It is now doubted whether the war known as King Philip’s War was the result of such deliberate and organized action as was formerly supposed, but about the formidable strength of the outbreak there can be no question. It began in June, 1675; Philip was killed August 12, 1676, and the war was prolonged at the eastward for nearly two years after his death. Ten or twelve Puritan towns were utterly destroyed, many more damaged, and five or six hundred men were killed or missing. The war cost the colonists £100,000, and the Plymouth colony was left under a debt exceeding the whole valuation of its property--a debt ultimately paid, both principal and interest. On the other hand, the war tested and cemented the league founded in 1643 between four colonies--Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut--against the Indians and Dutch, while this prepared the way more and more for the extensive combinations that came after. In this early war, as the Indians had no French allies, so the English had few Indian allies, and it was less complex than the later contests, and so far less formidable. But it was the first real experience on the part of the eastern colonists of all the peculiar horrors of Indian warfare--the stealthy approach, the abused hospitality, the early morning assault, the maimed cattle, tortured prisoners, slain infants. All the terrors that lately attached to a frontier attack of Apaches or Comanches belonged to the daily life of settlers in New England and Virginia for many years, with one vast difference, arising from the total absence in those early days of any personal violence or insult to women. By the general agreement of witnesses from all nations, including the women captives themselves, this crowning crime was then wholly absent. The once famous “white woman,” Mary Jemison, who was taken prisoner by the Senecas at ten years old, in 1743--who lived in that tribe all her life, survived two Indian husbands, and at last died at ninety--always testified that she had never received an insult from an Indian, and had never known of a captive’s receiving any. She added that she had known few instances in the tribe of conjugal immorality, although she lived to see it demoralized and ruined by strong drink.