The traitorous Indian ran eagerly to inform Captain Church that he had shot King Philip, and Church, by a prearranged signal, called his soldiers together and informed them of the death of their formidable foe. The corpse was dragged out of the swamp, as if it had been the carcass of a wild beast, to where the ground was dry. Captain Church then said: "Forasmuch as he has caused many an Englishman's body to lie unburied and to rot above the ground, not one of his bones shall be buried." Accordingly, an old Indian executioner was ordered to cut off his head and quarter his body, which was immediately done. Philip had a mutilated hand, caused by the bursting of a pistol; this hand was given to Alderman, who shot him, as his share of the spoil. Captain Church informs us that Alderman preserved it in rum and carried it around the country as a show, "and accordingly he got many a penny by exhibiting it." The head was sent to Plymouth, where it was set up on a gibbet and exposed for twenty years, while the four quarters of the body were nailed to as many trees, a terrible exhibition of the barbarism of that age.
"Such," said Edward Everett, "was the fate of Philip. He had fought a relentless war, but he fought for his native land, for the mound that covered the bones of his parents; he fought for his squaw and papoose; no—I will not defraud them of the sacred names which our hearts understand—he fought for his wife and child."
Philip, of Mount Hope, was certainly one of the most illustrious savages upon the North American continent. The interposition of Providence alone seems to have prevented him from exterminating the whole English race of New England. Though his character has been described only by those who were exasperated against him to the very highest degree, still it is evident that he possessed many of the noblest qualities which can embellish any character.
Mrs. Rowlandson, who was captured by the Indians at the time Lancaster was destroyed, met King Philip on several occasions and received only kind usage at his hands. She says in her narrative: "Then I went to see King Philip" (who was not present at the attack of Lancaster), "and he bade me come in and sit down, and asked me whether I would smoke, a usual compliment, now-a-days, among saints and sinners, but this no ways suited me. During my abode in this place, Philip spoke to me to make a shirt for his boy, for which he gave me a shilling. Afterward he asked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner. I went, and he gave me a pancake, about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life." She met Philip again at the rendezvous near Mount Wachusett. Kindly, and with the courtesy of a polished gentleman, he took the hand of the unhappy captive and said "In two more weeks you shall be your own mistress again," In the last talk she had with Philip, he said to her, with a smile on his face: "Would you like to hear some good news? I have a pleasant word for you. You are to go home to-morrow," and she did.
That magnanimity and gratitude were prominent characteristics of this great chieftain is shown by his treatment of the Leonard family, who resided at Taunton and erected the first forge which was established in the English colonies. Though living at Mount Hope, Philip had a favorite summer resort at Fowling Pond, near Taunton, and thus became acquainted with the Leonards, who treated him and his warriors with uniform kindness, repairing their guns, and supplying them with such tools as the Indians highly prized. "Philip," says Abbott, "had become exceedingly attached to this family, and in gratitude, at the commencement of the war, had given the strictest orders that the Indians should never molest or injure a Leonard. Apprehending that in a general assault upon the town his friends, the Leonards, might be exposed to danger, he spread the shield of his generous protection over the whole place." Thus the Leonard family did for Taunton what the family of Lot were unable to do for Sodom. The Indians were often seen near, and in large numbers, but it was spared the fate of thirteen other towns, some of them larger than Taunton.
"His mode of making war," says Francis Baylies, "was secret and terrible. He seemed like a demon of destruction hurling his bolts in darkness. With cautious and noiseless steps, and shrouded by the deep shade of midnight, he glided from the gloomy depths of the woods. He stole on the villages and settlements of New England, like the pestilence, unseen and unheard. His dreadful agency was felt when the yells of his followers roused his victims from their slumbers, and when the flames of their blazing habitations glared upon their eyes. His pathway could be traced by the horrible desolation of its progress, by its crimson print upon the snows and the sands, by smoke and fire, by houses in ruins, by the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the groans of the wounded and dying. Well indeed might he have been called the 'terror of New England.' Yet in no instance did he transcend the usages of Indian warfare."
Though the generality of the Indians were often inhuman, yet it does not appear that Philip was personally vindictive. His enmity was national, not individual. Nor is there any evidence that Philip ever ordered a captive to be tortured, while it is undeniable that the English, in several instances, surrendered their captives to the horrid barbarities of their savage allies.
As Abbott well says, "We must remember that the Indians have no chroniclers of their wrongs, and yet the colonial historians furnish us with abundant incidental evidence that outrages were perpetrated by individuals of the colonists, which were sufficient to drive any people mad. No one can now contemplate the doom of Metacomet, the last of an illustrious line, but with emotions of sadness."
"Even that he lived is for his conqueror's tongue, By foes alone his death-song must be sung. No chronicles but theirs shall tell His mournful doom to future times, May these upon his virtues dwell. And his fate forget his crimes!"
Philip's war was not only the most serious conflict which New England ever sustained against the savages, but the most fatal to the aborigines themselves. The great tribe of the Narragansetts, of old, the leading tribe of New England, was almost entirely exterminated; hardly a hundred warriors remained. The last chief of either tribe capable of leading the Indians to battle had fallen. Philip's son was sent to Bermuda and sold as a slave. The war cost the colonies half a million of dollars, and the lives of about six hundred men, the flower of the population. Thirteen towns and six hundred houses were burned, and there was hardly a family in the country that had not occasion to mourn the death of a relative.