On the Sabbath of the 26th of March, as the people of Marlborough were a.s.sembled at public worship, the alarming cry was shouted in at the door, "The Indians! the Indians!" An indescribable scene of confusion instantly ensued, as the whole congregation rushed out to seek shelter in their garrison. The terror and confusion were awfully increased by a volley of bullets, which the Indians, as they came rushing like demons over the plain, poured in upon the flying congregation. Fortunately, the savages were at such a distance that none were wounded excepting one man, who was carrying an aged and infirm woman. His arm was broken by a ball. All, however, succeeded in gaining the garrison house, which was near at hand. The meeting-house and most of the dwelling-houses were burned. The orchards were cut down, and all other ruin perpetrated which savage ingenuity could devise.
The Indians, exultant with success, encamped that night in the woods not far from Marlborough, and kept the forest awake with the uproar of their barbarian wa.s.sail. The colonists immediately a.s.sembled a small band of brave men, fell upon them by surprise in the midst of their carousals, shot forty and dispersed the rest.
On the same day in which Marlborough was destroyed, a very disastrous defeat befell a party of soldiers belonging to the old Plymouth colony. Nanuntenoo, son of the renowned Miantunnomah, was now the head chief of the Narragansets. He was fired with a terrible spirit of revenge against the English, and could not forget the swamp fight in which so many of his bravest warriors had perished, and where hundreds of his women and children had been cut to pieces and burned to ashes in their wigwams. He himself had taken a large share in this fierce fight, and with difficulty escaped. This chieftain, a man of great intrepidity and sagacity, had gathered a force of nearly two thousand Indians upon the banks of the Pawtucket River, within the limits of the present town of Seekonk. They were preparing for an overwhelming attack upon the town of Plymouth.
The colonists, by no means aware of the formidableness of the force a.s.sembled, dispatched Captain Pierce from Scituate with seventy men, fifty of whom were English and twenty Indians, to break up the encampment of the savages. Nanuntenoo, informed of their movements, prepared with great strategetic skill to meet them. He concealed a large portion of his force in ambush on the western side of the river; another body of warriors he secreted in the forest on the eastern banks. As Captain Pierce approached the stream, a small party of Indians, as a decoy, showed themselves on the western side, and immediately retreated, as if surprised and alarmed. The colonists eagerly crossed the stream and pursued them.
The stratagem of the wily savage was thus perfectly successful. The colonists had advanced but a few rods from the banks, near Pawtucket Falls, when the Indians, several hundreds in number, rose from their ambush, and rushed like an avalanche upon them. With bravery almost unparalleled in Indian warfare, they sought no covert, but rushed upon their foes in the open field face to face. They knew that the colonists were now drawn into a trap from which there was no possible escape. As soon as the battle commenced, the Indians who were in the rear, on the eastern bank of the narrow stream, sprang up from their ambush, and, crowding the sh.o.r.e, cut off all hope of retreat, and commenced a heavy fire upon their foe. Utter defeat was now certain.
The only choice was between instantaneous death by the bullet or death by lingering torture. Captain Pierce was a valiant man, and instantly adopted his heroic resolve. He formed his men in a circle, back to back, and with a few words inspired them with his own determination to sell his life as dearly as possible. Thus they continued the fight until nearly every one of the colonial party was slain. But one white man escaped, and he through the singular sagacity of one of the friendly Indians.
Captain Pierce soon fell, having his thigh bone shattered by a bullet.
A n.o.ble Indian by the name of Amos would not desert him; he stood firmly by his side, loading and firing, while his comrades fell thickly around him. When nearly all his friends had fallen, and the survivors were mingled with their foes in the smoke and confusion of the fight, he observed that all the hostile Indians had painted their faces black. Wetting some gunpowder, he smeared his own face so as to resemble the adverse party; then, giving the hint to an Englishman, he pretended to pursue him with an uplifted tomahawk. The Englishman threw down his gun and fled, but a few steps in advance of his pursuer. The Narragansets, seeing that the Indian could not fail to overtake and dispatch the unarmed fugitive, did not interfere. Thus they entered the forest, and both escaped.
A friendly Indian, pursued by one of Nanuntenoo"s men, took shelter behind the roots of a fallen tree. The Indian who had pursued him waited, with his gun c.o.c.ked and primed, for the fugitive to start again from his retreat, knowing that he would not dare to remain there long, when hundreds of Indians were almost surrounding him. The roots of the tree, newly-turned up, contained a large quant.i.ty of adhering earth, which entirely covered the fugitive from view. Cautiously he bored a small hole through the earth, took deliberate aim at his pursuer, shot him down, and then escaped.
Another of the Indian allies, in his flight, took refuge behind a large rock. This was a perfect shelter for a moment, but certain death awaited him in the end. His pursuer, with loaded musket, sure of his victim, quietly waited to see him start again. In this deplorable condition the beleaguered Indian thought of the following shrewd expedient. Putting his cap upon his gun, he raised it very gradually above the rock, as if he were endeavoring to peep over to discover the situation of his enemy. The sharp-eyed Narraganset instantly leveled his gun and sent a bullet through the cap, and, as he supposed, through the head of his foe. The fugitive sprang from his covert, and, advancing toward his unarmed enemy, shot him dead. Thus was escape effected. With the exception of one Englishman and five or six friendly Indians, all the rest were cut down. The wounded were reserved for the horrible doom of torture.
The Indians were exceedingly elated by this signal victory, and their shouts of exultation were loud and long-repeated. The next morning, with yells of triumph, they crossed the river, made a rush upon Seekonk, and burned seventy buildings. The next day they stormed Providence, and burned thirty houses. These devastations, however, were not accompanied with much bloodshed, as most of the inhabitants of Providence and of Seekonk had previously fled to the island of Rhode Island for protection.
The heroic Roger Williams, however, remained in Providence. He had ever been the firm friend of the Indians, and was well acquainted with the leading chiefs in this war-party. The Indians, while setting fire to the rest of the town, left his person and property unharmed.
Flushed with success, they a.s.sured him that they were confident of the entire conquest of the country, and of the utter extermination of the English. Mr. Williams reproached them with their cruelties, and told them that Ma.s.sachusetts could raise ten thousand men, and that even were the Indians to destroy them all, Old England could send over an equal number every year until the Indians were conquered.
Nanuntenoo proudly and generously replied,
"We shall be ready for them. But you, Mr. Williams, shall never be injured, for you are a good man, and have been kind to us."
Nanuntenoo had about fifteen hundred warriors under his command.
Thinking that the English were very effectually driven from the region of Seekonk, he very imprudently took but thirty men and went to that vicinity, hoping to obtain some seed-corn to plant the fields upon the Connecticut from which the English had been expelled. But the English, alarmed by the ravages which the Indians were committing in this region, sent a force consisting of forty-seven Englishmen and eighty Indians to scour the country. Most of the Indians were Mohegans, under the command of Oneco, a son of Uncas.
As this force was approaching Seekonk they encountered two Indians with their squaws. They instantly shot the Indians and took the squaws captive. Their prisoners informed them that Nanuntenoo was in a wigwam at a short distance, with but seven Indians around him. His hut was erected at the bottom of a hill, upon the brow of which he had stationed two sentinels. These cowardly savages, when they saw the English approaching in such force, precipitately fled, without giving their chieftain any warning. The sachem, from his wigwam, saw their flight, and sent a third man to the hill-top to ascertain the cause.
As soon as he arrived upon the brow of the hill he saw the glittering array of more than a hundred men almost directly upon him. Appalled by the sight, he also fled like his predecessors. Nanuntenoo, amazed by this conduct, dispatched two more to solve the mystery. These last proved more faithful to their trust. They came running back in breathless haste, shouting, "_The English are upon you._"
Not a moment was to be lost in deliberation. The enemy was already in sight. Nanuntenoo leaped from his wigwam, and, with the agility of a deer, bounded over the ground in a hopeless attempt to escape. Nearly the whole army, English and Indians, like hounds in full cry, eagerly pressed the chase.
With amazing speed, the tall, athletic sachem fled along the bank of the river, seeking a place to ford the stream. In his rapid flight he threw off his blanket, his silver-laced coat, and his belt of wampum, so that nothing remained to obstruct his sinewy and finely-moulded limbs. A Mohegan Indian was in advance of all the rest of the company in the pursuit. Nanuntenoo plunged into the narrow stream to cross.
His foot slipped upon a stone, and he fell, immersing his gun in the water. This calamity so disheartened him that he lost all his strength. His swift-footed pursuer, Monopoide, was immediately upon him, and grasped him almost as soon as he reached the opposite sh.o.r.e.
The naked and unarmed chief could make no resistance, and, with stoicism characteristic of his race, submitted to his fate.
Nanuntenoo was a man of majestic stature, and of bearing as lofty as if he had been trained in the most haughty of European courts. A young Englishman, but twenty-one years of age, Robert Staunton, following Monopoide, was the first one who came up to the Narraganset chieftain after his capture. Young Staunton, in the pert spirit of Young America, ventured to question the proud monarch of the Narragansets.
Nanuntenoo, looking disdainfully upon his youthful face, after a short silence, said,
"You are too much of a child--you do not understand matters of war.
Let your chief come; him I will answer."
He was offered life upon condition that he would submit to the English, and deliver up to them all the Wampanoags in his territory.
"Let me hear no more of this," he replied, n.o.bly. "I will not surrender a Wampanoag, nor the paring of a Wampanoag"s nail."
He was taken to Stonington, where he was sentenced to be shot. When informed of his doom, he replied, in the spirit of an old Roman,
"I like it well. I shall die before my heart is soft, or before I have said any thing unworthy of myself."
He was shot by one of the Indians who were in alliance with the English; his head was cut off by them, and his body quartered and burned. The Indians who aided the colonists were always eager for any work of blood, and considered it a great privilege to enjoy the pleasures of executioners. They often implored permission to torture their enemies, and several times the English, to their shame be it recorded, allowed them to do so. In this case, "The mighty sachem of Narraganset," writes Cotton Mather, "the English wisely delivered unto their tawny auxiliaries for them to cut off his head, that so the alienation between them and the wretches in hostility against us might become incurable."
His head, a ghastly trophy of victory, was sent by the Mohegans to the Common Council at Hartford, in token of their love and fidelity to the English. The spirit of the times may be inferred from the following comments upon this transaction in the narrative written by Hubbard: "This was the confusion of that d.a.m.ned wretch that had often opened his mouth to blaspheme the name of the living G.o.d and those that made profession thereof."
We can not take leave of Nanuntenoo without a tribute of respect to his heroic and n.o.ble character. "His refusal," writes Francis Baylies, "to betray the Wampanoags who had sought his protection is another evidence of his lofty and generous spirit, and his whole conduct after his capture was such that surely, at this period, we may be allowed to lament the unhappy fate of this n.o.ble Indian without incurring any imputation for want of patriotism."
The inhabitants of New London, Norwich, and Stonington, being in great peril in consequence of their near vicinity to the enemy, raised several parties of volunteers and ranged the country. They succeeded in these expeditions in killing two hundred and thirty-nine of the enemy without incurring the loss of a single man. As most of the inhabitants of the towns had found it necessary to take refuge in garrison houses, prowling bands of Indians experienced but little difficulty in setting fire to the abandoned dwellings and barns, and the sky was every night illumined with conflagrations.
On the ninth of April a small party made an attack upon Bridgewater.
They plundered several houses, and were commencing the conflagration, when the inhabitants sallied forth and put them to flight. It is said that Philip had given orders that the town of Taunton should be spared until all the other towns in the colony were destroyed. A family by the name of Leonard resided in Taunton, where they had erected the first forge which was established in the English colonies. Philip, though his usual residence was at Mount Hope, had a favorite summer resort at a place called Fowling Pond, then within the limits of Taunton, but now included in the town of Raynham. In these excursions he had become acquainted with the Leonards. They had treated him and his followers with uniform kindness, repairing their guns, and supplying them with such tools as the Indians highly prized. Philip had become exceedingly attached to this family, and in grat.i.tude, at the commencement of the war, had given the strictest orders that the Indians should never injure a Leonard. Apprehending that in a general a.s.sault upon the town his friends the Leonards might be exposed to danger, he spread the shield of his generous protection over the whole place. This act certainly develops a character of more than ordinary magnanimity.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DESTRUCTION OF SUDBURY.]
On the 18th of April an immense band of savages, five hundred in number, made an impetuous a.s.sault upon Sudbury. The inhabitants, warned of their approach, had abandoned their homes and taken refuge in their garrisons.
The savages set fire to several of the dwellings, and were dancing exultingly around the flames, when a small band of soldiers from Watertown came to the rescue, and the inmates of the garrison, sallying forth, joined them, and drove the Indians across the river.
Captain Wadsworth, from Boston, chanced to be in the vicinity with about seventy men. Hearing of the extreme peril of Sudbury, although he had marched all the day and all the night before, and his men were exhausted with fatigue, he instantly commenced his march for that place. Painfully toiling on through the night by the road leading from Marlborough, early on the morning of the 19th he arrived within a mile and a half of the town. Here the Indians, who by their scouts had kept themselves informed of his approach, prepared an ambush. As the English were marching along with great caution, a band of about a hundred Indians crossed their path some distance in advance of them, and fled, feigning a panic. The English pursued them impetuously about a mile into the woods, when the fugitives made a stand, and five hundred Indians sprang up from their concealment, and hurled a storm of lead into the faces of their foes.
The English, with singular intrepidity, formed themselves into a compact ma.s.s, and by unerring aim and rapid firing kept their foes at bay while, slowly retreating, they ascended an adjacent hill. Here for five hours they maintained the conflict against such fearful odds.
The superior skill of the English with the musket rendered their fire much more fatal than that of their foes. Many of the savage warriors were struck down, and they bit the dust in their rage and dying agony, while but five or six of the English had been slain.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE INDIAN AMBUSH.]
The wind was high, and a drought had rendered the leaves of the forest dry as powder. Some shrewd savage thought of the fatal expedient of setting the forest on fire to the windward of their foes. The stratagem was crowned with signal success. A wide sheet of flame, roaring and crackling like a furnace, and emitting billows of smothering smoke, rolled toward the doomed band. The fierceness of the flames, and the blinding, suffocating smoke, soon drove the English in confusion from their advantageous position. The Indians, piercing them with bullets, rushed upon them with the tomahawk, and nearly every man in the party was slain. Some accounts say that Captain Wadsworth"s company was entirely cut off; others say that a few escaped to a mill, where they defended themselves until succor arrived. President Wadsworth, of Harvard College, was the son of Captain Wadsworth. He subsequently erected a modest monument over the grave of these heroes.
It is probably still standing, west of Sudbury causeway, on the old road from Boston to Worcester. The inscription upon the stone is now admitted to be incorrect in many of its particulars. It is said that one hundred and twenty Indians were slain in this conflict.
These successes wonderfully elated the Indians. They sent a defiant and derisive message to Plymouth:
"Have a good dinner ready for us, for we intend to dine with you on election day."
In this awful warfare, every day had its story of crime and woe.
Unlike the movement of powerful armies among civilized nations, the Indians were wandering every where, burning houses and slaughtering families wherever an opportunity was presented. They seemed to take pleasure in wreaking their vengeance even upon the cattle. They would cut out the tongues of the poor creatures, and leave them to die in their misery. They would shut them up in hovels, set fire to the buildings, and amuse themselves in watching the writhings of the animals as they were slowly roasted in the flames. Nearly all the men who were taken captive they tortured to death. "And that the reader may understand," says Cotton Mather, "what it is to be taken by such devils incarnate, I shall here inform him. They stripped these unhappy prisoners, and caused them to run the gauntlet, and whipped them after a cruel and b.l.o.o.d.y manner. They then threw hot ashes upon them, and, cutting off collops of their flesh, they put fire into their wounds, and so, with exquisite, leisurely, horrible torments, roasted them out of the world."
On the 20th of April a band of fifty Indians made an attack upon Scituate, and, though the inhabitants speedily rallied and a.s.sailed them with great bravery, they succeeded in plundering and burning nineteen houses and barns. They proceeded along the road, avoiding the block-houses, and burning all that were unprotected. They approached one house where an aged woman, Mrs. Ewing, was alone with an infant grandchild asleep in the cradle. As she saw the savages rushing down the hill toward her dwelling, in a delirium of terror she fled to the garrison house, which was about sixty rods distant, forgetting the child. The savages rushed into the house, plundered it of a few articles, not noticing the sleeping infant, and then hastened to make an a.s.sault upon the garrison. A fierce fight ensued. In the midst of the horrid scene of smoke, uproar, and blood, Mrs. Ewing, with heroism almost unparalleled, stole from the garrison unperceived, by a circuitous path reached the house, rescued the babe, still unconsciously sleeping, and bore it in safety to the garrison. Soon after this, the savages, repelled from their a.s.sault, set fire to her house, and it was consumed to ashes. All the day long the battle and the destruction continued in different parts of the town. There were several garrisoned houses which the Indians attacked with great spirit, but in every case they met with a repulse. Many of the savages were shot, and a few of the English lost their lives.
On the 8th of May a band of three hundred Indians made a very fierce attack upon Bridgewater. The inhabitants had fortunately received warning of the contemplated a.s.sault, and had most of them repaired to their garrisoned houses. The savages, hoping to take the place by surprise, with fearful yells rushed from the forest upon the south part of the town. Disappointed in finding all the inhabitants sheltered in their fortresses, they immediately commenced setting fire to the buildings. But the inhabitants boldly sallied forth to protect their property, and the Indians, though greatly outnumbering them, fled before their determined valor. They succeeded, however, in burning some thirteen houses.
The condition of the colonists was at this time deplorable in the extreme. During the campaign thus far the Indians had been signally successful, and had effected an inconceivable amount of destruction and suffering. The sun of spring had now returned; the snow had melted, and the buds were bursting. It was time to plow the fields and scatter the seed; but universal consternation and despair prevailed.
Every day brought its report of horror. Prowling bands of savages were every where. No one could go into the field or step from his own door without danger of being shot by some Indian lying in ambush. It was an hour of gloom into which scarcely one ray of hope could penetrate.
CHAPTER X.
THE VICISSITUDES OF WAR.
1677