Philip was not the only one seeking an alliance with the Mohawks. The governor of New York, Edmund Andros, also hoped to get them on his side. Unlike the Puritan magistrates, who viewed all Indians as potential enemies, Andros saw the Mohawks and the rest of the Iroquois as a powerful independent group that must be dealt with diplomatically rather than through force. Andros and the Iroquois were in the midst of creating what became known as the Covenant Chain, a partnership between the colony and the Iroquois that would stand for generations. It became Andros’s mission to persuade the Mohawks that Philip and the tribes to the east were a threat to that alliance. sometime in late February, the Mohawks attacked Philip’s forces in schaghticoke. By all accounts, it was a rout. On March 4, Governor Andros witnessed the triumphant return of the Mohawks to Albany. In addition to plenty of prisoners, they proudly showed all the scalps of the Indians they had killed.
Once again, Philip’s forces had been decimated and were on the run. This time they headed east, back to the Connecticut River. The future of the war was in others’ hands.
◆ The title page and first page of Genesis from John Eliot’s Bible, translated into the Wampanoag language for the Praying Indians.
◆◆◆ His name was Job Kattenanit. He was a Praying Indian who had been sent to Deer Island. Before he had been transported to the island, his village had been attacked by the Nipmucks, who’d taken his three children captive. By December, Job, who was a widower, was desperate to find his children, so he and another Praying Indian named James volunteered to become spies for the English. Their mission was to join the Nipmucks at Menameset, the village near Brookfield to which Philip had fled after escaping from Plymouth, and learn anything they could about the Indians’ plans for the winter. If Job was lucky, he might also make contact with his three children. It was a dangerous task to be sure, but James and Job could truthfully tell the Nipmucks that they had been so abused by the English that they had no choice but to leave Deer Island.
James was the first to report back to the English on January 24. He said that the Nipmucks had at first threatened to kill him and Job, but a sachem who had fought with James against the Mohawks several years earlier spoke in his defense, and they had been allowed to live. Job had found his children, who were all still alive, and he had decided to remain with them at Menameset for as long as possible. James reported to Daniel Gookin, the superintendent of the Praying Indians, that the Nipmucks had “rejoiced much” when they learned that the Narragansetts had been forced to join their struggle. Now that most of the English towns along the Massachusetts portion of the Connecticut River had been abandoned, the Indians planned to attack the settlements to the east, beginning with Lancaster. James even knew the details of how the Nipmucks planned to do it. First they would destroy the bridge that was the only entrance to the town. Knowing that there was no way for English reinforcements to reach it, the Indians could easily burn the settlement.
Much of what James said was confirmed by other reports, but the Massachusetts authorities chose to ignore his warnings as the untrustworthy testimony of just another Indian. Then, at ten o’clock on the night of February 9, Daniel Gookin was awakened by an urgent pounding on the door of his home in Cambridge.
It was Job. Like James before him, he had traveled with “rackets on his feet” through the snow of the western frontier. He was starving, exhausted, and fearful of what might happen to his children, whom he had been forced to leave with the Nipmucks, but he felt a responsibility to tell Gookin that everything James had reported was true. Four hundred Nipmucks and Narragansetts were about to descend on Lancaster, and there was very little time. The attack was scheduled to begin the next day, February 10, at daybreak.
Gookin leaped out of bed and sent a messenger to Marlborough, where Captain samuel Wadsworth and about forty troops were stationed. The messenger rode all that night, and by morning Wadsworth and his men were riding furiously for Lancaster, about ten miles away. As both James and Job had predicted, the bridge had been set on fire, but Wadsworth and his troops were able to get their horses across it. Up ahead the English soldiers could see smoke rising into the sky and hear the shouts of the Indians and the firing of muskets. The attack had already begun.
◆◆◆ Mary Rowlandson was thirty-eight years old and the mother of three children—Joseph, eleven; Mary, ten; and sarah, six. In a few years’ time she would be the author of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, an account of her capture by the Indians that became one of America’s first bestsellers. But on February 10, 1676, she was simply the wife of Lancaster’s minister, John Rowlandson, who was away in Boston begging the Puritan authorities to provide his town with some protection.
On the morning of February 10, the residents of Lancaster had taken the precaution of gathering in five different garrisons, one of which included the Rowlandson home, which was built beside a hill, with a barn nearby. When the Indians attacked at daybreak, there were between forty and fifty men, women, and children assembled in the Rowlandson garrison.
First they heard the musket fire in the distance. When they looked cautiously out the windows, they could see that several houses were already burning. They could hear shouts and screams as the Indians worked their way from house to house until suddenly they, too, were under attack.
Dozens of Indians climbed up on the barn roof and on the hill behind the house and began firing on the garrison “so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail.” In no time at all, three of the men stationed at the windows had been hit, one of them quite badly in the jaw. soon enough, the roof of the house was on fire. “Now is the dreadful hour come,” she remembered. “some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head if we stirred out.” Mothers and children were “crying out for themselves and one another, ‘Lord, what shall we do?’”
With six-year-old sarah in her arms and her other two children and a niece gathered around her, Mary decided “to go forth and leave the house.” But as they approached the doorway, the Indians unleashed a round of “shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had taken a handful of stones and threw them.” Mary and the children paused, but with the flames roaring behind them, they had no choice but to push ahead, even though they could see the Indians waiting for them with their muskets, hatchets, and spears. Her sister’s husband John, already wounded, was the first to die. The Indians shouted and began to strip his body of clothes as they continued firing at anyone who dared leave the house. Mary was then hit in the side, the bullet passing through her and into sarah’s abdomen. Her nephew William’s leg was broken by a bullet, and he was soon killed with a hatchet. “Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen,” she wrote, “standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.” Rowlandson’s oldest sister, who had not yet left the house and had just seen her son and brother-in-law killed, cried out, “Lord let me die with them!” Almost immediately, she was struck by a bullet and fell down dead across the entrance of the house.
An Indian grabbed Rowlandson and told her to come with him. Indians had also seized her children Joseph and Mary and were pulling them in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, Captain Wadsworth and his troopers had just arrived, and the Indians had decided it was time to leave. Mary begged for her children but was told that if she went along quietly, they would not be harmed. she and twenty-three others were taken prisoner that day and so began what she later described as “that grievous captivity.”
◆ A 1771 woodcut depicting the attack on Mary Rowlandson’s house.
◆◆◆ They spent the first night on a hill overlooking the smoking ruins of Lancaster. An empty house stood on the hill, and Rowlandson asked if she and her injured daughter might sleep inside. “What, will you love Englishmen still?” mocked the Indians, who celebrated by feasting on roasted cattle while Rowlandson and the others were given nothing to eat. “Oh the roaring and singing and d
ancing and yelling of those black creatures in the night,” she remembered, “which made the place a lively resemblance of hell.”
They left early the next morning. Rowlandson’s wounds had become infected, making it impossible for her to carry her daughter. One of the Indians had a horse, and he offered to hold sarah, who whimpered, “I shall die, I shall die” as Rowlandson staggered behind “with sorrow that cannot be expressed.” That night she sat in the snow with her daughter in her lap. “[T]he Lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful spirit,” she remembered, “and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning.”
That afternoon they arrived at the great Nipmuck gathering spot of Menameset. There Rowlandson met Robert Pepper, a captive now for more than five months. Pepper told her to lay oak leaves on her wound, a Native remedy that had helped his injured leg and would also cure Rowlandson. But there was nothing to be done for little sarah, who had caught a deadly fever. “I sat much alone with a poor wounded child in my lap,” she wrote, “which moaned night and day, having nothing to revive the body or cheer the spirits.” Finally on February 18, nine days after being shot, sarah died.
That night, Rowlandson slept in the snow with sarah in her arms. The next morning, the Indians buried her child on the top of a nearby hill. “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me,” Rowlandson wrote, “in preserving me in the use of my reason and sense, in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life.” Instead, she went in search of her other two children.
There were more than two thousand Indians gathered at Menameset. Rowlandson had learned that her ten-year-old daughter Mary was somewhere nearby. That day as she wandered from wigwam to wigwam, she found her daughter. But when Mary began to sob uncontrollably, the girl’s Indian master told Rowlandson that she must leave—“a heart-cutting word to me.”
“I could not sit still in this condition,” she remembered, “but kept walking from one place to another.” she prayed to the Lord that He would show her “some sign, and hope of some relief.” soon after, she heard her son’s voice.
Joseph Rowlandson had been taken to a village about six miles away. But his master’s wife had agreed to bring him all the way to Menameset to look for his mother, and “with tears in his eyes, he asked me whether his sister sarah was dead ... and prayed ... that I would not be troubled in reference to himself.” It was too brief a visit, but Rowlandson could not help but interpret her son’s appearance as God’s “gracious answer to my earnest and unfeigned desire.”
The next day, February 22, several hundred warriors returned from a raid on the town of Medfield, twenty miles southwest of Boston. There had been about two hundred soldiers in the town, but even they were not enough to prevent the Indians from burning close to fifty houses and killing more than a dozen inhabitants. Even worse, the Indians had the nerve to leave a note. “Know by this paper, that the Indians that thou hast provoked to wrath and anger, will war this twenty-one years if you will; there are many Indians yet, we come three hundred at this time. You must consider the Indians lost nothing but their life; you must lose your fair houses and cattle.”
When the war party returned to Menameset, the warriors shouted a total of twenty-three times to indicate how many English had been killed. “Oh! The outrageous roaring and hooping that there was,” Rowlandson wrote. “Oh, the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was over some Englishmen’s scalps that they had taken.” One of the Indians had brought back a Bible from the raid, and he offered it to Rowlandson. she immediately turned to chapter 30 of Deuteronomy and read, “though we were scattered from one end of the earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curses upon our enemies.” It was a wonderful gift for the grieving Englishwoman. “I do not desire to live to forget this scripture,” she remembered, “and what comfort it was to me.”
Rowlandson’s master was the Narragansett sachem Quinnapin. Her mistress was Quinnapin’s new wife, Weetamoo, the sachem from Pocasset. After reluctantly joining her brother-in-law Philip, she had fled to the then-neutral Narragansetts. By marrying Quinnapin, who already had two wives but none as important as the Pocasset sachem, Weetamoo was now partners with the Pocassets’ traditional enemy. After the Great swamp Fight, all of them were in this together.
By the middle of February, word had reached Menameset of the Mohawk attack on Philip. The Pokanoket sachem and what was left of his forces were heading to a village site well to the north on the Connecticut River. It was time for the Nipmucks and Narragansetts to meet with Philip and plan for the spring attack. When their scouts informed them that a large Puritan army, including six hundred horsemen, was headed for Menameset, the Nipmucks and Narragansetts immediately broke camp and headed north.
Keeping two thousand Native men, women, and children ahead of an English army on horseback might seem impossible. But as Mary Rowlandson witnessed firsthand, the Indians’ knowledge of the land and their talent for working together made them more than a match for the fastest English forces. As a small group of warriors headed south “to hold the English army in play,” hundreds upon hundreds of Indians picked up their possessions and began to flee. “[T]hey marched on furiously, with their old and with their young. some carried their old decrepit mothers, some carried one and some another. Four of them carried a great Indian upon a bier, but going through a thick wood with him, they were hindered and could make no haste; whereupon they took him upon their backs and carried him, one at a time, till they came to Bacquag River.”
Known today as Miller’s River, the waterway is an eastern branch of the Connecticut. “They quickly fell to cutting dry trees,” Rowlandson wrote, “to make rafts to carry them over the river.” Rowlandson and her master and mistress were among the first to cross the river. The Indians had heaped brush onto the log rafts to protect them from the frigid water, and Rowlandson was thankful that she made it across without wetting her feet, “it being a very cold time.”
It was now the third week of her captivity, and Rowlandson’s hunger was such that she ate what she had earlier called “filthy trash,” from groundnuts and corn husks to the rotting meat of a long-dead horse. Rowlandson was often on the edge of starvation, but so were her captors, whose ability to find food in the winter landscape seemed nothing less than a miracle. “[s]trangely did the Lord provide for them,” she wrote, “that I did not see (all the time that I was among them) one man, woman, or child die with hunger.”
Now that she no longer had her daughter to care for, Rowlandson was expected to work. she was soon knitting a pair of white cotton stockings for her mistress, Weetamoo. As a sachem, Weetamoo wore both English and Native clothing. she was “a severe and proud dame ... bestowing ... as much time as any of the gentry of the land [in dressing herself neatly]: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands.”
Just as the last groups of Indians reached the north bank of the river, the English army, under the command of Major Thomas savage, arrived at the southern bank. But instead of pursuing the Indians across the river, savage chose to do as so many Puritan commanders had done before him and quit the chase. For Rowlandson, it was a crushing turn of events, but the Lord must have had his reasons. “God did not give them courage or activity to go after us,” she wrote; “we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance.”
The Indians continued north for several days until they reached the Connecticut River near the town of Northfield. Philip, Rowlandson was told, was waiting for them on the opposite bank. “When I was in the canoe,” she recalled, “I could not but be amazed at the numerous crew of pagans that were on the ... other side. When I came ashore, they gathered all about me ... [and] asked one another questions and laughed and rejoiced over their gains and victories.” For the first time of her captivity, Rowlandson started to cry. “Although I had met with so much affliction,” she wrote, “and m
y heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight, but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished. But now I may say as Psalm 137, ‘By the Rivers of Babylon ... [I] wept.’”
One of the Indians asked why she was crying. Not knowing what to say, she blurted out that they were going to kill her. “ ‘No,’ said he, ‘none will hurt you.’” soon after, she was given two spoonfuls of cornmeal and told that Philip wanted to speak with her.
It was one of several conversations she would have with the Pokanoket sachem. Despite everything she had heard of Philip’s evil nature, Rowlandson was treated with kindness and respect by the Native leader. In the weeks ahead, she would knit a shirt and cap for Philip’s son and even be invited to dine with the sachem. “I went,” she remembered, “and he gave me a pancake about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten and fried in bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.”
• An elm bowl attributed to King Philip.
Later, in the midst of yet another extended journey, Rowlandson started to lose strength. As she slogged through the knee-deep mud of a swamp, Philip unexpectedly appeared at her side and offered his hand and some words of encouragement. In her book, Rowlandson faithfully records these acts of kindness on Philip’s part. But nowhere does she suggest that the sachem was unfairly hated by her fellow Puritans. Rowlandson had lost her daughter and several other loved ones in the war Philip had started, and nothing—not a pancake or a hand offered in friendship—could ever bring them back.
On March 9, Philip met for the first time with Canonchet, the young leader of the Narragansetts. As they all knew, the victories they had so far won at Lancaster and Medfield were meaningless if they did not find a way to feed their people. They needed seed corn to plant crops in the spring. Hidden underground in swansea was a large store of seed. Canonchet volunteered to lead a group of warriors and women back into the very heart of Plymouth Colony to retrieve it. As the women returned with the seed to the Connecticut River valley, Canonchet would remain in Plymouth and bring the war back to where it had begun.