Thus was Philip hurried into "his rebellion"; and he is reported to have
wept as he heard that a white man's blood had been shed. He had kept his
men about him in arms, and had welcomed every stranger; and yet, against
his judgment and his will, he was involved in war. For what prospect had
he of success? The English were united; the Indians had no alliance: the
English made a common cause; half the Indians were allies of the
English, or were quiet spectators of the fight: the English had guns
enough; but few of the Indians were well armed, and they could get no
new supplies: the English had towns for their shelter and safe retreat;
the miserable wigwams of the natives were defenseless: the English had
sure supplies of food; the Indians might easily lose their precarious
stores. Frenzy prompted their rising. They rose without hope, and they
fought without mercy. For them as a nation, there was no to-morrow.
The minds of the English were appalled by the horrors of the impending
conflict, and superstition indulged in its wild inventions. At the time
of the eclipse of the moon, you might have seen the figure of an Indian
scalp imprinted on the centre of its disk. The perfect form of an Indian
bow appeared in the sky. The sighing of the wind was like the whistling
of bullets. Some heard invisible troops of horses gallop through the
air, while others found the prophecy of calamities in the howling of
the wolves.
At the very beginning of danger the colonists exerted their wonted
energy. Volunteers from Massachusetts joined the troops from Plymouth;
and, within a week from the commencement of hostilities, the insulated
Pokanokets were driven from Mount Hope, and in less than a month Philip
was a fugitive among the Nipmucks, the interior tribes of Massachusetts.
The little army of the colonists then entered the territory of the
Narragansetts, and from the reluctant tribe extorted a treaty of
neutrality, with a promise to deliver up every hostile Indian. Victory
seemed promptly assured. But it was only the commencement of horrors.
Canonchet, the chief sachem of the Narragansetts, was the son of
Miantonomoh; and could he forget his father's wrongs? Desolation
extended along the whole frontier. Banished from his patrimony, where
the pilgrims found a friend, and from his cabin, which had sheltered the
exiles, Philip, with his warriors, spread through the country, awakening
their brethren to a warfare of extermination.
The war, on the part of the Indians, was one of ambuscades and
surprises. They never once met the English in open field; but always,
even if eightfold in numbers, fled timorously before infantry. They were
secret as beasts of prey, skillful marksmen, and in part provided with
firearms, fleet of foot, conversant with all the paths of the forest,
patient of fatigue, and mad with a passion for rapine, vengeance, and
destruction, retreating into swamps for their fastnesses, or hiding in
the greenwood thickets, where the leaves muffled the eyes of the
pursuer. By the rapidity of their descent, they seemed omnipresent among
the scattered villages, which they ravished like a passing storm; and
for a full year they kept all New England in a state of terror and
excitement. The exploring party was waylaid and cut off, and the mangled
carcasses and disjointed limbs of the dead were hung upon the trees. The
laborer in the field, the reapers as they sallied forth to the harvest,
men as they went to mill, the shepherd's boy among the sheep, were shot
down by skulking foes, whose approach was invisible. Who can tell the
heavy hours of woman? The mother, if left alone in the house, feared the
tomahawk for herself and children; on the sudden attack, the husband
would fly with one child, the wife with another, and, perhaps, one only
escape; the village cavalcade, making its way to meeting on Sunday in
files on horseback, the farmer holding the bridle in one hand and a
child in the other, his wife seated on a pillion behind him, it may be
with a child in her lap, as was the fashion in those days, could not
proceed safely; but, at the moment when least expected, bullets would
whizz among them, sent from an unseen enemy by the wayside. The forest
that protected the ambush of the Indians secured their retreat.