[9] Native raiding parties attacked homesteads and villages throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine over the next six months, and the colonial militia retaliated.

[11] In the space of little more than a year, 12 of the region's towns were destroyed and many more were damaged, the economy of the Plymouth and Rhode Island Colonies was ruined and their population was decimated, losing one-tenth of all men available for military service.

The New England colonists faced their enemies without support from any European government or military, and this began to give them a group identity separate and distinct from Britain.

The Rhode Island, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven colonies each developed separate relations with the Wampanoags, Nipmucs, Narragansetts, Mohegans, Pequots, and other tribes of New England, whose territories historically had differing boundaries.

Two months before the outbreak of the war, Mammanuah, the son of Awashonks, leader of the Sakonnet, had signed a deed granting English colonizers the right to all the land from Pocasset Neck south to the sea, without first seeking his mother's approval.

Mammanuah sought restitution at Plymouth, where his title was reinstated by colonial authorities who had noticeably ulterior motives for wanting the land deed to remain valid.

Not long after, Sassamon's body was found in the ice-covered Assawompset Pond, and Plymouth Colony officials arrested three Wampanoags on the testimony of a Native witness, including one of Metacomet's counselors.

[36] Officials from the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies responded quickly to the attacks on Swansea; on June 28, they sent a punitive military expedition that destroyed the Wampanoag town at Mount Hope in Bristol, Rhode Island.

[39] The siege took place at Ayers' Garrison in West Brookfield, but the location of the initial ambush was a subject of extensive controversy among historians in the late nineteenth century.

The next colonial expedition was to recover crops from abandoned fields along the Connecticut River for the coming winter and included almost 100 farmers and militia, plus teamsters to drive the wagons.

The Battle of Bloody Brook was fought on September 12, 1675, between militia from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a band of Natives led by Nipmuc sachem Muttawmp.

An indigenous servant who worked for Morgan managed to escape and alerted the Massachusetts Bay troops under the command of Major Samuel Appleton, who broke through to Springfield and drove off the attackers.

As the colonial forces went through Rhode Island, they found and burned several Native towns which had been abandoned by the Narragansetts, who had retreated to a massive fort in a frozen swamp.

[41] The Narragansetts were finally defeated when Canonchet was captured and executed in April 1676; then female sachem Queen Quaiapen and approximately 138 supporters were killed in an ambush.

They attacked homes in Andover, Bridgewater, Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough, Medfield, Medford, Portland, Providence, Rehoboth, Scituate, Seekonk, Simsbury, Sudbury, Suffield, Taunton, Warwick, Weymouth, and Wrentham, including Norfolk and Plainville.

Utlizing kinship networks, the Wampanoags and their allied tribes spread word of English locations, encampments, and attacks in order to warn other resisting Native Americans.

Philip led a force of 1,500 Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett men in a dawn attack on the isolated village, which then included the neighboring communities of Bolton and Clinton.

The Connecticut River towns had thousands of acres of cultivated crop land known as the bread basket of New England, but they had to limit their plantings and work in large armed groups for self-protection.

Combined forces of colonial volunteers and their indigenous allies continued to attack, kill, capture, or disperse bands of Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and Wampanoags as they tried to plant crops or return to their traditional locations.

In the summer of 1676, a band of over 100 Narragansetts led by female sachem Quaiapen returned to northern Rhode Island, apparently seeking to recover cached seed corn for planting.

They were attacked by a force of 400, composed of 300 Connecticut colonial militia and about 100 Mohegan and Pequot warriors, and Quaiapen was killed along with the leaders as they sought refuge in Mattekonnit (Mattity) Swamp in North Smithfield, while the remainder of the survivors were sold into slavery.

Metacomet took refuge back at Assawompset Pond, the Wampanoag settlement near which John Sassamon had been found dead before the outset of the war, but the colonists formed raiding parties with indigenous allies, and he retreated southwest towards Rhode Island.

[56] His head was displayed in Plymouth for a generation, which was commonly done in Britain to traitors; Wampanaog memory holds that the skull was later taken by tribal members and secretly buried.

[58] Upon hearing news of the Wampanoag attack on Swansea, colonists in York marched up the Kennebec River in June 1675 and demanded that Wabanakis turn over their guns and ammunition as a sign of goodwill.

Mogg Hegon repeatedly attacked towns such as Black Point (Scarborough), Wells, and Damariscove, building a flotilla out of the approximately 40 sloops and a dozen 30-ton ships previously armed by militia.

[72] Plymouth Colony governor Josiah Winslow and Captain Benjamin Church rode from Boston to Dedham to take charge of the 465 soldiers and 275 cavalry assembling there and together departed on December 8, 1675 for the Great Swamp Fight.

Metacom's Pennacook allies had made a separate peace with the colonists as the result of early battles that are sometimes identified as part of King Philip's War.

[78] Plymouth Colony lost close to eight percent of its adult male population and a smaller percentage of women and children to Native attacks and other causes associated with the war.

After 1695, Plymouth’s incorporation into Massachusetts encouraged expansion and creation of English settlements, putting new pressures on Native resources and driving the consolidation of their villages.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, nearly all of the remaining Indians on the Cape would move to Mashpee, making it the largest community on the mainland, and the other three clusters would shrink to just a few families.