Boys' Book of Indian Warriors and Heroic Indian Women — John Shaqi
Boys' Book of Indian Warriors and Heroic Indian WomenSabin, Edwin L. (Edwin Legrand)
History
Boys' Book of Indian Warriors and Heroic Indian Women
Sabin, Edwin L. (Edwin Legrand)
Indians of North America -- Biography; Indians of North America -- Wars
After the death of the luckless Alexander, Wetamoo married a Pocasset
Indian named Petananuit. He was called by the English "Peter Nunnuit."
This Peter Nunnuit appears to have been a poor sort of a husband, for
he early deserted to the enemy, leaving his wife to fight alone.
Wetamoo was not old. She was in the prime of life, and as an Indian
was beautiful. Not counting her faithless husband, only one of her
Pocassets had abandoned her. He was that same Alderman who betrayed
and killed King Philip.
In the beginning Queen Wetamoo had mustered three hundred warriors.
She stuck close to King Philip, and fought in his ranks. She probably
was in the fatal Narragansett fort when it was stormed and taken, on
December 19, 1675. The English much desired to seize her, for her
lands of Pocasset "would more than pay all the charge" of the war. She
was considered as being "next unto Philip in respect to the mischief
that hath been done."
But she was not taken in the fort among the Narragansetts. She fled
with King Philip her brother-in-law, and warred that winter and spring,
as he did, against the settlements in Massachusetts.
Truly a warrior queen she was, and so she remained to the last, ever
loyal to the losing cause of her grand sachem, and to the memory of
Alexander.
With Philip she was driven southward, back toward her home of Pocasset,
east of Mount Hope. By the first week in August of 1676, she had only
twenty-six men left, out of her three hundred.
Then there came to the colonists at Taunton, which lay up the river
Taunton from Pocasset, another deserter, with word that he could lead
them to the little Wetamoo camp, not far southward.
Twenty armed English descended upon her, August 6, and easily overcame
her camp. She alone escaped, in flight. She had no thought of
surrendering herself into slavery.
In making her way to Pocasset, she "attempted," reads the tale, "to get
over a river or arm of the sea near by, upon a raft, or some pieces of
broken wood; but whether tired and spent with swimming, or starved with
cold and hunger, she was found stark naked in Metapoiset [near present
Swansea of southern Massachusetts, at the Rhode Island line], not far
from the water side, which made some think she was first half drowned;
and so ended her wretched life."
No respect was paid to her. Her head was cut off and hoisted upon a
pole in the town of Taunton, as revenge for the similar beheading of
some English bodies, earlier in the war. When, in Taunton, the
Pocasset captives saw the head--"They made a most horrid and diabolical
lamentation, crying out that it was their queen's head."
Here let us close the melancholy story of the warrior queen Wetamoo,
who as the companion-in-arms of her sachem sought to avenge her
husband's death, as well as to save her country from the foreigner.
However, Wetamoo and Philip together dragged the once mighty
Narragansetts down. This brings to the surface the tale of Canonchet,
the big-hearted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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