Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Upon the western shore of Mount Hope Bay is the town of Bristol,
quiet, with wide, grassy, tree-shaded streets leading down to the
waterside, now a pleasant summer-resort, having a ferry over to Fall
River. Farther up the peninsula is Warren, with its factories. In
Bristol rises the splendid isolated eminence of Mount Hope, which
gives the bay its name. Its rounded summit is a mass of quartzite
rock, almost covered by grass. It is hardly three hundred feet high,
but being the most elevated spot anywhere around, has a grand outlook,
every town in Rhode Island being visible from it, and all the islands
of Narragansett Bay, while far to the southward, upon distant
Aquidneck, Newport gleams in the sunlight. Eastward, across Mount Hope
Bay, the city of Fall River, with its rising terraces of huge granite
mills, is built apparently into the sloping side of a ledge of rocks.
Upon this mountain lived the famous chief, King Philip, and from it,
with his warrior band, he sallied forth to carry slaughter and rapine
among the Puritan settlements. The eastern side of Mount Hope falls
off precipitously to the bay, and when he was finally surprised by the
colonists in his lair, he is said to have rolled down this steep
declivity like a barrel. The mountain top is now known as "King
Philip's Seat;" there is a natural excavation in the mountain side,
called "King Philip's Throne;" and from the foot the waters of
"Philip's Spring" flow away, a little purling brook, out to Taunton
River. One disgruntled early colonial annalist described the place as
"Philip's Sty at Mount Hope." The greatest tradition of this region
tells of the ambush, surprise and death of this famous sachem, the
"Last of the Wampanoags."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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