Mayflower

to threaten war in 1671, p. 53. Hugh Cole’s 1671 report of seeing Narragansett Indians at Mount Hope, where the Indians were “employed in making bows and arrows and half-pikes, and fixing up guns” is in Collections of the MHS, vol. 6, 1799, p. 211, and is cited in Richard Cogley’s account of John Eliot’s involvement in Philip’s negotiations with the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts in 1671, in John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians, pp. 200–203. Francis Baylies’s Historical Memoir of…New-Plymouth, vol. 2, edited by Samuel Drake, provides the most detailed account of what happened between the Pokanokets and the English in 1671, particularly at Taunton; Baylies quotes the reproof Massachusetts-Bay officials sent Plymouth: “[T]he treatment you have given him, and proceedings towards him, do not render him such a subject [of your colony],” p. 23. I have also looked to Samuel Drake’s account of the events of that year in OIC, pp. 63–86, and Jenny Pulsipher’s Subjects unto the Same King, pp. 94–100. Much of the documentary record from this crucial summer is contained in PCR, vol. 5, pp. 63–80. Josiah Winslow refers to Philip’s supposed scheme to abduct and ransom both himself and Governor Prence in a note on a March 24, 1671, letter from Governor Bellingham to Governor Prence, Winslow Papers II, MHS. William Hubbard in HIWNE writes of the unnamed warrior who disavowed Philip after the sachem capitulated at Taunton in April 1671: “[O]ne of his captains, of far better courage and resolution than himself, when he saw [Philip’s] cowardly temper and disposition, [did] fling down his arms, calling him a white-livered cur, or to that purpose, and saying that he would never own him again, or fight under him, and from that Time hath turned to the English, and hath continued to this day a faithful and resolute soldier in this quarrel,” pp. 58–59. Hubbard in HIWNE also describes how the son of the Nipmuck sachem Matoonas “being vexed in his mind that the design against the English, intended to begin [in] 1671, did not take place, out of mere malice and spite against them, slew an English man traveling along the road,” p. 44. William Harris in A Rhode Islander Reports on King Philip’s War, edited by Douglas Leach, claimed that Philip’s plan to attack the English in 1671 was prevented “twice at least by great rains, which afterward was made known by some Indians,” p. 21. The September 1, 1671, letter from James Walker to Governor Prence describing Philip’s drunken rant against Sassamon is in MHS Collections, 1st ser., vol. 6, 1799, pp. 196–97.
    Concerning the state of the Pokanokets’ war plans after 1671 Samuel Drake writes, “Much…was to be done, before a war could be undertaken with any prospect of success on their part. The Wampanoags, who were to begin it, were almost without firearms, and it would require much time to obtain a supply,” OIC, p. 86. Jeremy Bangs describes Philip’s final sell-off of his land holdings around Mount Hope in Indian Deeds, pp. 162–65. Hubbard in HIWNE states that some Narragansett Indians later revealed that their tribe had promised “to rise [with the Pokanokets] with four thousand fighting men in the spring of this present year 1676,” p. 58. William Harris in A Rhode Islander Reports on King Philip’s War, edited by Douglas Leach, wrote that the Pokanokets on Mount Hope had “laid up great quantities of corn, not in the usual manner, but a year ahead of time, as a supply for the war…. The intention of the Indians is alsorevealed by their accumulation of powder, shot, and arrows. The English perceiving this and inquiring about it, the Indians pretended it was a preparation against the Mohawks, but actually it was aimed only at the English,” p. 23. Samuel Drake refers to the annulment of the order to prohibit selling powder to the Indians in the fall of 1674 in OIC, p. 96.
    For information on the murder trial of John Sassamon, I have looked to Yasuhide Kawashima’s Igniting King Philip’s War, pp. 88–111; Jill Lepore’s “Dead Men Tell No Tales” in American Quarterly, December 1994; James P. Ronda and Jeanne Ronda’s “The Death of John Sassamon: An Exploration in Writing New England History” in American Indian Quarterly; and James Drake’s “Symbol of a