USA > Massachusetts > Bristol County > Somerset > History of the town of Somerset Massachusetts : Shawomet purchase 1677, incorporated 1790 > Part 2
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Natural bounds such as rivers, shore lines, island groups were, on the other hand, generally recognized as demarking areas. The name Narragansett means "People of the Pointed Lands," and it was by these natural divisions, with their bay and river outlines, that the Indians named Sakonnet, Papoosesquaw, Assonet, Shawomet, Pokanoket, Mattapoisett and others.
Shawomet was probably in their minds the region extending along the Taunton river from Broad Cove to Brayton's Point and up the east side of Lees River.
Shawomet Lands were among the most esteemed of Wampanoag possessions. No offer of purchase, and there were many, by the Whites for Pokanoket, including Mt. Hope and Bristol Neck, or for Assonet or Shawomet, was ever considered by them. Regarding particularly Shawomet, the reason is easy to see. The combined facilities it offered for farming, hunting, fishing, shellfish harvest, easy transpor- tation in every direction and genial residential conditions were unsurpassable.
It was, moreover, one of the six principal villages of the tribe, a center of Wampanoag living, cultivation and tradition for many generations. Implements which orig-
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inally must have been dropped on the surface of the ground have been dug up in later Somerset excavations at a depth which may represent a thousand years of soil accretion.
Winslow and Hopkins, and later visitors, found Shawomet deserted as a consequence of the epidemic Bradford reports as occurring in the year 1618. What this plague was is not established. Some commentators think it may have been measles caught from European ship crews. It if was, it is curious there was no recurrence in later years. It may have been the disease, unknown to the European' pioneers, which in their first years here attacked Indians in the form of a sudden and furious bleeding at the nose, with death usually in two or three hours. Whatever it was it killed off three-fourths of the Wampanoags, while missing the Narragansetts entirely.
Previous to this abandonment, either to escape the plague or to consolidate the remaining tribes for protection, the town site of Somerset had had for many generations a populous and a prosperous predecessor in Shawomet Village.
All Atlantic coastal Indian tribes had goods and food and ease of life beyond the average of the country at large. And Shawomet was a little better off than most. Surround- ing waters supplied both fresh and saltwater fish, shellfish and crabs and lobsters; the woods furnished every kind of game in season. Woods and water courses combined to provide all kinds of wildfowl. Grapes, blueberries, black- berries, raspberries and huckleberries were abundant; wild cherries, cranberries, wild apples, beach plums, elderberries and other fruits plentiful.
Fish furnished fertilizer for the hills of corn, beans, squash and melons, which could be set in holes scattered between stumps without troubling to remove them. Maples grew along watercourses and in swamps everywhere to provide the sap and boiled down maple syrup which provided the sugar many tribes in the interior did without. When maples were lacking the birch produced a thinner but still sweet juice. Salt, as essential to their health as to ours, was
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easily procured by evaporating salt water in stone hollows and brushing it together with whisks. When we realize that the salt of some interior nations had to be brought hundreds of miles by couriers we see the privilege of this resource.
Medicinal herbs of every kind were close at hand, and there was a good exchange traffic in these. There was never lacking wood for fires, springs for water-the Indian avoided drinking from running streams-clay for pottery, rushes for baskets and the mats they wove for summer house walls and beds. Shells for everything : hoes, fish-hooks, small instruments such as the tweazers with which young braves pulled out their sparse beards hair by hair, were always at hand.
And this was the region where wampum, the gold and silver of the Indian, was plentiful. The greater part of authentic wampum, made with a special process and finish which the Indian easily distinguished from White Men's counterfeits, was produced on Long Island.
Its currency as money at first was due to the desire of all Indians to have it for ornament. In this desire the Dutch traders early saw its possibilities as a medium of exchange, sold goods for it, offered it for goods and soon had it established in the Indians' mind as money. In 1627, they brought it to the attention of the Pilgrims, as they had others, and it soon became currency, not only among the Narragansetts and Wampanoags, but among the English who used it themselves as money, with its equivalents in English coinage established by law. The Narragansetts learned to make it; then the Wampanoags. And, said Brad- ford in his Journal, "it makes ye Indians in these parts rich & power full and also prowd therby."
The periwinkle and the white of the quahaug shell furnished the material for the white bead; the black spot on a quahaug shell the black bead, which was worth twice the white. Its plenty was wealth that bought more wealth, and growing ease. Already when the Pilgrims landed, the Indian's equipment was becoming streamlined with Euro-
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pean manufactures. The first sheaf of arrows shot at Pilgrims on Cape Cod and collected by them to send back to a British museum contained several with brass heads.
It is easy to reconstruct this earlier Somerset called Shawomet. All early visitors report that its slopes had been cleared for dwellings and farming for a considerable distance back from the shore. There is evidence that the residence section ran well up to the ridge. When the high school play- ground was levelled down, two years ago, the stone work- bench, or anvil, of an arrow maker was found some yards in the rear of the school.
By the time the White Man came, the stumpage of these occupied slopes must have long since disappeared. They would be green with grass in season. There was a coopera- tive farm at the present Somerset Village. And a very large one just over the present line of Dighton. Between these a forest of white oak wedged its way to a considerable distance down the Great Neck, as early descriptions show and the coming of settlers in the 1690's to build ships of that same white oak proves. Brayton's Point then, as now, was flanked with salt marsh.
Along the "residential slopes" from the Village to the Point, at will and without order or streets, the houses of the residents were scattered. Mostly they were round, built of small skinned poles tied together and coming to a point at the top; although there were some oblong roofed dwellings for large families. In summer, they were covered by mats of woven grass or reeds; in the chill of early autumn, by skins. In the winter they stood bare and tenantless because the population had left for their winter homes in the ever- green thickets of Barrington or Middleboro.
Canoes of birch or dugout pattern were numerous on the river as the menfolks left for their daily business of fishing, hunting or ranging the woods, perhaps on their way to enjoy the plentiful lobsters of Plymouth harbor, of which they were inordinately fond. They roved fearlessly as far north as Stoughton or south to Sakonnet Point, for all were Wampanoags in this region and on the islands of Narragan-
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sett Bay. But they kept away from the westerly shores of Narragansett south of Bristol, for, possibly because of the softening luxury described, they feared the Narragansett man to man, as the guides of the Pilgrims often showed by their scrutiny of an approaching Indian.
Meanwhile in Shawomet Village a cheerful life went on. The women divided their domestic labors of cooking with days on the communal farms hoeing or harvesting; digging clams ; treading out quahaugs, splitting fish and laying them out on the rocks to salt and dry; gathering wild fruits and berries and drying most of the latter in the sun for winter use; weaving mats and baskets; softening deerskins or sewing them into garments.
Occasionally they worked with their babies strapped on their backs, as often pictured, but generally the baby rolled on the ground in charge of a sister or of a cousin whose duty as nurse was as strong as a sister's; and all too often com- pletely neglected. Child mortality was terrific.
Except for baby-tending, or young masculine attempts with bow and fishing tackle, the children played at will. Nobody ever punished them whatever they did. They did not quarrel because an Indian seldom thought of any object as his personal property. All goods, like all their gods and all their morals, were tribal affairs. Early Christian preachers failed to find any Indian who thought that he individually had ever sinned. Parents cuffed their children as they cuffed their dogs, sometimes, because they were in the way; but the parental attitude, all in all, was more indulgent and on the surface, more affectionate, than that of the average English of early days.
Games played by the children ranged all the way from dolls to baseball. The girls frequently dressed little puppies in complete Indian baby attire and carried them around like papooses on their small backs in imitation of their mother. Jackstones, often carved to represent animals and familiar articles, were popular with both sexes. Shinny or hockey with a crooked hockeystick any modern boy might have cut from an alder clump was a great favorite with the boys;
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stilt-walking was universal. Guessing games of the hide- the-thimble character were popular. The throwing of small spears, or sticks to represent them, so that they would land in certain positions relative to or across another, was a game that occupied them endlessly. And there was no school, except that all Indian children, boy and girl alike, but particularly boys, were expected to learn the language with complete accuracy by listening and practice, and it is reported that they learned it at a surprisingly early age and that an error in language among Indian children was so rare that some observers never heard one.
The really big time of the day was when father came home at night. There was usually a meal befitting the size of his appetite, eaten in absolute silence, but with the whole community for company; and after the eating there was talk. An Indian was judged by his ability to talk well as a story teller or as an orator, with oratory prized as the supreme accomplishment. If the talk were good it might last all night, as weary visiting colonists often discovered. In Shawomet Village there was always tobacco, another comfort that made it a peaceful and luxurious place, smoked most often with a lobster claw for a pipe bowl; and always a small cheerful fire. So insistent was the Indian on having a fire for cooking or good cheer whenever he wanted it that he usually carried a pocket-lighter, ingeniously contrived of a heat-resisting clay tube filled with some smouldering material.
Shawomet women could cook, like most Wampanoag women. There is no record of a Wampanoag's ever being seen to eat raw meat. He liked his fish and his fowl a good bit over-ripe, it is true, and mouldy corn or nut meal had no distaste for him. But he had luxuries. Winslow enjoyed very much a dish of baked shadroe which Corbitant served him, although he didn't care for its garnish of musty acorns. It was from Wampanoag Indians that the Pilgrims got their first taste of johnny cakes swimming in maple syrup. Then there were blueberry corn muffins, succotash, usually with bits of meat thrown in with the corn and beans ; fowl wrapped
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in leaves or clay and baked, not quite so delicious, perhaps, because the entrails were left in as nature made them; oysters and quahaugs baked until they lay open in their own juice; and the clambake.
There was much joking and singing in Shawomet, too. Even the staid Pilgrims record some of the Indian jokes. Practical jokes were popular and often cruel. The Indian brave sang at work and at play. The Indian squaw sang endlessly. There is a strange minor note in all their songs, generally supposed to show that the Indian was too afraid of his gods to be ever wholly happy. But there have been too many other nations and people whose music prefers the minor key for this explanation to be acceptable.
Although war roused their savage philosophy of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, in everyday life they were affectionate, talkative, gamesome and home-loving. It is a mistake to believe that their wives were down-trodden and brow-beaten. A Wampanoag explained to a Pilgrim that the women cultivated the farm, made the clothing and got the meals "because she was the mother of life and could make these things give life." When a baby was expected, if it was the first one, the father spent days and weeks carving and adorning a cradle. When his children died he . often maimed himself, even to cutting off a finger, in mourning. Older members of the family were buried beside the house where they had lived, the mats were taken from its walls, its furnishings removed, and the bare frame, never to be occupied again, left as a token of a home bereft. This is the reason why Indian graves have been found, in later days, in all sections of Somerset.
In the tribe, as has been said of the home, the tribal conception of life and property made quarrels and crimes rare. Such matters as required an application of the tribal law were adjudged in tribal courts held twice a year, with the Chief Sachem as judge and his sagamores as jury. Generally, judge and jury with delight awarded the decision to the Indian whose advocate made the best oration in his behalf. The most frequent punishment was banishment,
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for some days, a season, a year or permanently from the tribe.
This was the life of the residents of aboriginal Somerset, called Shawomet. It was a very human pop- ulation. Some of its people were highly intelligent, with foreheads and brain pans whose capacity astonishes present- day scientists, and some acted and looked like cretins. Some were fat and some slim; some energetic, some lazy; some merry, some moody like King Philip who was now growing up on Mt. Hope. There were good cooks and poor cooks : though nobody ever recorded a good housekeeper amongst them; good hunters and poor ones; brave fighters and cowards.
Some were handsome and some ugly. Some painted themselves with black and white stripes, some red all over. Several Wampanoags learned English and went to Harvard and Yale. King Philip employed an Indian private secretary to write letters. Some never had an idea worth a letter.
Shawomet residents, in short, were more human than the popular conception of the Indian may believe.
KING PHILIP'S WAR
HE Indian and the White Man never understood each 1 . other. Each made more allowances for the other, tried harder and forgave more, than is usually realized. But the misunderstanding was fundamental and both races were too stubborn, too sensitive and too courageous to yield their point of view entirely to any other.
The Englishman's law was personal and vigorously administered even in the wilderness. The Indian's only law was a code of tribal customs which he seldom broke but would allow no other tribe, least of all a tribe from another world, to infringe.
Upon the Englishman's conscientious effort to convert him to Christianity the Indian looked as an effort to wean individuals from their sachems to English submission.
But the critical point of difference was the fundamental one of land ownership. The White Man felt that he had bought the land he traded for and that he and his heirs and assigns owned it personally and forever. The Indian thought he had rented it; that like a renting landlord he might go and come across it as he willed ; and, moreover, that he had only rented it for the lifetime of the renter.
Massasoit, shrewd and intelligent enough to keep his authority even though he had been conquered by the Narra- gansetts, welcomed the Pilgrims as allies for his tribe, cut in quarter by the great sickness. It was an excellent deal for him to sell the White Man land and leave his doubts unspoken.
His oldest son, Alexander, was disposed to follow Massasoit's policy. Alexander's death from fever while an enforced guest of Josiah Winslow at Marshfield, whither he had been compelled to come to discuss Indian disturbances, left a quite different type of sachem in power.
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KING PHILIP'S WAR
Philip, second son of Massasoit, came into the kingship when the pressures and permanency of White policies had clearly begun to threaten his people. He was 23 years old, shrewd and energetic. His sultry nature fitted him for a program of resentment. His gift of oratory, that greatly prized art of the Red Race, enabled him to state his issue persuasively to the tribes all over New England.
The result was the Indian rebellion against White encroachment known as King Philip's War.
This was an important chapter in Somerset's history, not only because it broke out in the region where Somerset is located, and ravaged it, but because it erased completely the Indian town of Shawomet and any Indians that might return to it, and left it an empty stage ready for the scenes and the cast of the next act.
It broke out on Sunday, June 19, 1675, in Swansea, when the village was at church. Technically, as Philip prob- ably wished, the Whites drew the first blood, when an old man who had not been able to go to church, fired a gun and wounded marauding Indians who had stolen some of his furniture. By night, two Swansea houses had been burned and a Swansea man killed. One of the homes was that of Job Winslow, grandson of that William Winslow who had been the first White Man to set foot in Swansea- Somerset.
The beginning was deliberate. Some Indians had ransacked the house of Hugh Cole just west of the later Touisset railroad station at Swansea the day before but this was evidently the impulsive act of some impatient braves. Tradition is strong that the inter-tribal war council decree- ing the war was held that night, Saturday, June 18, on an island at the mouth of the Assonet river, ever since known as Conspiracy island.
At this council the assault on Swansea, during the hours of church service, was doubtless decided upon. By Sunday night, the Whites were in flight : those of Swansea gathering in the home of Rev. Myles, which was speedily provisioned and barricaded, or to the Bourne house on Gardner's Neck.
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Dighton folk fled to Taunton. The scattered settlers west of Swansea hastened to Providence. Portsmouth dwellers felt safe under Roger Williams' egis; and Little Compton residents held their neck of land, firmly backed by the Sakonnet Indians who had refused to join Philip. Similar concentrations took place all over New England, but we are dealing only with Somerset territory and neighborhood.
Outlying Indian villages were similarly deserted and Indian families and Indian fighting forces were gathered at strategic places, notably Mount Hope, where an attempt by assembled Colonial troops on the 28th failed, with fatal consequencess, to dislodge them.
Shawomet Village was completely deserted. On the necks between the rivers the Indian lodges were empty. In this vicinity there remained of Indians only a small group of families, living on the slope southward to Dublin creek and known in those days as the Quaker Indians.
In numbers the Colonists and the Indians were about equal. King Philip's Wampanoags could muster about 500 fighting braves; the Pocassets along the present Tiverton slopes about an equal number. The Narragansetts had a thousand. Colonial levies of parallel size were quickly assembled, the first force gathering at Taunton under Major Cudworth of Scituate, Major William Bradford of Plymouth, son of the Plymouth governor, and Capt. Benjamin Church of Little Compton, and arriving at Swansea on the 22nd.
From that date on, war flamed violently in this region, as it did all over New England. Undoubtedly this section owes most to Capt. Benjamin Church, who lies, with his sword of five wars beside him, in Little Compton cemetery. The policy of the trained leaders of the Colonial forces was to build forts at assumed strategical points and dare the Indians to come and attack them. When the Indians failed to come, as they shrewly did, Capt. Church pursued them, with relentless energy and unvarying success.
Gradually but steadily the numbers of fighting Indians diminished. Decreasing bands of Indians flitted from place to place, foraying for supplies and against the unprotected
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edges of towns. Philip was everywhere, even making a trip to the New York Indian tribes which, however, refused to join him. Either from a sense of his value as leader, or as chroniclers of the time believed, because he was lacking in personal valor, Philip fled at every approach, never leading in battle.
Poor Weetamoe, who had almost yielded, as Awashonks of the Sakonnets had, to Church's advice not to take part, but who had finally joined her brother-in-law Philip, found her forces drained to a hopeless handful. Memories of happier days must have moved her with a strong homesick- ness. Or perhaps she merely came home to die.
For in the spring of 1676 she brought her decimated tribe, a mere fifty now, up from the Pocasset woods, across the bay, and settled them at the old site of Shawomet, on the neck today known as Brayton's Point, then as Boston neck. It was her old stamping ground, from the shores of which her father had run ferry service to Mt. Hope and to the slopes of the future Fall River. This was the last, melancholy chapter of the Indian history of Shawomet.
There was nobody to attack her refuge on Brayton's Point. All but four houses in Swansea had been burned. The eastern shore of the Taunton where Fall River would sometime rise, was still a wilderness between the river and the Watuppas. Dighton, on the main Indian trails from the Middleboro lakes to Mt. Hope, was deserted. And in Shawomet Lands there was not as yet a single settler, unless it may have been the owner of the mysterious house in the present village, whose owner must long before have fled.
For the moment Shawomet Lands were an asylum for Weetamoe. But with the advance of spring disaster closed in rapidly on Philip. His allies were being rapidly wiped out, or were deserting his cause to the wiser Uncas in Connecticut, or had fled to the Six Nations in New York. The Indian crops of the year before had been but sketchily planted and what had grown had been mostly destroyed. The settlers had fared little better in this respect but could count on neighboring colonies while their farms yielded nothing to Indian forays.
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The circle of colonists, infuriated by the war's destruc- tion and killing of their property and families, closed steadily tighter about Philip. He was driven from his Middleboro stronghold, and, pursued up and down by the tireless Church, finally retreated to his original base on Mt. Hope.
After sleeping for a night, it is said, in Bear's Den rocks in Freetown, he arrived with a small company of braves at Mt. Hope on August 16, 1676, determined, it is believed, to surrender. Unfortuately one of his Indians had the poor diplomacy to suggest that course. The exasperated Philip struck him dead. The dead Indian's brother, Alderman, fled the camp and finding Church, still in pursuit, offered to guide him to Philip.
Church's force came upon Philip, camped on the edge of a swamp on Mt. Hope, in the early morning light. Alderman seized a gun from a soldier's hand and shot Philip dead. The English, with their customary legal logic, adjudged Philip a traitor to the English crown and gave him a traitor's sentence. He was drawn and quartered and his head sent to Plymouth and set up on a pole. A hand, well known to have been crippled by an exploding gun, was cut off and given to Alderman to carry about the colonies as a token of Philip's defeat.
The war had lasted almost exactly fourteen months and the Indians of this region had been exterminated. Except for the tribes of Maine, which required an expedition led by Capt. Church, and a single attack on Hatfield in November of that year by Indians swooping down from Canada, there was never again an Indian attack in the region of King Philip's confederacy.
The job had been well done, but it had cost the colonies appallingly. Over 600 dwellings had been destroyed. Thir- teen villages had been wiped out. One able-bodied man in eleven of the Colonial population had been killed, besides many women and children. The cost to Plymouth colony alone had been half million dollars (£100,000).
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KING PHILIP'S WAR
On the other hand, the region was free of the Indian forever. All those who had survived the war, with the exception of the Christianized Indians, and the loyal tribes at Seaconnet, Nashua, Nantucket, Martha's Vine- yard, were sold in slavery to the West Indies. This included King Philip's wife, Weetamoe's sister, and her son.
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