Rogue History

- There's a lot about the first Thanksgiving that's a myth.

For one, they were eating corn porridge and eels, not turkey and pumpkin pie.

It is true, however, that Wampanoag Chief Massasoit managed to foster peace between the pilgrims and his people, but that piece wouldn't last.

Half a century later, his son known as King Philip united Indigenous tribes in an all out war on the colonists of New England.

What would follow was not just the deadliest conflict of the colonial period, but a defining moment in a centuries long battle between the United States and Indigenous people.

I'm Joel Cook and this is "Rogue History: Rebels & Revolutionaries."

So who violated the spirit of the original Thanksgiving treaty first?

I'll give you one guess.

It's a hard one, I know.

The second generation of English colonists was no longer content to practice their religion in privacy or trade for survival.

Their population was absolutely exploding.

They wanted land, lots of it, and they were developing an entire legal framework to legitimize straight up taking it.

Until this point, Chief Massasoit had a very diplomatic relationship with the colonists.

But as the decades wore on, the English continuously tested the boundaries of treaties, eventually breaking them outright.

This is where Chief Massasoit's son, King Philip, comes into the picture.

His Wampanoag name was Metacom but his father encouraged two of his sons to adopt English names as a sign of respect for English customs.

Thus, he became Philip.

Massasoit died in 1661 when Metacom was about 23 years old.

His older son, Wamsutta, known to the English as Alexander, became chief of the Wampanoag.

But here's where things get really sketchy.

After being summoned to Plymouth, Alexander died mysteriously.

Many Wampanoag suspected poisoning.

Previously harmonious relations were growing chillier by the day.

When Philip became chief after his brother died, he initially continued his father's diplomatic approach and the colonists kept pushing his buttons.

By the 1670s, colonists livestock were destroying Wampanoag crops.

They were claiming land through dubious purchases, and Plymouth courts were asserting jurisdiction over Indigenous affairs.

Basically, they were acting like they owned the place.

In 1667, Plymouth established yet another settlement on Indigenous land.

Rather than fight, Philip negotiated an accepted payment for the land, but he was quietly reaching a breaking point.

He used the money from the sale to buy weapons, preparing for what might come as if things weren't already tense enough.

In 1675, a colonial court condemned three Wampanoag men to death and executed them.

Their alleged crime?

Murdering an Indigenous Christian convert who had been spying on King Philip for the colonists.

This incident highlighted a growing fracture at the time.

Some Indigenous were converting to Christianity and spending a lot of time around the colonists, and they weren't always loyal to their original communities.

Remember that, it'll be important later.

For the Wampanoag, the execution of three of their own was the final straw.

The Wampanoag had their own law and order systems, their own way of punishing transgressions.

The colonists really thought they could just kidnap their people and put them to death with no consequences?

Philip hit his limit.

He believed that co-existence was no longer possible.

The total subjugation of Indigenous people was inevitable unless they fought back.

Of course, this war was preventable.

Even the English Parliament warned the colonists that they wouldn't support a war and caustioned them to practice restraint, just seemed like an unnecessary hassle.

But in an early sign of things to come, the colonists chose to operate, shall we say, independently of Great Britain.

They felt they could handle this little rebellion on their own.

How hard could it be?

Philip understood the importance of building alliances across tribal lines, something that had never been done at this scale against colonial aggressors.

His coalition eventually brought together the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Podunk, Narraganset, Nashaway, and Wabanaki Tribes forging an alliance that stretched across all of New England.

In June of 1675, Wampanoag warriors attacked their first settlement, marking the official start of what would become known as King Philip's war.

By winter, the colonists lived in genuine terror.

Philip's forces had attacked over a dozen colonial settlements across New England.

In March 1676, they burned Providence, Rhode Island to the ground.

What scared the colonists most was the military sophistication of Philip's forces.

Indigenous warriors used gorilla tactics that the English trained in European style warfare were completely unprepared for.

Indigenous warriors were superior marksmen who had grown up hunting with precision weapons like bows and arrows, spears, tomahawks, and war clubs.

English militia training focused on firing large volleys indiscriminately, not hitting precise targets.

So while the colonists were the ones who brought guns to the new world, King Philip's forces were already way better at using them.

Indigenous forces would appear, strike, then vanish across rivers after destroying bridges behind them, leaving the colonists stranded while the Indigenous taunted them from the far shore.

As one Indigenous warrior mocked the English, they always keep in a heap together, so it is as easy to hit them as to hit a house.

The Battle of Bloody Brook perfectly demonstrated both Indigenous tactical brilliance and English overconfidence.

As the story goes, during the battle, a bunch of colonists were traipsing through the forest when they stopped, set down their weapons, and started picking grapes.

I literally cannot make this up.

They were ambushed and slaughtered by about 700 Indigenous warriors lying in wait.

King Philip's war was the deadliest conflict of the colonial period in terms of the percent of populations that were killed.

Casualty rates of this magnitude wouldn't be seen again until the American Civil War.

And for a good chunk of it, the colonists were suffering most of the casualties.

If they wanted to stay alive and stay in New England, the colonists needed to get it together.

No more missing every shot, no more huddling together out in the open, and no more stopping for sweet treats.

And if Philip was going to coordinate between tribes, they needed to coordinate between colonies too.

The winter of 1675 marked the turning point.

English forces from Massachusetts and Connecticut finally got on the same page and attacked an Indigenous fort.

The fighters were elsewhere and the colonists killed a bunch of women, children, elderly, and wounded people.

But what was clearly an atrocity, even by the standards of the day, gave the English momentum to keep fighting.

They also evolved.

Remember the Indigenous Christian converts from earlier?

Well, the English did, and they asked for their help.

Colonial commanders began fielding mixed units that combined colonial soldiers with Indigenous allies who understood the terrain and gorilla tactics.

The results were dramatic.

As one Puritan minister put it, "Where Indians are employed, there have been the greatest success, if not the only success."

By summer 1676, Philip's forces were exhausted and scattered.

Then came personal tragedy.

Philip's uncle was killed and his wife and their young son captured and sold into slavery.

Philip's own bravery and resolve had been the backbone of this struggle.

The loss was devastating, not just for him but for the cause.

A mixed colonial army tracked Philip to Mount Hope, his ancestral stronghold.

The hill from which his father Massasoit had reigned when he welcomed the pilgrims would now be the place where Philip made his last stand.

At dawn on August 12th 1676, the colonists attacked the camp.

Philip grabbed his gun and rolled down the hillside into the swamp where two colonists waited.

An Englishman whose gun misfired, no comment, and an Indigenous Christian convert who shot two bullets through Philip's heart.

King Philip's death marked the end of the war, but also the end of any pretense of coexistence.

Gone were the days of Massasoit's cooperative trading posts and shared meals.

In their place were mutual suspicion and unilateral domination.

Philip's body was quartered.

His head was cut off and mounted on a pike in Plymouth, where it remained for over 20 years as a trophy and brutal warning to Indigenous people not to rebel against the colonial status quo.

The war's end sparked widespread violence against Indigenous people across New England.

Colonists launched unprompted attacks on Indigenous villages using King Philip's war as a justification for preemptive strikes.

What had once been a war now became a genocide.

As a result of this sustained violence, Indigenous political and military power were nearly extinguished.

Of the roughly 18,000 Indigenous people living in New England before the conflict, approximately 40% were killed, enslaved, or forced to flee.

Several tribes, including the Wampanoag, were almost entirely wiped out.

And the colonists weren't just engaging in genocide.

Through it, they were forging a brand new shared identity, an American identity.

The shared experience of coordinated action across colony lines gave these colonists confidence that they could govern themselves, fight their own wars, and make their own decisions about expansion.

They had first defeated, and then terrorized Indigenous people, largely without help from England, and sometimes against English wishes for restraint.

Exactly as century later, American revolutionaries would use the specter of King Philip to criticize British authorities as a similar evil.

This propaganda completely disrespected the countless Indigenous people, Wampanoag among them, who fought for the patriot cause.

It wasn't until a generation after the revolution that writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper began to speak about Philip and the Wampanoag as patriots.

But those shifts in tone didn't bring back the losses or the land.

King Philip's war was a determined struggle by Indigenous people to defend their sovereignty.

Though they fought bravely and very nearly won, the penalty from losing was high, centuries of brutal oppression that continues to this day.

American identity was forged in the crucible of Indigenous genocide.

And part of the founding myth of the nation is that this project was complete, that Americans had become Americans by claiming the New World from its old inhabitants.

Today, Indigenous people's presence is all too often forgotten and denied, and so is their history of resistance.

But that history deserves to be told.

And King Philip deserves to be remembered for what he was: America's first Revolutionary War hero.