A New Series for Native American History Month and the 350th Anniversary of King Philip’s War

November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.

The culminating fight for New England occurred in 1675, following a half century of tension, in an event called King Philip’sWar. It’s the war that essentially finished the First Nations of New England as powers to be reckoned with militarily, and set the precedent for how such conflicts would be dealt with in America forever going forward. It was, proportionally the costliest and bloodiest war in American history. It was one of the few wars, perhaps the only one, in which Native Americans not only enjoyed significant victories, but came close to defeating the English settlers. It would appall the people who lived through it (as it must appall anyone today who learns about it) to know that King Philip’s War would one day be almost completely forgotten, as it has been today. I know a lot about this event because I grew up ten minutes from the site of its catastrophic climactic battle, the Great Swamp Fight.

If you’ve ever taken an Amtrak train on the northeast corridor between New York and Boston, the Great Swamp is in the wooded stretch you pass through between the Rhode Island towns of Westerly and Kingston, the locomotive equivalent of flyover country. It’s about 80 miles from Plymouth Rock and it’s located in the township where I grew up.

By 1675 the situation was very different than it had been in 1620. There were now 80,000 colonists living in New England from Maine to Connecticut. And unlike some of the earlier settlers, the large influx of colonists had no qualms about just taking what they wanted. Meanwhile, the Native Americans living in the area had been reduced to about 10,000. Outnumbered 8 to 1. Further, this number was divided amongst several tribes: the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, and others, who weren’t all allied with one another.

After countless triggering events and the constant population pressure, the Wampanoag chief Metacomet (a.k.a. King Philip) saw that things were only going to get worse, and this was perhaps his last and only chance to get rid of the Europeans. Hostilities broke out. All of the New England colonies were drawn in, as were all of the local tribes (though some were allies of the English). The English had 16,000 men under arms, the natives more like 2,000. Still the tribes did enormous damage to the colonies, especially during the first year. A large proportion of the fledgling towns in the interior were completely destroyed, the settlers forced to flee back to the coast. Most of the surviving towns were converted into fortresses, of the sort we associate with westerns or medieval romances. And while in the end the tribes were fatally reduced in number, they hit the colonists hard. Some relatives of mine were kidnapped and taken to locations hundreds of miles away in New Hampshire or Canada. One was tied to a tree for two weeks, a gash cut into his face and filled with gunpowder, giving him a permanent black tattoo. Many others were killed, shot with arrows, brained with warclubs, picked off while they were working in the field or walking to church in towns all over the region. One of my ancestral families was attacked five times. An aunt, (many times removed) managed to kill one of her attackers with a ladleful of hot lye while she was making soap. Later, after she was kidnapped, she gave birth and the baby was impaled on a pike by her captors. She was sold as a servant to the French, and later retrieved by her husband. Some were killed while fighting the natives in King Philip’s War. It took the English several generations to recover.

But the First Nations never did recover. Here’s what happened in the Great Swamp Fight (December, 1675), which was just one of the battles that took place during King Phillip’s War.

During the time of trouble, many of the English took to fortifying their towns and their dwellings into garrisons and blockhouses. On December 15, 1675 Narragansetts attacked one of these built by Jireh Bull, the son of the Rhode Island Governor at the time. The fort was burned and several colonists were killed. A teenage boy managed to flee and was pursued for miles along a brook. A tomahawk was thrown at him. He survived hand to hand struggle and finally made it to safety to raise the alarm. Four days later a turncoat guide named Indian Peter led the colonial militias of Plymouth, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay to the Narragansett stronghold, which at the time was in the middle of the Great Swamp as a strategic wartime tactic. There were about a thousand people living there on a five-acre compound, men, women and children. The fortress was surrounded and burned. Those who didn’t die inside were killed as they fled or perished later from their injuries or from exposure to the harsh winter elements since their dwellings had been destroyed. About a hundred Narragansett warriors died, along with hundreds of non-combatants, maybe as many as a thousand. The surviving Narragansetts were dispersed, many of them sold into slavery. About 70 of the English died during the fighting including a couple of my ancestors. So what that amounts to in terms of proportional loss is 10% of the Native Americans vs. .1% of the whites of New England. Sure there’s pain on both sides. But the amount of it differed by several orders of magnitude. When you hear talk of equivalency on topics like that, it’s important to try to get some actual perspective. It’s true that killing is bad no matter who does it; on the other hand we’re inclined to feel more sympathetic toward the side who didn’t almost exterminate the other one.

I said almost. Centuries passed. The descendants of those Narragansetts still live in my hometown. One of them was my Pop Warner football coach. Another one was one of my best  friends in the third grade. I have a niece and nephew with Pequot blood in their veins. Names and places are still there. That brook where James Eldred fled from the natives became known as Indian Run. I crossed it or walked alongside it practically every day of the first 20 years of my life. And there is a whole town named after the Narragansetts. Some people, quite commendably, tried to keep the memory of people and places alive with the naming of these things. These names aren’t just a bunch of highway signs and vacation lakes. THEY ARE IT.

We are strangers, Johnny Come Latelys, trampling over all that’s underfoot like goats in the garden. 99.9% of the people who pass through have no idea, don’t give it a moment’s thought. My mother was like that. Didn’t give a damn. Even though it was her ancestral homeland and the clues were right in front of her. The place where she spent her last years was called Indian Run Village.