Jun 24, 1675: King Philip's War begins

Here is an interesting piece of early American Colonial history that has been pretty much forgotten today but it helps to give us a clearer picture of the relationships between England, the early Colonists and the Native Americans.

On this day in 1675, in colonial New England, King Philip's War begins when a band of Wampanoag warriors raid the border settlement of Swansee, Massachusetts, and massacre all of the English colonists in the settlement.

In the early 1670s, 50 years of peace between the Plymouth Colony and the local Wampanoag Indians began to deteriorate when the rapidly expanding settlement forced land sales on the tribe. Reacting to increasing Native American hostility, the English met with King Philip, chief of the Wampanoag, and demanded that his forces surrender their arms. The Wampanoag did so, but in 1675 a Christian Native American who had been acting as an informer to the English was murdered, and three Wampanoag were tried and executed for the crime.

King Philip responded by ordering the attack on Swansee on June 24, which set off a series of Wampanoag raids in which several settlements were destroyed and scores of colonists, including many women and children, were massacred. The colonists retaliated by destroying a number of Indian villages. The destruction of a Narragansett village by the English brought the Narragansett into the conflict on the side of King Philip, and within a few months several other tribes and all the New England colonies were involved. In early 1676, the Narragansett were defeated and their chief killed, while the Wampanoag and their other allies were gradually subdued. King Philip's wife and son were captured, and on August 12, 1676, after his secret headquarters in Mount Hope, Rhode Island, was discovered, Philip was assassinated by a Native American in the service of the English. The English drew and quartered Philip's body and publicly displayed his head on a stake in Plymouth.

King Philip's War, which was extremely costly to the colonists of southern New England, ended the Native American presence in the region and inaugurated a period of unimpeded colonial expansion.

Live Long and Prosper...