Mayflower

fighting during King Philip’s War. In Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast, Guy Chet begs to disagree with Malone’s thesis, claiming that the Indians had little influence on the way war was ultimately fought in America. To my mind, John Grenier in The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier convincingly demonstrates that Malone’s thesis cannot be so easily dismissed. Armstrong Starkey’s European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1815 is also useful, as is John Ferling’s A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America.
    All quotations from Church’s narrative in this chapter are from EPRPW, pp. 1–48; the description of Philip’s warriors is from Church, who describes a dance among the Sakonnets in which Awashonks had worked herself into a “foaming sweat.” Perhaps not unexpectedly, there is much conflicting information concerning the outbreak of King Philip’s War. In November 1675 Governor Josiah Winslow and Thomas Hinckley authored “A Brief Narrative of the Beginning and Progress of the Present Trouble between Us and the Indians,” which is in vol. 10 of PCR, pp. 362–64; they maintain that “our innocency made us very secure and confident it would not have broke out into a war.” They were not the only ones who believed that the threat of war had passed. On June 13, 1675, Roger Williams wrote Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr., “[P]raise be God the storm is over. Philip is strongly suspected but the honored court at Plymouth (as we hear) not having evidence sufficient, let matters sleep and the country be in quiet, etc,” Correspondence of Roger Williams, vol. 2, p. 691.
    Patrick Malone discusses the typical modifications made to a garrison house in The Skulking Way of War, p. 96. Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias provide an excellent description of where the various garrisons were located in Swansea in King Philip’s War, pp. 98–103. John Callender in the notes to An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode-Island, published in 1739, writes, “I have heard from some old people, who were familiarly acquainted with the Indians, both before and after the war, that the powwows had likewise given out an other ambiguous oracle…viz., that they promised the Indians would be successful if the English fired the first gun. It is certain the Indians long delayed and designedly avoided firing on the English, and seemed to use all possible means, to provoke the English to fire first,” pp. 73–74. Saltonstall in OIC describes the Indians asking an Englishman to grind their hatchet on Sunday, July 20, p. 126. Increase Mather speaks of June 24 being “a day of solemn humiliation through that colony, by fasting and praying, to entreat the Lord to give success to the present expedition,” in HKPW, p. 54. Josiah Winslow writes of the colony’s innocence respecting the Indians and the fairness of the Sassamon trial in a July 29, 1675, letter to Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr., MHS Collections, 5th ser., vol. 1, pp. 428–29. John Easton writes of the “old man and a lad” shooting at the Indians pilfering a house and killing one of them in “A Relation of the Indian War” in Narratives of the Indian Wars, edited by Charles Lincoln, p. 12. Saltonstall in OIC writes of the scalping and killing of the father, mother, and son, pp. 128–29. On the history of scalping, see James Axtell and William Sturtevant’s “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?” WMQ, 3rd ser., 1980, pp. 451–72. Hubbard in HIWNE describes the eclipse of the moon on June 26, pp. 67–68.
    Concerning Church’s sprint from Taunton to Swansea, Douglas Leach writes in Flintlock and Tomahawk, “Perhaps Church would not have thought himself so clever if the enemy had laid an ambush between him and the main force which he was supposed to be shielding,” p. 38. Saltonstall in OIC describes Samuel Moseley as “an old privateer at Jamaica, an excellent soldier, and an undaunted spirit,” pp. 127–28. George Bodge in Soldiers in King Philip’s War provides a detailed description of Moseley’s activities before and during the war and how he put together his company of volunteers, pp. 59–78. Concerning the relationship between Moseley and