alternatehistory.com

This is a set of two excerpts from the revised, so far Kindle-only version of my American Indian Victories collection. The first excerpt is factual background and a little alternate history speculation about King Phillip's War, one of the biggest and most desperate of our Indian Wars, though the war is almost forgotten now. The second excerpt is fiction, and it involves an interloper who comes about as close as flesh and blood can come to fulfilling the colonist's description of New England's forests as "demon-haunted."


What actually happened: King Phillip was actually a Wampanoag Indian chief, leader of the same tribe that helped the Pilgrims out in the first winters when they were starving. More than fifty years after those starving times, King Phillip led an Indian attempt to destroy the New England colonies. It was a futile effort, born out of desperation, as colonists pushed the Wampanoags into the last remnants of their lands.

In June 1675, at the start of the war, there were more than forty thousand settlers in the four New England colonies (Massachusetts, Plymouth Bay-later incorporated into Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island). The population of the hostile Indian tribes was probably around eleven thousand. The Indians depended on continued existence of the colonies for gunpowder and a variety of other trade goods.

New York was also in British hands, though it still had a large Dutch population, and the royal governor was hostile to the New England colonies, partly because they had been major supporters of the recently deposed Cromwell regime in England and were still passively resisting reimposition of effective royal control, and partly because the New England colonies, especially Connecticut, claimed and occupied areas that the king had allocated to New York.

The Mohawks were traditional enemies of many New England tribes, and hostile to the New England colonists, though they were friendly to the English in New York. New England had actually organized a failed expedition of several New England tribes against the Mohawks while New York was New Amsterdam.

Muddy enough political situation for you so far? It gets worse. At its heart, King Phillip's war had more to do with inter-colonial politics than with the Indians, at least at first. The colonies often acted more like independent small countries than parts of England (a preview of what was to come). The issues were:

First, would Plymouth Bay colony remain a separate colony or would it become part of Massachusetts? Unlike Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, Plymouth Bay didn't have a charter, a kind of legal recognition of its existence. It based its continued legal existence on a theory that it was operating a kind of protectorate over the Wampanoags—King Phillip's people.

The problem was that the king had recently set the boundary of Rhode Island so that many Wampanoags, including King Phillip, were in Rhode Island, not Plymouth Bay. That eliminated Plymouth Bay's legal reason for existence, so they reacted by reasserting their protectorate much more strongly and limiting Wampanoag autonomy, while petitioning the king for boundary changes.

Second, who would control Narragansett country? New England doesn't have much good farmland, and the Narragansett Indians controlled the biggest single stretch of it. The Narragansett were also officially in Rhode Island, but all three of the other colonies were itching to claim that farmland by right of conquest.

Rhode Island was militarily weak, with a population of only four-thousand, many of whom were from pacifist religious groups. The other colonies could seize the land, but only if they had an excuse that wouldn't bring the power of the home country down on them.

Attacking a sister colony militarily would give the king an excuse to assert royal control. Attacking Indians inside a sister colony, then going home and letting the Indians take vengeance on the nearest settlers was another story, and the other three colonies did exactly that to Rhode Island, attacking the up-until-then peaceful Narragansetts and leaving Rhode Island to either ask for help or fight the Indians themselves.
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