We mourn our stricken Captains, but not vainly did they fall:
The King of Pocanoket has received their stern command;
Their lives were laid down gladly at their country's trumpet-call,
And on their savage foemen have they set the heavier hand;
Against our day-long valor was the red man's fortune spent
And that one day at Sudbury has saved a continent.
In graves adown the hemisphere, in graves across the seas,
The sons of Massachusetts sleep, as here beneath her trees,
Nor Brocklebank nor Wadsworth is the first or last of these.
Oh, blue hills of New England, slanting to the morning beams
Where suns and clouds of April have their balmy power sped;
Oh, greening woods and meadows, pleasant ponds and babbling streams,
And clematis soft-blooming where War once his banners led;
How hungers many an exile for that homeland far away,
And all the happy dreaming of a bygone April day!
Wherever speaks New England, wheresoever spreads her shade,
We praise our fathers' valor, and our fathers' prayer is said,
That, fearing God's Wrath only, firm may stand the State they made.
Wallace Rice.
The victory at Sudbury was the last considerable success the Indians gained in the war. Jealousies broke out among them, many deserted to the whites, and the final blow was struck when, at daybreak of August 12, 1676, Captain Church surprised Philip's camp at Mt. Hope, and Philip himself was shot by an Indian while trying to escape. His head was cut off, sent to Plymouth, and fixed upon a pole, where it remained for twenty years. His wife and son, a boy of nine, were taken prisoners and sold into slavery. With them, the race of Massasoit, that true and tried friend of the early settlers, vanishes from the pages of history.
KING PHILIP'S LAST STAND
[August 12, 1676]
'Twas Captain Church, bescarred and brown,
And armèd cap-a-pie.
Came ambling into Plymouth-town;
And from far riding up and down
A weary man was he.
Now, where is my good wife? he quoth
Before the goodmen all;
And they replied, What of thine oath?
And he looked on them lorn and loath,
As he were like to fall.