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Updated: May 10, 2025
North of the Pequots, the squalid villages of the Nipmucks were scattered over the beautiful highlands that stretch in long ridges from Quinsigamond to Nichewaug, and beyond toward blue Monadnock. Westward, in the lower Connecticut valley, lived the Mohegans, a small but valiant tribe, now for some time held tributary to their Pequot cousins, and very restive under the yoke.
To them the Indians were heathens and inferiors; not free allies, but subjects of the king of England. Before the landing of the Pilgrims in the Indians' territory, sailing ships, touching at the New England shore, had borne Indians away into slavery. Since the landing of the Pilgrims, the Pequots had been crushed in battle, and Captain Miles Standish had applied knife and rope to other Indians.
A large fire has been kindled in the woods and a score of savages are wrapping dry grass around the ends of long poles, with which to fire the wooden walls of the block-house. Thirty or forty men women and children in a wooden fort, a hundred miles, perhaps, from any settlement, and surrounded by five times their number of Pequots or Wampanoags thirsting for their blood!
With heroism which was the more signal in that it was entirely unostentatious, this bold man remained three days and three nights with the savages, encountering the threats of the Pequots, and expecting every night that they would take his life before morning. Grandeur of character always wins applause.
And it had a glacis and a ditch outside. When it was completed, the Early Settlers, leaving the women in the schoolhouse, a prey to the Indians, used to retire into it, and await the attack of the Pequots. There was only a handful of the garrison, while the Indians were many, and also barbarous. It was agreed that they should be barbarous.
The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated, and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard, was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and one said that they had prayed the bullet into Philip's heart.
"Samoset is an Indian," replied the interpreter, "and his heart is red." "Has he forgotten the time when, with Sassacus and his Paniese, he drank of the Shetucket, where it bounds into the river of the Pequots, when he was thirsty with driving the Narraghansetts over the hills, like leaves chased by the wind?" "Samoset has not forgotten."
It is said that, a few years before the arrival of the English in this country, the Pequots had poured down like an inundation from the forests of the north, sweeping all opposition before them, and had taken possession of the sea-coast as a conquered country. Sassacus was the sovereign chief of this nation. The present town of Groton was his regal residence.
It ended in the slaughter of seven hundred of the Pequots and thirteen of their Sachems.
There was once a great Sachem among the Narragansetts; he was wiser than the beaver, swifter than the moose, and more cunning than the red fox. But he could not see, into to-morrow. Foolish counsellors told him to go upon the war-path against the Pequots and Mohicans. He lost his scalp; it hangs in the smoke of my wigwam. We shall see if it will know the hair of its son.
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