THE SQUAW SACHEM OF POCASSET (1675-1676)]
AND CANONCHET OF THE BIG HEART
When King Philip had planned his war, he well knew that he might depend upon Wetamoo, the squaw sachem of Pocasset.
After the death of the luckless Alexander, Wetamoo married a Pocasset Indian named Petananuit. He was called by the English "Peter Nunnuit." This Peter Nunnuit appears to have been a poor sort of a husband, for he early deserted to the enemy, leaving his wife to fight alone.
Wetamoo was not old. She was in the prime of life, and as an Indian was beautiful. Not counting her faithless husband, only one of her Pocassets had abandoned her. He was that same Alderman who betrayed and killed King Philip.
In the beginning Queen Wetamoo had mustered three hundred warriors. She stuck close to King Philip, and fought in his ranks. She probably was in the fatal Narragansett fort when it was stormed and taken, on December 19, 1675. The English much desired to seize her, for her lands of Pocasset "would more than pay all the charge" of the war. She was considered as being "next unto Philip in respect to the mischief that hath been done."
But she was not taken in the fort among the Narragansetts. She fled with King Philip her brother-in-law, and warred that winter and spring, as he did, against the settlements in Massachusetts.
Truly a warrior queen she was, and so she remained to the last, ever loyal to the losing cause of her grand sachem, and to the memory of Alexander.
With Philip she was driven southward, back toward her home of Pocasset, east of Mount Hope. By the first week in August of 1676, she had only twenty-six men left, out of her three hundred.
Then there came to the colonists at Taunton, which lay up the river Taunton from Pocasset, another deserter, with word that he could lead them to the little Wetamoo camp, not far southward.