In colonial New England, King Philip’s War effectively comes to an end when Philip, chief of the Wampanoag tribe, is assassinated by a Native American in the service of the English.
In the early 1670s, 50 years of peace between the Plymouth colony and the local Wampanoag Indians began to deteriorate when the rapidly expanding settlements forced land sales on the tribe. Reacting to increasing Native American tension, the English met with King Philip, chief of the Wampanoag, and demanded that his forces surrender their arms. The Wampanoag did so, but in 1675 a Christian Native American who had been acting as an informer to the English was murdered, and three Wampanoag were tried and executed for the crime.
On June 24, King Philip responded by ordering a raid on the border settlement of Swansea Massachusetts. His warriors massacred the English colonists there, and the attack set off a series of Wampanoag raids in which several settlements were destroyed and scores of colonists massacred. The colonists retaliated by destroying a number of tribal villages. The destruction of a Narragansett village by the English brought the Narragansett into the conflict on the side of King Philip, and within a few months several other tribes and all the New England colonies were involved.
In early 1676, the Narragansett were defeated and their chief killed, while the Wampanoag and their other allies were gradually subdued. King Philip’s wife and son were captured, and his secret headquarters in Mount Hope, Rhode Island, were discovered. On August 12, 1676, Philip was assassinated at Mount Hope by a Native American in the service of the English. The English drew and quartered Philip’s body and publicly displayed his head on a stake in Plymouth.
King Philip’s War, which was extremely costly to the colonists of southern New England, ended Native American dominance in the region and inaugurated a period of unimpeded colonial expansion.
