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Updated: June 26, 2025
The Mohegans under Uncas enlisted with the English, which was expected. The "praying Indians," as the Christianized Pokanokets were known, also either stayed aloof, or else were used as scouts against their people. The New Hampshire Indians refused to take up the hatchet, and the Narragansetts still hung back.
A large number of towns were to be garrisoned, and many men were necessarily employed in the customary duties of life. Still less is known of the strength of Philip's confederated tribes. Pestilence and war had depopulated New England previous to the arrival of the Pilgrims. In 1675 the Pokanokets and Narragansets were the most powerful, and together mustered three or four thousand warriors.
He had only a handful of Pokanokets and scarcely more Narragansetts with him. Although frequently attacking, he himself was never sighted. The English accused him of hiding in cowardly fashion, but he well knew that with his death or capture the war would be ended. Only the name King Philip supported it still.
When his warriors had fallen in battle, been sold into slavery or corrupted by bribes, when his old men and women, and children had perished, when the first of the enemy had laid in ashes the wigwams and villages of the Pokanokets and their allies, when to his race there was neither seed-time nor harvest, he came to the home of his ancestors, and there his troubled spirit, contrasting sadly in death as in life with the placid scenes of nature around, passed forever away.
Repeated sales of land narrowed their domains, and the English had artfully crowded them into the tongues of land, as "most suitable and convenient for them," where they would be more easily watched. The two chief seats of the Pokanokets were the peninsulas now called Bristol and Tiverton.
Finally, the sachem added that he as Sagamore of the Pokanokets, and as it were regent of the Massachusetts, had authority to order the punishment of these rebels to his expressed commands for peace, and he hereby did so. "And very sensible and good the sachem's counsel seemeth in my ears," remarked Standish complacently. "Nay, Captain," replied the Elder sternly.
So some doubts as to the wisdom of Massasoit's treaty with the English began to spread through the Pokanokets. The Plymouth officers ordered Alexander to appear at court and answer the charges against him. When he delayed, Major Josiah Winslow was sent to get him. The major took ten armed men, and proceeded for Mount Hope.
These Indians were the Pokanokets, whose number had been very much thinned by the pestilence. After the first hostilities directed against the exploring parties they avoided the whites, and held a meeting in a dark and dismal swamp, where the medicine-men for three days together tried vainly to subject the new-comers to the spell of their conjurations.
The Narragansetts were friendly with the Pokanokets; they rather looked upon Philip as their adopted leader. His lands were rapidly going, the English were rapidly spreading, the Puritan laws and religion were being forced upon him. It was galling that he, a king by his own right, should be made a subject of another king whom he had never seen.
But a third of the Narragansett nation had been slain or taken captive, and of the Pokanokets only a remnant was left. Eighty killed, was the report of the Connecticut troops alone. There were one hundred and fifty men grievously wounded. As the soldiers had destroyed the fort and its provisions, they had no shelter.
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