It has been said that New England, during its early colonial days, had five powerful Indian confederacies. While the Wampanoags could not put more than a thousand warriors in the field, the united tribes could muster twenty-five thousand. What a resistless army they would form, if they would combine to destroy the pale faces that had come across the great water to steal their hunting grounds! King Philip's dream was to bring about such a union, and he now bent all his energies to the task. The Wampanoag leader saw the necessity of care, time, and thoroughness in his preparations. It would be the height of rashness to strike before everything was ready. He held back the impatience of his followers, and was slowly moulding his grand scheme into form, but when fully a year was needed in which to perfect it, the war was brought on by an unexpected event. [Illustration: GROUP OF INDIAN CHIEFS] As a result of the self-sacrificing labors of Eliot, the missionary among the Indians, many of these people had been turned from their evil ways and become Christians. One of those professing conversion was John Sassamon, who had been partly educated at Cambridge, and served as school-teacher at Natick. He was cunning and artful, and became interpreter or secretary to Philip, who could not read or write English. In this situation he acted as a spy upon the chieftain, and betrayed all the secrets he could gather to the authorities. Philip discovered his treachery and determined to put him to death, but, knowing he was certain to be charged with the crime, it was carried out by three others, who no doubt were hired by Philip himself. In the month of January, 1675, the body of Sassamon was found under the ice in a pond near Middleborough, with such marks of violence as to show he had been murdered before being thrust into the water. Three Indians were charged with the crime, one being a close friend of Philip, and all were hanged on evidence which in these days would not have been admitted in court. Philip with good reason believed that the authorities would try to get hold of him, and, if they did so, he too would be executed as an "accessory before the act." He had not yet brought about the vast union of tribes that was under way, but he made up his mind to wait no longer. The squaws and children of the Wampanoags were sent to the Narragansetts, and the warriors stripped for the fray.