Transcript
1675
Mount Hope Neck June 1675
In June 1675, John Easton of Rhode Island crossed a bay to meet Metacom, the Wampanoag leader whom the English called King Philip.
John Easton The English were afraid, and Philip was afraid, and both increased in arms.
Metacom's people and the neighboring colony of Plymouth were close to war. His council told Easton they might as well be killed as lose their whole livelihood.
That same year, in Santa Fe, two thousand miles to the west, Spain's governor arrested forty-seven Pueblo religious leaders. Spain had ruled New Mexico's Pueblo towns, in today's American Southwest, since 1598.
Then about seventy armed Tewa men came to the governor's palace. The governor gave in and let the prisoners go.
One of the freed men was a Tewa religious leader named Po'pay.
Within five years, the Wampanoag and the Pueblo both went to war against the colonists. The English defeated Metacom and his allies and spread across southern New England. The Pueblo drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years.
The Ferry
January–June 1675
Five months earlier, the body of John Sassamon, a Christian Native man who had worked for Metacom, turned up under the ice of a pond. Shortly before, he had warned Plymouth's governor that Metacom was preparing for war.
That June, Plymouth's court convicted three of Metacom's men of murdering him and put all three to death. Sassamon's death set off the crisis, but the trial showed that Plymouth now claimed the power to judge and execute Wampanoag people.
Easton was a Quaker from Rhode Island, which had no power over Plymouth, so all he could offer Metacom was a fair hearing.
Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut belonged to the New England Confederation, a military alliance formed in 1643 that left Rhode Island out. Now you are Easton: hear Metacom and his counselors, then make your offer.
Metacom's council told Easton that in English courts, the word of twenty honest Native witnesses against an Englishman counted for nothing.
They said the English had made their leaders drunk to cheat them in land deals, and that English cattle were trampling their corn.
Easton had to answer the council, even though Rhode Island could not give orders to Plymouth.
Easton proposed that each side choose a judge: an Indian king for the Wampanoag and the governor of New York for the English. He also warned the council that the English were too strong for them.
The council answered that the English should now treat them as the Wampanoag had treated the English, back when the Wampanoag were stronger.
In 1621, Metacom's father, Massasoit, had allied with the Plymouth colonists, and for more than fifty years the two peoples avoided war. By 1675, English farms surrounded Wampanoag land, English cattle trampled Wampanoag corn, and Plymouth's courts were judging Wampanoag people. The quarrel was over land, and over who had the right to govern the Wampanoag.
Soon afterward, Plymouth's governor wrote that he meant to force Metacom to submit, and Easton's plan went nowhere.
About a week after Easton's visit, an English boy in Swansea, a Plymouth town near Mount Hope, shot a Wampanoag man. The next day, Wampanoag fighters killed the boy, his father and five other colonists.
John Easton So the war began with Philip.
Choosing Sides
1675–1676 · westward interlude, 1679–1680
In the fall of 1675, Massachusetts confined hundreds of Christian Native people on Deer Island, in Boston Harbor, even though they had converted. Daniel Gookin, a Massachusetts official who defended them, described their winter there:
Daniel Gookin They lived chiefly upon clams and shell-fish, that they digged out of the sand, at low water; the Island was bleak and cold.
In February 1676, Native fighters raided the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, and Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife, later described the attack:
Mary Rowlandson On the tenth of February came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster.
They took Rowlandson and three of her children captive, and a bullet badly wounded her six-year-old daughter, Sarah.
Mary Rowlandson My sweet babe like a lamb departed this life… It being about six years, and five months old.
That winter, Metacom went west, toward Albany, to find allies. Instead, the Mohawk, New York's allies, attacked his camp and drove him back east.
In March 1676, Rowlandson's captors joined Metacom's camp, and she met Metacom himself.
Mary Rowlandson Philip spake to me to make a shirt for his boy, which I did, for which he gave me a shilling.
In the camp, Rowlandson served Weetamoo, the sachem, or leader, of the Pocasset Wampanoag, who ruled her people in her own right.
Mary Rowlandson My mistress’s papoose was sick, and it died that night.
Mary Rowlandson Though I confess, I could not much condole with them.
That summer, Awashonks, sachem of the Sakonnet, a community near Mount Hope, joined forces with Plymouth's captain, Benjamin Church. She agreed only if Plymouth spared her people's lives and never shipped any of them away as slaves.
On August 12, 1676, at Mount Hope, a Native man named Alderman, fighting in Church's company, shot and killed Metacom.
About three thousand Native people and six hundred colonists died, and the colonies sold hundreds of Native captives into slavery overseas. Survivors scattered or lived under English rule, and the Native nations of southern New England could no longer stop English expansion.
Plymouth decided to sell even Metacom's young son, the boy Rowlandson had made a shirt for.
John Cotton Jr. Philip's boy goes now to be sold.
In 1676, while New England fought Metacom, frontier farmers in Virginia turned against their own governor, William Berkeley. Berkeley ruled for the rich tobacco planters around Jamestown, and poorer farmers who wanted more land said he would not protect them from Native raids.
That spring, a young planter named Nathaniel Bacon raised frontier volunteers without Berkeley's permission. His men attacked Native towns, even those of the colony's allies, like the Occaneechee and the Pamunkey.
When Berkeley called him a rebel, Bacon marched into Jamestown, and the seventy-year-old governor bared his chest and dared Bacon's men to shoot. Nobody fired, and in July, Bacon accused the governor of many crimes, including this one:
Nathaniel Bacon For having protected, favored, and emboldened the Indians against his Majesty's loyal subjects
In September, Bacon's army burned Jamestown, but Bacon died of disease that October, and his rebellion fell apart. Berkeley later hanged twenty-three rebels, but frontier farmers' anger at the rich planters who ran Virginia lasted for decades.
In those same years, far to the west in New Mexico, Pueblo leaders were secretly planning a revolt against Spain.
Two Knots Left
1668–1681
On August 9, 1680, in Santa Fe, New Mexico's governor, Antonio de Otermín, arrested two young runners from Tesuque Pueblo and questioned them. They were carrying a deerskin cord with two knots in it. Each knot stood for one day left before the revolt.
The cord had come from Taos, in the far north. Po'pay, the prisoner freed in 1675, was there. Runners carried cords like it from Taos as far south as Isleta, so that towns speaking different languages could rise together.
In the late 1660s, a drought brought famine to the Pueblo towns, and a Spanish friar reported:
Fray Juan Bernal A great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines, and in their huts.
Under Spain's encomienda system, colonists had the right to collect tribute from Native towns. Even during the famine, they kept taking Pueblo corn and cotton cloth, and officials forced Pueblo people to work for them.
Missionaries and officials also raided kivas, the rooms where Pueblo men held ceremonies, and burned the sacred objects they found.
In 1681, a captured Keres elder, Pedro Naranjo, told Spanish officials how the plan spread:
Pedro Naranjo The said cord was taken from pueblo to pueblo by the swiftest youths under the penalty of death if they revealed the secret.
Look at what the two arrests on August 9 changed about the day of the rising.
The arrests forced the leaders to strike a day early, and on August 10, 1680, most Pueblo towns rose at once. They killed about four hundred colonists, including twenty-one Franciscan missionaries, and burned churches.
Survivors crowded into the governor's palace in Santa Fe, and Pueblo fighters soon surrounded the town. Their spokesman was Juan, a Tano man who spoke Spanish and had once carried messages for the governor.
Juan brought two crosses, one red and one white, and told Otermín to choose. Red meant war, and white meant that the Spanish would leave New Mexico for good.
Otermín refused and attacked, but more Pueblo fighters arrived and cut off the palace's water for two days and a night.
On August 20, with no water left, Otermín decided to break out:
Antonio de Otermín It would be a better and safer step to die fighting than of hunger and thirst, shut up within the casas reales.
His men broke out of the palace, and the next day Otermín led about a thousand survivors south from Santa Fe.
Antonio de Otermín I left without a crust of bread or a grain of wheat or maize
For twelve years, Spanish governors no longer ruled the northern Pueblo towns.
Opposite Endings
1676–1704
In December 1681, Otermín came back up the Rio Grande and questioned Pueblo men near Isleta. A young man named Josephe answered in Spanish, and the governor's secretary, Francisco Xavier, wrote it down:
Francisco Xavier The causes they gave were alleged ill treatment and injuries received from the present secretary, Francisco Xavier
Francisco Xavier …because they beat them, took away what they had, and made them work without pay.
Xavier wrote down the accusation against himself, and then he signed the record.
Numbers, unity and what each colony wanted explain why the Pueblo drove Spain out and Metacom lost.
Compare how many people lived in New England with how many lived in New Mexico.
In New England, colonists far outnumbered Native people, but in New Mexico, Pueblo people far outnumbered the Spanish. The Pueblo were also more united: towns that spoke different languages rose together, while many New England nations fought against Metacom. The Mohegan and Pequot of Connecticut, longtime rivals of the Wampanoag, fought for the English, and a Native soldier killed Metacom.
The colonies also wanted different things from Native people, and New England's fast-growing settler population mainly wanted their land. New Mexico ran on Pueblo labor and crops, so when the Pueblo towns refused both and drove out the missionaries, the colony collapsed.
After the Spanish fled, Po'pay ordered the towns to destroy the churches, and Naranjo remembered his message:
Pedro Naranjo now they were as they had been in ancient times, free from the labor they had performed for the religious and the Spaniards
Within a few years, drought, Apache raids and old quarrels between Pueblo towns broke up their alliance.
In 1692, a new governor, Diego de Vargas, rode to Santa Fe. The Pueblo people holding the old palace agreed to submit, without a battle.
But when Vargas brought settlers back the next year, the Pueblo people in Santa Fe refused to give up the town. At Pecos Pueblo, east of Santa Fe, its leader, Juan de Ye, sided with Spain. His Pecos warriors rode with the Spanish against other Pueblo towns.
Vargas retook Santa Fe by force and executed seventy defenders. He sentenced roughly four hundred captives, including women and children, to ten years of servitude.
Spain ruled New Mexico again, but less harshly: it never restored the encomienda, and missionaries tolerated more Pueblo ceremonies. Officials still drafted Pueblo workers, but Pueblo and Spanish soldiers now fought raiders together, and Pueblo towns defended their land in Spanish courts.
Spain compromised because its colonists were few and needed Pueblo workers, food and soldiers. Across North America, colonies with few settlers had to bargain with Native nations, while colonies with many settlers could take their land.
The Other Answers
1640s–1742
In 1701, about thirteen hundred delegates from some forty Native nations met the French at Montreal to end decades of war.
In 1681, New France, along the St. Lawrence River in today's Canada, had fewer than ten thousand colonists and lived on the fur trade. Its traders depended on Native hunters for beaver furs, and many married Native women, tying French and Native families together.
The wars that ended at Montreal had grown out of the fur trade. The Dutch at Fort Orange, today's Albany, sold guns to the Mohawk, who used them against the Wendat and other French allies. Native nations used European allies and weapons against their own rivals, just as Europeans used Native allies against each other.
On August 4, 1701, the delegates signed the Great Peace of Montreal with the marks of their nations.
The Haudenosaunee made peace with France at Montreal, and sought England's protection at Albany. For decades, they worked to keep both empires from ruling them.
In Pennsylvania, William Penn had bought land from the Lenape, the Native people of the Delaware valley, and his heirs pressed for more.
In 1737, the Penns produced an old deed whose original could not be found. It gave them as much Lenape land as a man could walk in a day and a half. Then they picked the fastest walkers they could find, and cleared a path.
Lenape observer · Knowles’s report You run; that’s not fair, you was to walk.
Follow the walk, then the survey, and watch what happens to the Penns' claim.
When the Lenape refused to leave, Pennsylvania turned to the Haudenosaunee, England's partners in the Covenant Chain alliance, who claimed to speak for the Lenape. In 1742, in Philadelphia, the Onondaga speaker Canasatego ordered the Lenape off the land:
Canasatego · interpreted English record We charge you to remove instantly; we don't give you the Liberty to think about it.
Canasatego · interpreted English record Take the Advice of a wise Man, and remove immediately.
The Lenape moved west, pushed off their land by the same alliance that protected the Haudenosaunee.
Still Here
present day
In 1980, three hundred years later, Pueblo runners ran from Taos to the Hopi towns to remember the runners of 1680. The Pueblo Revolt forced Spain to change how it ruled, while Metacom's defeat opened southern New England to English settlers. Both peoples survived, and the Pueblo and Wampanoag nations still live on their homelands today.