The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (32 page)

◆
Nineteenth-century engraving of the Native American attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts.

For the Indians, it was an astonishingly easy triumph. “[T]he heathen were wonderfully animated,” the historian 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. Moseley believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, so he refused to trust Native scouts and had nothing but contempt for the colony's Praying Indians. In August, he disregarded orders and burned the wigwams of the friendly Penacooks in New Hampshire; soon after, he seized a group of Praying Indians on false charges, 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 happily wrote 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. Moseley ordered his vastly outnumbered men to remain together as a unit as they marched back and forth through the Natives, firing their muskets 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 all been killed. The next day, sixty-four Englishmen were buried in a single mass grave.

◆
Nineteenth-century engraving of the ambush at Bloody Brook.

Less than a month later, on October 5, the Indians fell on springfield. 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 out of seventy-five houses and barns were left standing.

In this climate of growing fear, the presence of the Praying Indians' self-contained villages within a thirty-mile radius of Boston became unacceptable to most New Englanders. When the minister John Eliot and Captain Daniel Gookin, superintendent to the Praying Indians, dared to defend the Indians against charges of disloyalty, they received death threats. Finally, Massachusetts authorities decided to relocate the Praying Indians to a camp on Deer Island in Boston Harbor.

On the night of October 30, hundreds of Praying Indians gathered at a dock on the Charles River. The ships left at midnight, and in the months ahead, many of these Indians died of starvation and exposure on the bleak shores of Deer Island.

That fall, Boston was overrun with English refugees from towns along the Connecticut River. With food running low, Major samuel Appleton was told to stop any more people from leaving their settlements without official permission.

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 to the Puritans, who imagined he was responsible for every burning house and lifeless English body. In the years to come, stories sprang up in the river valley of how Philip moved from cave to cave and mountaintop to mountaintop, watching with satisfaction as fire and smoke arose from the towns along the Connecticut River.

The truth, however, was less romantic. Instead of being everywhere, Philip spent much of the summer and fall near the modern Massachusetts-Vermont state border. While he and his handful of poorly armed warriors may have participated in some of the victories that season, Philip was not the mastermind behind any plan of Native attack. Indeed, there is no proof of his presence at a single battle in the fall of 1675. 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 was the largest tribe in the region: the Narragansetts. To date, their sachems had signed two different treaties swearing their loyalty to the English. However, many New Englanders believed that the Narragansetts were simply waiting. Come spring, when the leaves had returned to the trees, they would surely attack. “[T]his false peace hath undone this country,” wrote one Providence resident on October 20.

The colonial forces demanded that the Narragansetts turn over the 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.”

The United Colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth decided to raise the largest army New England had ever seen. 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 huge force was to be Plymouth's own Josiah Winslow. serving as General Winslow's trusted aide was none other than Benjamin Church.

 

◆◆◆ In early December, Church and Winslow rode together to Boston. After meeting with Massachusetts officials, they headed to Dedham Plain, where more than 450 soldiers and horse troopers were assembling as similar groups gathered in Taunton, Plymouth, and New London. In all, 527 soldiers came from Massachusetts, 158 from Plymouth, and 325 from Connecticut. The Massachusetts forces were under the command of Major Appleton, a veteran of the war in the western frontier. The Connecticut forces were under Major Treat, another veteran commander, and Plymouth's two companies were under captains William Bradford and John Gorham.

December 2 was declared a day of prayer throughout New England. According to Increase Mather, “the churches were all upon their knees before the Lord, the God of Armies, entreating his favor and gracious success in the undertaking.” On December 8, Winslow and his soldiers departed from Dedham. The next day, the army arrived at seekonk along the seekonk River. Winslow ordered Church to sail directly for their next destination, smith's garrison in Wickford, Rhode Island, while he led the troops on the land route through Providence. That way Church could prepare for his arrival; it also gave Church the chance to share a boat ride with samuel Moseley.

By this time in the war, Moseley was almost as mythic a figure as Philip himself, while Church, with the exception of the Pease Field Fight, had accomplished almost nothing. For his part, Church wanted to prove that he was as skilled at capturing Indians as anyone in New England. so instead of remaining at smith's garrison in Wickford to await Winslow, Church teamed up with some “brisk blades” from Rhode Island and set out that night in search of Indians. It was a cold December night, but they had the benefit of a nearly full moon. By sunrise the next day, Church and his men had returned to the garrison with eighteen captive Indians. As it turned out, Moseley had also been out that night, and he, too, had captured eighteen Indians.

Winslow and his army had already arrived by the time Church and Moseley returned to Wickford. “The general, pleased with the exploit,” Church wrote, “gave them thanks.” There were two Indian children in Church's group, and Winslow decided to make a present of these “likely boys” and send them to friends in Boston. The general grinned at Church and said that “his faculty would supply them with Indians boys enough before the war was ended.” As Winslow made clear, slaves were to be one of the prizes of war.

Moseley had captured an Indian named Peter, who because of an argument with one of the Narragansett sachems was willing to talk. Peter claimed the tribe possessed a total of three thousand “fighting men,” most of them gathered together with their women and children in the depths of a giant swamp to the southwest. As the English had learned in pursuing Philip, under normal conditions it was almost impossible to fight the Indians in a swamp. But these were not normal conditions. It had been a bitterly cold December, so cold that the swamps had frozen solid. As a consequence, Winslow could now take his army just about anywhere. The real problem was how to find the Narragansetts. It was true that there were no leaves on the trees, but the swamplands around modern Kingston, Rhode Island, were still so dense with bushes that even the most experienced guide would have difficulty leading them to the Indians' base. Peter, however, claimed he could find it.

For them to attack the Narragansetts, Winslow had to march his army south to Jireh Bull's garrison in modern Narragansett, Rhode Island. From there it should be a six- to seven-mile march to the swamp. But on December 15, Winslow received disturbing news. The Indians had attacked the garrison, killing fifteen people and burning it to the ground, thus robbing him of a location from which to launch the attack. Even more troubling was that the Connecticut soldiers under the command of Major Treat had not yet arrived. Two days later, Winslow learned that Treat and 300 English and 150 friendly Mohegan and Pequot Indians had come to the burned-out shell of Bull's garrison. Winslow's force set out to the south, arriving at the garrison around five in the evening on December 18.