the colony took the defendants into custody. It is difficult to imagine the men surrendering voluntarily without Plymouth making some threat against their home communities. A more likely scenario is that the English seized them forcefully. Plymouth held Mattashunannamo and Wampapaquan in jail—which Indians widely considered a form of torture—until trial, but permitted Tobias to go free on bail, which was less an act of mercy than manipulation. Authorities released him only after his local sachem, Tispaquin, and Tispaquin’s son, William, put up bond in the form of a one-hundred-pound mortgage for land, which included none other than Assawompset Pond, where Sassamon’s body had been found. Finally, on June 1, Governor Josiah Winslow and his seven assistants heard the case following English, not Wampanoag, standards of jurisprudence. The court did, however, make the diplomatic gesture of adding six Indians, certainly Christians, as consultants to the colonial jury of twelve men. None of the accused had a court-appointed lawyer to advocate for them, as legal representation in colonial New England courts was still rare in practice if not in principle. When the jury came back with the unanimous verdict of guilty, the magistrates sentenced the three men to death, thereby violating another basic judicial standard of requiring two eyewitnesses to a capital crime (Patuckson was the only one in this case).12
Mattashunannamo and Tobias met their ends by hanging on June 8, but Wampapaquan received a brief reprieve. His rope either slipped or broke and upon his surprise landing he began pleading frantically for his life. Easton, from the distance of Rhode Island, heard that Wampapaquan “confessed [that] they three had done the fact.” The two rival puritan historians of King Philip’s War, the Reverend Increase Mather of Boston and the Reverend William Hubbard of Ipswich, disagreed with Easton that Wampapaquan admitted his guilt. Their understanding was that he said only “that his father and the other Indian killed Sassamon, but that himself had no hand in it, only stood by and saw them do it.” Some historians have wondered if the English had staged the broken rope “accident” precisely to extract such a confession. Either way, once Plymouth had its testimony, it ordered Wampapaquan “shot to death within said month.”13
Pumetacom and his people viewed Plymouth’s arrest, trial, and execution of his men as a hostile violation of Wampanoag sovereignty. Even if Sassamon had been murdered, it was a purely Wampanoag matter within Wampanoag territory. Pumetacom fumed that “whatever was only between … Indians … they would not have us prosecute.” The same was true even if he had ordered Sassamon’s death, which he did not admit. After all, “it was their [the Wampanoags’] law to execute whomever their kings [sachems] judged deserved it, and that he had no cause to hide it.” In other words, only Wampanoag law governed Wampanoags in Wampanoag territory. Ousamequin’s alliance with Plymouth had always rested on this principle.14
Even if one sets aside the central question of jurisdiction, Pumetacom considered the entire trial a sham. He accused Patuckson of bearing false witness against the executed men to avoid paying back a debt he owed to one of them and because he thought it “would please the English so, to think him a better Christian.” Pumetacom also charged the other witness, William Nahuaton, with having a vendetta against him for rejecting his Christian entreaties. Nahuaton had been one of two praying Indian ministers who approached the sachem in August 1671 proffering Christian counsel as the solution to his standoff with Plymouth. Pumetacom had followed this advice, only to have colonial arbitrators rule against him in Plymouth’s favor. This bait and switch, as Pumetacom saw it, left him more embittered than ever against the praying Indians, including Nahuaton. Nahuaton returned the sentiment in the Sassamon trial by lying on the stand, or so Pumetacom alleged. The whole Sassamon murder trial was rigged as far as Pumetacom was concerned, aimed less at the executed men than at him. If ever there was any lingering doubt that the Thanksgiving alliance’s principles of mutual respect and friendship were as good as dead, this was it.15
When the trial started in early June, the Wampanoags of Montaup began to “gather strangers” around Pumetacom for his protection “and to march about in arms towards the upper end of the neck … near to the English houses.” Their obvious message was that if Plymouth tried to arrest their sachem, they would resist violently. The question was whether they were going to fight anyway. Several English authorities who had negotiated their way through previous war scares believed that this “cloud might blow over” if Plymouth avoided any direct moves against Pumetacom. Yet the Wampanoags interpreted the trial as an English test of whether they would tolerate colonial authorities flouting their sovereignty to take their people’s lives. If they did not fight back now, there would be no limits to the colonists’ subjugation of them.16
By all accounts, the Wampanoags’ young men were especially incensed, with Pumetacom claiming that their rage exceeded his control. Yet, to outside eyes, he remained very much in charge. Shortly after the executions, a letter from John Brown of Swansea dated June 15 notified Plymouth that Pumetacom was hosting a dance of gun-toting matawaûog from “Narragansett, Coweset, Pocasset, Shaowmet, [and] Assawompset.” Women were packing up their children and household things to take refuge among the Narragansetts, though the Wampanoags had once looked to the English for protection against that tribe. “The truth is,” Brown concluded, “they are in a posture of war.”17
Indeed they were. Shortly after Brown’s visit to Pokanoket, Awashonks summoned the colonist Benjamin Church to attend a dance she was holding, which, as Church noted, “is the custom of that nation when they advise about momentous affairs.” Church was one of the first Englishmen to settle in Sakonnet, and clearly Awashonks had come to value his counsel. She wanted to speak with him because she recognized that this crisis threatened to destroy a decades-long experiment between the Wampanoags and English in which familiarity had bred not only contempt but sometimes comity and cooperation. Awashonks sent her invitation to Church through Roland Sassamon, who, like his deceased brother, John, could speak and write in English as well as Wampanoag, certainly by virtue of a formal education in missionary schools. The shared history of the Wampanoags and English was also embodied in Charles Hazelton, the son of one of Church’s tenants, who accompanied Church on his mission to Sakonnet. Young Hazelton could speak Wampanoag, which he must have picked up from Wampanoag playmates and neighbors. One of the pressing questions at Awashonks’s dance was whether the future would have any room for cross-cultural friendships like the one between the sunksquaw and Church, and and for cross-cultural figures like Roland Sassamon and Hazelton.18
Church arrived at Sakonnet to find hundreds of Indians drumming, chanting, and circling around a great central fire, and Awashonks herself “in a foaming sweat.” It was one of their ways of deciding whether to accept Pumetacom’s entreaty “to draw her into a confederacy with him in a war with the English.” Seeing Church had arrived, Awashonks and her counselors stepped aside to speak with him. They began by pointing out the presence of six matawaûog from Pokanoket who “made a formidable appearance, with their faces painted, and their hair trimmed up in combed-fashion, with their powder horns and shot bags at their backs, which among that nation is the posture and figure of preparedness for war.” These men brought Awashonks warning that the English were gathering an army to invade Wampanoag country and that, when they did, Pumetacom’s retaliatory strikes “would provoke the English to fall upon her.” In other words, Sakonnet’s fate was sealed whatever Awashonks decided, so it would be best for her people to throw their full support to the cause. Church, of course, advised her to take another path, which was “to knock those six Mount Hopes on the head, and shelter herself under the protection of the English.” For now, Awashonks hedged her bets by permitting Church to approach Governor Winslow on her behalf for instructions about how to keep her community safe and neutral. Yet she would never get the chance to weigh Winslow’s response because the war reached Sakonnet first.19
At Pocasett, the decision appeared already to have been made. Church went straight there from Sakonnet only to find that most of Weetamoo’s men were at Pokanoket mobilizing with other Wampanoag fighters. Reportedly, Pumetacom had just given them the go-ahead that, the next Sabbath day, “when the English were gone to meeting, they [the Indians] should rifle their [the colonists’] houses and from that time forward kill their cattle.” Church reported Weetamoo, like Pumetacom, saying that her men acted “against her will,” but these words also ring hollow, however accurately conveyed. After all, Weetamoo probably shared Pumetacom’s belief that the English had poisoned her former husband. She certainly blamed them for repeatedly trying to swindle her out of land. She had been at the forefront of the Wampanoags’ rapprochement with the Narragansetts, which was part of what made the Wampanoags believe that an anticolonial uprising might be possible in the first place. Not least of all, her sister remained married to Pumetacom. Nevertheless, Church urged her, too, to seek the protection of her “friend” Governor Winslow, a puzzling characterization given Winslow’s history of high-handedness with Indians and stated belief that Weetamoo was “undoubted a secret friend to Philip.” No, if the people went to war, she would be among the sachems to lead it.20
After the failed meeting between Easton and Pumetacom, the people’s matawaûog spent several days goading their English neighbors to draw first blood, because, as Easton understood it, “their priests [pawwaws] informed them if they began [the violence] they should be beaten and otherwise not so.” On Saturday, June 19, a group of matawaûog ransacked Job Winslow’s wisely abandoned house at the north end of Mount Hope Neck. The next day, the Sabbath, the men stepped up their aggression, just as Church had been told they would. A group of them reportedly mocked the local English blacksmith by asking him to sharpen the very hatchets they threatened to use against his people. When he refused, citing “God’s day” as a time of rest, they retorted “they knew not who his God was, and that they would do it.” They then proceeded to loot some abandoned homes, setting two of them ablaze. On the way back to Montaup, they detained a wayward colonist, “giving him this caution, that he should not work on his God’s day, and that he should tell no lies,” which they clearly meant as a jab at the hypocrisy of Christians. News of these alarming developments prompted Governor Winslow to order militia and unidentified “Friend Indians” to rendezvous at Taunton under the command of Major William Bradford, son and namesake of the governor who had helped forge Plymouth’s historic compact with Pumetacom’s father, Ousamequin. Winslow also alerted Massachusetts that it was probably only a matter of time before the Narragansetts and Nipmucs joined the Wampanoags in arms.21
Ball club (also known as King Philip’s war club). Image courtesy of the Trustees of Reservations, Fruitlands Museum.
This exquisite club is reputed to have belonged to Pumetacom. It certainly belonged to an elite warrior. The solid head is from the ball root of a maple tree, while the handle is decorated with arrowhead-shaped carvings and inlaid with wampum. Its provenance is unknown, but legend has it that a white clergyman, the Reverend John Checkley, bought it from Wampanoag people in the 1840s before it passed through several hands and came into the possession of the Fruitlands Museum in the 1930s. Someone stole it from the museum in 1970, and then it showed up again at a yard sale in 1995, whereupon the museum recovered it.
The English could not marshal their troops quickly enough. Wampanoag matawaûog continued to sack homes and kill livestock throughout Swansea until finally, on June 23, part of the pawwaws’ premonition came true: an English boy gunned down a Wampanoag plundering his family’s farmstead on Mattapoisett, or Gardiner’s Neck. According to Easton, afterward a group of Wampanoags shouted to colonists hunkered inside the nearby Bourne garrison, demanding to know “why they shot the Indian.” The English replied by asking whether the man was dead, and when the Natives answered yes, the boy who pulled the trigger dismissed it as “no matter.” This exchange just confirmed why the Wampanoags were in a state of war in the first place and provided further incentive for them to abandon their restraint. The next day, Wampanoags began ambushing colonists throughout Swansea whom they caught tending their corn or returning from the meetinghouse after a day of fasting to seek God’s protection of their community. The nine dead and two mortally wounded included the boy who had fired the first shot and his father who authorized it, which Easton read as God’s providence and which the Wampanoags probably saw as just desserts.22
SWAMPED
Winslow believed that he could end this conflict “in a few days” if only his troops could execute a north-to-south sweep of the Mount Hope peninsula while Rhode Island boatmen patrolled the surrounding waters. He failed to appreciate the enormity of this task, particularly given how unprepared colonial troops were to ferret out Indians hidden among the woods, swamps, and thick fields of seagrass and reeds that characterized the Wampanoag coast. When the English began their campaign on June 28, they plodded along in line formation as if expecting the Wampanoags to meet them in open battle or somehow to stumble on an unsuspecting village. Instead, they made themselves easy targets for ambush.23
Over and over again, Englishmen fell to the shots of an enemy they could barely see and who disappeared back into the bush ahead of any counterstrike. Each night the troops returned to their camp fewer in number but with greater wells of frustration, only to try again the next day amid the mounting ruin of charred colonial homesteads and mangled English bodies. Wampanoag fighters had dismembered some of the dead and arranged their parts in grisly displays to warn English soldiers that they should abandon their mission before they were next. Finally, on June 30, the English slogged their way to the southern tip of the peninsula, from which they could easily see the shores of Pocasset and Sakonnet to the east and Aquidneck Island to the west. Yet there were no Wampanoags to be found. Somehow, Montaup’s large civilian population had managed to escape by mishoon across Mount Hope Bay to the territories of Weetamoo and Awashonks, even as the English were guarding against this contingency.24
In what would be a signature of this war, the colonists’ hasty next step drove Montaup’s Wampanoag neighbors firmly into Pumetacom’s camp. Though the people of Pocasset and Sakonnet had taken in their Montaup cousins, that did not mean they were fully committed to fighting the English. Reportedly, Awashonks and her son, Peter, had initially wanted to accept Church’s offer of refuge, but they held back, probably because of the danger of being shot at by colonial troops or lynched even if they managed to reach the English lines. Already, colonial society was in a “fury against all Indians.” Still, those risks did not stop a Pocasset known as Alderman from crossing over to Aquidneck with his family and offering his services to the English—including informing them that Pumetacom and his followers had escaped from Montaup. Even Weetamoo’s own latest husband, Petonowowet (or Peter Nunnuit), defected to the colonists. Yet, if other Pocassets and Sakonnets were still torn about what to do, the English pursuit of the Montaups into their territory made the decision for them. The invaders numbered just three dozen men—other troops had been assigned to build a fort on Mount Hope Neck or march on Narragansett country as a warning to that uncertain tribe—but their treatment of everyone as hostile compelled a defense. A Sakonnet named George later explained that when fighting began at Montaup, “diverse of them [Sakonnets] sat still and minded their work at home.” However, once the English carried the fight to Pocasset and Sakonnet, including torching abandoned homes and killing elderly people unable to escape to the swamps, “some of the [Sakonnet] Indians did then go to Philip, and fight with him against the English.” The Wampanoags made their newfound enemies pay for this rashness, unleashing a ferocious guerrilla attack on them after two days of lying quietly in wait. The English, musket balls whizzing about their ears and piercing their clothing, just barely escaped with their lives by retreating to the shore and hailing a boat from Aquidneck to come rescue them. The Wampanoags knew, however, that it was only a matter of days before another, larger squad returned to finish the job. At that point, their only remaining options would be flight or surrender, both of which meant that many and perhaps most of them would lose their lives and liberty.25
When all seemed to be lost for the people of Montaup, Pocasset, and Sakonnet, their mainland Wampanoag and Nipmuc allies sprang into action, attacking colonial towns throughout the Taunton River valley and even deep into Massachusetts to divert English troops from their search-and-destroy mission. On July 9 Tispaquin struck Middleboro with such overwhelming force that the local militia was forced to retreat to the garrison and watch helplessly as the enemy put the entire town to the torch. It must have given the sachem some measure of satisfaction to have revenged the lives of Mattashunannamo, Wampapaquan, and Tobias on the very lands Plymouth had swindled from his people. Later in the week, Totoson of Mattapoisett led his men on a three-town blitz that killed “many people” and burned thirty houses at Dartmouth (modern New Bedford) and left parts of Swansea and Taunton “greatly destroyed.” If all this was not enough to redirect English attention, then a July 14 assault by the Nipmuc sachem, Matoonas, against the town of Mendon, forty miles west of Boston, certainly was. Not only was this the first concrete evidence that the Wampanoags had the support of other Native people, but some of Matoonas’s matawaûog consisted of praying Indians. English authorities had always expected the praying towns to serve as their first line of defense in the event of an Indian-colonial war. Yet now they seemed at risk of becoming a vanguard of Indian attack.26
Finding it impossible to defend everywhere at once, on July 19 the English called in their units for a renewed push into Pocasset, believing that a defeat of Pumetacom and Weetamoo would quell the resistance before it spread any farther. They knew that the Wampanoags were hunkered down in one of the area’s cedar swamps. The problem was flushing them out from the boggy, dense terrain while defending against unpredictable Native ambushes. “We shall never be able to obtain our end this way,” exclaimed the Plymouth captain James Cudworth shortly after the mission began, “for they [the Wampanoags] fly before us, from one swamp to another” and “pick off our men.” Facing mounting losses in lives and treasure with little to show for it, it took only a few days before the English command called a halt to the drive and reassigned the troops once again. It put some of them to work building a new fort to control Weetamoo’s territory, transferred others to a new “flying army” tasked with responding quickly to the multiplying Indian attacks on colonial towns, and decommissioned others to reduce the already spiraling costs of the war. This easement of English pressure was just the chance Pumetacom and Weetamoo needed to make their escape. Leading at least several hundred people on foot, they exited their swampy hideouts, headed north off the main paths, crossed west of the Taunton River at Assonet, and made a beeline for the Narragansett/Nipmuc borderlands. The fact that they went undetected until July 30 was testimony to their superior knowledge of the land, organization, and stealthy travel. It also was a reflection of their desperation, as they were literally running for their lives.27
Their fate at this critical moment hinged on the successes and failures of years of intertribal diplomacy conducted by Pumetacom and Weetamoo. Stressed and exhausted after days of marching double time, they made temporary camp at Nipsachuck, an area of hills and swamps near the headwaters of the Woonasquatucket River, twelve miles northwest of Providence. Not coincidentally, this was the territory of the Narragansett sunksquaw, Quaiapen, to whose son Weetamoo had once been married. The Wampanoags knew they could count on her protection while they recouped their energy and determined what to do next. If they continued north, they could find refuge among the Quabaug Nipmucs, whom the Pokanoket sachems had claimed as their protectorates since at least the days of Ousamequin. As Matoonas’s raid on Mendon signaled, his people were equally committed to the Wampanoags’ defense as the Wampanoags had once been to theirs. To the south, some of the Narragansett sachems supported the cause, but others, particularly Ninigret, were doubtful. Nevertheless, the Wampanoags knew that if they were to have any chance of dislodging the English troops who now occupied their territory, they would need the Narragansetts on their side.28
The time of decision was shorter than they anticipated, because not only were the English in pursuit, so was a bevy of the colonists’ Indian allies. No sooner had news of the war reached the Mohegans than Uncas declared his support of the English, volunteered fifty men to assist in the campaign, and delivered two of his sons to Boston as hostages. At least fifty praying Indians from Massachusetts also stepped forward to assist colonial troops. Despite constant English suspicions that their Indian allies were playing a double game, Native guides led colonial forces to the very edge of the Wampanoag camp on August 1 and then served with distinction in a bloody four-hour battle conducted in disorienting predawn light. Wampanoag losses that day were reportedly severe, including four “captains” (or múckquomp), but their valiant resistance allowed the rest of the people to escape. Pumetacom, Tispaquin, and their followers continued northwest toward the Nipmuc country, while Weetamoo, Awashonks, and their followers broke south toward the Narragansetts. These were the friends and relatives who would provide the Wampanoags with succor so they could mourn the lives they had already lost and recover their strength. After all, they would need every ounce of fortitude they could muster for what was already turning into a regional war.29
“A KIND OF MAZE, NOT KNOWING WELL WHAT TO DO”
The descendants of colonial New Englanders dubbed this conflict King Philip’s War, as if Pumetacom bore responsibility for its start and spread. Yet it was the English treatment of Indian neutrals and even allies as a fifth column that drove growing numbers of them into the resistance. Connecticut’s Wait Winthrop inadvertently expressed the point with his observation that “the Bay and Plymouth seem to be resolved to make their work with all the Indians either to make them sit [in submission] or else to destroy them.” The attack on Sakonnet and Pocasset was bad enough in this respect. Many times worse was the English enslavement of scores of Wampanoags who sought English protection at the start of the war, which signaled that there was no depending on the colonists’ word or honor. Some eighty Wampanoags, mostly women and children, had remained behind at Pocasset during Pumetacom and Weetamoo’s escape, assuming that the English would show mercy to surrendering noncombatants. They were dead wrong. They had the unfortunate fate of being discovered by the Massachusetts rogue Samuel Mosely, who captained an independent company made up of some of the most desperate elements of colonial society. His force included Dutch privateers released from jail in Boston in exchange for military service, indentured servants fighting to free themselves from their contracts, and adventure-seeking teenagers too young for regular units. Massachusetts had authorized this crew to operate outside the normal chain of command on the condition that its compensation would come in the form of plunder and captives and not regular pay. It was a topsy-turvy operation in which English bound servants would themselves become enslavers and former sea raiders would become land pirates, except now their booty took the form of human beings. These men had little concern with whether the Indians they took were noncombatants or even allies of the English. All Natives who crossed their path were fair game. Indeed, Mosely’s dragnet in Wampanoag country apparently snared a number of “Eliot’s Indians,” which is to say, Christians. Hauling the terrified prisoners to Boston, Mosely sold them in two installments of fifty-five pounds and twenty-six pounds. It was the beginning of a yearlong reign of terror by Mosely’s band against the colonies’ Indian friends as well as foes.30
Mosely was an especially vile character, but he was hardly alone in his use of the war as an opportunity to profit from the sale of Indian people. In August, Plymouth ordered the enslavement of 112 Wampanoags in its custody, some of whom had turned themselves in at Apponogansett (or Dartmouth) on promises of quarter from Captain Samuel Eells. Plymouth’s justification for violating Eells’s pledge was that a number of the men had participated in recent hostilities. As for the rest—women, children, and the elderly—the magistrates ruled that they were accomplices for having failed to reveal Pumetacom’s “poisonous plot.” The next month, Plymouth’s General Court sentenced another fifty-seven Wampanoags to “perpetual servitude” even though they had turned themselves in to the town of Sandwich “in a submissive way.” Somehow the magistrates viewed them as being “in the same state of rebellion as those previously condemned.” Plymouth kept its Native captives in a holding pen until the end of September, then loaded 178 of them onto a ship bound for Cádiz, Spain, for sale into slavery. Proceeds went toward helping the colony meet the mountainous financial burden of the war. It was the beginning of a trend. By the next year, the colonies had enslaved upward of two thousand Native people and distributed them throughout the vast range of England’s dominions and its foreign markets, from Plymouth to the Portuguese Wine Islands and Taunton to even Tangier.31
Whatever short-term profits the English gained from these sales, it cost them dearly in lives and estates in the long run because Indians otherwise inclined to sit out the war or even side with the colonies realized that doing so would render them vulnerable to enslavement. Church saw that the colonists’ betrayal of Indians who turned themselves in expecting leniency was not only a moral travesty but a tactical one. “Had their [the colonies’] promises to the Indians been kept, and the Indians fairly treated,” he bemoaned, “’tis probable that most if not all the Indians in those parts had soon … surrendered themselves; which would have been a good step towards finishing the war.” John Eliot agreed, protesting that if the English extended one hand in peace while holding shackles in the other, it is “like to be an effectual prolongation of the war and such an exasperation of it, as may produce we know not what evil consequences.” How right they both were.32
Among the evil consequences was the decision of the “Friend Indians” or “River Indians,” as the English called the Pocumtucks, Norwottucks, and Sokokis of the upper Connecticut River valley, to join the resistance. Though some men from these communities served alongside the English in the early days of the war, colonial troops distrusted them, charging that they purposefully shot high and celebrated the enemy’s victories. Rumor had it that they were merely waiting for the chance to waylay English forces from behind. Even the Mohegans said that the River Indians could not be trusted, though that probably had something to do with hostilities between the two groups dating back to at least the 1640s. The English of Connecticut River towns such as Springfield, Deerfield, Hadley, and Northampton had so little confidence in the loyalty of their Indian neighbors that they demanded them to turn over their arms, only to have the sachems bluntly refuse. Native leaders cited the danger of Mohawk attack, which was quite real, but the more pressing reason must have been their fear that colonists would use the opportunity to put them in chains. After all, “innocent Indians” everywhere were now exposed to “the rash cruelty of our English,” as Plymouth’s own Thomas Walley put it. Boxed into a corner by colonists who insisted that Indians were enemies no matter what they did, the River Indians ambushed the expedition sent to confiscate their weapons, then spent September and October striking English towns up and down the valley. By the time they were done, several communities lay in ashes and dozens of colonial troops lay dead. Hubbard, like many of his English contemporaries, believed these attacks revealed the Natives’ true identity as “children of the devil.” He would not acknowledge how his own people’s persecution of their Friend Indians was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of a regional uprising.33
In this respect, nobody was in a tighter bind than the praying Indians, who neither the English nor the warring Indians trusted. It made little difference to the English that the praying towns of Massachusetts contributed dozens of men to the campaign against the Wampanoags in the summer of 1675. Colonial troops suspected them, like the River Indians, of conspiring with the enemy under the color of loyalty. By August, a string of Indian attacks against English settlements in Nipmuc country had turned these doubts into outright accusations, Mosely’s company seized on the opportunity to raid the Nipmuc praying town of Hassanamesit, take fourteen of the residents prisoner, then march them “pinioned and fastened with lines from neck to neck” fifty miles back to Boston. These captives included none other than James Printer, who had played a central role in the publication of the Wampanoag-language Bible. Meanwhile, English authorities were struggling to contain popular fears of praying Indian duplicity before they burst into bloody vigilantism. The same day Mosely’s band entered Boston with its coffle of prisoners, August 30, Massachusetts officials ordered the rest of the Christian Indians confined to just five of their fourteen praying town. If they went more than a mile outside their respective village centers, colonists had license to treat them as enemy combatants.34
Yet even that measure failed to pacify the colonial public, whose anxieties were building into a frenzy. They charged that praying Indians slipped intelligence to enemy Indians and even committed several acts of arson in outlying English towns, though without any firm evidence. Leaders who preached moderation and due process, never mind that the praying Indians were the colonists’ fellow Christians and royal subjects, faced public ridicule and even death threats. The likelihood of mob violence, plus the concern that enemies lay hidden within the ranks, prompted the Massachusetts General Court in October to order all the praying Indians removed to a concentration camp on barren, frigid Deer Island in the middle of Boston Harbor. They would have to leave most of their property behind, including the “civilized” farming implements and household goods that had formerly symbolized their alliance with the English. Instead, those items became plunder for the English, the praying Indians’ co-religionists, who took advantage of the Natives’ absence to loot their towns.35
Now it was time for Indian fears to run amok. The removal order, particularly in light of Plymouth’s enslavement of unthreatening Wampanoags, put the Natick Indians “in fear that they should never return more to their habitations, but be transported out of the country.” Narragansetts heard a rumor that the English had seized “all the praying Indians” so they could be “killed by Boston men.” That was not true in the strictest sense, but it took only a month before the five hundred Christian Indians on Deer Island began suffering starvation, exposure, and disease. Some colonists in Boston were indeed calling for their heads.36
Residents of the Nipmuc praying town of Hassanamesit, other than the fourteen men of theirs taken captive by Mosely, were fortunate to have delayed their removal for several weeks longer than Natick and Punkapoag, only to face another dreaded choice. As the deadline to turn themselves in grew near, Nipmuc militants marched into the community to seize its corn and issue their own ultimatum: the people could either come with them, join the resistance, and be treated as kin, or take their chances with the English. Faced with no good options, the Hassanamesits took the offer “somewhat willingly, others of them unwillingly,” as the praying Indian James Quannapaquait related. He reflected back on that day that “before they went away [with the warring Nipmucs] they were in a great strait, for if they came to the English they knew they should be sent to Deer Island, as others were … and others feared they should be sent away to Barbados, or other places.” Even the Hassanamesits’ English missionary, Daniel Gookin, could sympathize that, when faced with these “two evils,” they decided “to choose the least, at least as it to them appeared.”37
A devil’s bargain also confronted Wampanoag praying Indians on the Cape and islands. The mainland Wampanoags were their relatives with whom they shared a number of grievances against the English, so they could fully sympathize with the decision to go to war. Yet in other ways their colonial experience was so different from the mainlanders in degree as to be different in kind. The fact that Wampanoags still vastly outnumbered the English on the Cape and especially the islands made the colonists of those places tread with a lighter foot. Jurisdictional disputes were still rare, and the English made no attempts to fine their Indian neighbors into ceding land. English encroachment was a growing problem, but there are no cases on record of Cape and island colonists using straw sellers or bogus deeds in the process. In most locales, the English continued to respect joint-use agreements and the “planting rights” of common Indians. Most important, Christianity bound the people together and fostered trust, above all among the leadership class of both societies. That trust would make all the difference during these perilous times.
The Cape and island Wampanoags were certainly aware of mainland colonists’ antagonism toward Indian neutrals and even allies. Shortly after the war broke out, Vineyard Wampanoags working as field hands for colonists near Boston dropped their tools and headed for home because “the English were so jealous and filled with animosity against all Indians without exception.” Doubtlessly, offshore Wampanoags had family and friends sold into slavery by Plymouth or interned by Massachusetts on Deer Island. And, of course, they knew all the details about the English army rampaging through mainland Wampanoag communities during the first weeks of the war. The stakes could not have been clearer.38
Christian Wampanoags did everything they could to express their fidelity to the English short of volunteering their men for military service until it was absolutely necessary. In August 1675, right after the mainland Wampanoags escaped into Nipmuc country, several leading Nantucket Indians appeared before the island’s colonial court to “disown Philip,” resubmit to the authority of King Charles II, and surrender a handful of weapons as a symbolic gesture. They also sent a wampum belt representing peace to the governor of New York, whose colony had jurisdiction over Nantucket during the war. Over a dozen Cape sachems and their counselors followed suit in an October visit to the Plymouth General Court. Collectively, they pledged to deliver up all “strange Indians which are enemies to the English” and support the colonial war effort, which they would have to fulfill sooner than they liked. As if to test their loyalty, just days later the Cape Cod town of Barnstable prevailed on the sachem Keencomsett to cede it land along the community’s border with Yarmouth, and then the following month secured another seven acres from him. There was no break from colonial land sharking, even in wartime.39
Despite these measures, “too many of our English” remained “unreasonably exasperated against all Indians,” according to the missionary Matthew Mayhew. The infection even spread to Martha’s Vineyard, despite its history of peace brokered through a shared Christianity. There, fearful colonists rallied around the island Wampanoags’ longtime nemesis, Simon Athearn, to demand the Natives’ disarmament. However, the island’s colonial governor and missionary Thomas Mayhew Sr. knew that force was not an option, not with the local Wampanoags boasting at least ten times the population of the English. All he would permit was for an English embassy to pose the issue to Mittark, the sachem of Aquinnah on the west side of the island, whose people “were mostly to be doubted.” Adding to the inherent danger of this mission was that Mittark was fresh off thwarting a challenge to unseat him by his brother, Ompohhunnut. If Mittark caved in to the English, Ompohhunnut could use it as a basis to rally support for a revival of his claim. At the same time, Mittark knew that an outright rejection of the request to disarm threatened to light a powder train that could explode the peace, as had occurred in the Connecticut River valley. What, then, to do?40
Mittark’s answer was an inventive counterproposal in which there would be no clear winners or losers and everyone would have to show a degree of mutual trust. No, his people would not turn over their weapons because, as he argued, it “would expose them to the will of the Indians engaged in the present war, who were not less theirs than the enemies of the English.” This explanation was stretching the truth more than a little because the island and mainland Wampanoags remained kin despite their differences over Christianity and tribute. He stood on firmer ground with the contention that his people “had never given occasion of the distrust intimated.” Yet, whereas in the Connecticut River valley the Indians had left the matter there, prompting the English to try to seize their guns forcibly, this negotiation ended far differently. The Aquinnah Wampanoags, drawing on the literacy skills they had learned through the mission schools, produced a writing in the Wampanoag language that declared that, as loyal subjects of the crown, they would assist the English in this war. In exchange they expected colonial authorities not to disarm them but to furnish them with munitions and employ them as an island guard.41
It was an audacious plan, yet it won the day over vocal opposition from some English quarters. Japheth Hannit, a leader in the Native church, served as captain of the Wampanoag militia throughout the conflict, “being firmly set, if possible,” according to the Mayhews, “to maintain and preserve peace betwixt the English and Indians.” He kept the English so well informed about goings on among the Vineyard Wampanoags, lest they imagine the worst, that Experience Mayhew credited him for “the preservation of the peace of our island … when the people on the main were all in war and blood.” The English returned the trust, outfitting their Wampanoag neighbors with guns despite concerns that the Natives would turn these weapons against them. “The temporal sword is good,” explained Thomas Mayhew Sr. to the Connecticut governor, John Winthrop Jr., in October 1675, but “the spiritual sword is longer and more sharp.” Spiritual bonds between the Wampanoags and English of the Vineyard left him confident that the two peoples could and would work together “to the utter overthrow of those heathen that despise him [God].”42
Yet that peace was always at risk because everyone worried, with good cause, that those on the other side wanted to kill or capture them. Throughout the war, Plymouth maintained a guard at the shoulder of the Cape to prevent Indians from passing between the peninsula and the mainland. The English warned that they would treat as hostiles any Cape Wampanoags discovered west of the town of Sandwich without a pass. That restriction must have heightened the Cape and island Wampanoags’ sense of being held hostage. In February 1676 Plymouth risked provoking the eastern Wampanoags further when it ordered the removal of their cousins from Nemakset to Clark’s Island in Plymouth Harbor “and not to depart from thence without license from authority upon pain of death.” The colony did not explain how these Nemaskets wound up in English custody or why it decided to confine them. Perhaps colonial forces captured them in the field, but a likelier explanation is that they were Christians from the congregation of the murdered interpreter and preacher, John Sassamon, who merely wanted to sit out the conflict. Whatever the case, Plymouth’s callous treatment of them, in imitation of Massachusetts’s Deer Island policy, combined with its earlier enslavement of Wampanoags who surrendered, infuriated even Wampanoags still allied with the English. In April 1676 the Reverend Thomas Walley of Barnstable lamented, “We had some hope the Indians with us might have proved faithful, and been a help to us; but they see our weakness and confusion, and take great notice of the severity shown towards the squaws [women] that are sent away, some of them much grieved, others, I fear, provoked. They say we cannot so easily raise armies as send away poor squaws.” There was no mistaking the strains in this partnership.43
Fundamentally, what held the alliance together was everyone’s awareness of the terrible consequences if it broke. Numbering some three thousand people, the easternmost Wampanoags could have easily dispatched the English of Nantucket, the Vineyard, and the Cape if they joined the resistance. Plymouth town itself would have been at risk of being sacked. Yet the Cape and island Wampanoags faced grave dangers, too. They knew Massachusetts would eventually make them pay if they took up arms against Plymouth. Given their locations on islands and a peninsula, they would be easy targets for naval or amphibious attack. Additionally, many of these Wampanoags had become Christians who believed that God imposed harsh judgment on those who violated his law. Fear of his wrath during the fallout of the Pequot War and the epidemics of the 1640s had drawn many of them to Christianity in the first place. In all likelihood, they saw the war, or rather the keeping of the peace, as a test of their faith.
FORMER ENEMIES UNITED
The stakes for the resistance were doubly high in the Narragansetts’ choice of sides. Though the Narragansetts’ population had declined significantly since the days of Canonicus and Miantonomo, they still boasted some two thousand men of fighting age and between eight and ten thousand people overall. If they took up arms against the English, Rhode Island and even Connecticut were in peril, and the colonies’ Mohegan and Pequot allies would have to devote more resources to guarding their home fronts and less to pursuing the enemy. Perhaps most important, the Narragansetts represented the best chance of recruiting the Mohawks into the war, as those two tribes had been close allies since at least the early seventeenth century.44
The colonies had good reason to believe that a sizable portion of the Narragansetts not only sympathized with the warring Wampanoags but intended to join their campaign soon. The Narragansetts shared practically every grievance of the mainland Wampanoags against the English, to which they added the United Colonies’ decades-long obstruction of their campaign to kill Uncas as revenge for his murder of Miantonomo. Every war scare since the 1660s had cited evidence of Wampanoag-Narragansett rapprochement such as joint dances and conferences. Furthermore, when King Philip’s War broke, a number of Narragansetts were living among the Wampanoags because, as they explained, they had been “removed by the English, having got their land.” Through such developments, a growing cross section of Wampanoags and Narragansetts considered each other “kindred” with an obligation to come to one another’s defense.45
In the first days of the war the collected Narragansett sachems promised the English that they would reject any Wampanoag requests for aid and turn over any Wampanoags who sought refuge with them, but Ninigret of the Niantic band was the only one of them serious about these terms. The rest were either firmly behind the resistance and just waiting for the right time to show their colors or cautiously leaving their options open. By appearances, Quaiapen, Ninigret’s sister, was the strongest advocate for war. During the fight for Montaup and Pocasset, she accepted three English heads from Wampanoag messengers, thereby signaling her support for their cause. She must have had a strong popular mandate for this decision. Indeed, at the very moment the Narragansett sachems were pledging their neutrality to the English, bands of Narragansett matawaûog rampaged through nearby English settlements, killing the livestock, driving laborers from their fields, robbing and burning abandoned houses, and making “threatening speeches.” The very next day, a body of armed, painted Narragansett men marched into Warwick, then suddenly turned back, sending a clear warning of their readiness if the English insisted on war. These incitements, combined with reports of Narragansett mishoons crossing the bay to reach the Wampanoags, led Roger Williams, who knew them better than any other Englishman, to contend that their promises were “but words of policy, falsehood, and treachery.”46
Ninigret and neutral-minded leaders such as Pessacus and Canonchet did what they could to maintain the peace without actively supporting the English. Ninigret proposed a grand plan to end the war that would have involved him visiting sachems throughout the region to persuade them to deny aid to Pumetacom, then convincing the Wampanoags to give up the fight in exchange for everyone but the war leaders receiving quarter. Presumably he imagined many of the surrendered Wampanoags being forced to live under Narragansett governance like so many Pequots after the Pequot War. Some Narragansett sachems turned over severed Wampanoag heads to the English, with Ninigret emphasizing that he hoped “the English will take notice of his fidelity.” Rhode Island’s William Harris, however, suspected that these trophies came from the bodies of Wampanoags the English had already killed or from Wampanoags against whom the Narragansetts had a particular grudge. Either way, they represented the genuine desire of at least a portion of Narragansett society to stay out of this war.47
The Narragansetts’ offer of refuge to Weetamoo and her followers made that impossible, even if they did not intend it as a sign of hostility toward the English. After all, the point might have been merely to shelter and defend vulnerable friends and relatives. Yet the United Colonies did not see things that way. For decades, that puritan confederation had been itching for a war with the Narragansetts in order to seize their rich lands and subjugate Rhode Island. Now, with this clear breach of treaty, it had not only an excuse to attack the Narragansetts but convincing evidence that they intended to join the Wampanoags in arms. Any lingering doubts evaporated with the news that Weetamoo had married the Narragansett sachem, Quinapin, who would soon emerge as one of his people’s most respected military leaders. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the English, Quaiapen was constructing a great stone fort in the hills of what is now Exeter, Rhode Island, replete with bastions for gunmen and underground chambers for the shelter of noncombatants. Indian informants revealed that the Narragansetts’ strategy was to maintain their tacit neutrality through the winter and then strike the English in spring, when sprouting greenery would provide camouflage for their fighters. True or not, the English believed it.48
Unwilling to wait and see what the Narragansetts would do next, the United Colonies decided to act preemptively in December 1675 with a thousand-man invasion of the tribe’s heartland. The campaign centered on a massive fort the Narragansetts had constructed on four or five acres in the middle of a swamp in what is now South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Crowded with dozens of wetus, untold amounts of stored food, and hundreds of people of all ages, it was literally the winter headquarters for Narragansett society. Normally the site’s bogs and thickets would have made it inaccessible to the heavily laden colonial troops, but severe cold froze the muddy water solid enough to permit them to march over the terrain. The subsequent attack turned into a replay of the massacre at Mystic Fort decades earlier. Once the English and their 150 Mohegan and Pequot allies breached the palisade, they put the place to the torch and shot down those who tried to escape the flames, killing hundreds of people and destroying essential food and war materials. Suffice it to say, this carnage sealed the issue of whether the Narragansetts would join the war against the English. Back in the 1620s, Wampanoag-Narragansett hostilities had provided the wedge for the English to found a colony at Patuxet and form an alliance with Ousamequin. Now, fifty years later, English guns were driving the Wampanoags and Narragansetts together into an alliance sealed with blood.49
TURNS OF FORTUNE
Despite the Narragansetts’ devastating losses at the Great Swamp, Indian resistance forces got the best of this war during its opening phases. Throughout the fall of 1675 and spring of 1676, they raided English towns up and down the Connecticut River valley, throughout Nipmuc country, and on both sides of Narragansett Bay. Twice they targeted sites within the heart of English population and power, as in March 1676, when they struck Clark’s garrison in Plymouth, only three miles or so from the town center, and in April, when they attacked Sudbury, Massachusetts, just twelve miles from Boston. The Natives achieved these victories by avoiding pitched battles, favoring instead ambushes on marching troops and supply trains. Their assaults on colonial settlements usually involved matawaûog taking up positions under cover of darkness, firing on the sleepy residents when they awoke at dawn, driving the survivors into fortified blockhouses, and then burning and plundering at will before retreating. Outside of the immediate vicinity of Boston, all of colonial New England was vulnerable.50
By the war’s end, Native forces had struck fifty-two English communities, completely razed seventeen of them, caused an estimated £150,000 in property losses, and placed acute stress on the colonies’ finances. Of Plymouth’s fourteen towns, only those on the Cape escaped attack, and six were either destroyed or sustained major damage. Dozens of English suffered Indian captivity after the trauma of witnessing the deaths of family and friends. Colonial society seemed so incapable of defending itself that Massachusetts held a serious discussion about whether to wall off its inner ring of towns, leaving everything and everyone else outside exposed to the enemy.51
Conditions were no better for the English in “down east” Maine, where colonists had goaded the surrounding Wabanakis into war by attempting to confiscate their arms and take hostages despite a complete lack of evidence that these people were confederates of the Wampanoags. The Wabanakis responded by wiping out nearly all the colonists’ riverside farmsteads and coastal fishing stations, a campaign that lasted well after the final shots had been fired in southern New England. Generations of Wabanakis, with a strong assist from New France, would carry on the fight for their homeland well into the mid-eighteenth century. They had plenty of strategic reasons to do so, but part of what drove them was the memory of English treachery during King Philip’s War. Any Indian descended from survivors of that war learned the terrible history of how the English had preferred the certainty of treating all Indians like enemies rather than gambling on the trustworthiness of their Native friends.52
The war spread so quickly and unexpectedly that many English concluded that the Indians were an instrument of God’s judgment. The question was for what. Staunch puritans in Massachusetts blamed lax morals and passed sumptuary laws banning men from wearing long hair, women from “following strange fashions in their apparel,” and unmarried couples from riding from “town to town” unchaperoned “upon pretense of going to lecture.” Plymouth leaders wondered if God smote them because of their lax treatment of Quakers, at least compared with Massachusetts. Dissenters countered that God chastised all of puritan society for its harsh persecution of them. All the English could agree about was that the war had little to do with genuine Indian grievances, which speaks volumes as to why the Natives felt compelled to fight in the first place.53
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
The warring Indians also linked their fortunes to the spirits, but other Native people were the greatest determinants of their fate. This was especially true of the Mohawks, as Pumetacom and his confederates learned the hard way while they spent the winter of 1675–76 camped at the confluence of the Hoosic and Hudson Rivers at the eastern edge of Mohawk territory. Two factors had lured them this far west. The first was that it gave them access to multiple sources of arms and ammunition. Albany’s Dutch merchants remained the most active traders of weaponry in the region. Though New York prohibited direct sales to Native combatants, arms dealers and their customers navigated around this impediment by using the local Wappingers, Housatonics, and Mohicans as middlemen. New England militants also received guns, powder, and shot from Québec, delivered to them by French fur traders and their Abenaki allies via the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain. These supplies gave the resistance the means to keep up the fight despite the loss of the English market.54
Yet the most important purpose of spending winter quarters at Hoosic was to recruit the Mohawks to join the cause. The English had done Pumetacom a great favor in this regard both by enlisting the help of the Mohegans, whom the Mohawks reviled, and by attacking the Narragansetts, who were the Mohawks’ long-standing allies. If the warring Indians secured Mohawk help, never mind that of the Mohawks’ fellow Iroquois League nations, they had a realistic prospect of seizing back most of their territory and confining New England colonists to Boston and its inner ring of towns. According to Hudson valley Indians, Pumetacom presented the Mohawks with three hundred fathoms of wampum “to engage them against the English or to sit still at New York.” The Mohawks’ response, as James Quannapaquait understood it, was that they would assist the warring Indians by furnishing them with ammunition from Albany and attacking the Mohegans, but would not fight the English. The Mohawks possibly sealed these commitments by presenting Pumetacom with gifts of their own. According to Church, at the war’s end, the sachem’s most cherished objects of state included three elaborately decorated wampum belts edged with red hair that he “got in the Mohawks’ country.” If this account is true, it points to Pumetacom’s recognition of how much at stake the resistance had in the Mohawks.55
Little did Pumetacom expect that the Mohawks’ decisive role would include a February attack on his Hoosic camp in which they killed about fifty militants and drove the rest away from their arms depots. Over the next several months, the Mohawks kept up the pressure by sending small bands of their warriors against the warring Indians as they fled east. Not only did they kill and capture untold numbers of people, but they forced the survivors to retreat all the way back to their homelands, where English troops and their Indian allies were waiting for them. In all these respects, the Mohawks’ turn against the resistance was a pivotal moment in the war.56
The Mohawks’ decision came as a surprise to Pumetacom, but there were obvious reasons for it. First and foremost, New York’s governor, Edmund Andros, encouraged them with gifts of trade goods and munitions. The implicit threat was that he would close the Albany arms market to them if they failed to comply. Given that the Mohawks needed weapons from New York to pursue their ongoing conflicts with several other Indian nations, the tribe was in a weak position to say no. In any case, Pumetacom’s ranks now included Pocumtucks and other River Indians against whom the Mohawks had warred for years. The strike against Hoosic was a way to deal them another blow. Another factor might have come into play as well. The Boston minister Increase Mather contended that the Mohawks turned on Pumetacom only after he had some of their people murdered and tried to pin it on the English. The scheme backfired when the Mohawks discovered this bloody deceit. Fact or fiction, we will never be able to tell unless additional evidence materializes someday. Yet the underlying premise of the story, that Pumetacom was desperate for the Mohawks’ support only to have them become his foes, was utterly true.57
The variety of forces pushing and pulling the warring Indians back to their home territories in the spring of 1676 signaled that the resistance was on the verge of collapse. Their main concern was to escape the terror of the Mohawks, even as they knew that returning to the coast exposed them to the risk of English attack. They were also stalked by hunger, having sometimes been reduced to consuming foods of last resort or going without while being pursued by the Mohawks, the English, and the colonists’ New England Indian allies. Back on familiar ground, they could take advantage of seasonal fish runs and hidden stores of seed corn, but only if they could avoid detection by the enemy. Their ammunition was short, but not exhausted, and neither were they. Despite the warring Indians’ ordeals, they continued to rack up successful raids against English towns, some of which they had already lashed the previous fall. A March 28 assault against Rehoboth by Indians identifying themselves as “Wepunuggs [Wampanoags], Cowesett[s], [and] Sakonnet[s]” killed forty-three English and destroyed twenty-eight houses and barns. Just days later, a band of Narragansett, Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and River Indian matawaûog wiped out another sixty-three English soldiers and twenty allied Cape Wampanoags in an ambush along the Blackstone River, then turned their attention to Providence, which they burned to the ground.58
Sauvage Iroquois (Iroquois Indian), from Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Encyclopédie des Voyages (Paris: Se trouve chez l’auteur, chez Deroy, libraire, et chez les principaux libraires de la Republique, 1796).
The decision of the Mohawks of the Iroquois League (or Haudenosaunee) to ally with the English in King Philip’s War, which involved driving the anticolonial Indians away from their arms markets on the Hudson River and then pursuing them east, was arguably the most significant turning point in the war.
As the smoke billowed up, the attackers called on the veteran interpreters and diplomats Valentine Whitman and Roger Williams to parlay with them, but when Williams began pleading for mercy and accusing the warring Indians of behaving like wolves, the Natives turned the tables to lecture him about why the English were at fault. Echoing Pumetacom’s conversation with Easton the previous year, a Narragansett fighter called Nawhaw (known as Stonewall John to the English) retorted to Williams that “we [the English] had forced them to it … we [the English] broke articles [of peace] and not they (as I alleged).” Nawhaw emphasized that colonial forces had “driven us out of our own country and then pursued us to our great misery, and your own.” After all, only Pokanoket and Pocasset had taken up arms against the English at first. It took the English attacking and otherwise intimidating Indian neutrals and friends for other communities to join the fight. Part of the English strategy was to starve the warring Indians into submission by driving them away from the planting fields and fishing places of their home communities. To some extent it had worked, insofar as anticolonial forces certainly were hungry, but still they would not submit. Instead, Nawhaw observed sardonically, “we are forced to live upon you,” which was to say, by pillaging the English.59
Williams warned that the Indians’ victories would not last. The English would pursue this war however long it took, forcing their enemies to remain on the run, unable to plant, until finally they surrendered. Even if the war dragged on for years and sapped the colonies’ will, King Charles II “would spend ten thousands before he would lose this country.” For all the damage Indians could inflict in the short term on vulnerable places like Providence, the fact was that English society had vaster resources that enabled it to fight a losing war longer than Natives could fight a winning one.
The matawaûog had heard these threats before, and they remained as unimpressed with them as ever. Their answer was that “they cared not for planting these ten years. They would live upon us, and deer,” just as the English had grown accustomed to living off plundered Indian land and labor. As far as Native fighters were concerned, they were in this campaign for the long haul.
Yet their bravado began to wane as growing numbers of Indian people threw their support to the English side. By the spring of 1676, it had finally dawned on Plymouth and Massachusetts that recruiting rather than alienating Indians was their best chance of ending this war as quickly and inexpensively as possible. It was unmistakable that Connecticut’s enlistment and even arming of the Mohegans and Pequots had spared the colony a great deal of hurt while enabling its forces to track the enemy with uncommon success. The Mohawks’ critical strike against Pumetacom’s Hoosic camp and ongoing pursuit of the warring Indians as they fled east also awakened colonial leaders to the value of Indian allies. Without any shame, the colonies asked for assistance from the same Christian Indians they had persecuted during the first nine months of the war and received a positive response. The praying Indians, whatever their trepidation, saw this as an invaluable opportunity for their men to prove their worth to the English and secure compensation to ease the suffering of kin still held on Deer and Clark’s Islands. They joined Massachusetts and Plymouth forces in the field in ever greater numbers throughout the spring and summer campaigns of 1676, drawing widespread praise for their performance, including teaching plodding English soldiers how to operate in the woods and swamps. A unit of Cape Wampanoags, who were “forward to serve” under their own “Captain Amos,” was particularly noteworthy for the bravery of its men, including George Wompey, Old Thomas, John Thomas, Peter Pompano, Abraham Jonas, and Tom Sipson. Yet perhaps the praying Indians’ most important influence on the outcome of the war was to show warring Wampanoags what life would be like if they surrendered. It would require them to adopt the colonists’ religion, contribute matawaûog to colonial military campaigns, and accept colonial governance. In other words, they would have to submit.60
That dreadful choice grew ever more sufferable when the other option was death. By the late spring and early summer of 1676, the resistance began to crumble under pressure from seemingly every direction. Militarily, Indians in resistance faced attack by the Mohawks from the northwest—who they called their greatest “terror”—Connecticut-Mohegan-Pequot forces from the southwest, and mixed Massachusetts–Plymouth–praying Indian units from the east. Martial stores were in critically short supply. In a series of defeats for the resistance between April and June, the English and their Indian allies killed or captured dozens of the enemy while suffering hardly any casualties themselves. By appearances, the warring Indians were unable to shoot back because of a lack of gunpowder and serviceable muskets. The people were also going hungry because enemy forces had driven them away from spring fishing camps along the rivers of the interior while harrying any Indians they found at key planting, shellfish gathering, and food storage places near the coast. Not to be overlooked, the people’s malnutrition, stress, and close living quarters for defense exposed them to lethal camp diseases “such as at other times they used not to be acquainted withal.” These afflictions, according to the warring Indians’ own testimony, carried off far greater numbers “than by the sword of the English.” In hopes of cutting their losses, growing numbers of anticolonial Wampanoags swallowed hard and accepted an English offer of clemency in exchange for military service against the remaining Indians in arms.61
The most detailed account of this process comes from a narrative attributed to Church but in fact written by his son from Church’s notes many years after the fact. Given that this telling makes Church the hero of practically every major turning point of the war and a voice of reason when everyone else was blind with fury and prejudice, it must be used with caution. Yet, on the issue of Wampanoags switching sides late in the war, many of the details ring true and are confirmed by other sources.62
The shift began, according to Church, in late May or early June 1676, when he happened to spy some Wampanoags fishing off Sakonnet Point while he was passing by on a boat bound for Rhode Island. As the Natives later explained, they were there “to eat clams (other provisions being very scarce with them).” Discovering that these people were Sakonnets, and that his old friend Awashonks was nearby, Church proposed sitting down to talk, despite everyone fearing that the other party might spring a trap. Church was startled when his Sakonnet escorts led him “to a convenient place to sit down” only for “a great body of Indians … being all armed with guns, spears, [and] hatchets” to emerge out of a nearby field of long grass and surround him. One of the men threatened Church with his tomahawk, accusing the Englishman of having killed his brother at the start of the war. The other Sakonnets intervened, but their angry glares made Church fear for his life. Awashonks was on edge, too. When Church offered her a salutary drink of rum from a shell, she made him take several swigs before she would taste it out of concern that it was poisoned. It was a reflection of both sides’ desperation to end this war that they were willing to hear each other out despite their deep mutual distrust.63
Massachusetts Bay Colony Peace Medal. Courtesy of National Museum of the American Indian.
This medal issued by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the summer of 1676 was supposed to help colonists identify Indians who had allied with the English. Recipients probably included praying Indians the colony had previously forced into concentration camps on barren Deer Island, and Wampanoags like the Sakonnets who switched sides late in the war in exchange for quarter. The Native figure with a bow and arrow comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal but, strikingly, without the normal accompanying blurb “Come over and help us.”
Though Church had no authorization from Plymouth to conduct such negotiations, he renewed the offer he made during the opening phase of the war to help lead the Sakonnets out of the anticolonial ranks and into English protection. If the Sakonnets surrendered, he pledged, the English would spare their lives and not sell any of them out of the country. However, the price for quarter was high. In exchange, the Sakonnets would have to subject themselves again to colonial authority and provide matawaûog to the English for the remainder of the war. After much discussion, the Sakonnets accepted the terms, but no sooner had they agreed than it appeared that Church had betrayed them. While the Sakonnets were distracted with their deliberations, a “great army” under Major William Bradford had entered Pocasset and now was just hours away from cutting them off. Fortunately for everyone, uncommonly cool heads prevailed. Informed by Church of his agreement with the Sakonnets, Bradford held back the troops and allowed the peace plan to continue. Awashonks’s son, Peter, would go to Plymouth to finalize the new alliance with Governor Winslow. Meanwhile, Awashonks would lead her people toward Sandwich under a white flag to await the results of this diplomacy. In the meantime everyone would have to exercise restraint. After all, there was ample yearning for revenge and fear of perfidy on both sides. The Sakonnets, in particular, must have been plagued with worry that the English would kill or enslave them at any moment. Yet somehow Awashonks, Church, and Bradford maintained discipline among their ranks as they set off together into the unknown.64
While Awashonks marched her people east, Peter, accompanied by George and David Chowahunna, were in Plymouth hashing out the Sakonnets’ future. “If our women and children can be secured,” they emphasized, “we will do any service we can by fighting against the enemy.” Plymouth agreed on the condition that the Sakonnets also pledge to surrender anyone in their custody who had committed hostilities against the English. Additionally, Peter was to serve as a hostage for the Sakonnets’ fidelity. The question was whether this fragile agreement could withstand the vengefulness and distrust generated by a year of brutal warfare. The Reverend Joshua Moody of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, counseled Plymouth to be wary of these new allies, stressing that “their words are good and fair. [Yet the] Lord only knows what is in their hearts … there is no trusting of them. They often mean worst when they speak best.” Wampanoags must have harbored similar opinions about the colonists, who, after all, had betrayed them too many times to count. This experiment was a dangerous gamble for everyone.65
The Sakonnets symbolized this shift with a ceremony performed at the mouth of the Sippican River near the head of Buzzards Bay. According to Church, who claimed to have been an eyewitness, it involved everyone sitting in concentric circles around a great fire while the war captains sequentially struck at it with their weapons, “making mention of all the several nations and companies of Indians in the country that were enemies to the English.” Then, one by one, they returned to their seats among the people. As they explained to Church, “they were making soldiers for him, and what they had been doing was all one swearing of them.” Such rituals marking the transition from peace to war or from one side of a conflict to another are well documented among Native people of this era. Fire, as Indians knew, created as well as destroyed, enabling fresh growth to emerge from the ashes of a burned forest or field and, analogously, new relationships to form from the horrors of war. The lingering question was what kind of fire this one would prove to be after the dancing was over.66
The Sakonnets, followed by increasing numbers of other Wampanoags, switched to the English side not because they had a change of heart or because their loyalities were thin. The decision was wrenching for them. Yet they had children and other loved ones to protect and were unwilling to see them killed, enslaved, or forced to seek refuge far away from their cherished homelands. Seeing no prospects for victory or even an acceptable loss with honor, they made the hard choice for the sake of their most vulnerable members and future generations. It was the right move insofar as the English kept their promise to spare the Sakonnets’ lives and permit them to return to at least a portion of their lands. Yet the guilt must have haunted the survivors for all their remaining days.
By May 1676 Plymouth and Massachusetts had added the manpower of three companies of Wampanoags and other praying Indians to the colonies’ armed forces. Some eighty praying Indians recruited from the Deer Island internment camp performed “so faithfully” and effectively, according to Daniel Gookin, that they killed an estimated four hundred of the enemy and even managed to ease some colonists’ “former hatred of them,” though the problem of Englishmen attacking them at random remained. Another fifty Cape Wampanoags marched with Bradford’s Plymouth troops, drawing the praise of Hubbard for having “all along continued faithful and joined with them [the English].” Then there was Church’s company, which began with twenty or thirty Sakonnet men and twice as many English and grew steadily as it cornered Wampanoag fighters and gave them a choice between the sword or submission. There were, of course, still numerous Wampanoag stalwarts, including Pumetacom, who preferred death to putting their fate in the hands of the English. Yet the others, hungry and exhausted as they were, accepted the uncertain offer of mercy, partly because it was extended by military units that included their own kind.67
The effect was dramatic. According to Hubbard, between June and October there were “seven hundred Indians subdued either by killing or taking captive, by the means of Captain Church and his company … besides three hundred that have come in voluntarily to submit themselves.” Thomas Walley agreed, adding that Plymouth’s “greatest success if not the only success” came “when Indians are employed.” He considered this pattern to be “a humbling providence of God that we have so much need of them and cannot do our work without them. It should teach us to be wise in our carriage towards them.” It was for these reasons that the Sakonnets’ defection “broke Philip’s heart,” as reported by the colonists’ Indian captives.68
Anticolonial Wampanoags eked out a few more successful strikes even in the populated recesses of Plymouth colony, as when Tispaquin’s men burned a series of houses and barns in Bridgewater, Halifax, Plymouth, and Scituate. Yet these were the last gasps of a collapsing war effort. In late May or early June, Mohawk raiders cut off Canonicus and a body of Narragansetts as they fled toward the Piscataqua River of Maine. By July 2 English and Indian forces had killed Quaiapen and her band. Pomham was dead by the end of the month. Matoonas surrendered himself on July 27 and went straight to the gallows on Boston Common. (Bostonians executed some fifty Indians that season, a black mark that public memorials have yet to acknowledge.) Days later English-Sakonnet forces captured Pumetacom’s sister and another 173 Indians along the Taunton River near Bridgewater and killed his uncle Uncompoen. Then, on August 6, the English took twenty-six mostly Pocasset Wampanoags and discovered Weetamoo’s body drowned in the Taunton River. She had been part of the spirit of resistance from its start.69
All the while, Pumetacom had managed several narrow escapes from Church’s forces as they pursued him through the swamps of Wampanoag country, each time killing and capturing some of his men and confiscating his supplies. On August 12 his luck finally ran out. As if to symbolize the very reason the sachem had taken up arms in the first place, it was a Christian Wampanoag, the Pocasset named Alderman, who shot him dead. Mopping-up operations continued for several weeks more, and intermittent fighting continued in the upper Connecticut River valley and Maine for years to come, but in southern New England, the conflict was essentially over. The English, with invaluable assistance from their Indian allies, had conquered the country of the mainland Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and Pocumtucks, and either killed, captured, or dispersed nearly all their people.
The best estimate, that the Indians had lost three thousand people during the war to disease or wounds, only begins to capture the extent of their hurt. For months after the fighting had slowed to a trickle, starving, terrified Native people straggled into English settlements pleading for mercy, some of them mere children on their own. Men who surrendered joined other Indian prisoners in jail or holding pens until authorities could determine whether they had committed hostilities during the war. Basic standards of evidence had no bearing on these rulings. The slightest suspicion was enough for English judges to sentence Indians to die on the gallows before hostile crowds. The same macabre scene played out over and over again in the public squares of Plymouth, Boston, and Newport throughout the summer and fall of 1676.
Perhaps two thousand Indian women, children, and even men who somehow convinced the English that they had done no harm received sentences of slavery. Then they confronted the terrifying questions of where, for whom, and with whom they would toil. Their fates rested in the hands of the town meetings and special committees that managed their sales, and the Atlantic merchants and local householders who purchased them at auction. In Providence, one of the officers who distributed Indian slaves was the elderly Roger Williams, to whom Ousamequin had provided refuge when he fled the religious persecution of Massachusetts puritans in the winter of 1635–36. Generally, the colonies shipped off all Indian males over the age of fourteen, mostly to the brutal sugar plantations of the West Indies, and even to Gibraltar, where they rowed the king’s galleys and built his stone fortress. Most of the rest worked in New England households to answer daily to their conquerors. Though such bondage was supposed to be temporary, in practice the English forced most of these prisoners and their offspring to serve for life. As late as the American Revolution, descendants of Indians taken by the English during King Philip’s War could still be found as slaves in every corner of New England and many other British dominions. The colonists’ exploitation of them was testimony to the multiple ways the destructiveness of this war radiated through generations to come, even as the Indians’ persistence spoke to their will to survive under the most dehumanizing conditions.70
Perhaps the most obvious fact of the colonial era belied by the Thanksgiving myth is that Indian losses were the colonies’ gain, a point that is clearest in the settlement of King Philip’s War. The English enslavement of Indian captives, and pocketing of the proceeds from their sale, is just one revolting example. The colonies’ annexation of Indian land by conquest is yet another. Though Massachusetts permitted the praying Indians to return to some of their towns, and Plymouth allowed Wampanoags who served in the English forces to resettle on small reservations at Sakonnet, Assawompset, and Titicut, the colonies seized nearly all the territory of the Indians they had defeated as the spoils of war. Plymouth, having no means to pay its veterans, allotted them confiscated Wampanoag lands at Assonet, Assawompset, Agawam, and Sippican, most of which the recipients then sold off to speculators. Church returned to Sakonnet and engrossed the best land that once belonged to his “friend” Awashonks. It was just the beginning of a frenzy of speculation in Wampanoag country by Church to lay the foundation for the towns of Dartmouth, Little Compton, Tiverton, and Freetown, among other municipalities. As for Montaup, Plymouth successfully asserted its claims to the area against Rhode Island (Rhode Island would get it back in 1747), then sold it to a group of Massachusetts investors who incorporated it into the town of Bristol. Among its early leaders was William Bradford’s grandson. One wonders if he had learned of the days “when the English first came,” when that very land was the seat of the Wampanoag sachem, Ousamequin, who treated the colonists “as a great man” would “a little child.”71
In the short term, the most overwhelming effect of the war on Wampanoag survivors was mourning, which was so powerful that it cuts through the victorious colonists’ own records. By June 1676 Indian prisoners were telling their English captors that Pumetacom was “ready to die … for you have now killed or taken all his relations.” Those relations included his wife, Wootonekanuske, and nine-year-old son, whose name the English did not record. Church’s forces had captured them on August 2 somewhere between the Taunton River and Assawompset Pond, right in the heart of Wampanoag country where the war began. The Boston minister Increase Mather gloated at the agony this must have caused Pumetacom, for he knew that “the Indians are marvelous fond and affectionate towards their children besides other relations.” Yet, whereas the English could afford to dispose of other Indian captives with little thought, Pumetacom’s family members had a public profile that risked drawing the attention of authorities in London. Thus Plymouth delayed ruling on their status until the ministry could discuss whether there was a biblical sanction for holding the son responsible for offenses committed by his father. After all, Deuteronomy 24:16 states clearly that “the fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” In the end, Plymouth decided not to execute the boy. Instead, it sold him into West Indian slavery.72
Another day of mourning occurred after the English discovered Weetamoo’s drowned body in the Taunton River. Reveling in their victory, colonial troops decapitated her and placed their trophy on a pike within sight of a holding pen full of injured, terrified Wampanoag prisoners of war. The English purpose was to torment their defeated enemy, and it had the desired effect. At the brutal sight, the captives “made a most horrid and diabolical lamentation, crying out that it was their Queen’s head.”73
The Sakonnets and Cape and island Wampanoags must have mourned, too, even as their service with the English had spared their communities certain destruction. The Sakonnets lived under the supervision of Church, who thereafter had cheap access to their labor to run his several plantations in their confiscated territory and the command of their fighting men in the New England colonies’ running wars against the Wabanakis of Maine. The Cape and island Wampanoags also retained all their lands and a strong degree of the sovereignty with which they had entered the war. However, all of them were acutely aware that the regional balance of power had shifted, thereby requiring them to remain constantly on guard against colonial efforts to appropriate their land and labor and to respond cautiously whenever disputes arose. Like the Sakonnets, they also had to live with the guilt of having turned on distant kith and kin to preserve their inner circles of friends and family. Their service included capturing refugees who fled to them or the nearby Elizabeth Islands during the summer and fall of 1676 and handing them over to the English for likely sale into slavery. Their trauma from this experience might account for why oral traditions make no mention about this impossible choice. The people appear to have agreed to suffer in silence in order to produce a collective amnesia about a moment too painful to revisit.74
No one’s mourning could have been greater than that of Wootonekanuske, Weetamoo’s sister and Pumetacom’s wife. Wootonekanuske would have been filled with anxiety and sorrow, too. Not only did she fear for the fate of her child and herself, but she would have known about the death and decapitation of her sister on August 6. She was spared the ordeal of having to gaze upon Weetamoo’s severed head, but she could not escape the colonists’ grisly display of her own husband’s remains. She and her son had been captives of the English for ten days when Church’s forces finally caught and killed the great Wampanoag sachem. According to Church’s posthumous account, he ordered that none of Pumetacom’s remains should be buried, “forasmuch as he had caused many an Englishman’s body to lie unburied and rot above ground.” Instead, Church had him beheaded and quartered. Pumetacom’s severed hands went to Alderman, who sold one of them for a quick profit, but held on to the other one to show as a trophy to those willing to pay for the thrill.75
Pumetacom’s head went to Plymouth, the very site where his father, Ousamequin, had once feasted with the English. Colonial authorities placed it on a pike outside the walls of the town and left it there to rot for twenty years. English records do not say what happened to Wootonekanuske afterward, whether she managed to avoid execution and survive her months as a prisoner, only for Plymouth to sell her into overseas slavery, like her son. However, if that was her ill fortune (which seems probable), her husband’s decaying head might have been one of the last things she saw of her country. The next place she arrived, like so many hundreds of other Native people, would have been one Caribbean island or another to toil the rest of her days under the whip of an overseer. What room does the Thanksgiving myth make for her story?76
Days after shooting Ousamequin’s son dead and cutting him into pieces, Plymouth and Massachusetts announced that they would observe August 17 as a day of thanksgiving in praise of God for saving them from their enemies.77