King Philip's War and the

King Philip's War and the Bloody Birth of New England The path to the formation of the United States of America is littered with the dead of centuries passed. As European colonists occupied the various regions of the continent previously inhabited by innumerable native tribes, they cleared a path for the development of America's cities and states through an unending series of skirmishes, battles and outright wars. These wars would shape the future of America and blot out the future of the natives.

King Philip's War is a prominent example of one such conflict, perpetuated between the Puritan colonists of 17th Century New England and an alliance of regional tribes ultimately pushed to hostilities by the exploitation, abuse and encroachment of the New Englanders. Persisting between the summer of 1675 and the summer of 1676, the war stretched across one brutal winter as blood spilled on both sides at a rate that actually marks this as the deadliest conflict per capita in American history.

(Tougias, 1) The war between the New England colonists and the Metacom tribe of the Wampanoag Tribal Alliance, one that would ultimately come to include a bevy of tribal participants aligned on either side, was instigated and capitulated much in the same way as countless other such wars throughout the so-called New World. This owes to the conflict of interests between colonists and natives, as well as the inherent perception of racial superiority which permeated the European perspective.

"In autumn of 1675, the Nipmucks and Wampanoags were joined on the warpath by tribes that lived along the Connecticut River including the Pocumtucks (residing in along the northern part of the river), Squakheags (residing in present day Northfield) and the Norwottocks (greater Hadley)." (Tougias, 1) Indeed, the intention of those who had initially sought the New World was to achieve great wealth, to find singular dominance in a bounteous and untouched wilderness and to do so with reckless determination regardless of preexistent inhabitance.

Of course, the reality was a harsh frontier that varied wildly. Still, it was the habit of those writing back to Europe on the subject to portray what they had found as matching that which they had aspired to find. They did so even when evidence suggests this to have been an exaggeration or distortion.

Cronon (1983) notes that "just as the habitats of New England formed a patchwork quilt on the landscape, the plenty of one being matched by the poverty of another, so too did those habitats change from month to month, the abundance of one season giving few clues to what a place might be like at other times of the year." (Cronon, 35) This would be an especially important and evolving reality for the New Englanders who attempted to stake out a claim of ownership as Europeans were wont to do.

Quite to this point, Massasoit, the father of Metcom-mockingly known to the colonists as King Philip on account of his regal mannerisms-would be a great friend to the New Englanders. (Tougias, 1) Tying his tribe to the commercial trade of the new arrivals, he would also help them to survive the severity of the winters in the wilderness of New England.

To this point, the Native Americans that had persisted successfully on the land for so many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans had done so on the strength of sustainable lifestyle habits. Among them, natives tended to engage the line in a decidedly less dominant fashion, acting as a member of the ecosystem rather than as its overseer. This is captured particularly by the distinction in the way natives and colonists approached forested lands.

The natives, Cronon tells, had long used controlled forest fires to remove undergrowth and prevent larger more catastrophic fires from striking unexpectedly. This would be misapprehended by colonists, who instead viewed the method of sustainability as an example of how lands could be expediently clearer of forest for the building of settlements. (Cronon, 118) The perspective on commodities in the New World would be especially problematic to the stasis of the Native American lifestyle.

For the colonists, encountering wildlife for pelts, wood and other building materials, free-growing harvestable items and other such 'merchantable commodities' demonstrated an incredible opportunity to simply reap the land for free goods. In the face of shortages of such goods in the long- inhabited and urbanized Europe, the prices of these commodities would rise significantly, providing settlers with a motive to gather up commodities and impose pricing upon them. This would, of course, create a new economic system from which Native Americans would be very much excluded.

The new pricing of items previously reaped for free and in a sustainable fashion would help to set off the isolation still experienced by Indians today. It would be under these conditions that the previously friendly relationship sustained between the New Englanders and the Metacoms would begin to break down.

In half a century, tensions had devolved to the extent that the Natives who had previously been enemies such began to establish a common ground in raiding colonial settlements responsible for pushing them further and further to the perimeters of the their land. As noted by the Pilgrim Hall Museum (2005), "tensions had long existed due to the two cultures' different ways of life. Colonists' livestock trampling Native cornfields was a continuing problem. Competition for resources created friction.

Regional economic changes forced many Natives to sell their land." (Pilgrim Hall Museum, 1) These tensions were only further exacerbated by the religious proclivities of the Puritans, historically notorious for their proselytizing of other cultures. They helped to drive a wedge between natives both between trips and within families as some subscribed to the Christian teachings foisted upon them by the Europeans and others defiantly sought to sustain their own cultures and spiritual doctrines.

Metacom would be of this latter disposition, and would respond with increasing hostility toward the affronts of the invading New Englanders, helping to organize acts of aggression on the settlements still struggling to gain a foothold on survival. The importance of the division between resistant Native Americans and those who had come to be called Praying Indians in light of the subscription to Christianity would be reflected in the onset of the period defined as war.

Indeed, a firsthand report of the hostilities form the colonists' perspective is attributed to one Edward Randolph, who tells that "various are the reports and conjectures of the causes of the present Indian war.

Some impute it to an imprudent zeal in the magistrates of Boston to christianize those heathen before they were civilized and injoyning them the strict observation of their lawes, which, to a people so rude and licentious, hath proved even intolerable, and that the more, for that while the magistrates, for their profit, put the lawes severely in execution against the Indians, the people, on the other side, for lucre and gain, entice and provoke the Indians to the breach thereof, especially to drunkenness, to which those people are so generally addicted that they will strip themselves to their skin to have their fill of rum and brandy." (Dorsey, 1) This primary quote reflects not just the set of factors which helped to instigate the war but also the low cultural regard in which the natives were held by the colonists.

When an native sympathetic to the colonists named John Sassamon was murdered for betrayal by the Metacom Indians in 1675, outright war proceeded and was uniquely brutal on both sides. There would be myriad routs and triumphs for both sides. But in most instances the casualties were a high percentage amongst those committed to the fight on either side. Indeed, according to Pike (2008), "Pierce's Fight Site and Riverwalk Park was the site of one of the fiercest battles of King Philip's War fought between the English Colonists and the.