Part III: Native Americans Strike Back
King Phillips War was the Bloodiest War on US Soil until the Civil War; Why Haven't Most Everyone Heard of It?
This week, in recognition of Thanksgiving week, PurpleAmerica has a three part series on the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. This allows us to write all these ahead of time and then just automatically push them out without having to do anything else. In fact, I’m writing this in September. At this moment, I’m probably gorging on some mashed potatoes and dark meat turkeylegs like Henry VIII while watching the Lions walk over their Thanksgiving Day opponent.
Now, most publications take one of two avenues with these wayward individuals; either they were essentially the founders of America in a certain way of speaking or genocidal relgious fanatics bent on destroying Native American culture. Neither of these depictions are true. And that is the focus of our week. We are going to demonstrate for you, our humble readers, just how inept and incompetent these buffoons really were, and how they stumbled into success and fame. Our first story is about who these cranks were in the first place, the second about how they were utter failures in the new world and the third about King Phillips’ War, the bloodiest war fought on American soil before the Civil War, and how almost nobody has ever heard of it.
Part I: The Pilgrims. Who the F**k Were They?
Part II: The Pilgrims Fail Upward
Part III: Native Americans Strike Back: King Phillips’ War
So while you’re enjoying that turkey and pumpkin pie, watching some football and getting ready for those Black Friday deals, sit back, relax, and rest assured knowing you are much smarter than most everyone who came across on the Mayflower. And now our conclusion… “Native Americans Strike Back.”
Part III: Native Americans Strike Back
When we last left our comically dumb Pilgrims, half of them had managed to survive the first year in Plymouth Colony. They had managed to establish decent trading relations with the Wampanoag Tribe and it’s Chief Massassoit, and were starting to turn the corner. Over the coming years they managed to make peace treaties with a number of the tribes, often in conflict with one another, and maintain a somewhat peaceable existence. By October of that first year, they even threw a party to show some goodwill with their Native American peers.1
Well, what happens when people back home find out you’re doing well? They have to come over and crash the party. When Plymouth Colony finally received its charter from the King of England, news was starting to spread all was good in Massachusetts. Pretty soon, colonies at Salem, Springfield and up and down the coast of Massachusetts started developing. While the Native Americans regarded the Pilgrims as stupid and lucky, and people they could do business with, this new crop of individuals were less respectful, more demanding and also more likely to infringe on the agreements the tribes had made with the Plymouth colonists.
Native diplomacy with the settlers quickly fell apart, as colonists tried negotiating with some tribes, but often slighted female Native rulers (saunkswkas) of the land and erroneously claimed some land as freely given. This created further tension between colonists and Natives, as colonial beliefs did not recognize female leaders as legitimate, despite the great power they held within Native societies. On one such occasion of land dispute, saunkswkas Weetamoo and Awashonks appeared in a colonial court to protest illegitimate deeds signed by a male, Wamsutta, that gave colonists lands that were not his to give. This conflict strengthened complaints among natives while simultaneously bolstering colonist claims to the land and served as an omen for conflict that was yet to come.
Eventually, Massasoit’s Wampanoag tribe entered into an agreement with the Plymouth Colony and believed that they could rely on the colony for protection. However, in the decades preceding the war, it became clear to the Native Americans that the treaty did not mean that the Colonists were not allowed to settle in new territories.
Massasoit’s son Phillip was always distrustful of the white colonists. He saw them as exploiting his father Massasoit and reneging often on promises. One thing he did do was stockpile an armory of weapons, including guns he traded with the colonists “for hunting” and other manufactured weaponry. He also started negotiating with other tribes early, before he became chief, in hopes of building up common cause and goodwill for the time when they would confront the colonists. As Massachusetts Colonists expanded into the tens of thousands, Phillip was building an army of unified Native Americans against them. The only thing was that disease and receding territories had shrunk the Native American tribe populations in the area down to about 10,000, one fifth the size of the growing settlements.
John Sossamon, a Native American who converted to Christianity, warned the colonists that Phillip was planning a war. Phillip was brought to court but a trial failed to prove any such activity. Soon after the trial, Sossamon was found dead in a pond which was the subject of a land dispute, and a number of Wampanoag members were hanged for the murder, including Phillip’s main counselor. This event lit the fuse of the war.
Across Massachusetts in 1675, Native Americans launched attacks on English colonies. From April through the entire summer, skirmishes and straight up militia battles occured. There was the Siege of Brookfield, the Battle of the Bloody Brook and the Attack on Springfield. In one event, the Naragansett who had been neutral through most of these events (but still harbored and aided Native American assailants), were the subject of several attacks by colonists. Corralled in a fort by a frozen swamp in December, nearly 2/3 of them were massacred in the “Great Swamp Massacre.” Those Naragansett warriors that escaped would avenge the event with burning Providence to the ground, including the home of Roger Williams, leader of Rhode Island who often entreated with the Naragansett.
Phillip wintered in Northern New York, attempting to get the Mohawk tribes involved. The attempt failed and the Mohawk sensing weakness attacked the Wampanoag instead, sending Phillip back into Massachusetts. Throughout the start of 1676, he continued to lead a consortium of various Native Tribes against the colonists, but his numbers by midsummer dwindled. He took refuge back at Assawompset Pond, the Wampanoag settlement near which John Sassamon had been found dead before the outset of the war, but the colonists formed raiding parties with indigenous allies, and he retreated southwest towards Rhode Island. “King Phillip” was killed by one of these teams when Captain Benjamin Church2 and Captain Josiah Standish of the Plymouth Colony militia tracked him to Mount Hope in Bristol, Rhode Island. He was shot and killed by a Native American named John Alderman on August 12, 1676. Phillips's corpse was beheaded then chopped into pieces. His head was displayed in Plymouth for a generation, which was commonly done in Britain to traitors; Wampanaog memory holds that the skull was later taken by tribal members and secretly buried.
The war in southern New England largely ended with Phillip's death. More than 2,000 colonists and 3,000 Natives had directly died from the hostilities. More than half of all New England towns were attacked by Native warriors, and many were completely destroyed. Hundreds of Native captives were enslaved. Some women and children were sold as indentured servants or slaves to the households of English settlers, but the majority, including Phillip's son and most adult men, were transported to slave markets in Bermuda, Barbados, Jamaica, Spain, Portugal, Madeira, and the Azores. Other survivors joined western and northern tribes and refugee communities as captives or tribal members. The Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Podunks, Nipmucks suffered substantial losses, several smaller bands were virtually eliminated as organized bands altogether. Plymouth Colony lost close to ten percent of its adult male population and a smaller percentage of women and children to Native attacks and other causes associated with the war. Indigenous losses were much greater.
As a percentage of the population, it would be the second largest war ever fought on American soil, second only to the United States Civil War. It also started the concept of unfettered expansion into Native American lands. As the tribes’ size decreased and they receded further west, more land became available for the growing colonies and their ever expanding group of European immigrants. One hundred years later they would claim a fight for independence and then claim all land east of the Mississippi as their own. Soon after that, they’d claim all lands touching the Mississippi as a part of Louisiana as their own as well.
So as we sit and ponder the First Thanksgiving, also ponder it was probably the last time in American history that there was a strong binding accord between the two populations. In fact, there was even pity on the colonists by the Native American tribes who did not think these unprepared and strange people would ever survive the next winter much less prosper. And as we dive into that last batch of leftovers, give thanks, that instead of easily murdering the fifty or so white colonists in Plymouth at the time, they chose instead to break bread, have some deer and turkey and enjoy some peace ahead of the coming winter. And how that fifty or so would eventually lead to over 35 million, one tenth of all the people currently in the United States.
Of which they were not. The Pilgrims were lucky that the Native Americans showed them any respect or trade because without them, they all would have died pretty quickly.
Church’s journal is considered the main source of information about King Phillip’s War. Although it is very detailed and comprehensive, it also maintains a very pro-colonist slant to it.