This thread is based on something I read today in a book about the Pilgrims and Plymouth colony, which stated that during King Philip's War, the colonists might well have been defeated in the northeast had the powerful Narragansett nation under their sachem Canonchet (IIRC) decided to join Metacom's southern NE Algonquian confederacy at the outset of his revolt in Sept 1675, instead of initially deciding to remain neutral. As it was, in Dec, the colonial forces from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, assisted by Mohegan scouts, who'd suspected Canonchet of playing a double game by on 1 hand claiming neutrality and on the other still providing covert assistance to the hostiles, surrounded the Narragansett fort at the Great Swamp near present-day Kingston, Rhode Island, and set fire to the Indian encampment resulting in the burning to death of at least 700 Indians, mostly women and children, and the destruction of the Narragansetts as a tribal power.
WI the Narragansetts actually had decided when 1st approached by Metacom and the Wampanoags to fully throw their lot in with his war effort ? How much of a difference could such a united pan-Indian alliance have made towards the blunting of continued white expansion in southern NE ?
WI the Narragansetts actually had decided when 1st approached by Metacom and the Wampanoags to fully throw their lot in with his war effort ? How much of a difference could such a united pan-Indian alliance have made towards the blunting of continued white expansion in southern NE ?