The
culminating fight for New England occurred in the month of December, 1675,
following a half century of tension, in an event called King Philip’s
War. It’s the war that essentially finished the First Nations of New England as
powers to be reckoned with militarily, and set the precedent for how such
conflicts would be dealt with in America forever going forward. It
was, proportionally the costliest and bloodiest war in American history. It was
one of the few wars, perhaps the only one, in which American Indians not only
enjoyed significant victories, but came close to defeating the English
settlers, another unpopular truth. It would appall the people who lived through
it (as it must appall anyone today who learns about it) to know that King
Philip's War would one day be almost completely
forgotten, as it has been today. I know a lot about this event because I
grew up ten minutes from the site of its catastrophic climactic battle, the
Great Swamp Fight.
If you’ve
ever taken an Amtrak train on the northeast corridor between New York and
Boston, the Great Swamp is in the wooded stretch you pass through between the
Rhode Island towns of Westerly and Kingston, the locomotive equivalent of
flyover country. It’s about 80 miles from Plymouth Rock and it’s located in the
township where I grew up. When I called my grandfather a Swamp Yankee earlier?
It’s the Great Swamp that gave Swamp Yankees their appealing name.
By 1675
the situation was very different than it had been in 1620. There
were now 80,000 colonists living in New England from Maine to Connecticut. And
unlike some of the earlier settlers, the large influx of colonists had no
qualms about just taking what they wanted. Meanwhile, the Native Americans
living in the area had been reduced to about 10,000. Outnumbered 8 to 1.
Further, this number was divided amongst several tribes: the Wampanoag,
Nipmuck, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, and others, who weren’t all allied with
one another.
After
countless triggering events and the constant population pressure, the Wampanoag
chief Metacomet
(a.k.a. King Philip)
saw that things were only going to get worse, and this
was perhaps his last and only chance to get rid of the Europeans. Hostilities
broke out. All of the New England colonies were drawn in, as were all of the
local Indian tribes (though some were allies of the English). The English had
16,000 men under arms, the Indians more like 2,000. Still the Indians did
enormous damage to the colonies, especially during the first year. A large
proportion of the fledgling towns in the interior were completely destroyed,
the settlers forced to flee back to the coast. Most of the surviving towns were
converted into fortresses, of the sort we associate with westerns or medieval
romances. And while in the end the tribes were fatally reduced in number, they
hit the colonists hard. some relatives of mine were kidnapped and taken to
locations hundreds of miles away in New Hampshire or Canada. One was tied to a
tree for two weeks, a gash cut into his face and filled with gunpowder, giving
him a permanent black tattoo. Many others were killed, shot with arrows,
brained with warclubs, picked off while they were working in the field or
walking to church in towns all over the colony. One of my ancestral families
was attacked five times. An aunt, (many times removed) managed to kill one of
her attackers with a ladleful of hot lye while she was making soap. Later,
after she was kidnapped, she gave birth and the baby was impaled on a pike by
her captors. She was sold as a servant to the French, and later retrieved by her
husband. Some were killed while fighting the natives in King Philip’s war. It
took the English several generations to recover.
But
the First Nations never did recover. Here’s what happened in the Great Swamp
Fight, which was just one of the battles that took place during King Phillip’s
War.
During
the time of trouble, many of the English took to fortifying their towns and
their dwellings into garrisons and blockhouses. On December 15, 1675
Narragansetts attacked one of these built by Jireh Bull, the son of the
Rhode Island Governor at the time. The fort was burned and several colonists
were killed. A teenage boy managed to flee and was pursued for miles along a
brook. A tomahawk was thrown at him. He survived hand to hand struggle and
finally made it to safety to raise the alarm. Four days later a turncoat guide
named Indian Peter led the colonial militias of Plymouth, Connecticut and
Massachusetts Bay to the Narragansett stronghold, which at the time was in the
middle of the Great Swamp as a strategic wartime tactic. There were about a
thousand people living there on a five-acre compound, men, women and children.
The fortress was surrounded and burned. Those who didn’t die inside were killed
as they fled or perished later from their injuries or from exposure to the
harsh winter elements since their dwellings had been destroyed. About a hundred
Narragansett warriors died, along with hundreds of non-combatants, maybe as
many as a thousand. The surviving Narragansetts were dispersed, many of them
sold into slavery. About 70 of the English died during the fighting including a
couple of my ancestors. So what that amounts to in terms of proportional loss
is 10% of the Native Americans vs. .1% of the whites of New England. Sure
there’s pain on both sides. But the amount of it differed by several orders of
magnitude. When ya hear talk of equivalency on topics like that, it’s important
to try to get some actual perspective. It’s true that killing is bad no matter
who does it; on the other hand we’re inclined to feel more sympathetic toward
the side who didn’t almost exterminate the other one.
I said almost. Centuries passed. The
descendants of those Narragansetts still live in my hometown. One of them was
my Pop Warner football coach. Another one was one of my best friends in the third grade. Names and places
are still there. That brook where James Eldred fled from the natives
became known as Indian Run. I crossed it or walked alongside it practically
every day of the first 20 years of my life. And there is a whole town called
Narragansett. Some people, quite commendably tried to keep the memory of people
and places alive with the naming of these things. These
names aren’t just a bunch of highway signs and vacation lakes. THEY ARE IT. We
are strangers, Johnny come latelys, trampling over all that’s underfoot like
goats in the garden. 99.9% of the people who pass through have no idea, don’t give it a
moment’s thought.
My mother
was like that, even though it was her ancestral homeland. Didn’t give a damn.
My father was not. She outlived him by a decade, and never sought out any new
boyfriends. Instead, she would call my brothers and I, in our respective
cities, spread out across the U.S., weeping with loneliness from her little
apartment in a senior citizen complex. The place where she spent her last years
was called Indian Run Village.
No comments:
Post a Comment