[Sidenote: Providence protests against him] [Sidenote: He flees to Shawomet, where he buys land of the Indians] Meanwhile the unfortunate Miantonomo had rushed upon his doom. The annihilation of the Pequots had left the Mohegans and Narragansetts contending for the foremost place among the native tribes. Between the rival sachems, Uncas and Miantonomo, the hatred was deep and deadly. As soon as the Mohegan perceived that trouble was brewing between Miantonomo and the government at Boston, he improved the occasion by gathering a few Narragansett scalps. Miantonomo now took the war-path and was totally defeated by Uncas in a battle on the Great Plain in the present township of Norwich. Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured. By ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally. This message puzzled the Mohegan chief. The appearance of a schism in the English counsels was more than he could quite fathom. When the affair had somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers. Whether it is to be inferred that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be called their "shirt-sleeves," the reader must decide. [Sidenote: Miantonomo and Uncas]