Framingham Legends & Lore Read Free

in preparation for college. This was not a wholly positive experience, however. He had understood that the costs of his son’s education would be borne by the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England, a British organization dedicated to Christianizing the Indians. But when it failed to pay for the boy’s expenses, Elijah Corlett, the teacher, sued Netus and received title to three hundred acres in Grafton as compensation. Netus later settled in Natick.
    It would be a mistake to overly romanticize this period in Indian-English relations. The overall trend was marked by a receding native population and a burgeoning white one, with settlers pushing steadily inland. Treaties and deals negotiated between the societies were inevitably conducted on European rather than native terms and therefore led to the ultimate benefit of the settlers. However warily they regarded one another, they did at least attempt to accommodate each other, if it was at times an uneasy peace. Yet even an uneasy peace was preferable to the devastation of war, as both sides were soon to learn.
    K ING P HILIP ’ S W AR
    King Philip’s War, the most destructive of all the conflicts between the English settlers and natives, broke out in 1675. It shattered the nearly forty years of peace that had endured since the close of the Pequot War of 1636–37. It originated in the continuing friction between Philip, sachem of the Pokanoket of the Mount Hope peninsula in Rhode Island, and the leaders of the Plymouth Colony. Philip’s father was the sachem Massasoit, who is renowned for having aided the Pilgrims during their difficult early years in America. While in Massasoit’s time the alliance helped the Pokanoket and their Wampanoag allies fend off their more powerful Narragansett neighbors, by the 1670s the expansion of Plymouth into new towns closer and closer to Mount Hope meant that the white settlers posed an increasingly greater threat to Philip’s domain.
    The long-simmering conflict erupted into open warfare with the Pokanoket raid on the town of Swansea on June 20, 1675. While deeply troubling, there was no reason for the few white families living in what is now Framingham to believe they would be directly affected. The area was in the Massachusetts Bay (not Plymouth) Colony, and the local natives were Nipmuc, not Pokanoket or Wampanoag, and most of them were Christian converts.
    By midsummer, the forces dispatched from Plymouth successfully drove Philip and his allies out of southeastern Massachusetts, but they failed to capture him. More important, their efforts to intimidate neighboring tribes into remaining neutral had the opposite effect of pushing them into open alliance with Philip. The Narragansett began wreaking havoc on Providence in the Rhode Island Colony while, even more troubling, on July 14, 1675, the Nipmuc attacked Mendon in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
    T HE T RAGEDY OF THE P RAYING I NDIANS
    Any doubts as to which side the Nipmuc favored were answered in August 1675, when they ambushed an English expedition that sought to negotiate a treaty of neutrality with them and allowed Philip and his followers safe refuge at their village at Menameset (near New Braintree, Massachusetts). This put the natives settled in and around Framingham in an awkward position, to say the least. Most of them were Christian converts, and all lived alongside if not actively participated in white society. Yet their brethren had declared war upon that society. As a result, they were trusted by neither side.
    So what happened to the Indians we met earlier in the chapter? John Awassamog, aged by this time, seems to have had the good sense or good fortune not to become ensnared in the conflict, probably staying with his son Thomas in the vicinity of Sherborn. The same could not be said of Old Jethro, Old Jacob, Captain Tom and Netus.
    When the English settlement of Lancaster, eighteen miles to the north, was attacked on August 22,