United States or French Polynesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Upon that very day, June 24,1675, the war burst into flame. At the town of Swansea, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border, and the nearest settlement to Mount Hope, a Wampanoag was wounded by an angered colonist. The Indians were glad. They believed that the party whose blood was shed first would be victors.
They have broken down the fences between their hunting-grounds, and they have cleared the paths, between their villages, of briars. What have you to say to the Narragansett? he has not yet shut his ear." "Wampanoag, if such be thy tribe," resumed Content, "thou shalt hear that which my conscience teacheth is language to be uttered.
Awashonks called upon the Wampanoag embassadors to come forward. They were marked men, dressed in the highest embellishments of barbaric warfare. Their faces were painted. Their hair was trimmed in the fashion of the crests of the ancient helmets. Their knives and tomahawks were sharp and glittering. They all had guns, and horns and pouches abundantly supplied with shot and bullets.
But the imperial spirit of the Wampanoag chieftain was so tortured by the humiliation to which he was exposed that he was thrown into a burning fever. The best medical attendance was furnished, and he was nursed with the utmost care, but he grew daily worse, and soon serious fears were entertained that he would die.
"Wampanoag," answered the other, with a fierce flashing of his eagle eye; and laying his hand firmly on his breast, "the night the snows were red with the blood of my people, is here! my mind is dark: none of my race have since looked upon the place where the lodges of the Narragansetts stood, and yet it hath never been hid from our sight.
These Wampanoags had been with Annawan only yesterday, but one and all declared that they did not know where Annawan might be to-day, for he never stayed long in one place. Then a Wampanoag young man asked leave to go out and get his old father, four miles distant in a swamp. Captain Church decided to go with him and explore.
Piscataqua, however uncouth, most Americans can place; but what shall we say of Ammonoosuc, Wampanoag, and such like, then adorning our lists, which seem as though extracted by a fine-tooth comb drawn through the tangle of Indian nomenclature. Under the succeeding administration Piscataqua was changed to Delaware.
Glances of fierce revenge, and of inextinguishable though disappointed hatred, were exchanged between the victim and his chief, as the former lay on the rock gasping for breath; and then the latter turned in his tracks, and raised the dripping weapon over the head of the white man. "Wampanoag, no!" said Conanchet, in a voice of thunder. "Our lives are one." Philip hesitated.
March they did, through the thickets and swamps of the base of the main point, to enter the upper part of the Poppasquash Neck. Here the captain sent forward Lightfoot the Sogkonate, with three other Indians, to scout. Lightfoot took with him, as one, a Wampanoag of King Phillip's defeated army, named Nathaniel.
As these deep-laid plans of the shrewd Wampanoag chieftain were approaching maturity, Philip became more independent and bold in his demeanor. The Massachusetts colonists now began to feel that the danger was indeed imminent, and that their Plymouth brethren had more cause for complaint than they had supposed.
Word Of The Day