by Jill Lepore
The problem of knowledge of the syllabary does not plague Edmund Delabarre’s second conjectural explanation for the inscription’s origins. If not by the Penobscots, Delabarre proposed, the inscription on the Mount Hope Rock might have been carved by a Cherokee Indian named Thomas Mitchell and his Wampanoag wife, Zerviah Gould, who herself claimed to be a direct descendant of Massasoit, Philip’s father (and also, ironically, of John Sassamon, through his granddaughter, Mercy Felix, who married Massasoit’s great-grandson, Benjamin Tuspaquin; their daughter, Lydia Tuspaquin—Zerviah’s grandmother—drowned in Assowampset Pond in 1812).11 Gould and Mitchell married in 1824 and lived for the next several decades outside Boston, where they would have had the means, the opportunity, and, one might imagine, the motive to carve an inscription on the rock in nearby Rhode Island, thus memorializing Zerviah’s Wampanoag ancestors in Thomas’ Cherokee language.
Zerviah G. Mitchell. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
The image of Zerviah Gould and Thomas Mitchell standing on the rocky beach of Mount Hope Bay, peering over each other’s shoulders the better to view their handiwork, is a tempting image indeed. In a contest for meaning that began with the earliest reports of John Sassamon’s death and included gestures as powerful and bizarre as Josiah Winslow sending Philip’s “crowne” to the king of England, James Printer setting the type for Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, Cotton Mather pulling the jaw off Philip’s decaying skull, and Edwin Forrest bellowing out Metamora’s curse, a Cherokee man and a Wampanoag woman carving “Metacomet, Great Sachem” on a rock near Philip’s home seems a sublimely suitable coda. The consequences of literacy, the power of print, the negotiation of identity, the suppleness of memory, all are here. And here, too, for extra measure, is a bit of romance, in the marriage of two Indian cultures, and in the mysteriousness of the inscription—for who, other than Zerviah and Thomas, would ever be able to read it?
Tempting as it is to end here, with this romantic and mysterious fantasy (for fantasy it must remain, since there seems no way of proving it), there are good reasons to take this story a few steps farther and to carry it, even, all the way up to the present. In her youth, Zerviah Gould Mitchell may or may not have been involved in carving the inscription on Mount Hope Rock with a chisel or a sharp stone, but at a later age she most certainly did have other tools at her disposal. In 1878 Gould Mitchell, at age seventy-one, published a book on the history of the Wampanoag Indians, with particular reference to the story of King Philip’s War. As she wrote in the preface, “I now, through the medium of the printing press, and in book form, speak to the understanding and sense of justice of the reading public.” (Now, what might have been read by Zerviah and Thomas alone was made legible to all.) Sometime in the 1870s Gould Mitchell hired a genealogist named Ebenezer Peirce to research and write a book whose publication she would fund, partly, no doubt, with her own savings, and partly by advance subscriptions solicited by two of her children, Charlotte (Wootonekanuske) and Melinda (Teweelema).12 Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy: Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe, and His Descendants appeared in 1878, with “Zerviah G. Mitchell” listed as publisher. As Gould Mitchell explained,
My object in bringing this work before the public is not only to show that I am a lineal descendant, in the seventh generation, from the great and good Massasoit, whom both the red and white man now venerate and honor, but also to make record of the wrongs which during all these generations have been endured by my race.13
Gould Mitchell’s motives for establishing her descendance from Massasoit were also practical. In the 1850s she had placed a series of petitions before the Massachusetts legislature, attempting to regain control of Indian property near Fall River and to receive compensation from a white neighbor, Benjamin F. Winslow (himself possibly a descendant of Josiah Winslow, who had proclaimed in 1676, “I think I can clearly say, that before these present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of Land in this Colony, but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian Proprietors”).14Benjamin Winslow admitted to harvesting lumber from the Indian property, but pleaded that no Indian heirs existed who might warrant compensation. Zerviah Gould Mitchell aimed to confound Winslow’s plans for the Indian land: “It seemed as though, when it was thought by him that all the Indians were dead, one was dug right up out of the grave.” Gould Mitchell, however, was unable to receive satisfaction in court (“there seems to be no law for the Indian,” she wrote bitterly), and decided instead to seek public, historical vindication.15
Gould Mitchell’s hiring of Ebenezer Peirce to write Indian History, Biography, and Genealogy may also have been inspired by the bicentennial anniversary of King Philip’s War, celebrated in 1875 and 1876. (While the actual genealogy of Massasoit and his family is crowded into a brief appendix of the book, the great bulk of it is devoted to a detailed history of King Philip’s War.)16 The bicentennial of King Philip’s War was celebrated largely by white New Englanders making speeches and dedicating monuments, but Zerviah’s own family attended at least one of these public commemorations. In August 1876, on the two hundredth anniversary of Philip’s death, Charlotte and Melinda Mitchell were invited to participate in “King Philip’s Day” in Bristol.17 The Rhode Island Historical Society, which had organized the festivities, oversaw the delivery of numerous addresses detailing the horrors of King Philip’s War, but the keynote address was made by the governor of Rhode Island. True to the nineteenth century’s ambivalent embrace of the noble but vanished savage, the governor passionately defended Philip—“Hadn’t he a right to fight? Would any of us have had him do differently?”—at the same time as he relished the colonists’ victory over him: “That he must fail every one felt assured. And we know that he did fail; and of course we thank God that he did.” Finally, the governor gladly conceded the extinction of the Indian: “Within a few years the red man will be practically wiped out. We cannot help it. There is no use in wailing about it, because it is one of the things that are inevitable. It has been proven many times that the two races cannot live together.”18
On King Philip’s Day in 1876, the governor of Rhode Island and his largely white audience celebrated not only their own Americanness (for Philip’s story “must necessarily excite the interest of every American citizen”) but also the obsolescence of Indianness (on exhibit were a kettle and a belt supposedly owned by Philip, along with several other Indian “relics”). Meanwhile, no doubt just a few yards away from the governor’s podium, Charlotte and Melinda Mitchell stood dressed in full Indian regalia, selling traditional Wampanoag baskets and perhaps taking subscriptions for their mother’s soon-to-be-published history of Massasoit’s descendants.19 Charlotte, Melinda, and Zerviah Mitchell would not be made relics and, contrary to the governor’s words, “the red man” would not be “wiped out.”
EVEN AS Zerviah Gould Mitchell and her daughters staged a revival of Wampanoag heritage in the latter half of the nineteenth century, nearby Narragansetts were engaged in extraordinary attempts to preserve their own cultural identity and tribal lands. After a protracted struggle, Narragansett representatives finally agreed to detribalization legislation proposed by the Rhode Island Assembly in 1880.20 Yet the loss of their lands and tribal status did not diminish Narragansetts’ sense of identity; as one Narragansett said in 1883, “We have the same blood running through our veins that we had before we sold the lands.”21 The tenacity of Narragansett identity led ultimately to a dramatic Narragansett cultural revival that can best be dated to the 1930s, when a woman named Princess Red Wing began publishing a tribal newspaper, Narragansett Dawn, to tell her people about their history and to teach them the Narragansett language.22
Melinda Mitchell. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library
Red Wing was actually both Narragansett and Wampanoag, and she claimed to be the direct descendant of a man named Simeon Simons, who, as tradition has it, was the grandson of Philip, the son of the long-lost
son of Philip who had been sold into slavery in 1677. According to this tradition, Philip’s grandson escaped the West Indies, returned to the colonies, and served as a close aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Many of Red Wing’s descendants, calling themselves the “Royal House of Pokanoket,” continue to embrace this tradition of direct descendance from Philip.23 (Members of the Pokanoket royal family call Philip’s son by the name “Metom,” which I suspect may be a corruption of “Metamora.”)24
Led by men and women like Zerviah Gould Mitchell and Princess Red Wing, similar revivals took place among other New England Indian groups at about the turn of the century. In the early twentieth century, such revivals were further fueled by a new spirit of pan-Indianism as well as by the continuing patronage of white historians and antiquarians. In 1923 the “Indian Council of New England” was formed to cultivate interest in Indian heritage and to ensure cultural survival (the Councils motto was “Algonquin ‘I still live’ “). A coalition of New England Indians and white amateur historians and other nonacademics, the Council was often subject to its white members’ romanticism, yet it nonetheless greatly increased native regional consciousness among Algonquians in New England.25 That consciousness, in turn, laid the foundation for renewed efforts at political mobilization, especially during the American Indian Movement. In the 1970s and 1980s Narragansetts, Mashpee Wampanoags, Pequots, Mohegans, and Penobscots all began pressing for federal recognition and for the return of lost tribal lands. Since that time, groups that have succeeded in establishing economic and political autonomy (and often in accumulating massive wealth, due to the success of tribal-run casinos) have also become passionately involved in researching and documenting their heritage.26 Among some groups, interest in commemorating the events of King Philip’s War and understanding its legacy has become a powerful concern. Yet, for other New England Indians, the importance of Philip and his war has been exaggerated; the Mashpee Wampanoags, especially (most of whose ancestors were not actually involved in the war), are not particularly interested in Philip and some even consider him a “renegade.”27
Much of the contestation over King Philip’s War today concerns public commemoration of the war. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monuments to the war were erected all over New England, many by the Society of Colonial Wars, a group whose members trace their ancestry to colonial soldiers.28 Markers at sites with names such as Bloody Brook, Redemption Rock, and Nine Men’s Misery celebrate the deeds and mourn the sufferings of the colonists, not their enemies, while sites of special significance to Indians have rarely been preserved.29 Recently native groups have attempted to change all that. In 1991, when the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority proposed constructing a sewage-treatment plant on Deer Island, a coalition of Indians from New England and elsewhere, calling themselves the Muhheconneuk Intertribal Committee, staged a series of protests and demonstrations, including annual marches retracing the steps of Natick Indians forced to remove to the island in October 1675.30 But no protest has been more sustained, or more deeply symbolic, than the Narragansetts’ efforts to reclaim the monument at the Great Swamp.
The Great Swamp Fight Monument was first unveiled at a dedication ceremony in October 1906. About a hundred people, including “three lineal descendants of the noble but now almost vanished Narragansett Tribe,” gathered at the Great Swamp in South Kingston, Rhode Island, for the dedication, hosted by the Society of Colonial Wars. Soon after the ceremony began, rain began to fall, and it seemed to some “as if the clouds shed tears over the memory of the bloody scene recalled by the memorial about to be unveiled.” Squinting against the heavy rain, the three Narragansetts drew the veil from the monument, revealing four massive boulders, one for each of the United Colonies, planted around a granite obelisk, signaling “a perpetual memorial of the stern purpose and high valour of our forefathers.” Next, the chaplain delivered a dedicatory address, placed a wreath and an American flag at the base of the shaft, and called the exercises to a close.31
The Great Swamp Monument, South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Photograph by the author
In September 1992, some fifty people gathered at the same site, in a circle around those same four boulders and solitary granite shaft in South Kingston. But this time, several dozen members of the Narragansett Nation led the ceremonies. (Narragansetts had achieved federal recognition as a “nation” in 1983.) They commemorated not the “Great Swamp fight” but the “Great Swamp massacre.” Many wore full regalia—fringed leather dresses and vests, or pants, and also moccasins and beaded headbands. Strong Horse (Kenneth Smith), the subsachem of the Narragansett Nation, began the ceremonies, asking those present to honor the dead and pray for peace. Next, Lloyd Wilcox, a medicine man, cleansed the circle of evil spirits and lit fires. A peace pipe ritual followed, and the women of the tribe conducted a mourning ceremony, wailing for the dead. John Brown, a tribal councilman, also spoke:
I’m not sure that they thought we’d be walking here in the twentieth century or in the forthcoming twenty-first century. Because, you see this place here was built not as a memory to us, but as a memory to our slaughter.
Next, Brown looked to the monument, erected by the Society of Colonial Wars in 1906, and pointed to the four massive boulders, explaining that they represent the four colonies: “The state of Rhode Island, over there, the state of Connecticut, the state of Massachusetts, and Plymouth Colony.” Finally, he pointed to the granite shaft, which, in 1906, was erected to represent the colonists’ “stern purpose and high valour,” but as Brown interpreted it, “that spire means that that’s the Narragansetts, we are again sitting in the middle, looking out at all of them.” Finally, the Narragansetts and their guests formed a circle, hands together, and danced a round dance.
To me, watching that dance around that circle during a research trip, the scene powerfully echoed a passage in William Hubbard’s 1677 Narrative, of the torture of a Narragansett man, circled by Mohegans and English soldiers. In Hubbard’s account, English soldiers stood in a circle and watched the man in the middle being tortured to death, and, as I read it (and relate in this work’s Prologue), the scene serves as a metaphor for the elaborate maneuverings by which seventeenth-century English colonists preserved their Englishness while engaging in a cruel war against their Indian neighbors. But at the Great Swamp in September 1992, the Narragansetts themselves formed the circle, along with their guests, and there was no tormented man in the middle; instead, they danced around a granite shaft, a memorial that for the Society of Colonial Wars had celebrated seventeenth-century colonists (of “stern purpose and high valour”), but that, for twentieth-century Narragansetts, towers as a testament to their own survival (“sitting in the middle, looking out at all of them”). Here was yet another metaphor, suggesting the still more subtle maneuverings of language and memory.
TO GET to the rocky beach where the Mount Hope Rock sits, Edmund Delabarre had to travel down Metacom Avenue in Bristol, Rhode Island. Taking the same road today, we would pass by the King Philip Inn, at 400 Metacom Avenue. “King Philip” is a popular theme in Bristol, the name of streets, schools, and automotive repair shops. But Delabarre’s theory about the rock’s inscription has gone unnoticed; people in town call it “Viking’s Rock,” and, though everyone has heard of it, no one seems to remember exactly where it is. And almost no one, of course, remembers Edmund Delabarre, a young psychology professor who arrived at Brown University in 1892, just a year before Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Delabarre had trained at Harvard with William James, and though his interests shifted from rapid movement, the subject of his dissertation, to inscribed rocks, his newfound New England hobby, he remained true to his Jamesian education. That is, he prided himself on his rigor in debunking romantic Victorian myths; he considered his investigation of inscribed rocks “an exceedingly valuable discipline in scientific method and an enlightening commentary on the psychology of �
� the differing ways in which the same object may be seen by different observers.”32
King Philip Inn, Bristol, Rhode Island. Photograph by the author
For the same reason, Edmund Delabarre would have been fascinated by the waging, writing, and remembering of King Philip’s War. Or at least I would like to think so. The story of King Philip’s War, as I have tried to tell it, is the story of how English colonists became Americans, and of the sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward, sometimes brutal posturing by which they positioned themselves in relation to the indigenous people of America and of Europe. It is a story of words and of wounds and of resurrections. Behind that story, however, is yet another tale. King Philip’s War, in all its reincarnations, also traces shifting conceptions of Indian identity—from tribal allegiances to campaigns for political sovereignty to pan-Indianism, and, today, to struggles for cultural survival and political recognition. In the 1830s, Penobscots attended performances of Metamora and turned its sympathy for “vanished” Indians to their own political ends; and by the end of the nineteenth century, the story of King Philip’s War had gained an important place within New England Algonquian folklore. By the early twentieth century, white and Indian traditions merged with, competed with, and borrowed from one another. Finally, today, the meaning of King Philip’s War has become, once again, hotly contested, especially in the struggles for renaming the site at the Great Swamp and preserving the sacredness of Deer Island. During the 1993 celebration at the Great Swamp Memorial, Ella Sekatau, a Narragansett tribal historian, proclaimed, “We are Narragansetts first, and we are Americans when it is convenient.”33 Ella Sekatu’s words, like John Brown’s interpretation of the Great Swamp monument, suggest that Indians in New England in the latter part of the twentieth century are attempting, in effect, to preserve their Indianness as passionately as seventeenth-century colonists once struggled to preserve their Englishness. They want to stand in a circle, they want to mark the rock.