An eagle or hawk flying over what is called “the Great Swamp” in present-day Rhode Island would see more water than woods, a sprawling maze of creeks, brush, ponds, and murk, all melting into the 1,000-acre sweep of a windswept glacial lake.
Only four miles inland from the ocean, the lake (present-day Worden’s Pond) is without shoreline, drawn instead with a meandering squiggle of reeds and cattails surrendering to boggy forest. The mud-black water trails braiding off in every direction look bottomless: deep enough to swallow a small child whole and a man or woman to their waist; deep enough to slow, confuse and confound an invading army.
Which is why, in the winter of 1675, an estimated 1,000 men, women and children of the Narragansett nation hid themselves away on a small island somewhere in the middle of the Great Swamp. On that island, they constructed 500 wigwams, lining them with insulating baskets filled with their winter food stores: dried meat, fish, shellfish, corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and cranberries. They surrounded all of it with a 12-foot-high picket fence, a defensive perimeter against whatever band of colonial militia might be wily enough to paddle or slog their way through the maze of icy water to attack them.
It was the dead of winter, the darkest days of that terrible year.
Six months earlier, the colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth – with their insatiable hunger for more land and Puritan zeal for more souls – had provoked the Wampanoag to the east and Nipmuck and Pocumtuck to the north into a war of resistance. Up and down the margin of settlement – what the Colonists called “the frontier” – dozens of colonial towns and native villages were burned to the ground and their inhabitants slaughtered or carried off into captivity. (The memoir of the most famous of those captives, Mary Rowlandson, would become the first book published by a woman on this continent and its first ever best-seller.) Livestock, farm fields, and food stores were destroyed, leaving any survivors hiding in the woods to starve. In what would ultimately become the deadliest war in American history in terms of total casualty rate, “King Philip’s War” quickly metastasized into campaigns of mutual cultural and spiritual annihilation.
As the war raged, the 10,000-strong Narragansett – the largest and most economically powerful nation in the region – believed they could remain neutral, safe on their expansive and still remote homeland. Still, they would hole up for the winter in a makeshift fort in the middle of a seemingly impassable swamp.
Keeping the Peace in Dawnland
For the prior 30,000 years, the ancestors of the Narragansett had inhabited, cultivated, and controlled the hundreds of square miles surrounding the swamp: the marshy, game- and shellfish-rich coastline to the west; the fertile agricultural valleys to the north; and to the east, the fish, seal, and whale-filled waters of the Bay that still bears their name.
By 1675, with an estimated population between 7,500 and 10,000, the Narragansett were still the largest and most powerful native people in Dawnland, or what the Colonists were calling “New England.” Compared to the Wampanoag – who had originally welcomed and assisted the first to arrive in Plymouth – they were well to the west of the colonial tide. They also controlled their vast, food-rich, transit-friendly, namesake estuary – the watery core of present-day Rhode Island – and the thousands of square miles ringing Narragansett Bay to the north, west and south.
The Narragansett people also had the good fortune of a long-term trading partner in the radical theologian Roger Williams. He and his followers established the Rhode Island colony after he was banished from Massachusetts for – among other sins against Puritanism – arguing for the separation of church and state, against the forced conversion of the Natives, and most strenuously against the seizure of their lands without their consent, in their language and on their own terms. (To assist with trade and in orderly land sales, Williams had learned their language, Algonquian, a guide to which he published in 1643 as A Key into the Language of America, which is still in print and in active use today.)
In the years and months leading up to “King Philip’s War,” the Narragansett had remained, as a nation, studiously neutral. By the time it had broken out all around them that summer – and three of the four “United Colonies” formed up an army out of their militias – the Narragansett leaders had pledged that neutrality with colonial leaders in Connecticut and Massachusetts; they also renewed their pledge of neutrality with Rhode Island.
But all those fertile lands and food-rich waters were coveted by those same three colonies, who – however “United” they might be on paper – were all in a mad land-rush against each other. Buffeted by the Dutch in New Amsterdam to its west, Connecticut – which had broken the Pequot tribe in the 1630s in a ghastly campaign of near extermination that introduced the concept of “total war” to all the tribes in the region – looked eastward for expansion. Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had overwhelmed the Nipmuck and Pocumtuck with numbers, land theft, disease, and evangelical zeal, looked southward. And Plymouth Colony, after the sons and daughters of the first to arrive were done killing or converting what was left of the Wampanoag, would be coming from the east.
In the summer of 1675, when the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Pocumtuck finally rose up against their Massachusetts and Plymouth colony tormentors, Rhode Island refused to join in the campaign, even though they were the fourth member of the United Colonies. Roger Williams and its other leaders – mindful of the prior four decades of orderly trade and land sales with the Narragansett since the rebel colony’s founding – would honor those peace agreements.
But in a pattern that would be repeated across the continent for the next 200 years, the Narragansett leaders could not control all their people, scattered across those hundreds of square miles. Many would harbor warriors and refugees from the fighting; the Wampanoag, Nipmuck and Pocumtuck were, after all, also an Algonquian people, extended family by language and generations of intermarriage. Many young warriors would also be lured by their cousins into the fighting.
Anecdotes about those safe harbors and scattered defections – along with a few random depredations against isolated homesteads – triggered outrage across the region; then rumors of wholesale Narragansett duplicity; and finally calls for preemptive strikes against the entire nation. The most pernicious rumor of all? The Narragansett had built a large fortress, somewhere in the Great Swamp, where they were harboring large numbers of enemy combatants. Surely, the story circulated throughout the colonies, their neutrality had been a ruse all along; for all they had promised and all they had to lose, they were simply waiting for the right moment to turn hostile and overwhelm the colonial army. Who would dare trust these “savages?”
And so, with a rationale that would be repeated across the continent for the next 200 years, the colonial army chose, as its best defense, a preemptive strike. Winter was setting in; who knew what was really going on in that fort; hitting the Narragansett first might be the Colonial Army’s only hope of surviving a winter camped far from home.
Winterkill
That December, on their first combined campaign, the militias from the three colonies that would comprise that Army would meet in the middle: on the western shore of Narragansett Bay, 15 miles from the Great Swamp.
Any lingering hesitation to break the three standing peace agreements with the Narragansett was swept aside by their discovery,12 miles south of where they were camped, of a raid on a garrison house. The raiders had left the remains of 15 armed men; the general at the head of the Colonial Army assumed the perpetrators were Narragansett; and the peace was broken. They would march into the maze of the Great Swamp and put an end to the scattered hostilities by the Narragansett.
But where exactly was that fort? And how would an army of 1,000 men find their way in, and navigate all that water?
They found the first answer in the form of a Narragansett prisoner, one of 30 the Army had captured on their march around the Bay. There are only presumed motives for this “Peter,” whom historians call a traitor to his own people. He may have been what the Colonists called a “praying Indian,” one who submits to Christian conversion and then seeks to curry favor with his new masters. He may have been bribed, tortured, or terrorized into complicity. Or he may have been estranged, vindictive, slow-witted, gullible, duped. All history records is his “Christian” name, and his betrayal of the fort’s location.
The colonial army found the answer to the second question in the form of plummeting temperatures. The Great Swamp’s sprawl of water trails, skimmed with a few inches of ice every winter, do not freeze solid in a typical winter, given the Swamp’s proximity to the moderating effects of the nearby ocean. (This may help explain the Narragansetts confidence in their safety.) That December, the Swamp did freeze, and just in time for a foot of snow to fall on top. Suddenly, its every unforested stretch was a straight shot to the island fortress at its center. The Army could march right in.
After trudging through all that snow on December 19th, they found the fort at 1 PM.
The higher ground of the island and 12-foot-high pickets forced the army to breach the fort in one spot, and the Narragansett were able to repel their first thrust. Accounts by members of that Army report that the estimated 1,000 Narragansett women, children, and men of all ages fought back with every weapon they had, but they were no match for as many fighting-age men. Because the guns of the era fired one shot and took 20 – 30 seconds to re-load, they must have been reduced to clubs and spears in the face of whatever resistance the Narragansett could muster; and so the Army proceeded, once fully inside, with knives, hatchets, clubs, rocks, fists, teeth, and fire.
The soldiers worked their way through the fort, killing all the men and women who fought back, and setting ablaze all the wigwams where they had hidden their children, elderly, and infirm. It took four hours to kill them all, mostly with fire. That would have put the end of the massacre into the evening hours, but the Army could still see what it was doing: the fort was lit up from the burning pickets and 500 wigwams filled with dried food and hundreds of dead or dying Narragansett.
An unknown number managed to flee, but it was reportedly easy for the colonial army to track and kill or capture them: all they had to do was follow the trail of blood through the fresh white snow, the whole Swamp backlit for three miles by the flames from the burning fort.
The mostly women and children they captured – the remnant who survived the winter march out – were sold off into slavery.
Fanning the Flames of a Conflagration
The preemptive strike and genocidal slaughter against the Narragansett proved to be the dumbest thing the Colonial Army could have done. It may have murdered nearly 1,000 Narragansett non-combatants that day; but there were an estimated 6,500 – 9,000 left, scattered throughout the region.
The Great Swamp Massacre ended official Narragansett neutrality, mobilizing the nation to take up arms with the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Pocumtuck against the Colonists. Tribal leadership shifted from Ninigret, the wily, aging sachem who had deftly kept the Narragansett out of the colonial crosshairs for decades, to the young war leader, Canonchet.
The Narragansett, reeling with the trauma of the massacre, joined in the killing spree. By then, the other tribes had been playing cat and mouse with the Colonial Army for a hundred miles in every direction, practicing the way of total war they had first witnessed in Connecticut’s war on the Pequot. They burned and killed their way up and down the margin of settlement, as far west as the Connecticut River, up into the Berkshire Mountains, and back east, coming within 25 miles of Boston. This was no limited skirmish to refine boundaries, the kind of warfare they had always known among themselves; this was total war. They sought to eradicate every vestige of a culture that had condemned them to hell, stolen their children, and destroyed with their livestock in one generation the natural world they had cultivated for 30,000 years.
Alongside their former rivals the Wampanoag, they even unleashed their fury on their old allies in the colony of Rhode Island. They razed the settlement of Providence – which the Narragansett had sold to Roger Williams and the other outcasts from Puritan Massachusetts as a buffer zone between them and the Wampanoag – and several nearby villages. Notably, in their rampage of fire, they did not kill any of the residents of Providence, explaining to Roger Williams (while his house burned behind him) that they meant only for them to go away.
But the colonists had numbers and technology on their side, and the tribes were far from their homes, food base, and supplies. What followed was a guerrilla war of retribution and counter-retribution: Native warriors were captured and executed, women sold off into slavery in the Caribbean, their children taken away as slaves for Colonist farms and homes.
By the end of the war the following summer, much of the margin of settlement was abandoned, rolled all the way back to within a dozen miles of Boston. The colonial economy would take ten years to grow back to what it was in 1675, before the Narragansett were provoked into joining the war. The native economy of seasonal hunting and fishing, sustainable food cultivation and storage, and trade with tribes in every direction was destroyed.
The estimated death toll among the Natives: 4,000, or 20% of the 20,000 Narragansett, Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Pocumtuck in 1675. Among the colonists, 1,000 dead, or 2% of a population estimated at 50,000. The numbers may seem small by modern standards, but the 7% combined casualty rate over the one-year period of “King Philip’s War” edges out the 6% combined rate experienced by Americans, north and south, during their four-year Civil War.
In the process, Native cultures that had been in place and evolving for the prior 30,000 years, already under the stress of contact – disease, habitat loss, destruction of agricultural base, loss of food independence, religious persecution – vanished into the forest. The surviving Narragansett mixed into communities of freed African slaves south and west of the Great Swamp, on land the colonists did not want (yet). They assimilated, intermarried, took what was left of their lifeways, religion, and oral traditions and went underground for the next 300 years.
Where Exactly Was That Fort?
Because it is a sprawling and ecologicaly complex wetland too large for even the US Army Corps of Engineers to destroy, the Great Swamp survives as the largest roadless tract of land and water in present-day Rhode Island. It is now the “Great Swamp Management Area,” a 3,300-acre, state-owned and managed property, popular with hunters, hikers, and bird watchers.
Three dirt roads dead-end into the area, leading to trailheads, while two developed routes pass through: an old railway bed converted to a busy bicycle trail cutting through the northeast corner; and a very busy Amtrak and freight line slicing through the northernmost end, where the land is driest.
Here is a photo of the sign along the bike trail describing the Great Swamp’s ecosystem, flora, and fauna. It also attempts to explain what happened in 1675, erroneously claiming that the massacre occurred in November of that year, not December. You will note that the more egregious errors on the sign have been corrected by a passerby with a black marker.
A mile north of the busy Amtrak line sits this equally erroneous – and aesthetically ridiculous – stone “monument” to the Great Swamp Massacre.
The inscription on the obelisk at the center reads: “Great Swamp Fight / December 1675.” It was not a “fight.” It was a Massacre: of hundreds of men, women and children, holed up in a defensive shelter for the winter, an unprovoked bloodbath against people trying only to keep safe, warm, and fed.
The four square blocks at the obelisk’s corners are labeled for the four United Colonies – Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth and Rhode Island – that “fought” so bravely against the Narragansett in that fort. The inclusion of Rhode Island is revisionist nonsense: consistent with the colony’s longstanding role as a sanctuary for those persecuted by the Puritans – and its refusal to participate in the other Colonies’ wars of genocide – it made multiple declarations of neutrality in the war.
This is almost certainly not the site of the actual fort: there is no appreciable rise in the land, certainly not one large enough to host a 4 – 5 acre community of 1,000 people. It may well have been swampland; but if so, 349 years of ecological succession have converted this part of the Great Swamp into fully hardwood forest.
So why is this “monument” even here? Other than to gaslight for posterity the Narragansett murdered somewhere around here in yet another version of the classic American blame-the-victim telling of the story?
The monument was erected in 1906 by the Society for Colonial Wars, based on flimsy archeological evidence from 1782 that has long since been debunked. An influx of immigration to the US in the early 1900s gave rise – as they always do – to yet another classic American rise in white nationalism. All over the American South, the Ku Klux Klan was erecting monuments to the glorious deeds of the Confederacy; up here in the north, the Society for Colonial Wars erected monuments, like this one, to the valor of Colonists for their genocidal wars against the original inhabitants of Dawnland.
The Society of Colonial Wars erected the obelisk as an homage to the towering fierceness of their vanquished enemy, leaving the stone uncut as a nod to their “natural” or primitive state. After all, it isn’t much of a war story at the village tavern – in 1675, 1906, or now – if the enemy is not wild, formidable, and more than up for the “fight.
Dawnland Rising
Over the long and difficult course of the last 349 years, the descendants of the tiny remnant of the Narragansett who survived the Great Swamp Massacre – and the genocide and slave trade at the close of King Philip’s War, and the centuries of cultural genocide and political erasure in the centuries to follow – managed, somehow, to survive with their identity intact.
The Narragansett Nation has been a federally recognized tribe since 1983. They own a patchwork quilt of reservation lands to the south and west of the Great Swamp, where many of their people still live and work. Like so many other tribes driven to the brink of extinction centuries ago, they are assumed by the majority of Americans all around them – many of whom enjoy Narragansett beer while boating and fishing on Narragansett Bay or sunning themselves on Narragansett Town Beach – to have gone over that brink long ago. Like so many other tribes, the Narragansett have not been banished to the pages of history. They practice their culture, teach their origin stories to their children, and are working to restore their language, foodways, and the natural habitats that sustained their ancestors for tens of thousands of years.
Many visit this monument site for a commemorative ceremony every fall, even though they do not believe this is the site of the Massacre.
And I have to wonder: do the Narragansett come here to stir epigenetic memory, and vent three centuries’ worth of rage at the wholesale murder of their ancestors? To let the world know that they had lived for decades peaceably alongside the outcasts of the Puritan theocracy, and that the Colony of Rhode Island was never their enemy, no matter how big the rock that tries to tell that lie?? To speak out their ancestral truth to this self-serving white supremacist fantasy of a monument???
Or do the Narragansett come here to find a collective pathway out of the darkness of so much collective and individual human pain over so many years, a pathway to healing? Maybe they come here simply because they can, because they want the world to know what Native peoples across the continent want everyone to know: they are still here.
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