Mayflower (32 page)

On July 30, some residents of Taunton were astonished to see several hundred Indians making their way west. A messenger was sent to Rehoboth, a village situated some ten miles west of the modern town of that name, where the minister, Noah Newman, began to organize a party of volunteers to pursue Philip. Also in Rehoboth was a group of approximately fifty newly arrived Mohegan Indians under the command of Uncas’s son Oneco. Many in New England had wondered how the Mohegans would respond to word of the Pokanoket revolt, especially since Philip was known to have sought Uncas’s support that spring. The Mohegans’ decision to remain loyal to the English was one of the few pieces of good news the colonies received in the summer of 1675, and Uncas’s son eagerly joined the chase.

By sunset of July 31, the English and Mohegans had pursued Philip across the Seekonk River into the vicinity of modern North Providence. The trail headed northwest for another ten or so miles, and with it now almost totally dark, several Mohegan scouts were sent up ahead. They reported hearing the sounds of wood being chopped as Philip’s men made camp. Leaving their horses behind with some attendants, the English and Mohegans continued on foot another three miles until they reached a region known as Nipsachuck, in modern Smithfield, Rhode Island.

It had been hoped that Captain Henchman and his men, who had sailed from Pocasset to Providence, would have joined them by now. But even without reinforcements, they decided they must engage the enemy. As they prepared to attack in the predawn twilight, five Pocassets from Weetamoo’s camp, apparently out foraging for food, stumbled upon them. Shots were fired, and the battle began.

The fighting lasted until nine in the morning, when Philip’s and Weetamoo’s men were forced to retreat into a nearby swamp. They had suffered catastrophic casualties—losing twenty-three men, including Nimrod, one of Philip’s bravest warriors, while the English had lost only two.

Philip had lost even more men to desertion, and he and his sixty or so remaining warriors were on the verge of surrender as they huddled at the edge of the Nipsachuck Swamp. They were starving, exhausted, and almost out of gunpowder, with several hundred women and children depending on them for protection. But instead of pursuing the enemy, Captain Henchman, who did not arrive from Providence until after the fighting was over, decided to wait until the Mohegans had finished stripping the bodies of the dead. Not until the next morning did he order his men to break camp and pursue Philip.

By then it was too late. Both Weetamoo and Philip had managed to escape. They hadn’t gone far when Weetamoo, who had been a reluctant ally of Philip’s since the very beginning of the war, decided she must leave her brother-in-law. Many of the women and children were unable to go on much farther. Even if it might mean capture and certain death, the Pocasset sachem resolved that she and two hundred women and children, along with a handful of their husbands and fathers, must seek sanctuary among the nearby Narragansetts to the south. Philip’s forces, now down to just forty warriors and a hundred or so women and children, continued north until they were met by several Nipmuck warriors, who escorted them to a remote, well-guarded village at Menameset in modern New Braintree, Massachusetts.

Three times Philip had avoided what seemed like certain capture, but he had been driven from his homeland. His original fighting force of approximately 250 warriors was down to 40, only 30 of whom had guns. The Pokanokets were, for all practical purposes, defeated. Yet by fighting his way out of Plymouth Colony, Philip was poised to transform a local squabble into a regionwide conflagration.

The Pokanokets were devastated, but the Nipmucks were ready to take up the fight. Just a few days before, they had laid waste to the frontier town of Brookfield, Massachusetts. On Friday, August 6, Philip was greeted by three of the Nipmucks’ most powerful sachems. Philip possessed a coat made of wampum, and he used it to good effect. Unstringing the valuable white and purple shell beads, he gave “about a peck” to each of the sachems, “which,” according to an eyewitness, “they accepted.”

Philip had been the beneficiary of his father’s foresight and planning. By moving to Nipmuck country in 1657, Massasoit had given his son both an exit strategy from Mount Hope and an army to take up his cause.

In the months ahead, Philip continued to cut “his coat to pieces” as he ritualistically secured the cooperation of sachems from Connecticut to modern Maine. “[B]y this means,” William Hubbard wrote, “Philip…kindl[ed] the flame of war…wherever he [went].”

U
PON THE RETURN
of her husband in August to her family’s home in Duxbury, Alice Church did as many a soldier’s wife had done before and has done since: she almost instantly became pregnant. In the months ahead, as a son grew in the womb of Alice Church, the war that had begun in New England’s oldest colony spread with terrifying speed to the newest and most distant settlements in the region. The frontier of Massachusetts, which included the Connecticut River valley and modern New Hampshire and Maine, erupted into violence, while a sudden and eerie placidity came to Plymouth. As they all knew, it was yet another calm before yet another storm.

The war in Massachusetts had begun in earnest on August 2 with the Nipmucks’ attack on the town of Brookfield, one of the most isolated settlements in the colony. Set in the midst of the wilderness between the towns outside Boston and those along the Connecticut River, Brookfield possessed just twenty houses and was a day’s journey from its nearest neighbor, Springfield. As happened with frightening frequency in the months ahead, the fighting began with an ambush. A diplomatic delegation from Boston, hoping to establish peace with the Nipmucks, was suddenly attacked from a hillside overlooking the forest path. Eight English, including three residents of Brookfield, were killed, with just a handful of survivors managing to ride back to town. Soon after their arrival, several hundred Nipmucks descended on Brookfield, and one of the most legendary sieges in the history of New England was under way.

For two days, eighty people, most of them women and children, gathered in the home of Sergeant John Ayres, one of those killed in the ambush. When the Indians were not burning the rest of the town to the ground, they were firing on the house with guns and flaming arrows, forcing the English to chop holes through the roof and walls so that they could douse the fires. At one point the Nipmucks loaded a cart full of flaming rags and pushed it up against the side of the house. If not for a sudden shower of rain, the garrison would surely have become an inferno. Finally, on the night of August 3, fifty troopers under the command of Major Simon Willard came to the rescue, and the Nipmucks dispersed.

Detail from John Seller’s 1675 map of New England

With the attack on Brookfield, inhabitants throughout the western portion of the colony began to fear that they would be next, especially when the Nipmucks moved on Lancaster on August 22 and killed eight English. On August 24, a council of war was held at the town of Hatfield on the Connecticut River, where concerns were voiced about the loyalty of the neighboring Indians. A force of one hundred English was sent out, and the Indians, many of whom did not want to go to war, had no choice but to join the fight against the English. What became known as the battle of South Deerfield resulted in the deaths of nine English and twenty-six Indians as the war quickly spread up and down the river valley. When, four days later, a tremendous hurricane battered the New England coast, the Indians’ powwows predicted that the number of English dead would equal the number of trees “blown down in the woods.”

On September 3, Richard Beers was sent with thirty-six men to evacuate the town of Northfield. Unaware of the Indians’ use of concealment as a tactical weapon, Beers led his men into an ambush and twenty-one were killed. On September 17, a day of public humiliation was declared in Boston. Colonists were told to refrain from “intolerable pride in clothes and hair [and] the toleration of so many taverns.” But the Lord remained unmoved. The following day proved to be, according to Hubbard, “that most fatal day, the saddest that ever befell New England.”

Captain Thomas Lathrop, sixty-five, was escorting seventy-nine evacuees from the town of Deerfield. They were about to ford a small stream when several of the soldiers laid their guns aside to gather some ripe autumn grapes. At that moment, hundreds of Indians burst out of the undergrowth. Fifty-seven English were killed, turning the brown waters of what was known as Muddy Brook bright red with gore. From then on, the stream was called Bloody Brook. For the Indians, it was an astonishingly easy triumph. “[T]he heathen were wonderfully animated,” Increase Mather wrote, “some of them triumphing and saying, that so great a slaughter was never known, and indeed in their wars one with another, the like hath rarely been heard of.” But the fighting was not over yet.

Captain Samuel Moseley and his men happened to be nearby, and they heard gunshots. By this time, Moseley was widely known as Massachusetts-Bay’s most ferocious Indian fighter. An early proponent of the doctrine that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, Moseley refused to trust Native scouts and had nothing but contempt for the colony’s Praying Indians. In August he countermanded orders and burned the wigwams of the friendly Penacooks in New Hampshire; soon after, he seized a group of Praying Indians on a trumped-up charge, strung them together by the neck, and marched them into Boston for punishment. Since Moseley was related to the governor and was now a popular hero, he felt free to do anything he wanted. He also enjoyed shocking the authorities back in Boston. That fall he blithely related in official correspondence that he had ordered a captive Indian woman “be torn in pieces by dogs.”

There was no Englishman the Indians hated more, and when Moseley took the field at Bloody Brook, the Nipmuck warriors shouted, “Come on, Moseley, come on. You want Indians. Here are enough Indians for you.” For the next six hours Moseley and his men put up a tremendous fight. Scorning the Natives’ scattered style of warfare, Moseley ordered his vastly outnumbered men to remain together as a unit as they marched back and forth through the Natives’ ranks, firing relentlessly. After hours of fighting, Moseley was forced to ask his two lieutenants to take the lead while he, according to Hubbard, “took a little breath, who was almost melted with laboring, commanding, and leading his men through the midst of the enemy.” If not for the arrival of Major Robert Treat and some friendly Mohegans at dusk, Moseley and his men might have been annihilated. The next day, sixty-four Englishmen were buried in a single mass grave.

Less than a month later, on October 5, the Indians fell on Spring-field. By day’s end, thirty-two houses and twenty-five barns had been burned; several mills had been destroyed and tons of provisions. In all of Springfield, only thirteen of more than seventy-five houses and barns were left standing. “I believe forty families are utterly destitute of subsistence,” John Pynchon, son of the town’s founder, wrote; “the Lord show mercy to us. I see not how it is possible for us to live here this winter…, the sooner we [are] helped off, the better.” Pynchon, who had been named the region’s military commander, was so shaken by the devastation that he asked to be relieved of his duties.

Prior to the attack, Springfield had enjoyed a long history of good relations with the local Indians. For many Puritans, the burning of Springfield proved once and for all that all Indians—friend and foe alike—were, in Hubbard’s words, “the children of the devil, full of all subtlety and malice.”

In this climate of mounting paranoia and racial bigotry, the presence of the Praying Indians, situated in their own self-contained villages within a thirty-mile radius of Boston, became intolerable to most New Englanders. When the minister John Eliot and Captain Daniel Gookin, superintendent to the Praying Indians, dared to defend the Indians against unsubstantiated charges of deceit, they received death threats. Finally, Massachusetts authorities determined that the Praying Indians must be relocated to an internment camp on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. On the night of October 30, hundreds of Praying Indians were gathered at a dock on the Charles River. As they prepared to board the three awaiting ships, a scene startlingly reminiscent of the Pilgrims’ departure from Delfshaven was enacted. Gookin related “how submissively and Christianly and affectionately those poor souls carried it, seeking encouragement, and encouraging and exhorting one another with prayers and tears at the time of the embarkment, being, as they told some, in fear that they should never return more to their habitations.” The ships left at midnight, and in the months ahead, hundreds of Indians died of starvation and exposure on the bleak shores of Deer Island.

By the end of October, New Englanders were desperate for even the most meager scrap of positive news. So many refugees from the towns to the west had flooded Boston that Pynchon’s replacement as military commander, Major Samuel Appleton, was instructed to forbid any more inhabitants from leaving their settlements without official permission. Massachusetts-Bay and Connecticut were already beginning to run low on food, and in October both colonies embargoed trade in provisions. Some of the bloodiest scenes of the war had occurred in coastal Maine, where the scattered settlement pattern made the inhabitants particularly susceptible to Indian attack. In the months ahead, conditions became so desperate that some Massachusetts authorities considered the possibility of building a palisade wall from the Concord to the Charles rivers and abandoning all the territory to the north, west, and south to the Indians. Since this would effectively have cut off all the settlements in Maine, New Hampshire, and the Connecticut River valley, the wall was never built.

Adding to the fears and frustrations of the English was the elusiveness of the man who had started the conflict. By November, Philip had become an almost mythic figure in the imagination of the Puritans, who saw his hand in every burning house and lifeless English body. In the years to come, traditions sprang up in the river valley of how Philip moved from cave to cave and mountaintop to mountaintop, where he watched with satisfaction as fire and smoke arose from the towns along the blue necklace of the Connecticut.

The truth, however, is less romantic. Instead of being everywhere, Philip appears to have spent much of the summer and fall holed up near the modern Massachusetts-Vermont state border. While he and his handful of poorly equipped warriors may have participated in some of the victories that season, Philip was certainly not the mastermind behind a coordinated plan of Native attack. Indeed, there are no documented instances of his having been present at a single battle in the fall of 1675. Instead of being heralded as a hero, Philip appears to have been resented by more than a few Indians in the Connecticut River valley. One well-known warrior in the Hadley region even attempted to kill the Pokanoket sachem, “alleging,” an Indian later recounted, “that Philip had begun a war with the English that had brought great trouble upon them.” Although unsuccessful, the assassination attempt indicated that Philip was hardly the dominant and controlling force the English claimed him to be. Rather than looking to the Pokanoket sachem for direction, the Nipmucks and the river valley Indians, as well as the Abenakis in New Hampshire and Maine, were fighting this war on their own.

With Philip having vanished like smoke into the western wilderness, and with unrest and fear growing by the day among the English, colonial authorities needed a foe they could see and fight. To the south, occupying a large and fertile territory claimed by both Massachusetts and Connecticut but presently a part of the infidel colony of Rhode Island, was the largest tribe in the region: the Narragansetts. To date, their sachems had signed two different treaties pledging their loyalty to the English. However, many New Englanders believed that the Narragansetts were simply biding their time. Come spring, when the leaves had returned to the trees, they would surely attack. “[T]his false peace hath undone this country,” Mary Pray wrote from Providence on October 20.

The colonial forces determined that as proof of their loyalty the Narragansetts must turn over any and all Pokanokets and Pocassets who were in their midst—especially the female sachem Weetamoo. When an October 28 deadline came and went and no Indians had been surrendered, the decision was made. “The sword having marched eastward and westward and northward,” Increase Mather wrote, “now beginneth to face toward the south.”

Some Englishmen privately admitted that if the Narragansetts had chosen to join Philip in July, all would have been lost. As the Nipmucks assailed them from the west, the far more powerful Narragansetts might have stormed up from the south, and Boston would have been overrun by a massive pan-Indian army. But instead of acknowledging the debt they owed the Narragansetts, the Puritans resolved to wipe them out.

The United Colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth determined to mount the largest army New England had ever seen. From now on, all hope for negotiation was lost. In December, one thousand soldiers, representing close to 5 percent of the region’s male English population, would invade the colony of Rhode Island, which refused to participate in the attack. The leader of this mammoth force was to be Plymouth’s own Josiah Winslow. Serving as General Winslow’s trusted aide was none other than Benjamin Church.

Winslow had originally requested that Church command a company of Plymouth soldiers. But he had declined. In his narrative, he gives no reason for the refusal, saying only he “crave[d] excuse from taking commission.” Church was still angry over the enslavement of the Indians the previous summer. In addition, it’s probable that he had his doubts about the efficacy of attacking a huge and so far neutral Indian tribe. But there may have been other, more personal reasons for turning down the commission.