Famous Indian Chiefs / Their Battles, Treaties, Sieges, and Struggles with the Whites for the Possession of America

by Charles H. L. Johnston

There had been living among the Wampanoags at Nemasket, an Indian converted to Christianity by John Eliot, a Puritan missionary. This savage was named Sassamon, a cunning and plausible fellow, who accompanied King Philip to the last conference with the Governor, as an interpreter. He was close to Philip, was in his confidence, and hearing him speak often of a desire to go to war against the English, he one day journeyed to Plymouth, and told the people there to be on their guard, for the Wampanoag chief was determined to massacre them if he had a favorable opportunity. This alarming news was not believed by Governor Prince, "for," said he, "all Indians are, by nature, untruthful and wish to make you fear them." So the Puritans paid little heed to this information, especially as Philip, himself, soon came to the settlement, declaring that he wished for peace; that he had heard of Sassamon's talk; and that he wanted to tell them that such sayings were untruthful and absurd.

Today a few survivors of the Nemasket tribe of Indians live upon the edge of Assowomset Pond, four miles south of the village of Middleborough, Massachusetts, and on the surface of this quiet sheet of water was found floating the body of Sassamon, in the spring of the year. Bruises upon his body aroused the suspicions of the whites, who came to the belief that he had been killed during the winter and his remains thrown beneath the surface of the pond, in revenge for his treacherous talk. Three Indians were arrested on suspicion, but they claimed that Sassamon had been drowned while fishing and that the marks upon his body were caused by contact with the ice. In spite of this, they were called before a jury of whites and Indians, and, upon the evidence of an Indian who claimed that he was an eye witness of the affair, were sentenced to be hung. The last red man to swing for the crime confessed that the other Wampanoags had really murdered the red man and that he had been a looker-on, but not a participator in the deed. In spite of thus turning "States Evidence" he was first reprieved and then executed, and, although there was no actual proof of King Philip's connection with this terrible affair, it was evident that he had decreed that Sassamon should die as a fit punishment for his tale-bearing to the English settlement.

The execution of the three Indians aroused the angry passions of the Wampanoags to fever heat and they soon began to annoy the white settlers who had the misfortune to live in the neighborhood of Mount Hope. The peaceful folk at Plymouth now had rumors of ravage and excesses of all kinds. Houses were robbed while the men were in the fields at work; cattle were shot when they were beyond the hearing of the farmers' wives; corn was stolen; outbuildings were set on fire in the night, and sheep were mysteriously slaughtered. A Christian Indian came, one day, to Governor Prince, and said: "Strange warriors swarm to King Philip's village. His women and children are being sent to the Narragansetts. He and his men are thick as flies, and they are armed and ready for a long war." Alarm and terror spread among the far-distant settlements, and some persons of imaginative minds saw comets in the form of blazing arrows shoot across the skies, while the thunder of hoofs of invisible horsemen, and the whistle of unseen bullets, were heard upon the still air as the peace-loving villagers walked to and from their meeting-houses. "To arms! To arms!" was the cry, as the rumors of the Indian uprising grew more and more frequent, and the stern-faced Puritans oiled their Cromwellian muskets, cleaned out the fuse pans, and set their wives busily to work moulding leaden bullets. War—cruel, savage, relentless war, was soon to burst upon the white settlers of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

And, as we look upon the events which led up to this conflict, we see that King Philip and his men had good reason to make one desperate attempt to rid the country of the superior race of whites. "What can we do against you English?" Philip had said in a conference at Bristol Neck. "If we surrender our arms to you, you do not deliver them back to us without charging us a fine; you take our land away from us and pay us practically nothing. You cheat us whenever we have dealings with you. As we have no fences around our cornfields, your horses and cattle trample out our food. You sell our men liquor, get them drunk, and then, when they hurt the sober Indians and your cattle, you fine us so heavily that we must needs sell our land to pay it. When you English first came to our country, my father Massasoit was a great man, and you white men were weak and poor. He gave you more land than I now possess. Yet you seized upon my brother Alexander, forced him to come to you with a loaded pistol, and killed him by your cruel treatment. You will not believe the testimony of our brothers in your court, and every lying white man's tale against us is credited."

These accusations were all true; the English had crowded the men of a different race and manner of living back into the interior, and, desiring their land, had cheated, browbeaten and robbed them of their possessions with a supreme contempt for their feelings. To compete with the Puritans, the Wampanoags had to adopt their ways, but they were content with their own manner of living; were satisfied with their wigwams and primitive method of tilling the soil, and did not want the care or trouble of tending to flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, which made the white man rich and prosperous. It was the stronger race against the weaker, and, as has always happened, the Indians had to give way to those of greater intelligence and thrift.

Philip was driven to bay and forced into a fight by the passions which he was unable to control, yet he must have known that he could not win. The Narragansetts had not joined him. The surrounding tribes gave him little assurance that they would fight with him to the bitter end, and, although tradition has it that the Indians had seven or eight thousand fighting men, it is probable that their actual numbers were about three thousand five hundred. No general conspiracy had been organized, and, although many individual Indians were sure to join with Philip's warriors, he could count upon no assistance save that of his own followers. So the hostilities began with the odds decidedly against the native Americans.

The little village of Swansea, Massachusetts, was not far from the Wampanoag capital of Mount Hope, and here on Sunday, June the 20th, 1675, a war party of eight Indians crept stealthily into the quiet street as the settlers were at church. They entered a house, upturned tables, chairs, and bedsteads; stuck arrows through the pictures, and then killed some peaceful cows grazing on the village common. But an old man and his son were at home, and, as they saw the thieving savages issuing from a neighbor's house, the father seized his musket and told his boy to "shoot a robbing varmint." Putting the gun to his shoulder the young man fired from a window, dropped a savage with the first bullet, and turned around smiling, when the Indian crawled to his feet and made off. Later in the day some friendly Indians came to the village and asked why the brave had been shot. "Because he was a robber," replied the old man. "Is he dead?" "Yea," was the answer. "That is good," shouted the boy who had pulled the trigger, and, from the looks of hate upon the faces of the visitors, it could be seen that they were maddened by the young man's idle words.

Messengers were sent in haste to Plymouth, troops were ordered to march to Taunton, and, at the same time, the next Sunday was appointed as a solemn one for prayer and the chanting of psalms, with the request that war be turned aside. But these supplications to heaven were to be of no avail, for, as the settlers of Swansea returned from their meeting house upon the next Lord's day, suddenly the wild warwhoops of the savages and crack of rifles was heard from the depths of the woods, on either side of the path. One Puritan soon lay dead upon the ground, another was badly wounded through the body, and two young men who were running back to the village for a large gun, were found dying in the road, as the fleeing settlers came slowly towards their homes, with faces towards the lurking foe and their few muskets speaking loudly in answer to the wild whoops of the painted braves. Barricading themselves in the strongest farmhouses, they fought a desultory battle all through the day, but next morn six persons were found dead in an outlying log house, which was farther from the protection of the village. Their heads were scalped and their bodies had been brutally disfigured.

There were forty thousand English in New England, and, at the first news of this tragedy, men donned their armor, seized their guns, and soon were marching in numbers towards the scene of hostilities. The Praying Indians—those converted by the English missionaries—refused to join with King Philip's men and either did not fight at all, or marched with the whites. The Pequots and Mohegans of Connecticut would not take the field against the Colonists, for the war had broken out a year before King Philip had intended it to, and he had not had time to persuade these to become his allies. He, himself, is said to have wept, as the tidings of these first outrages of the war were brought him, for, savage as he was, he no doubt relented at the idea of disturbing the long peace which his father—the good Massasoit—had preserved with the Puritans. But the die was cast; from now on there was to be no rest for the Indian Sachem; and, although he must have known that, in the end, he would surely be defeated, he plunged into the campaign with a brave resolution to conquer the oppressors of his people. His own following consisted of six hundred warriors, eager and ready for the fray. The Narragansetts were willing to assist, the Nipmucks and the Indians residing upon the Connecticut River were prepared for a long war, and all the Indians upon the coast of Maine, fully two hundred miles away, were soon engaged in the common cause of the race—the extermination of the whites. Tradition has it that between seven and eight thousand fighting men were enrolled in the war under the leadership of Philip, but, in reality, there were probably about thirty-five hundred.