The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  In all, some twenty vessels were snapped up in short order. On the William and Sarah, Robert Roules found himself and his fellows tied up on the deck, stripped of most of their clothes except for “a greasy shirt and waistcoat, and drawers we used to fish in.” By midafternoon, the Indians unbound the men and ordered them to sail for Pentagoet, the French outpost on Penobscot Bay, in company with four other ketches they’d taken. Otherwise, they would kill all but a handful of the twenty-six sailors onboard the tiny fleet. Chafing the blood back into their numb limbs, Roules and his companions sulkily agreed.

  Two days later, the flotilla came upon a bark outbound from Boston, which, seeing nothing amiss in five Marblehead ketches sailing together, allowed them to range alongside. When Roules and the others hollered across the water demanding the boat’s surrender, the captain thought it was a grand joke. Then the seventy or eighty armed Indians, who had been hiding aboard the other ships, rose to their feet, and the laughter died in his throat.

  The Indians divided the crews among the various boats, bringing a man named Buswell from the bark aboard the William and Sarah and sending Bovey to another ship. They also reduced their own forces on the ketch, leaving just four, including two men that Roules referred to as sagamores.

  Not long after taking the bark, the Natives spotted another distant sail, and the fast-growing squadron took off in pursuit. Roules was at the William and Sarah’s helm, and as it grew dark, one of the sagamores ordered him to bear up for the night. He refused, and as the old man began to shout, Buswell grabbed him by the throat. A melee broke out—as Buswell held down one sagamore, the crew clapped the scuttle over the cook room hatch, trapping the other. In the ensuing scuffle, the remaining two Indians were tossed over the side. Tying up the survivors, Roules had the crew set a course back to Marblehead.

  When they arrived there almost two weeks later, they were met by a mob of women, frantic for news of the missing ships and clamoring for revenge. Many of the women were refugees from elsewhere in New England, their homes burned and their families dead or missing. Why were the Indians still alive? the women demanded to know. Roules and his mates said they’d lost everything, “even to our clothes, and we thought if we brought them in alive, we might get somewhat by them toward our losses.” They would lead the bound men ashore, they said, and deliver them to the constable, “that they might be answerable to the court at Boston.”

  The women were having none of it. As Roules and the others tried to lead the Indians off the ketch, the mob began pelting the fishermen with stones, forcing them to flee. Then the crowd literally tore the two sagamores to pieces. “We found them with their heads off and gone, and their flesh in a manner pulled from their bones,” Roules said. The women “suffered neither constable nor mandrake, nor any other person to come near them, until they had finished their bloody purpose.”

  To the English, who viewed with haughty superiority the stories of Indian women torturing captives, the Marblehead riot must have seemed like another step toward barbarism and anarchy in their own society. The wars of the late seventeenth century, of which King Philip’s was the most wrenching, took place against a backdrop of two societies deeply worried about their own identities—a disturbing, in-between world in which they increasingly reflected each other.

  To fundamentalists like the Puritans, life on the frontier, where colonists learned Indian woodcraft and farming techniques, thriving far from the reach of the church, posed a threat to the colonists’ essential Englishness, never mind to their individual souls. “Christians in this Land, have become too like unto the Indians and then we need not wonder, if the Lord hath afflicted us by them,” wrote the Puritan cleric Cotton Mather. One local magistrate, immigrating to the coast of Maine from England, was aghast at “the Immoralities of a People who had long lived Lawless.”

  If the English were worried about becoming too Indian, so were many Native leaders distraught to see how European their own people were growing. Indians were increasingly dependent on the new tools, technologies, and trade goods the colonists provided, moving them steadily farther from their traditional lifestyle. For a rising number of Indians, this change included their religion, too. Protestant missionaries such as John Eliot in Massachusetts and the Catholic orders in New France found ever-growing ranks of converts. Metacom complained through the members of his council that so-called Praying Indians “wer in everi thing more mischivous, only disemblers, and then the English made them not subject to their kings, and by ther lying to rong their kings.” For literate, Christian Indians such as a Nipmuc named Wawaus—who had taken the name James Printer, had attended Harvard, and now worked as a typesetter for Cambridge’s first printing shop—the growing chasm between their Indian heritage and the European culture they embraced left them mistrusted and outcast by both sides, with nowhere to turn that didn’t carry the risk of imprisonment or death.

  The violence that broke out with King Philip’s War and continued for decades was marked by appalling atrocities on both sides, from the Indians’ slaughter of entire homestead families down to the youngest infants, to a midwinter English massacre on a Narragansett town whose astonishing brutality was only amplified by the fact that the Narragansett were not at war with the English at the time. There were also occasional, oddly incongruous courtesies. When the survivors of the French and Indian attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, stumbled away from their burning homes and barns in February 1704, they found a leather bag hanging in a tree along the main road into town. “Some of our captives in Canada, knowing the enterprize that was on foot, sent several letters unto their friends, which the enemy did carefully put into a bag, and hung it upon the limb of a tree in the high-way,” wrote Judge Samuel Penhallow, noting that the letters “gave satisfaction to those that were then alive among them.”

  Through much of the seventeenth century, what had started as a fragile coexistence between Indians and Europeans—a wary bond aided by commerce, intermarriage, and convergent interests—was breaking down. The frontier had never been peaceful, of course. Long before the Vikings or Basques arrived, the Indian nations of eastern North America had been locked in an endless cycle of raids and reprisals among hereditary enemies. The onslaught of an alien culture, eager to trade sophisticated weaponry and household goods for skins, furs, or slaves, altered and intensified that dynamic, as well as sparking many conflicts with the intrusive, often violent, newcomers themselves. But whereas Native leaders had at one time been more likely to view Europeans as potential allies or trading partners, they now increasingly saw them as a direct and often paramount threat to their own culture’s continued survival.

  The whites simply kept coming. What began as a handful of coastal and riverine outposts had consolidated, by 1650, into a broad swath of seaboard under European control. In the north, the French occupied forts in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton in Mi’kmaq country, around the Bay of Fundy in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy territory, and up the St. Lawrence to Ville-Marie (Montreal), where the St. Lawrence Iroquoian villages among whom Jacques Cartier had stayed had vanished to an unknown fate.

  On the New England shoreline, English colonies stretched from Pemaquid, Maine, through Boston, Plymouth, and Providence to the Connecticut coast, steadily displacing Algonquian groups such as the western Abenaki, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, and Mohegan. By one estimate, there were 23,000 English settlers in the region by 1650. The Dutch held New Netherland on Long Island, Manhattan, and the Hudson Valley north to Fort Orange at present-day Albany, land that had belonged to the Munsee, Mahican, and Mohawk, among other nations. The Swedes had established themselves along Delaware Bay among the Lenape and Nanticoke.

  Along Chesapeake Bay, it was Englishmen again, Virginians and Marylanders. When John Smith had explored the bay less than half a century earlier, there had been fifteen thousand to twenty thousand Indians living there, but now there were only a few thousand, their numbers in continuing decline from disease, and almost all of them had been pushed b
ack from the fertile coastline. The farms that now stood along the tidewater grew tobacco for export. The land was tilled by English indentured servants, as well as a growing cadre of three hundred to four hundred African slaves.

  From the Georgia Bight across northern Florida, and in almost forty missions and forts strung out along both Florida coasts, the Spanish remained in firm command, having put down the Guale uprisings in the late sixteenth century. The Timucua, who once numbered 200,000, could muster barely one-tenth that number by 1650. The only region where Native control of the seaboard remained relatively intact was the Carolinas, despite Spanish slaving raids and epidemics. But the diseases, like the colonists, kept coming—malaria, smallpox, influenza, and typhoid, among others—and when English immigrants finally created permanent settlements along the Carolina coast in the 1650s and 1660s, they found a land that, like Massachusetts thirty years before, had been largely emptied by pestilence. (They also imported laborers from farther south, employing Indian slavers to kidnap Timucuas from Spanish missions.)

  By the time Indians woke up to the threat posed by waves of land-hungry settlers, they were often politically and militarily too weak to react decisively. Powhatan, near the peak of his power, almost succeeded in pushing the Virginians into the sea in 1610, but Opechancanough’s subsequent assaults proved to be years too late for lasting success. Farther north, the callous destruction of the Pequot had cowed many sachems and sagamores into an uneasy accommodation with the New England colonists. Yet by the 1660s and 1670s, despite rapidly expanding control of the seaboard, many colonists were more frightened than ever that an Indian leader would emerge to unite the tribes against them, sweeping away what they still saw as a fragile English beachhead.

  Phillip Alias Metacomet of Pokanoket

  By far the most widely reproduced “portrait” of King Philip, this image is based on an engraving by Paul Revere, who in turn lifted most of its elements from a painting of the eighteenth-century Mohawk leader Joseph Brant. (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-96234)

  It is doubly ironic, then, that Metacom—Philip—was the son of Massasoit, the Pokanoket sachem without whose help the Plymouth colony would not have survived, and who struggled for years to find a way to balance the needs of the Wampanoag confederacy with the demands of their increasingly importunate neighbors. Massasoit’s death around 1660, followed quickly by that of his elder son, Wamsutta (allegedly by English poison), brought Philip to power just as the Wampanoag’s situation was reaching a breaking point.

  The Wampanoag had their backs increasingly against the wall. Whereas Massasoit saw the English as allies and trading partners, Philip and a growing number of like-minded sachems saw them as a plague. English birthrates were high, and shiploads of white immigrants kept arriving, pressuring the Plymouth and Bay Colony leaders, who in turn badgered the Indians to sell ever more land.

  Worse for the Wampanoag, the beaver trade was flagging even as Native demand for European goods was increasing, leaving more and more Indians in debt. Selling land was frequently the only way out, and in Massachusetts, unlike in Maine, the Wampanoag had a long list of grievances involving fraudulent dealings, such as Indians made drunk so their land could be swindled from them. The Indians tried moving away from English settlements, but there was nowhere to go. The Pokanoket land around Mount Hope in what is now Rhode Island was ringed by English settlements radiating out of Plymouth, Newport, Portsmouth, and the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay.

  Philip and his representatives “saied they had bine the first in doing good to the English, and the English the first in doing rong,” wrote John Easton, the Quaker deputy governor of Rhode Island, who gave an evenhanded account of complaints on both sides in the run-up to war, and who tried to mediate the disputes. Easton had his own ax to grind, however. His family had been banished from Massachusetts for religious differences, and he had little love for the United Colonies. What’s more, from its founding by Roger Williams, the Providence Plantations, which would become Rhode Island, had earned a reputation for relatively straight dealing with the Indians. Although Rhode Island stood apart from the United Colonies, Easton knew that any armed conflict would embroil everyone.

  The Wampanoag and other Algonquians tried to seek redress through the English legal system but found the door slammed there, too; in Plymouth, the leaders banned Indians from town when court was in session, to reduce the flood of Native litigation about land cheats or livestock trampling crops. Indeed, the English couldn’t even agree among themselves on issues of land; Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island were constantly locking horns over boundaries and property sales.

  If English law wouldn’t respond to the Indians’ pleas, there were other means of forcing the issue. The Wampanoag quietly armed and organized during the winter of 1674–75. The English, getting wind of this from another Harvard-educated Christian Indian, a minister named John Sassamon who often acted as a scribe for Philip, also prepared for war.

  The fuse was lit on a frigid day in February 1675. Sassamon, his gun, and some dead birds were pulled from a frozen lake in Plymouth—ostensibly an accident, except that injuries to his neck suggested foul play. A coroner’s inquest ruled it murder, and the general assumption was that he’d been killed for having told the colonists about the Wampanoag’s plans. On scanty evidence, a jury of twelve Englishmen and six Praying Indians convicted three of Philip’s associates for the crime, and they were hanged on June 8. The Indians massed; the English leadership began frantic negotiations with Philip, as well as with their allies among the Mohegan, Narragansett, and Nipmuc. As the expectation of violence grew, some settlers abandoned their homes.

  Exactly how the war started isn’t clear. Easton wrote that on June 24, several Indians were found rifling an empty house. As they fled, a boy with a gun fired at them, killing one. “The next day the lad that shot the indian and his father and fief English more were killed.” Others place the outbreak of violence elsewhere, but the result was the same. As Easton said simply, “So the war begun with philop.”

  The conflict, which rapidly widened to encompass Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine, also pulled in most of the Algonquians in the region, willingly or otherwise. Many allied themselves with Philip, and the colonists saw every Native hand raised against them. “In this time of Extremitye Wee have Great Reason to beleeve that there is a universall Combination of the Indians,” one settler wrote to Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr.

  How much of this was genuine fear, and how much was motivated by a desire to gain control of supposedly hostile Indian land, is an open question, but there was by no means a “universall” uprising. Some longtime English allies, such as Uncas and the Mohegan, eagerly fought alongside the United Colonies. So did the remnants of the Pequot, whose fort at Mashantucket served as a refuge for white and Indian residents alike. But loyalties were not split neatly along tribal or even family lines. The large Wampanoag population on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, many of whom had converted to Christianity, turned en masse against Philip. Many Pocassets and Sakonnets joined him, despite the initial misgivings of their sachems, while other Wampanoags, who had listened to English instructions to stay out of the fray, were nevertheless subsequently attacked, killed, or sold into slavery.

  Many of the Nipmucs in Massachusetts needed little prompting to join Philip; they had been close allies of his father, Massasoit. But other Nipmucs, such as James Printer, had become Praying Indians, and as the war spread, they found themselves between two fires—mistrusted by both sides, shunned, murdered, or captured. James Quanapohit (also spelled Quannapaquait or Quanapaug), a Nipmuc from the Praying town of Natick, and his brother Thomas served the English for months, fighting bravely in several engagements; Thomas even killed one of Philip’s chief commanders and carried the man’s head to Boston to present to the governor. They were instrumental in recovering one English captive from Philip’s forces and in saving the lives of two other Englishmen.

  “Yet
after all these services both they & their wives & children . . . were mistrusted by the English,” Quanapohit later complained. By November 1675, the English were rounding up Praying Indians with only a few hours’ notice. Quanapohit, his family, and the rest of the Christian Indians of Natick were herded into a wretched internment camp on windswept Deer Island in Boston Harbor, “leaving & loosing much of their substance, cattle, swine, horses & corne, & at the Iland were exposed to great sufferings haveing little wood for fuell, a bleak place & poore wigwams such as they could . . . make themselves with a few matts.” Many of the internees starved or froze to death. A few, such as Tantamous (Old Jethro), managed to escape.

  Their own people didn’t treat them much better. At the same time as the Deer Island roundups, Nipmucs allied with Philip fell on Hassanemesit and several other Praying towns, presenting the residents with an equally forbidding choice: join Philip and fight; flee to the English, who would certainly imprison them or sell them into slavery; or be laid waste, their corn supplies burned.

  “If they came to the English they knew they shold be sent to Deare Iland, as others were . . . and others feard they should bee sent away to Barbados, or other places,” James Quanapohit lamented. “And to stay at Hassanamesho these indians our enemies would not permit . . . Most of them thought it best to go with [Philip] though they feared death every way.”

  That was the decision facing James Printer, whose brother was a prominent minister. Although James had worked for years as a translator and typesetter for the Cambridge printer Samuel Green, he had been imprisoned by the English in Boston earlier in the autumn, accused of taking part in an attack. Escaping a lynch mob, he fled to Hassanemesit, but having evaded one set of combatants, he now had little choice but to join the other side, willingly or not. The same option confronted another Christian Nipmuc, Tantamous’s son Peter Jethro.