The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (31 page)

It had been a remarkable day. For six hours, twenty men had held off three hundred Indians (a number that was later confirmed by the Indians themselves) without suffering a single death. Church looked to this event for the rest of his life as proof of “the glory of God and His protecting providence.” But he'd also learned something else during what came to be known as the Pease Field Fight: When it came to Awashonks and the sakonnets, the time for diplomacy was over.

 

◆◆◆ On Monday, July 19, 1675, a combined Plymouth-Massachusetts force crossed the bay for Pocasset. Running along the eastern shore of the bay was a seven-mile-long cedar swamp, beside which Philip had reportedly camped with Weetamoo. For the English it would be a day of confusion and fear as they chased the Pokanokets and Pocassets into the depths of what Major William Bradford described as a “hideous swamp.” samuel Moseley once again led the charge. Moseley and his pirates were assisted by a pack of dogs, but even they weren't very helpful in the Pocasset swamp.

Almost as soon as Moseley's men entered the swamp, five of them were dead, the bullets flying, it seemed, from the trees themselves. The Indians quickly retreated deeper into the swamp, deserting close to a hundred wigwams made of bark so green that they were impossible to burn. The English came upon an old man who was unable to keep up with the others and who told them that Philip had just been there.

For the next few hours, they wandered through the swamp but soon discovered, in Hubbard's words, “how dangerous it is to fight in such dismal woods, when their eyes were muffled with the leaves, and their arms pinioned with the thick boughs of the trees, as their feet were continually shackled with the roots spreading every way in those boggy woods.” several soldiers accidentally shot at their own men, and as darkness came on, all of them gladly gave up and retreated to more solid ground.

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Pocasset Swamp as it appeared in the early twentieth century.

That night, Major Cudworth, the leader of the Plymouth forces, decided that he had had enough of swamps. They would do as they had done on Mount Hope: Instead of pursuing the enemy, they'd build a fort. Cudworth and his fellow officers thought that they now had Philip and Weetamoo trapped. If they carefully guarded the swamp and prevented the Indians from escaping, they could starve them out.

In addition to the soldiers stationed at forts on Mount Hope and in Pocasset, Cudworth suggested that there be a small “flying army,” whose purpose was to prevent the Indians from “destroying cattle and fetching in [a] supply of food, which being attended, will bring them to great straits.” If this strategy worked, the war would effectively be over. since there was now no need for a large army, most of the companies from Massachusetts Bay, including Moseley's, were sent back to Boston.

There was evidence, however, that Philip was not the only Indian sachem at war. A week earlier, on July 14, what appeared to have been Nipmucks from Massachusetts had attacked the town of Mendon, twenty miles to the west of Boston, and killed six people. Closer to home, Philip's brother-in-law Tuspaquin, the Black sachem, had burned down Middleborough, while the sachem Totoson from the Buzzards Bay region just to the west of Cape Cod had attacked the town of Dartmouth, burning houses and killing several people. While yet another “losing fort” was being built at Pocasset, Church accompanied the 112 Plymouth soldiers sent to aid Dartmouth.

What seems never to have occurred to Major Cudworth, who led the expedition to Dartmouth himself, and to Captain Henchman, who was left to build the Pocasset fort, was that Totoson's attack might have been a diversion. On July 30, word reached Henchman that the Indians he was supposedly guarding in the Pocasset swamp were no longer there. Philip and several hundred Pokanokets and Pocassets had managed to escape to the north and make their way across a shallow part of the Taunton River. They were now hurrying west and to the north toward Nipmuck country.

A messenger was sent to Rehoboth, 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. 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, the English and Mohegans continued on foot another three miles until they reached a region known as Nipsachuck.

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 it was time to fight the enemy. As they prepared to attack just before dawn, five Pocassets from Weetamoo's camp, apparently out looking 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 a major loss—twenty-three men including Nimrod, one of Philip's bravest warriors, were dead—while the English had lost only two men.

Philip had lost even more men to desertion, and he and his sixty or so remaining warriors were almost ready to 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 had not arrived from Providence until after the fighting was over, decided to wait until the Mohegans had finished taking plunder from 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 to leave her brother-in-law. Many of the women and children were unable to go much farther. Even if it might mean capture, the Pocasset sachem decided that she and two hundred women and children, along with a handful of their husbands and fathers, would look for safety 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 led them to a remote, well-guarded village at Menameset.

 

◆◆◆ 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 had a chance to transform a local fight into a regionwide war.

The Pokanokets were in bad shape, but the Nipmucks were ready to take up the fight. Just a few days before, they had destroyed the frontier town of Brookfield, Massachusetts. On Friday, August 6, Philip was greeted by three of the Nipmucks' most powerful sachems. Philip still possessed a coat made of wampum, and he used it to good effect. Unstringing the valuable white and purple shell beads, he gave a large amount of wampum to each of the sachems.

In the months ahead, Philip continued to cut “his coat to pieces” as he 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].”

FOURTEEN

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, soon erupted into violence.

The war in Massachusetts had truly begun on August 2 with the Nipmucks' attack on the town of Brookfield, one of the most isolated settlements in the colony. Brookfield had just twenty houses and was a day's journey from its nearest neighbor, springfield. As happened often in the months ahead, the fighting began with an ambush. Diplomats from Boston, hoping to establish peace with the Nipmucks, were 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 put out 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 house would surely have caught fire. Finally, on the night of August 3, fifty troopers under the command of Major simon Willard came to the rescue, and the Nipmucks dispersed.

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Nineteenth-century engraving of the English coming to the rescue at the end of the Indian assault on Brookfield.

With the attack on Brookfield, people 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 raised 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 them. 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.

On september 3, Richard Beers was sent with thirty-six men to evacuate the town of Northfield. Unaware of the Indians' use of hiding as a tactical weapon, Beers led his men into an ambush and twenty-one were killed. On september 17, a day of public humiliation and prayer 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 was leading seventy-nine people away from the town of Deerfield. They were about to cross a small stream when several of the soldiers put down their guns to gather some ripe autumn grapes. At that moment, hundreds of Indians burst out of the forest. Fifty-seven English were killed, turning the brown waters of what was known as Muddy Brook bright red with blood. From then on, the stream was called Bloody Brook.