Philip’s camps were populated by Algonquians of many tribal backgrounds and with deeply conflicted attitudes about the war. Many viewed it as Philip did, an overdue accounting for wrongs inflicted by invaders on a sovereign people, but others held the colonial view that Philip was a traitor and rebel against the English Crown to which he owed allegiance. Still others, regardless of their politics, focused on the consequences. One veteran of the wars against the Mohawk tried and failed to assassinate the Wampanoag leader, “alleaging that Philip had begun a warr with the English that had brought great trouble upon them.”
In fact, Philip wasn’t much of a leader, in the conventional sense. There is little evidence that he personally commanded more than a handful of attacks, nor that he was responsible for large-scale strategy among widely spread forces. Philip was a spark and became a symbol, but he wasn’t a general. The revolt he began among the Wampanoag spread to the Nipmuc and Abenaki, but each tribe, each community, and each sachem was fighting his own war.
Still, the English were reeling, beset by Wampanoag and Nipmuc attacks from the west and Abenaki assaults to the north in Maine. They realized that if the Narragansett—the largest and strongest Indian force in the region—entered the war against them from the south, they were likely doomed. Although the Narragansett had been somewhat weakened by the execution of Miantonomi—a killing sanctioned by the English because they’d feared exactly this kind of mass uprising—the dead sachem’s vigorous, charismatic son Canonchet could still field a large number of warriors.
Yet if the Narragansett were not firm English allies, like the aging Uncas and the Mohegan, they definitely did not want war with the colonists. Many Narragansett men worked as day laborers, building stone fences and doing other farm work. While some young men were certainly preying on English farms, their leaders were trying to preserve peace, and in October 1675, the Narragansett sachems signed a treaty restating their neutrality toward the United Colonies.
But the Narragansett also sheltered many Wampanoag refugees, and the English accused some Narragansett men of joining the fight. Rumors swirled of Narragansett treachery, some perhaps planted by Uncas as he had years earlier against both the Pequot and the Narragansett. The lessons of the Pequot War must have weighed heavily on Canonchet and his sachems, especially the way the Pequot had been targeted for reasons that were at least partially trumped-up. Ultimately, many of them withdrew to a massive palisaded village—an immense fort deep in the Great Swamp near modern South Kingstown, Rhode Island, where they hoped to avoid trouble.
The fort, which stood on an island of higher ground, must have been an imposing structure, enclosing four or five acres, in and around which lived an estimated three or four thousand people. It was walled with log palisades and surrounded by a thick barricade of brush, inside of which was a four- to five-foot-deep moat. It was further protected, like English forts, with “flankers,” projecting structures above the walls that allowed defenders to fire down onto attackers. Inside, there was at least one fortified blockhouse that gave the defenders a clear line of fire onto the only entrances—two logs that bridged the moat on opposite sides.10
Nor were forts the only aspect of European defense the Narragansett and other tribes adopted. When Connecticut soldiers stormed Mystic Fort in 1637, their muskets were too much for the arrows of the Pequots. By the time King Philip’s War broke out, most of the Indians were as well armed as the colonists—in some cases, given their insistence on flintlocks rather than the older, cheaper matchlocks, better armed—and they had the expertise, forges, and tools to make limited repairs and cast their own ammunition. It was illegal for an Englishman to fix a gun for an Indian, but some Natives now could do the work themselves. They lacked gunpowder, however, something so difficult to manufacture that even the colonists were dependent on imports from England until just before the war.
As autumn turned to an unusually hard winter, the English demanded that Wampanoag refugees be turned over to them, as the treaty required, but the Narragansett—perhaps feeling safe within the Great Swamp fort, about which the English knew nothing—refused to violate such a fundamental tenet of Algonquian hospitality. Canonchet declared that he would “not deliver up a Wampanoag, or the paring of a Wampanoag’s nail.”
The Bay Colony and Plymouth were ready for war. Informants had warned them that Canonchet had decided to join Philip in the spring. Connecticut wavered but finally agreed to send men. Faced with an invasion of Rhode Island territory that he did not condone but could not prevent, Roger Williams declined to contribute any soldiers, but he reluctantly agreed to allow passage of the United Colonies’ force of nearly a thousand English soldiers and militiamen, as well as several hundred Mohegans and Pequots under the command of Uncas’s son Owaneco.
Converging by land and sea near Wickford, the Massachusetts and Plymouth men set fire to any Narragansett village they encountered, killing and taking what captives they could. One of the Massachusetts captains seized the opportunity to buy forty-seven of the new Indian captives, “young and old, for 80£ in money.” The Indians fought rear-guard skirmishes to slow them down.
Capture of the Indian Fortress
A typically aggrandizing nineteenth-century depiction of the Great Swamp Fight, in which colonial forces storm one of two log bridges across the frozen moat surrounding the Narragansett’s elaborate fortification before going on to burn it and most of its defenders. Ostensibly English allies, the Narragansett were accused of sheltering Wampanoag refugees and taking part in Philip’s uprising, which had fueled English fears of a universal Indian attack. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-97115)
Bolstered by the soldiers from Connecticut and their Mohegan-Pequot allies, the combined army turned toward the Narragansett fort, about which they’d learned only a few days earlier. Clouds thickened and the temperature dropped. With no shelter, the soldiers hunkered down in the open the night of December 18 as one of the worst storms in local memory dumped up to three feet of snow. Setting out in the predawn darkness, the troops marched west fifteen miles, struggling through deep drifts, the hands and feet of the men freezing through their gloves, stiff boots, and cloth wrappings. Their commanders would likely never have found the fort had they not stumbled a few days earlier on a Narragansett turncoat named Peter, who agreed to guide them. By afternoon, they were in place, and the Narragansetts, who’d had ample time to prepare, were waiting.
Although the swamp, on whose impenetrability the tribe had depended, was frozen solid, as was the moat, the Narragansett fortification and the stiff resistance of its defenders blunted the first English attacks. Dozens of troops and a number of commanders were killed, including John Mason Jr., the son of the man who had led the bloodbath at Mystic more than forty years earlier. In fact, this new offensive was a replay of that Pequot massacre, only on a larger and still more violent scale—with the Narragansetts as victims instead of English allies.
The English, Mohegans, and Pequots torched the outlying houses, then stormed the palisades. “They within on the first onset stoutly repulsed us,” an anonymous letter writer recounted nine days after the attack. “But . . . every one put forth his utmost Strength, and on the renewing of the Assault we became Masters of the place.” Flames inside the fort forced the Narragansetts to flee directly into English guns. “We no sooner entered the Fort, but our Enemies began to fly, and ours now had a Carnage rather than a Fight, for every one had their fill of Blood: It did greatly rejoice our men to see their Enemies, who had formerly skulked behind Shrubs and Trees, now to be engaged in a fair Field, where they had no defense but in their Arms, or rather their Heels; But our chiefest Joy was to see they were mortal, as hoping their Death will revive our Tranquility, and once more restore us to a settled Peace.”
Far from being a “fair Field” of combat, it was a sickening slaughter. According to the anonymous witness, “We have slain of the Enemy about 500 Fighting men, besides some that were burnt in their Wigwams, and Women and Children the numb
er of which we took no account of.” Captain James Oliver of Boston put the toll at “300 fighting men; [of] prisoners we took, say 350, and above 300 women and children. We burnt above 500 houses, left but 9, burnt all their corn.” The English suffered more than two hundred casualties, including many who died in the snow on the long, bitter retreat back to the coast. But the expected counterattack, which could have been devastating, never came. By one account, the young Narragansett men were restrained by the surviving sachems because they had almost no powder for their guns.
In the days after the fight, some colonists pursuing Indians captured a white man among them, a fellow named Joshua Tift or Teffe, “a Renagado English Man.” Tift, who farmed not far from the Narragansett fort, claimed he had been captured and held as a slave. But Oliver and others insisted that Tift—“a sad wretch, [who] never heard a sermon but these 14 years”—had been a willing fighter for the Narragansett and “shot 20 times at us in the swamp.” Summarily tried by a “Counsel of War” and convicted of treason, he was sentenced to that most medieval of executions, drawing and quartering. On January 18, he was hanged, cut down while still alive, hacked apart, and left unburied, his head impaled on a gatepost by way of a warning.
The butchery visited on the Narragansetts in the Great Swamp Fight, the massacre of homestead families by Indians, and the shocking sentence meted out to Tift show that restraint of any sort, on every hand, had evaporated. In terms of the proportion of the population killed, King Philip’s War still ranks as the bloodiest conflict ever waged on American soil, and one of the nastiest. The English death toll may have been 2,500, some “destroyed with exquisite Torments, and most inhumane Barbarities,” and entire towns—Narragansett, Marlborough, Deerfield, and others—were burned to the ground.
“It is computed by the most judicious Men, That the Indians that were killed, taken, sent away . . . cannot all (Men, Women and Children) amount to fewer than Six Thousand, besides vast Quantities of their Corn, Houses, Ammunition . . . taken and destroyed,” the Boston merchant Nathaniel Saltonstall wrote. By “sent away” he meant sold into slavery, for the Puritans saw the captives as instruments of both profit and policy. When soldiers killed 166 Narragansetts in 1676, mostly women and children, and took another 72 alive to be sold as slaves, a Puritan minister noted approvingly that the children were “all young Serpents of the same Brood.”
John Hull, a wealthy Boston merchant, did a sporadic business in Indian slaves, buying captives hauled in by colonists and selling them on the domestic and Caribbean markets. On one occasion, his journals noted the purchase of 110 Indians for a pound or two apiece, while on another, he noted the sale of “13 Squawes & papooses wounded 1 sick” for £20—about $450 in modern currency.
Some Praying Indians also took part in the slave trade, although more than a few Christian Algonquians were themselves hauled into slavery, their religion and loyalty notwithstanding. Even the unwary household servants of Puritan masters were at risk, should they fall into an unscrupulous slaver’s hands. The prospect of slavery was always on the minds of those fighting the English. When in the winter of 1675 some older men among Philip’s movement counseled peace, many of the young men said it was better to go down fighting. “Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves?” they asked. “Let us live as long as wee can & die like men, & not live to bee enslaved.”
For many in Philip’s camp, the time for accommodation was over. “Know by this paper, that the Indians that thou hast provoked to wrath and anger, will war this twenty one years if you will,” read one extraordinary note written by a literate Algonquian attacker and left jammed in a bridge post outside the smoldering remains of Medfield, Massachusetts. “You must consider the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.”
According to historian Jill Lepore, “Always brutal and everywhere fierce, King Philip’s War . . . proved not only the most fatal war in all of American history, but also one of the most merciless,” leaving New England “a landscape of ashes, of farms laid waste, of corpses without heads.” Modern scholars estimate that 5 percent of the English population in the region, and an astounding 40 percent of the Indians, died.
In the wake of the Great Swamp Fight, the Indians settled down into winter camps of traditional wigwams, built of sapling frames covered with reed mats and slabs of bark. They had a gunsmith to keep their weapons in good repair, and although ammunition was low, they were able to trade beaver pelts and wampum to their traditional enemies, the Mohawk, for some. Food was the biggest concern. They augmented their dwindling supplies of dried corn with cattle and pigs taken on raids, and deer were easy prey in the thigh-deep snow. But it was clear to Philip and his leaders that once these supplies got too low, they would have to hit colonial outposts or starve. One of the most vulnerable towns was Lancaster, located about twenty-five miles west of Boston along the Nashaway (now Nashua) River.
English traders had been operating in the Nipmuc village of Nashaway as early as 1643, drawn by its location at the intersection of the north–south river and the east–west Nipmuc Trail, both major transportation routes for furs coming from the interior. When Nashaway Plantation was incorporated as the town of Lancaster, there were only nine English families there, living cheek by jowl with the Nipmuc village. By 1676, however, Lancaster had grown to fifty or sixty white families.
As the winter deepened and the Indian larders shrank, Philip planned his attack on Lancaster. But unbeknownst to him, the English had spies in his camps. James Quanapohit, the Christian Nipmuc who with his brother had fought for the English only to be imprisoned on Deer Island, and another Nipmuc internee named Job Kattananit had volunteered to seek out Philip’s group and report back to colonial authorities. Kattananit was desperate to find his three children, who had been taken by the anti-English forces at the Praying town of Hassanemesit, and this was his only opportunity to look for them. Both men were taking an enormous chance, especially Quanapohit. He knew that Philip had ordered his capture or death because he’d fought with the English. Still, risking their lives as spies may have been preferable to enduring the slow, freezing misery of Deer Island.
Armed with just their knives and tomahawks, and with only a little parched cornmeal for provisions, Quanapohit and Kattananit traveled five or six days through the snow and cold of early January, infiltrating a Nipmuc camp at Menameset, near modern Brookfield, Massachusetts. Kattananit was reunited there with his children, who were among more than a hundred Praying Indians, including the typesetter James Printer, who had been forced to leave their homes.
The two spies learned about Philip’s growing shortage of food and the planned attacks on Lancaster and other outlying towns, but as he feared, Quanapohit immediately aroused suspicion among some of the sachems. It’s likely that what saved him was the public protection of a prominent warrior known as John with One Eye, alongside whom he’d fought in the past. “Thou hast been with mee in the warr with the Mauhaks and I know thou are a valiant man,” John told Quanapohit. “None shall wrong thee nor kill thee here, but they shall first kill me.”
Still, many of the Nipmucs were suspicious of his apparent change of heart and pressured him to go to Philip so that the sachem could question him directly—an interview Quanapohit knew he was unlikely to survive. Instead, he stalled for time. He said he’d be happy to go to Philip, but not until he’d had a chance to prove himself. “Hee will not beeleve that I am realy turned to his party, unles I first do some exployt & kill some English men & carry their heads to him.” That seemed to satisfy the Nipmucs, but it was clear that the two spies had to escape soon with their information.
Quanapohit and Kattananit told the villagers they were going hunting, something they’d done previously. Quanapohit asked one of the Praying women for a pint of dried cornmeal, called nokake, before heading into the woods. Several times, as they pursued and killed four deer, they crossed human tracks in the snow; they were being watched, although they never caught a glimpse
of those who were shadowing them. Nervous, the two men settled down for the night near a pond, dressing the deer and building a fire against the cold.
No one appeared; the woods seemed silent and empty. Quanapohit decided it was time to make his escape. Kattananit, however, chose to remain with his children, telling Quanapohit he would try to slip away with his family later. “If God please hee can preserve my life,” he told his friend. “If not I am willing to die.”
With the nokake and some deer meat in his pouch, Quanapohit traveled through that night and the following days, resting only briefly in order to reach Boston as soon as possible. Arriving at the end of January, he brought news of the imminent attack on Lancaster to the Massachusetts council, in Boston—which looked askance at the intelligence, brought as it was by an Indian. They sent no troops to bolster the town, and on February 10, 1676, a mixed force of roughly four hundred Nipmucs, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags attacked Lancaster at daybreak.
Although no reinforcements reached Lancaster, word of Quanapohit’s warning did. Many of the residents had gathered in blockhouses, or garrison houses, a cross between a farmhouse and a fort. Usually positioned on high ground and built of thick, hand-squared beams with loopholes to shoot through, blockhouses had a second floor that overhung the first by several feet all the way around, so that water and gunfire could be poured down on attackers trying to torch the structure. Some had flankers rising from the corners that gave defenders a wide field of fire, and most were surrounded by a sturdy timber stockade with a heavily barred gate as a further perimeter of protection.
The First Frontier Page 20
