King Philip's War: Metacom, the Narragansett, and the Fight for New England

Ousamequin, the Pokanoket sachem the English called Massasoit, made an alliance in the spring of 1621 with the half-starved colonists at Plymouth. He had his reasons. An epidemic had swept the coast a few years before, and where a hundred fires had once smoked along the bays, a dozen burned; across Narragansett Bay, the Narragansett had been spared and could put thousands of warriors in the field. Fifty-four years later his son Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, went to war with the colonies his father had helped survive.

Half a century lay between the two: the Pequot War of 1636-37, the land deeds and English courts that squeezed the Wampanoag into a shrinking circle of towns, and the death of John Sassamon, the Christian Indian interpreter whose murder trial ended with three of Metacom's men hanged at Plymouth in June 1675. Less than two weeks later, Swansea was burning.

The war ran for fourteen months, up the Connecticut River valley, into the Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp, which colonial troops stormed on a frozen December day in 1675, and to Lancaster, where Mary Rowlandson was taken captive. It ended at Mount Hope in August 1676, when Metacom was shot and his head carried to Plymouth to be set on a pole. Then came the reckoning: the dead on both sides, the captives shipped to the West Indies as slaves, and the Native towns that held on in a country the English now called theirs.