I'm in the woods of Wayland, Massachusetts. This is the town where I grew up. This part of town is mostly conservation land, but that wasn't always the case.
In fact, this trail right here, this used to be an important stagecoach route called the Old Berlin Road and was traveled extensively on during colonial times. These foundations are all that remain of a tavern that was once on the old Berlin Road, a popular waypoint for travelers. Apparently, the tavern attracted some rather disreputable characters, including a semi-mythical highwayman named Captain Lightfoot.
It's said that Lightfoot was a careful man. Most highwaymen wore masks, but there was always a chance that one of their victims might identify them. So Lightfoot left nothing to chance. According to local legend, a later owner of the tavern found 13 skeletons buried beneath the floorboards. It's been known as the Tavern of the Damned ever since.
There's a rich forgotten history in this privileged suburban town. It's reflected in the ancient cemeteries, the historical markers, and on street signs. Place names can tell you a lot about history, and if you drive around here, you notice one name pop up. over and over.
King Philip, King Philip, King Philip. But who was King Philip? Was he some French monarch who invaded New England? A mad rebel with ambitions to establish his own empire in the New World?
Well, no. He was he was actually a Native American. King Philip was what the English called him, but his real name was Metacomet of Poconoke. And a generation after the first Thanksgiving, he led a coalition of Native American tribes to battle against the ever-engroaching English colonists of New England. King Philip's War, the conflict that bears Metacomet's Christian name, was the bloodiest war per capita in American history.
It shaped our national psyche, irrevocably changed the way colonists and Indians saw one another and opened the door to Anglo-American domination of this continent. In history class, this is what they tell you about the founding of our country. In 1620, the Pilgrims landed. And then in 1776, we declared our independence. They never seem to talk about what happened in between.
And they should, because it is a fascinating story. There's so much history to get into, but just consider this a simple introduction to this violent, chaotic, messy, deeply cynical chapter. in American history. This is the story of King Philip's War.
In 1675, there were four English colonies in New England. Massachusetts Bay, the largest, stretched from the Atlantic coast to the upper Connecticut River Valley. Plymouth centered around the Pilgrim's Landing and incorporated Cape Cod. Connecticut was made up of port towns on Long Island Sound, and farming communities up the Connecticut River to the modern-day border with Massachusetts.
And then there's Rhode Island, the black sheep of the bunch. It was largely populated by Baptists, Quakers, and other religious exiles. About 20,000 white colonists lived in New England.
For the most part, they were deeply religious Puritans, who valued industry and evangelism above all else. The Puritans'missionary work had been fairly successful. They had established several communities of praying Indians, Christian Algonquin people. The largest of these was Natick, Massachusetts.
Praying Indians lived according to English customs, but did not enjoy the full rights of Englishmen. Most of them languished in poverty and dealt with constant prejudice from their white neighbors. The colonies were growing constantly in size, population, and political power. The Native Americans of New England, on the other hand, were being squeezed out of their ancestral lands.
There were about 10,000 natives across the region in 1675. The major tribes were the Nipmuc, the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Wampanoag. Historically, relations between these tribes have been cool at best. Each tribe was ruled by a sachem, a paramount chief. The sachem of the Poconoke at Wampanoag was Metacomet, King Philip himself.
He was educated at Harvard, where he became intimately familiar with Puritan customs, and probably spoke excellent English. But make no mistake. Though he had spent much of his life amongst Europeans, he was not their friend. In January 1675, Josiah Winslow, governor of the Plymouth Colony, took a meeting with John Sassamon, a praying Indian.
Sassamon warned him that Metacomet was planning a major offensive against the English. His goal? To drive them back into the sea. Later that month, John Sassamon's body was found beneath the ice of Assawapset Pond. His neck had been broken.
The English arrested three Wampanoag men in connection to the murder. Another praying Indian testified against them and in June 1675 they were hanged. Soon word of the executions reached Mount Hope, Metacomet's homeland. The Wampanoag were outraged.
In their view, the English had exceeded their authority and set a dangerous precedent. Two weeks later, a band of Wampanoag warriors burned the town of Swansea in Plymouth to the ground, and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. The English responded quickly. A joint military force of militia from Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay descended on Metacomet's base on Mount Hope.
On June 27th, as the English militia prepared to sweep the Mount Hope Peninsula and destroy the Wampanoag, there was a total eclipse of the moon visible over Massachusetts. The militia grew apprehensive. Some said the eclipse, which lasted over an hour, was an evil omen. The Indians, however, saw it as a sign that ultimate victory would be theirs.
Under cover of darkness, the Wampanoag aborted canoes and slipped away to Pacasset country on the mainland to continue the fight. The English arrived at Mount Hope to find the Wampanoag wigwams deserted. Metacomet's escape ensured that the war would continue.
Historians such as Douglas Edward Leach have suggested that war came before Metacomet was truly ready. Perhaps the attack on Swansea had been the work of a few hot-headed young warriors, acting contrary to Metacomet's orders. The Indians left no written records of the war, so we will never know for sure. But Metacomet did have one major tribe on his side. The powerful Mi'kmaq of central Massachusetts.
Over the course of the summer and the autumn, They staged daring raids on English settlements, sending the colonies into a panic. The violence the Indians committed that summer was extreme. Men, women, children, and livestock were indiscriminately butchered, and the colonies seemed completely incapable of offering an effective defense. The English militia commanders fighting in King Philip's War were mostly veterans of the English Civil War, and they were used to fighting on the green verdant battlefields of their home country. But fighting against an ambush in a swamp is an entirely different matter.
In autumn, the Nipmuc attacked the Connecticut River Valley, driving farmers from their fields. So Massachusetts Bay militia gathered what crops they could find, loaded the harvest into wagons, and proceeded to the town of Hadley. Onward to the next day, the Nipmuc army was in the area of the river. route, their caravan was ambushed. A large force of Nipmuc warriors, led by their cunning sachem Mudawamp, sprung from the trees and smashed the English at the Battle of Bloody Brook.
The harvest of the upper Connecticut River Valley was lost. For the English, it would be a lean winter. The onset of winter brought a lull in the fighting, which was extremely lucky for the English.
In six months of war, they had failed to win a single military victory. The economic downturn caused by the raising of farms and homesteads... was ruinous, and morale across the colonies was extremely low.
The Wampanoag and Nipmuc had crossed the Rubicon, but not all the tribes of the region were quite so eager to raise their tomahawks against the English. The Mohican of Connecticut, for example, were enthusiastically allied with the colonists. The Narragansett, however, remained neutral. Despite a pledge of loyalty to the colonies, they bore no love for their white neighbors, and tensions between the two groups were high.
If the Narragansett Metacomet's side, they would be perfectly positioned to attack Massachusetts on one side and Connecticut on the other. Colonial leaders lived in constant fear of this possibility. The war was going badly enough.
A major offensive from another hostile tribe could prove apocalyptic. So delegates from each of the United Colonies met in Boston. They decided to attack the Narragansett preemptively.
The colonies assembled an army of a thousand men, the biggest New England had ever seen, and marched off to Rhode Island. On December 19, 1675, after marching for days through the frigid wilderness of the Great Swamp, the army came across a... ...heavily fortified Narragansett village. They took a moment to gawk at the fortifications. They were unlike anything the Algonquin had ever built.
Then the English set about destroying them. The army discovered a weak point in the palisade, and soldiers led by Captain Samuel Mosley poured into the fort. Mosley was a cruel, racist Indian fighter.
He thought of the natives like animals, so he slaughtered them like animals. Oh, well. Oh, well. When the smoke cleared, 600 Narragansett warriors and civilians were dead.
Puritan historians describe the Great Swamp Fight as a glorious victory. It was, in truth, a needless slaughter that forced the Narragansett into the war. Meanwhile, Metacomet and the Wampanoag wintered west of the Berkshires, in the colony of New York.
There, he attempted to convince the Mohawk tribe to enter into the war on his side. Instead, the Mohawk turned on him and nearly destroyed his army. Metacomet returned to Massachusetts in February 1676. His army crippled and his reputation damaged beyond repair.
Spring brought more attacks on English villages. The natives were more ferocious and daring than ever, and their raids went all the way to the Atlantic coast. The last great Native American victory of the war was fought right here in Sudbury, Massachusetts in April 1676. 500 Wampanoag and Nipmuc warriors surrounded a unit of Massachusetts militia and wiped them out. Nevertheless, the fire of native resistance was burning down to its embers. The fearsome Nipmuc, who had inflicted worse defeats against the English than any other tribe, were effectively neutralized at the Battle of Turner's Falls in May 1676. As for the Wampanoag, starvation and disease were taking their toll.
Throughout the spring and summer, hundreds of hostile natives gave up the fight and surrendered to colonial authorities. The English were also changing up their tactics. The colonies, especially Plymouth, had begun to appreciate the value of allied native scouts and warriors, who were expert trackers and born guerrilla fighters.
Medic Comet saw the writing on the wall. He fled back to Mount Hope, his ancestral homeland. A dashing frontiersman named Captain Benjamin Church, commanding a small company of Englishmen and native allies, set off in pursuit.
Church's men surrounded the Wampanoag camp at Mount Hope on August 12th before dawn. They took their positions and opened fire. During the battle, two of Church's men spotted a big Indian running through the forest. One of them, an Englishman, drew a bead with his rifle, pulled the trigger, and the piece misfired. So his companion, a praying Indian named John Alderman, shouldered his rifle, took a careful aim, and killed the fleeing man.
The two men approached the big Indian's corpse. They recognized him immediately. Metacomet of Poconoket, Sachem of the Wampanoag, known to white men as King Philip.
Captain Church! They got him! Apparently, aldermen cut off King Philip's hand, kept it in a jar, and showed it to people at taverns for a fee.
Cheers. King Philip was dead, but several of his men survived the August 12th battle, including his shrewd chief lieutenant, the aged Anowan. Captain Church, acting on information provided by Wampanoag prisoners, tracked Anowan to his camp. descending down a sheer cliff face to achieve the element of surprise. But instead of fighting, Anowan decided to take a meal with Benjamin Church.
He even presented him with Metacomet's own belt of wampum as a sign of respect. Despite Church's protests, though, Anowan was taken in chains to Plymouth and later executed. As a young man, Anowan had probably attended the first Thanksgiving, but he lived to see his tribe extinguished and his way of life brutally repressed.
King Philip's War was a chaotic mess. The natives lost because of their lack of cohesion, as well as their inability to capitalize on their many strategic... The English won almost accidentally. Each campaign, each battle was marred by incompetence at the highest level of command.
In fact, officials in London were so unimpressed by colonial leadership during the war that in 1686 they passed legislation that directly reasserted their control over their American colonies. Not until 1776 would Americans enjoy nearly as much independence. Most crucially. King Philip's War set a precedent for how Anglo-Americans would treat Native Americans, namely with slaughter, enslavement, and confinement on reservations. Throughout the war, hundreds of praying Indians who were suspected of colluding with the enemy were banished to a barren, windswept rock in Boston Harbor called Deer Island.
Many of them starved or froze to death there. It was a deplorable policy, motivated by paranoia and blind hatred. and eerily foreshadowed Japanese internment during World War II.
Naturally, the newcomers looked about with some curiosity. They were in a new area, on land that was raw, untamed, but full of opportunity. Those Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett who survived King Philip's War fled west, to upstate New York and beyond.
In June 1675, the English and the natives had shared power in New England. Eighteen months later, the white man, was the undisputed master of all the land from the sea to the Hudson River. We all know there's a dark side to this country.
The specter of Indian genocide looms over all of our flag waving, our apple pie, our baseball games. King Philip's War embodies that dark shadow, that conveniently forgotten history of theft, rape, mutilation, and slaughter. King Philip's War, the most important American war you've never heard of.