There may have been some truth in this. The Puritans were a stern, strict people, who kept what they had seized, and who constantly added more. To them the Indians were heathens and inferiors; not free allies, but subjects of the king of England.
Before the landing of the Pilgrims in the Indians" territory, sailing ships, touching at the New England sh.o.r.e, had borne Indians away into slavery. Since the landing of the Pilgrims, the Pequots had been crushed in battle, and Captain Miles Standish had applied knife and rope to other Indians.
So some doubts as to the wisdom of Ma.s.sasoit"s treaty with the English began to spread through the Pokanokets.
The Plymouth officers ordered Alexander to appear at court and answer the charges against him. When he delayed, Major Josiah Winslow was sent to get him. The major took ten armed men, and proceeded for Mount Hope. On the way he found Alexander and party in a hunting lodge, their guns leaning outside.
The major seized the guns. With pistol in hand he demanded that Alexander come with him, or die. Alexander claimed that he was a sachem and free ruler, not a dog. He "fell into a raging pa.s.sion." He had a proper pride, and a fierce temper.
He agreed to go, as a sachem attended by his own followers. The charge against him never was pressed, because his rage and shame at the insult threw him into a fever, from which he soon died.
He had reigned only a few months. In this year 1662 Philip or Metacomet took his place as grand sachem of the Pokanokets. The death of his brother grieved him. Wetamoo, the young widow, said that Alexander had been poisoned by his captors, the English. The story counted, and the fate of Alexander was not a pleasant story, to the Pokanokets.
Philip saw trouble ahead. His neighbors the Narragansetts had long been at outs with the English. In his father"s reign their old chief Mi-an-to-no-mah had been handed over by the Puritans of Connecticut to Chief Uncas of the Mohegans for execution in the Indian way. The Narragansetts were friendly with the Pokanokets; they rather looked upon Philip as their adopted leader.
His lands were rapidly going, the English were rapidly spreading, the Puritan laws and religion were being forced upon him. It was galling that he, a king by his own right, should be made a subject of another king whom he had never seen.
The New England colonists could not forget how the Virginia colonists had been surprised and killed by the Powatans. They watched King Philip closely. In 1671 he was said to be complaining that certain of them were trespa.s.sing on his hunting grounds. This led to the report that his people were holding councils, and were repairing their guns and sharpening their hatchets, as if for war.
So King Philip, like his brother King Alexander, was summoned to the Puritan court, to be examined. He had not forgotten the treatment of Alexander. He went, but he filled half the town meeting-house with his armed warriors.
There he denied that war was planned against the English. He was persuaded to sign a paper which admitted his guilt and bound him to deliver up all his guns.
He decided not to do this latter thing. To give up his guns would leave him bare to all enemies.
He was made to sign other papers, until little by little the Pokanokets seemed to have surrendered their rights, except their guns. The white people, and not Philip, ruled them.
Then, in the first half of 1675 the affair of John Sa.s.samon occurred.
John Sa.s.samon was an educated Indian who had returned to the Wampanoags, after preaching. He spoke English, and was used by King Philip at Mount Hope as secretary. He thought that he had found out war plans, and he carried the secrets to Plymouth.
The Indian law declared that he should die. In March his body was discovered under the ice of a pond of Plymouth Colony. His neck had been broken.
To the Pokanoket idea, this had been legal execution ordered by the sachem. The English called it a murder. They arrested three of King Philip"s men. These were tried in court before a jury of twelve colonists and five Indians. They were found guilty. Two were hanged, the third was shot.
That was the end of peace. Miantonomah of the Narragansetts had been handed over by the colonists to the law of the Mohegans, but when the Pokanokets tried a similar law against a traitor, they had been punished. King Philip could no longer hold back his young men.
He had been working hard, in secret, to enlist all the New England tribes in a league greater than the league of Opechancanough, and by one stroke clean New England of the white colonists. The time set was the next year, 1676. The Narragansetts had promised then to have ready four thousand warriors.
But when the word from the English court was carried to Pokanoket, that the three prisoners were to be killed, and that Philip himself was likely to be tried, the warriors of the Wampanoags broke their promise to wait.
They danced defiantly. They openly sharpened their knives and hatchets upon the stone window-sills of settlers" houses, and made sport of the English.
A sudden cold fear spread through New England. A blood-red cloud seemed to be hovering over. Signs were seen in the sky--a great Indian bow, a great Indian scalp, racing hors.e.m.e.n; a battle was heard, with boom of cannon and rattle of muskets and whistling of bullets. The pious Puritans ordered a fast day, for public prayer, in the hope that G.o.d would stay the threatened scourge.
Upon that very day, June 24,1675, the war burst into flame. At the town of Swansea, Ma.s.sachusetts, near the Rhode Island border, and the nearest settlement to Mount Hope, a Wampanoag was wounded by an angered colonist. The Indians were glad. They believed that the party whose blood was shed first would be victors. The colonists returning from town meeting were fired upon; that day seven were killed and several wounded. King Philip"s young men had acted without orders.
When King Philip heard, he wept. He was not yet ready for the war, but now he had to fight. He had at hand sixty Wampanoag men of fighting age; all the Pokanoket league numbered six hundred warriors. Against these could be mustered thousands of the colonists, whose ninety towns extended through Ma.s.sachusetts, and Connecticut, and into present Rhode Island. Therefore he must act swiftly, or his cause was lost. All depended upon his appeal to the inland tribes on the north.
The powerful Narragansetts, his neighbors on the west, were not prepared, and sent no warriors at once; but certain of the other tribes did respond with gun and hatchet and fire.
Before the colonists could rally under a skillful leader, the forces of King Philip were successful. He had plenty of guns and ammunition.
Town after town in Plymouth Colony of southeastern Ma.s.sachusetts was laid in ashes by fierce surprise attacks. The scene shifted to western Ma.s.sachusetts. The Nipmucks of the Connecticut River, there, aided in the dreadful work.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1675 all settled Ma.s.sachusetts rang with the war-whoops of the Pokanokets and their allies. King Philip proved himself a master in Indian warfare to strike, and run, and strike again. In this one brief s.p.a.ce he earned his t.i.tle, the Terror of New England, not only because of his first successes, but also because during the span of more than a year no Englishman recognized his voice in battle, and only once was his face seen by his enemies.
Long after the war his name was used for frightening children.
"King Philip is coming!" And the naughtiest child would quiet and seek his mother"s skirt.
Although tortures and brutal killings were committed, King Philip himself opposed this. Many stories are told of his kindness to captives. He showed fully as much mercy as the colonists did.
Some tribes had failed to help. The Mohegans under Uncas enlisted with the English, which was expected. The "praying Indians," as the Christianized Pokanokets were known, also either stayed aloof, or else were used as scouts against their people. The New Hampshire Indians refused to take up the hatchet, and the Narragansetts still hung back.
King Philip"s own home of Pokanoket or Mount Hope had of course early been seized by the English troops. They had planned to keep him from escaping to the mainland in the north. But he easily moved his men out, by way of the narrow neck that connected with the mainland.
Now he was a roamer, until in this winter of 1675 he decided to stay among the Narragansetts, in southern Rhode Island, and renew his league.
To compel the Narragansetts to deliver over the King Philip people, an army of fifteen hundred was raised by Ma.s.sachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut colonies.
South Rhode Island was then an Indian wilderness, heavily timbered and deep with swamps. Near present South Kingston, in the Narragansett country, upon a meadow upland amidst a dense swamp Philip had built a fort containing five hundred wigwams. He had built well.
The only entrance from the swamp was defended by a high log fence or series of palisades. In addition, around a s.p.a.ce of five acres he had laid a thick hedge of felled trees. A single log bridged the water separating the fort from the drier land beyond. The wigwams were made bullet-proof by great stores of supplies piled against their walls, inside.
It was reported that he had three thousand persons in the fort--these being his Pokanokets, and many Narragansett men, women and children.
The place was called Sunke-Squaw.
Treachery it was that broke the power of King Philip. An Indian named Peter sought the English and offered to show them how to get in. After a long march amidst bitter cold and driving snow, they arrived at one o"clock in the afternoon of December 19. They were short of provisions, and very weary. For a time matters went ill with them.
Again and again their attacking parties were swept from the single log that Peter the traitor had showed to them. A number of officers and men had fallen, before, pressing hard, with night at hand, a party succeeded in entering the fort.
Here the hot fight pa.s.sed from wigwam to wigwam. Some of the English were killed by b.a.l.l.s from their own soldiers. Through all the swamp the battle raged.
"They run, they run!" sounded the loud cries, from the English within the fort. Their comrades on the outside hastened--scrambling, wading, straddling the log or knee-deep in the half frozen mire.
Indian women and children and warriors had taken refuge in the wigwams.
Torches were applied, burning them or driving them out to be shot down.
Officers tried to prevent the burning of the wigwams, in order to save the provisions, but the fire spread.
So by night the fort was in ruins. The Indians were killed, captured or fleeing. Seven hundred had been killed by bullet and sword, three hundred more perished by cold and hunger and wounds; how many old men, women and children had burned to death, no one knew. But a third of the Narragansett nation had been slain or taken captive, and of the Pokanokets only a remnant was left.
Eighty killed, was the report of the Connecticut troops alone. There were one hundred and fifty men grievously wounded. As the soldiers had destroyed the fort and its provisions, they had no shelter. Through a furious snowstorm they made a miserable night march of eighteen miles before even the wounded could be attended to.
King Philip was now a fugitive, but he was by no means done fighting.
He removed to the interior of Ma.s.sachusetts--it is said that he traveled clear to the Mohawks of New York, and asked their aid in this war against the English. He did not get it.
From January on into the summer of 1676 the war-whoop, the gun-shot and the torch again terrified the colonies. Aided by a few allies, King Philip was making his last great effort. He carried the war to within twenty miles of Boston. Of ninety towns in New England, thirteen had been burned; six hundred buildings had been leveled in smoke, and six hundred arms-bearing colonists killed.
"These were the most distressing days that New England ever beheld,"
reads a record. "All was fear and consternation. Few there were, who were not in mourning for some near kindred, and nothing but horror stared them in the face."