Winter was now at hand and that season was unfavourable to Indian warfare, the leafless trees affording them no longer ambush, while the hardened surface of the swamps, which were the strongholds of the savage, rendered them accessible to their enemies. It was now resolved to include the Narragansetts in the list of enemies, and accordingly, just before Christmas, 1,000 men, headed by Josiah Winslow, entered the Narragansett country, then covered with deep snow. At length they reached one of the ancient fastnesses of the Indians, where the town of South Kingstone now stands. “It was built on a rising ground,” says Hildreth, “in the morass, a sort of island of five or six acres, fortified by a palisade, and surrounded by a close hedge. There was but one entrance, quite narrow, defended by a tree thrown across it, with a block-house of logs in front and another at the back. It was Lord’s-day, but that did not hinder the attack.” Desperate was the onset, and equally desperate the defence; victory for some time was doubtful, but at length, after many lives were lost on both sides, the English became masters of the fort. The wigwams, amounting to 600 in number, were fired, and “all the horrors of the Pequod massacre renewed.” “Most of their provisions, as well as their dwellings, were consumed with fire,” says the old narrative, “and those that were left alive were forced to hide themselves in a cedar swamp not far off, where they had nothing to defend themselves from the cold but boughs of spruce and pine-trees.” The English were masters of the place, and after burning all they could set fire to, they retired with their dead and wounded, amounting to between 200 and 300. This terrible contest is known as the “Swamp Fight.” “Our victory,” continues the chronicle, which reads like the history of some wholesale slaughter of the heathen by the children of Israel, “was more considerable than we at first expected. The enemy lost many of their principal fighting men, their provisions also by the burning of their wigwams and stores, so that it was the cause of their total ruin, they being driven away from their habitations, and put by from planting for the next year. Seven hundred fighting men of the Indians died that day, besides 300 that died of their wounds. The number of old men, women and children that perished either by fire, or that were starved with hunger and cold, none can tell.” “Now, indeed,” may we say with Bancroft, “was the cup of misery full for the red men. Without shelter and without food, they hid themselves in the cedar swamp. They prowled the forests and pawed up the snow for ground-nuts and acorns; they ate the remnants of horse-flesh; they sunk down and died from feebleness and want of food.