Bloody King Philip’s War,For several decades the Puritans of the Plymouth Colony had lived in

Bloody King Philip’s War,For several decades the Puritans of the Plymouth Colony had lived in peace with the Native Americans that surrounded their towns and villages.  However in 1675 that peace would end kicking off one of the bloodiest wars in Colonial American history.By the 1670’s tensions were mounting as the population of Massachusetts swelled to over 80,000.  White settlers demanded more and more native lands, deadly smallpox epidemics became common among native tribes, and worse yet, capture Native Americans were being shipped to the Caribbean as slaves.  All it would take is one spark to ignite a terrible war.That spark occurred the brother of the  Wampanoag Chief Metacomet (known as King Phillip by the English) was murdered by whites.  Metacomet immediately gathered allies among the various New England tribes to make war on the English.  Metacomet was made to answer on the charge that he was inciting rebellion, and warned that Wampanoag land would be confiscated.  The last straw occurred when a Native American missionary was murdered.  Three Wampanoag men were hanged for the murder after a trial, which was seen to infringe on Wampanoag sovereignty.Over the next year a coalition of different tribes attacked the English.  There tactics were brutal, as they would capture town after town, raping the women, pillaging the homestead, and slaughtering every colonist before burning the village or town to the ground.  The English would respond with similar tactics, destroying village after village in a similar brutal manner.  Dozens of English towns were annihilated.  One soldier, George Ingersall, describes one such massacre, “When I came to the place, i found an house burnt down, and six persons killed, and three of the same family could not be found. An old man and a woman were halfe in, and halfe out of the house neer halfe burnt. Their owne Son was shot through the body, and also his head dashed in pieces. The young mans Wife was dead, her head skinned.”It is unknown how many Native American villages suffered similar fates.  The attacks on the colonists continued to the point that they were even able to lay siege to Plymouth itself.  Then supplies and soldiers from England poured in, pushing back the Natives.  The next years would see a bloody guerrilla war in the swamps and backwoods of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.  The Native Americans were expecting supplies from the French in Canada, but they never came.In the end the English won by attrition.  The Native Americans began to starve, die of disease, or exposure while fighting a large English force that had an endless supply of food, clothing, and weapons.  One by one the tribes were either destroyed or forced to surrender.  Metacomet was hunted down by the ranger, Col. Benjamin Church.  On August 12th, 1676 he was shot dead by a Christian Native named John Alderman.  Metacomet’s head was mounted on a pike at the entrance of Fort Plymouth where it stayed for 20 years.  His family would be shipped to Bermuda as slaves.Approximatly 600 English soldiers were killed during the war, but thousands more died of disease or massacre.  Approximately 8% of the white population of the colony had been killed. By contrast, the deadliest war in US history, the Civil War, cost around 2% of the population.  The war was much more devastating for the Native Americans, whose numbers were devastated and were never able to mount serious resistance against the whites in New England. -- source link

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