One nation two worlds

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The tribe holds a ceremony each year on the site of the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675, in which hundreds of Narragansetts were killed.

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The Narragansetts and the 'knife-men'

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"They say themselves, that they have sprung and growne up in that very place, like the very trees of the Wildernesse."

-- Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America

On a late January day in 1675, the Wampanoag John Sassamon delivered a chilling warning to Plymouth's governor, Josiah Winslow.

His message, whispered in the governor's ear, was this: the Wampanoag chief, King Philip, planned to wage war on the English.

Sassamon, a Christian minister who had once served Philip, feared that he would be killed for his betrayal. But Winslow dismissed the message. It came, after all, from an Indian.

A month later, Sassamon's bruised and bloated body was found in a frozen pond, and the colonists hanged three of Philip's top men for murder.

In retaliation, Indians burned and looted Swansea. Days later they killed nine colonists and wounded two others.

The thing that Sassamon could only whisper had begun.

Fourteen months later, at the end of King Philip's War, nearly half of the Indians in the region had been killed, sold into slavery, or driven away. The Narragansetts were decimated.

Once, they ruled southern New England.

THE NARRAGANSETT INDIANS say their ancestors roamed the region more than 30,000 years ago. The evidence, they say, is written in the stones.

Archaeologists don't disagree. They say a people may have hunted mastodons and bison when parts of North America were covered by glacial ice.

The first evidence of an early tool -- a tiny broken spear point -- has been linked to bands of hunters who stalked elk and bison some 10,000 years ago, after the last glacier melted.

A later group of Indians, ancestors of the Narragansett, fished and hunted along the edge of the Narragansett Bay some 3,000 years ago, archaeologists say. Between then and the 16th century, they built a network of villages and paths between ponds, coves and inland swamps and forests.

On land west of the Bay, they grew squash, beans and corn on hills; caught fish in weirs; dug shellfish from mudflats and ponds and trapped beaver and mink in snares.

Historians estimate these early Narragansetts numbered between 30,000 and 40,000.

Ella Sekatau, the tribe's ethnohistorian, says the number of Indians along the coast -- not just the Narragansetts but other tribes, including those that paid tribute to the Narragansetts -- numbered a million.

"Everything was under the Narragansett family of royal sachems," she says.

IRONICALLY, THEIR POWER increased with the arrival of the Dutch and English traders in the early 1600s.

Otters, muskrat and especially beaver were "too cunning for the English, who seldom or never catch any of them," said one observer.

So the Europeans traded manufactured goods -- knives, kettles, cloth and hoes -- to the Indians in return for furs. The Indians sold the same goods for higher prices to remote tribes.

Dominating the coast and inland waters, the Narragansetts and a rival group, the Pequots in Connecticut, controlled the trade routes.

The Narragansetts also created wampum, beads made from shells found along the Bay, an early form of currency. Tribes used it to buy furs, goods and to pay tribute, making the Narragansetts "America's first bankers," says tribal member Regina R. Reckling.

But the trade had its dark side.

Many Indians spent their winters hunting beaver instead of wild game; they became increasingly dependent on white businessmen to survive.

Contact could be lethal. A plague of European origin killed thousands of Indians between 1616 and 1619. The Narragansetts escaped that epidemic, but many died later from plague, smallpox and tuberculosis.

And the struggle for trade preeminence among the tribes and the Europeans would lead to violence -- and war.

SOON AFTER they arrived in Plymouth in 1620, the Pilgrims forged an alliance with the Wampanoag chief Osamequin, better known as Massasoit. This angered the Narragansetts, who had been fighting with the Wampanoags over trading rights in Narragansett Bay.

As a warning, the Narragansett sachems sent a bundle of arrows tied with a snake skin to the Plymouth Colony.

The English sent it back -- full of powder and shot.

The Indians greatly outnumbered the Pilgrims at first. But in 1629, the Great Migration began.

In the next decade, some 20,000 English men and women settled in the region and built satellite towns in Connecticut and northern Rhode Island. In the Massachusetts Bay colony alone, the English population doubled in just six years, to 13,000 by the mid-1640s.

Roger Williams, the son of a shopkeeper, landed in Boston Harbor on Feb. 5, 1631. He preached in Salem and Plymouth but was banished from Massachusetts after he questioned the purity of the New England churches -- and the colonists' right to seize Indian land in the name of the king and Christendom.

He mortgaged his home, fled Salem and acquired land from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomi at the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers, a place he called Providence.

Although he found some of their practices barbaric, Williams befriended the Narragansetts, lodged in their "smoakie holes" to learn their language, and often represented them in their dealings with the other colonies.

The tribe called the English Chauquaquock, or "knife-men."

LESS THAN SEVEN YEARS after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the English colonists declared war on the Pequots.

Charging the Pequots with the murder of two ship captains, the United Colonies sent John Endicott on a military expedition to Block Island where soldiers burned wigwams and stores of corn.

Endicott then marched to Connecticut and demanded that the Pequots give him wampum, hostages and the identities of those who killed the English traders.

The Pequots refused.

Before dawn on May 26, 1637, an English regiment attacked a fortified Pequot settlement at Mystic.

Approaching from the west and south, English officers set fire to the wigwams inside. The flames met in the center and "blazed most terribly," wrote Capt. John Underhill. "Many were burnt in the fire, both men, women and children." Those who fled were met with guns and swords. As many as 700 Pequots died in the raid. The bodies were so thick in places "that you could hardly pass along."

Seeking hunting rights on Pequot land, the Narragansetts aided the English in the raid. They had been assured the women and children would not be harmed, and were shocked by the carnage.

Should Christians show more mercy? asked Underhill, if rhetorically. Not in this case, he concluded. "We have sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings."

THE NARRAGANSETTS received nothing for their help.

Instead, Connecticut authorities summoned Sachem Miantonomi to Hartford in 1638 to sign a treaty under which the Narragansetts lost all rights to Pequot land. Future conflicts, the English said, would be settled by the colonists, not tribes.

Four years later, Miantonomi went to eastern Long Island seeking an alliance with the Montauks against the colonists.

Different tribes must stand together, he warned, "otherwise we shall all be gone shortly."

Once, he said, the tribes had plenty of skins; the plains and woods and coves were full of deer, turkeys and fish.

"But these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved."

Miantonomi's plea went unheeded.

A year later, he was captured by the Mohegans. Officials with the United Colonies of New England saw an opportunity to eliminate the feared Indian and asked the Mohegans to kill him.

Miantonomi's killer cut a piece of flesh from his shoulder and ate it.

By favoring the smaller Mohegan tribe and the beaten Pequots, the English were able to undermine the power of the Narragansetts, whom they regarded as potential enemies.

THE NEW ENGLAND power base changed further after the death in 1660 of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief.

A longtime friend of the English, he was succeeded by Wamsutta, his eldest son. The English gave Wamsutta and his younger brother, Metacomet, classical names -- Alexander and Philip.

In 1662, Alexander was summoned to Duxbury to answer charges of plotting against the English. Shortly after being interrogated, he died.

Philip succeeded him. But the world his father had known -- a world that would be later canonized in the story of the First Thanksgiving -- was gone.

Indian lawbreakers were "dragged off to an English jail, examined by a stern-faced English tribunal, and punished in a humiliating way before a crowd of jeering English townspeople," historian Douglas Leach wrote in Flintlock and Tomahawk. "They naturally felt abused."

Questioned by the English, Philip promised to remain peaceful. Some writers have suggested Philip did not want war.

But Leach imagines a different response.

Philip had a firm will, was ambitious and proud-spirited, and was quick to resent an affront to his dignity, he wrote.

"Within his breast there burned a sullen spark of dissatisfaction fed by the ever-growing power of the white men, who were slowly but relentlessly squeezing the Indians to death, while rebuking them for their savage ways."

ABOUT A WEEK after the Indians attacked Swansea in 1675, a group of soldiers swept the Mount Hope peninsula, but Philip had fled his home. Instead, they found the severed heads and hands of English settlers -- "gash'd and ghostly objects" -- hung on poles.

As the war progressed, other Northeastern Indians -- Nipmucks, Pocumtucks, and Abenakis -- joined Philip's campaign or fought the English for reasons of their own.

Terrified colonists in outlying towns abandoned their crops and homes to crowd into local garrison houses. From the fortified safe houses, they could see smoke rising from their burning farms. Families were killed or captured and tortured.

By the end of the war, one of the bloodiest in American history, the Indians had raided or burned 25 English towns, more than half the colonists' settlements in New England.

SOME NARRAGANSETT braves joined Philip in the fighting. But most of the Narragansetts remained neutral, and even signed treaties with Colonial officials after the start of the war.

Miantonomi's son, Canonchet, had also grown weary of one-sided treaties with the English, historians say. He knew, too, that some Wampanoag prisoners were being sold into slavery.

In October 1675, Massachusetts officials demanded Canonchet surrender any Wampanoag refugees. "No," he reportedly answered, "not a Wampanoag, nor the paring of a Wampanoag's nail."

On Sunday, Dec. 19, the United Colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts and Connecticut sent a militia of more than 1,100 soldiers and Indians through deep snow to the Great Swamp in West Kingston, where the tribe had fortified a winter settlement.

The militia marched across the icy swamp, fired on the Narragansetts and burned their fort, killing men, women and children as they ran from the flaming wigwams.

At one point, Captain Benjamin Church followed those who had fled into the swamp. "He soon met with a broad bloody track, where the enemy had fled with their wounded," he wrote later.

Early writers and later historians disagree on the number of casualties. The United Colonies lost anywhere from 20 to 70 men; 150 to 200 were wounded.

The Narragansetts suffered much greater losses -- nearly 100 warriors and between 300 and 1,000 women, children and old men, according to different accounts.

Even by the most conservative numbers, the death toll was the highest of any battle in the war.

"It was a dark day in our history, but only one," Sekatau says. Colonial soldiers continued to hunt and kill Narragansett men, women and children in New England, she says.

Harvard Prof. Jill Lepore says that colonists, who considered swamps "hideous and dangerous places" and the most "un-English land in all the New World," refused to consider the settlement a home.

Thus "the colonists absolved themselves of any possible violation of the laws of war in destroying them," Lepore says. If wigwams were not houses, and settlements were not towns but camps, then fights in swamps were "courageous battles" -- not "massacres."

The attack on Great Swamp brought all Narragansetts into the war. In January, they attacked Pawtuxet.

On March 29, 1676, a party of Narragansetts burned 103 of the 123 houses in Providence. Roger Williams, who watched his house burn from the outskirts of town, asked them why.

The Narragansetts had no choice, they said. "You have driven us out of our own countrie, and then pursued us to our great miserie, and to your own, and we are forced to live upon you."

The massacre became a rallying point for the English, who began to win more battles in the following months, in part because military leaders such as Church used Indian scouts to find enemies, and adopted an Indian style of warfare to defeat them.

Philip was killed in a dawn raid the following August. Church ordered several Indians to drag Philip's corpse -- "a doleful, great, naked dirty beast" -- out of a bog. An executioner cut his body into quarters with a hatchet. His head was taken to Plymouth and mounted on a pole.

THE DEATH of King Philip ended the major fighting between the English and the Indians in southern New England.

But it brought no peace to the Narragansetts. Once 40,000 strong, they now numbered less than 1,000, historians say.

Some merged with the Niantics, a group in southwestern Rhode Island who had remained neutral during the war, into a combined tribe that was known as the Narragansett.

Others joined tribes in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin.

The war "led to the breakdown of a nation," says Sekatau.

Devastated and dispersed, those who remained fought to keep their beliefs and culture alive.

The Narragansetts, who for centuries had moved freely between their winter and summer homes, who had hunted and fished southern New England and controlled the region's commerce, now found themselves shackled by state laws, curfews, fences -- and worse.