King Philip's War And Its Aftermath
Decades of Tension Escalate to War
In the summer of 1675 a war broke out in New England that few people today remember and fewer still were ever taught. It remains, by plain arithmetic of those killed measured against those who survived, among the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil. Historians and public historians have ranked it the bloodiest conflict in the country's history on a per capita basis, ahead of the Civil War and every war since. It is called King Philip's War, after the Wampanoag leader the English called Philip, whose own name was Metacom. It lasted little more than a year. In that year it broke the back of Native New England, and it swept up, among so many others, the small Christian community of about fifty-five people who had been living on the hill of the great trees at Magunkaquog, going quietly about their letters and their cedar in the last settled season of their lives.
To understand what happened to them requires understanding what the war was and why it came. It had been coming for fifty years.
For half a century the English had been pressing inland from the coast, and the pressing took the form that a deed or a boundarylinecould not fully capture. Settlers' livestock roamed where it pleased, and a wandering herd of English cattle or swine could ruin a field of Native corn in a single night, and often did. The colony's courts reached out to govern Native people under laws they had never agreed to and had no voice in making. By the time the war began, the Native population of southern New England, once far greater, had already fallen substantially across the preceding decades through disease and dispossession. The Nipmuc bands nearest Magunkaquog, in the land around Mendon and Milford, were themselves already diminished, hemmed in by growing English towns, watching the distance and woods that had once protected them grow thinner every year.
Metacom had reason enough to distrust the English. His own brother had died in English custody, a death his people did not forget. The immediate spark was a trial: three Wampanoag men were hanged in June 1675 for the killing of a Christian Indian named John Sassamon, in a proceeding many Native people regarded as a pretext dressed up as justice. The war began within weeks.
The Conflict Spreads Across Nipmuc Country
It spread quickly. The first blows fell to the south, at Swansea and towns nearby, as the uprising ran along the frontier. In mid-July it reached Nipmuc country directly, in the person of a sachem named Matoonas, whose own son had been hanged by the English years earlier on evidence that likely would not have convicted an Englishman. Matoonas led a raid on Mendon, the town next door to the area that would later become Hopkinton, killing several settlers and putting houses to the torch. The war did not stay in one place. By autumn the fighting had reached the Connecticut River valley, where an ambush near Deerfield killed a large part of an English company escorting a wagon train, an action remembered afterward as Bloody Brook. In December the war turned on the Narragansett, when English forces attacked a fortified winter village in a great swamp and burned it with several hundred people still inside. Contemporaries called it the Great Swamp Fight. There was little of the fight left in it by the end.
The war ended with a devastating toll for both sides, but it was far more severe for one. Estimates commonly place English losses at somewhere between six hundred and eight hundred dead, with a dozen or more towns destroyed outright. Native losses ran considerably higher, estimated in various accounts at several thousand killed, sickened, or starved, and the dying did not stop with the fighting. Large numbers of Native people, including some who had surrendered and never fought at all, were sold out of the country into slavery in the Caribbean, gone from New England for good. A population already reduced by disease and fifty years of encroachment was, within the space of a single year, very nearly broken as a presence in the land of its ancestors.
Internees on Deer Island
What happened next at the hill of Magunkaquog was its bitterest chapter, because it did not happen to the enemies of the English. It happened to their friends.
The praying Indians, as a body, had done nearly everything ever asked of them. They had taken up the English God and English crafts and the English manner of living. They had left their old grounds, settled in fixed towns, built better houses, learned trades, sent their children to school, and made themselves, by outward measure, among the most accommodating Native communities in the colony, though individual choices within that body were more complicated than any single description can capture. The colony's own leaders in government and church had said as much for years. None of it protected most of them. When the war came and fear spread through the English countryside, most ordinary settlers had never troubled to distinguish a Christian Indian from any other, and a frightened population rarely paused to make such distinctions.
In the fall of 1675 the Massachusetts authorities moved against their own Christian Indian allies directly. Residents of Natick and the other praying towns, Magunkaquog among them, were rounded up and marched toward Boston, then carried out to Deer Island in the harbor, a bare, wind-scoured spit of land in the cold tidal water. There they were left through November and into the depth of winter, with little food, little shelter worth the name, and no reliable source of firewood. Several hundred died there, by most estimates, from exposure, starvation, and the diseases that prey on cold and hungry people crowded together with nothing. The colony imprisoned its most faithful Native allies and let a great many of them die because the colony was afraid.
Destruction of the Praying Town System
The war ended where it had begun, with Metacom. In August 1676 he was run to ground near his home country at Mount Hope and killed. His body was cut apart, and his head was carried to Plymouth and set on a pole. Accounts differ on how long it remained there, with estimates ranging from a few years to a generation or more, but even the more conservative accounts describe a town's children growing up under the gaze of a dead man's skull. His wife and young son were sold into slavery in the Caribbean.
For the people of Magunkaquog, the war was the hinge on which their whole history turned, and it turned against them. The hill, with its eleven families, its school, and its stacks of drying cedar, did not survive the war as a settled, recognized praying town. Its people were swept off it. Few survived the winter on Deer Island. Those who did returned to a New England with no place for their experiment, its thirty-year network of praying towns largely destroyed. The praying-Indian population that had stood at well over a thousand souls in the year of Gookin's count fell, within a few years of the war's end, to a small fraction of that number.
Return to Magunkaquog and the 1678 Mohawk Raid
They came home. Some of the men and women and children driven onto Deer Island in the winter of 1675 lived through it, and when the war finally burned itself out and the survivors were released, a remnant of the people of Magunkaquog made their way back across the few miles of country between Boston Harbor and the hill of the great trees. They went home to the only thing they had left, which was the ground itself.
The village was gone when they got back. So they built again, on the same hill, with far less of everything else.
Two years after the war's end, in 1678, a Mohawk raiding party came down through the country and struck Magunkaquog. They took twenty-two women and children and carried them north. The Massachusetts General Court complained to the colonial authorities in New York and demanded the captives back and the raiders punished.
According to research into the site's history, the Mohawk, called on to account for themselves, offered a defense in writing, arguing that the people of Magunkaquog were not living as friendly Indians ought, since they kept a castle fortified with stockades, a thing friendly Indians had no need of, and so the raiders had taken them for enemies.
When archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts Boston's Fiske Center went up that same hill in 1997, they found no stockade.Here is your text organized with descriptive subheadings, continuing the structure from the previous section: