King Philip's War: Metacom's Blood Moon Revolt and the Mohawk Ambush

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Metacom, called King Philip by the English, became Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag around 1662 after the deaths of his father Massasoit and brother Wamsutta. By then the Great Migration had brought tens of thousands of Puritans, whose free roaming pigs and cattle destroyed clam beds and cornfields, and whose doctrine of vacuum domicilium treated unfenced land as legally empty. Colonists bypassed powerful female leaders such as Weetamoo and Awashonks to get land deeds from compliant male relatives, while missionaries like John Eliot pressed conversion. In 1675 the Harvard educated translator John Sassamon warned Plymouth of a coming war, and his body was soon found under the ice of Assawompset Pond in disputed Nemasket territory.

A jury of 12 colonists and six Native elders convicted three Wampanoag men, including a senior counselor to Metacom, and they were hanged in June 1675. Fighting broke out near Swansea, and a total lunar eclipse on June 27 served as a signal. Metacom united Nipmuc, Narragansett and Podunk allies, and his forces attacked more than half of the region's colonial towns. In December 1675 militia crossed a frozen Rhode Island swamp and burned the Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp Massacre, killing an estimated 600. Metacom's winter mission to recruit the Mohawks near Schaghticoke, New York, ended in a Mohawk attack, and on August 12, 1676, he was shot by John Alderman while hunted by Captain Benjamin Church's militia.

• The Narragansetts under Canonchet joined the war after the Great Swamp attack and counterattacked in spring.
• Women leaders organized retreats of noncombatants into swamps where English horses could not follow.
• Metacom's body was beheaded and quartered, and his head was displayed on a pike in Plymouth for more than 20 years.
• An estimated 30 percent of the regional Native population died, compared with about 0.75 percent of colonists.
• Metacom's wife and son were among the hundreds sold into slavery and shipped to places including Bermuda, Barbados, Spain and the Azores.