Only a few days after these arrangements were made, Deerfield had been attacked again, and Captain Lathrop, with about sixty men, “the very flower of the county of Essex,” was detailed to convoy some provisions accumulated there into Hadley. Although these troops were operating in a country filled with hostile savages, and the line of march lay in part through a dense forest, where they might easily be ambushed, the company had no scouts ahead, and many of the soldiers had stowed their arms in the carts, while they themselves gathered grapes by the roadside. Lathrop was familiar with the road and its dangerous places; but it was at one of these, the spot where the trail crossed the little stream ever since known as Bloody Brook, that the troop encountered the fatal result of their criminal folly. As they were crossing the ford, with their heavy wagons lumbering in the mud, the Indian war-whoop rang out on all sides, and the soldiers fell under the bullets of their unseen foe. The massacre was virtually complete. Hardly a man escaped, and not one would have done so, had not Colonel Moseley with another small troop, heard the shooting and hurried to the rescue. He, in turn, was being forced back, and was facing annihilation, when Major Treat, having likewise heard firing, hastened up with some Connecticut troops and friendly Indians, and saved the day.[[879]] The survivors, however, who fell back upon Deerfield, were obliged to evacuate the town a few days later, it thus being the third surrendered to the enemy.
On September 26, a slight attack was made upon Springfield, followed by demonstrations against Hadley. Some troops having been hurried thither from Springfield, the Indians, successful in their ruse, if that had been their plan, returned and attacked that town in force, destroying it on October 5.[[880]] Major Appleton now replaced Pynchon as commander; but Treat having retired with part of his troops to Connecticut, in view of the danger threatening Hartford, his lieutenant refused to obey Appleton, as he considered Treat to be his immediate superior. The matter became a subject of dispute between the colonies, but, the danger to Connecticut having passed, Treat returned, and Connecticut troops continued to garrison the Massachusetts towns throughout the winter.[[881]]
Connecticut from the start had adopted the policy of utilizing to the full the services of the friendly Indians, which Massachusetts, for the most part had refused, with disastrous consequences. Not only had she failed to make use of them as scouts and troops, but by removing the Praying Indians from the line of towns in which they had been settled, and placing them in a concentration camp on Deer Island, she had weakened her whole line of defense.[[882]] But, unfortunately, it was not a question of merely failing to utilize valuable resources. Her treatment of her civilized natives, individually and collectively, must be considered as cruel and inhumane, although the ministers and the magistrates seem, on the whole, to have endeavored to restrain the lawless persecution of the mob, and the savagery of their more brutal leaders, such as Moseley. Innocent Indians were insulted, and plundered of their possessions, and, in some cases, their women and children were murdered in cold blood. Yet juries refused to convict the offenders, and the General Court frequently yielded to the clamor, until letters from England, and the discovery of a hideous plot by the whites to massacre all the converts gathered on Deer Island, awoke them to some sense of their duty. The blind fury against the Praying Indians was by no means confined to the rabble. Moseley, whose refusal to use their services in the war had cost many English lives, treated them at Marlborough and Nashobeh with the most wanton brutality, although the execution of a squaw, taken prisoner on his expedition near Hatfield, is, we hope, unique in American military history. The laconic note of her fate merely reads that she was “ordered to be torn in peeces by Doggs, and she was soe dealt withal.”[[883]] It recalls, however, the earlier advice of Massachusetts, that the Indians be hunted down with mastiffs.[[884]] Although he was censured for his various acts of inhumanity and insubordination, no action was taken against Moseley by the authorities, who thus share his guilt; and so high did the feeling run that it became dangerous, even in Boston, for such men as Eliot and Gookin to speak a word in defense of the persecuted Christian natives.
In the early winter, it seemed as if the enemy had been successful everywhere. Philip, who apparently had not been present in any of the fights, had gone into winter quarters near Albany,[[885]] but it is probable that the war had long since passed out of his control; and there is nothing to indicate any concerted plan governing the actions of the various tribes now, or soon to be, on the war-path. By far the most powerful of those surviving were the Narragansetts; and their Sachem Canonchet, the son of Miantonomo, both from his position and his ability, was probably a more important factor than Philip; although, as yet, in spite of the ancient wrong done him in the judicial murder of his father, and the recent act of the English in forcing the treaty of July 15 upon some of his people, the sachem had committed no overt act against the settlers. A number of hostile Indians, however, had fled to his country for refuge; and in October, either from a deliberate purpose to provoke him into active hostility, or in the vain hope that he would be forced into an alliance with them by threats, the Massachusetts authorities required him to sign a treaty ratifying the one of July 15, and agreeing to give up all refugees to the English.[[886]] It is doubtful whether the sentiment of his people would have permitted this surrender; but, in any case, little opportunity was given to test it, and on November 2, only two weeks after having forced Canonchet to sign a humiliating peace, the English abruptly declared war.[[887]] Old Uncas, who had hated the Narragansetts for a lifetime, had long been scheming to bring about the conflict, and the land possessed by Canonchet and the refugee Awashonks was a most potent argument. A journal-letter from a citizen of Boston, dated only a few days after the treaty with the Narragansett, complains of his not having delivered up the squaw-sachem, but that there was prospect of force being used, and that, if she could be captured, “her Lands will more than pay all the charge we have been at in this unhappy War.”[[888]] About a week after the date of this letter, the Commissioners of the United Colonies, at the same meeting at which war was declared, arranged for a levy of a thousand more troops, and an immediate expedition was planned against the Narragansetts, under command of Governor Winslow of Plymouth.[[889]] The Massachusetts Council, with an eye to the long-coveted country, proclaimed that, if her soldiers “played the man,” and drove the Narragansetts out of it, the army should receive allotments of the land in addition to their pay.[[890]]
The various units of the new force, after sundry isolated skirmishes with the enemy, finally united at Pettisquamscott, late in the afternoon of December 18, and lay in the open that night in a severe snowstorm. The Indians, between three and four thousand in number, had taken refuge in a fortified position, on an island of four or five acres, in the middle of a large swamp, about sixteen miles from the English camp. Before daybreak, on the morning of the 19th, the army began its march, reaching the swamp about one in the afternoon. Some of the enemy were encountered upon its edge, but immediately fled, pursued, without order, by the English, straight to the entrance of the native fort. For three hours the fighting was desperate, and it was only after darkness began to fall that the colonists succeeded in capturing the Indians' blockhouse and other works. Then came the same order which had been issued in the Pequot swamp fight thirty years earlier, and the torch was applied to the four hundred wigwams and accumulated stores of the savages. It is impossible to tell how many of the warriors fell in the fight, or how many of the old people, women, and children were roasted alive in the flames; but the contemporary estimates run from four hundred to a thousand or more. The English loss was about seventy killed and a hundred and fifty wounded.[[891]]
Although the Narragansetts had received a terrible blow, they had not been so nearly annihilated as had the Pequots in the preceding generation; and the English, in view of their own actions, could now look for nothing less than a war to the death, waged with a ferocity equal at least to their own. An immediate levy of a thousand additional men was arranged for, divided among the colonies, and a new expedition was sent into the Nipmuck country, where the Narragansetts had joined some of Philip's forces.[[892]] The commissariat broke down, and the short campaign, known as “the hungry march,” accomplished nothing. On February 10, the savages fell upon Lancaster and nearly destroyed the town. Within the next few weeks, attacks were made upon such widely separated points as Medfield, Northampton, Hatfield, Providence, Groton, Longmeadow, and Marlborough.
The Indians, however, had suffered severely during the winter from want of food, and, as spring came on, Canonchet realized that crops must be raised during the summer if the war were to be maintained. He proposed that the conquered lands in the Connecticut Valley be planted, and he himself, with a small party, volunteered to go back to Seakonk, near Mount Hope, to procure seed-corn. The venture cost him his life, for he was taken captive by a party of Connecticut men and Indians operating in the Narragansett country, and was immediately condemned to death. When told of the sentence, the savage, who possessed to the full the courage lacked by Philip, replied that “he liked it well that he should die before his heart was soft, or had spoken anything unworthy of himself.”[[893]]
Warrant signed by Governor Winslow of Plymouth for Sale of Indian Captives as Slaves
Original in Massachusetts Historical Society
In spite of further attacks by the Indians, one as near Boston as Sudbury, the tide now turned in favor of the English throughout southern New England. A heavy blow was struck at the Upper Falls of the Connecticut, where a great company of natives had gathered to fish, and where Captain Turner inflicted a severe defeat upon them, in spite of his own heavy losses. The privations of the winter, the prospect of semi-starvation to come, the loss of Canonchet, and the breakdown of Philip as a leader, rapidly sapped the morale of the natives, who became disorganized and demoralized. Detachments of English hunted down and slaughtered or captured the scattered bands of savages. Philip, who had returned to his old home near Mount Hope, narrowly escaped being taken early in August, his wife and son falling into the hands of the English. A few weeks later, he himself was slain in a swamp, by one of Captain Church's Indians, and the main phase of the war, which, by bearing his name, has unduly exalted his part in it, was over.[[894]]