What part did the family play in King Philip's War, 1675-1678?

1. About twenty of the family’s direct ancestors bore arms in the war, and a dozen more held its offices, on the muster rolls, in the colony treasurer’s journal and the colony records, and in the soldiers’ land grants of 1728-1736.
2. The family’s war was a town war. Its men were lieutenants, sergeants, deputies, raters, press masters and draftees; one, John Pynchon, held high command, and one, John Foster, printed the war’s histories.
3. They paid for it. Ten near kin were killed (at Pawtucket, Bloody Brook, Sudbury, Lancaster and Mendon), two were maimed, and families lost houses at Springfield, Weymouth and Rehoboth and fled Mendon and the Sheepscot.
4. They took part in the conquest. Family men sat on the councils and juries that sold or banished the defeated, one was named to help sell the conquered land and held a Native servant, and their heirs drew war townships.
5. Their paths crossed most at four places: the Great Swamp (19 December 1675), Pierce’s company (26 March 1676), Capt. Brocklebank’s company and Capt. Holbrook’s expedition with Capt. Sill (April-May 1676).

The Wading River farm ties the family to the Narragansett side of the quarrel too. Capt. William Hudson of Boston was a partner of Maj.-Gen. Humphrey Atherton, whose company took a mortgage of 1660 on “all our whole Countrey” from the Narragansett sachems after the United Colonies fined them 595 fathom of wampum (PCR 10:449, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, ed. Shurtleff and Pulsifer, vols 1-12 (1855-61); Elisha R. Potter, The Early History of Narragansett (1835), pp. 58-66). The Crown’s commissioners declared the purchase “void” in 1665; the proprietors pressed it anyway. John Easton, Rhode Island’s deputy governor, wrote in February 1676 that the colonies’ contest for Narragansett country was, he had “Case to think,” “the greatest Case of the war against them” (Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, 1913): Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (1699), pp. 16-17). Atherton is an ancestor on the Hatten side, and in 1664 Lt. John Holbrook of Weymouth had been chosen to serve under Hudson; Hudson also witnessed Philip’s submission at Taunton in April 1671, when the Wampanoag gave up their guns.

The war began at Swansea on 24 June 1675. Massachusetts sent foot under Maj. Thomas Savage and Capt. Nicholas Paige’s troop to Mount Hope, and two Chebacco men of the Low side rode in Paige’s troop, both credited on 3 September: Joseph Safford, the husband of Sarah Low, daughter of Thomas Low, and Joseph Proctor, brother of Abigail (Proctor) Varney (Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War (1906), p. 86). Philip’s people slipped out of the neck, and the war went inland.

On 14 July Nipmuc men under Matoonas killed “five or six” of the people of Mendon “as they were at their Labour in the Field” (Hubbard 1:86). The only name the historians kept is Richard Post, the husband of Mary Tyler, daughter of Job Tyler (Brigham, The Tyler Genealogy (1912), 2 vols., 1:23-24; Drake’s note to Hubbard, 1:86). Post had been Mendon’s constable in 1674, with Job Tyler a surveyor of highways. The Tylers and the minister, Rev. Joseph Emerson (brother of Elizabeth (Emerson) Fuller), left, and Mendon was burned that winter. Hope Tyler took his family back to Roxbury, where his children were baptized in 1676; by late November his brother Samuel Tyler was at Rowley, one of twelve men impressed there, “some of them … men that are but latly come to town, and want arms” (Thomas Gage, The History of Rowley (Boston, 1840), pp. 181-182). In Boston Capt. Hopestill Foster sat on the General Court’s standing committee for Mendon (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:40), and William Holbrook, a brother of Capt. John, had a house lot there.

Brookfield was ambushed and besieged on 2-4 August. Thomas Millett, who had preached there since 1674, died that summer, and on 28 September the Ipswich court gave his widow the administration of his estate (Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 6:73). In the ambush that opened the siege Capt. Thomas Wheeler of Concord, perhaps an uncle of John Wheeler, was badly wounded.

On 5 October the Agawam people, Springfield’s neighbours and Pynchon’s trading partners, let in warriors and the town was burned while Pynchon had its soldiers at Hadley. He came back that afternoon with Capt. Samuel Appleton and Capt. Joseph Sill: “we came to a Lamentable & woefull sight. The Towne in flames … my grist Mill, & corne Mill, Burnt downe … I believe 40 familys are utterly destitute” (Henry M. Burt, ed., The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736, 2 vols. (1898-99), 1:131-132). Deacon Samuel Chapin, about 77, had gone with the old men into the fortified houses; Pynchon’s brick house was one. John Hitchcock, husband of the deacon’s daughter Hannah, lost “Barnes, corne & all they had,” and Jonathan Burt, grandfather of Ebenezer Hitchcock and so an ancestor on the Hatten side, wrote the only account of the burning in the town book. Capt. Sill’s company stayed to garrison the town, and the deacon died there on 11 November. While Springfield’s mills were ash, it ground its corn at the Westfield mill in which Cornet Joseph Whiting of the Hampshire troop had a share (Chester D. Stiles, comp., A History of the Town of Westfield (1919), p. 12).

In November Capt. Daniel Henchman and Capt. Sill went into the Nipmuc country after the people who had carried off the praying Indians of Hassanamesit. In the fight of 9 November, Henchman wrote, “his corporal, Abiell Lamb, outran himself” (Bodge p. 55). Abiel was a son of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb of Roxbury, a Low-side ancestor; Jeremiah Wise, a son of Joseph Wise, was in the same expedition.

On 2 November the United Colonies declared war on the Narragansett, who had sheltered Wampanoag women and children. The army mustered on Dedham Plain on 9-10 December, and the soldiers were promised “a gratuity of land, besides their wages” if they “played the man, took the fort” (Bodge p. 406). On Sunday 19 December, after a night march through snow, they stormed the Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp in what is now South Kingstown and burned its wigwams with the old people, women and children inside. Increase Mather reckoned that “not lesse then a thousand Indian Souls perished”; of the English “about two hundred and thirty” were killed or wounded and six captains fell (Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1862), pp. 107-109).

No battle of the war holds more of the family. In the army that day:

Captains Johnson and Davenport, whose companies held Thomas Holbrook, Abiel Lamb and John Wheeler, were shot at the log that bridged the entrance; Capt. Joseph Gardner of Salem was shot through the head inside the fort. Samuel Tyler’s company lost four men killed and eighteen wounded; Samuel came through unhurt.

Ralph Ellinwood, eighteen, probably went in with the Beverly men of Gardner’s company, among them William Bath, who would marry his widowed mother. More than fifty years later Ralph drew his own township right for that winter’s service, one of the few soldiers still alive to do it.

Behind the army stood the men who raised it. At Woburn the impressment return for Davenport’s company is headed by the town’s three officers, Capt. John Carter, the father of Hannah (Carter) Converse, Lt. William Johnson and Ensign James Converse, very probably Hannah’s father-in-law (Samuel Sewall, The History of Woburn (Boston, 1868), p. 113; Bodge p. 172). At Scituate the press masters for the Narragansett levy were “Major Cudworth, Cornett Robert Studson, and Isacke Chettenden” (PCR 5:183): Isaac Chittenden chose which of his neighbours would march. At New London the colony’s stores were put in the hands of Joshua Raymond, son of Richard Raymond, the army’s commissary (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:384, 405-406). Lt. Reinold Marvin, Lyme’s deputy, signed its soldiers’ pay bills (2:386).

The army stayed in the field. In January Prentice’s troop met a party of the enemy, “in which Exploit something hapned very remarkable; for one W. Dodge of Salem, riding in Company with another Friend,” met two Indians, and “saved the Life of one Friend, and slew two of his Enemies” (Hubbard 1:163). Rev. John Wise, another son of Joseph Wise and the future brother-in-law of Richard Mather, went out from New London on 26 January as one of the ministers to Maj. Treat’s Connecticut army (John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, vol. 2 (1881), 2:428-429). Capt. Samuel Brocklebank of Rowley brought recruits through a storm “that bit some of them by the heels with the frost,” and they followed the Narragansett north on the Hungry March, eating their horses; Robert Rand of Lynn was credited £1 10s under Brocklebank on 24 March, the five weeks those recruits served (Bodge pp. 200-207). In the same company was John Burrill, first cousin of the Lynn girl, Tabitha Ivory, whom Rand married in 1683/4.

In the new year the Native towns carried the war to the English towns, and the family’s war became a war at home.

Medfield, 21 February; Weymouth, 25 February. Medfield was half burned although Capt. John Jacob’s company was quartered there, and Turner’s company, among them Richard Cheever, then fifteen, came in the next day (Bodge pp. 234, 239). Four nights later, Increase Mather wrote, “the Indians fired seven Houses and Barns in Weymouth,” the town of Lt. John Holbrook and his father, old Thomas Holbrook, then about eighty-six (Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1862)). On 19 April Sgt. Thomas Pratt was killed at Weymouth, and Capt. William Torrey wrote for the militia committee that the town already had “ten men out … four killed by the enemy, already … Just at this instant saw appearing of fire and smoke about the Town” (Gilbert Nash, Historical Sketch of the Town of Weymouth, Massachusetts (1885), pp. 38-40).

Northampton, 14 March. Turner’s company was in Northampton when warriors broke through the palisade before dawn; five houses burned. Richard Cheever was probably with the company then, and inside the town were Isaac Sheldon and his household, Hatten-side ancestors (James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (1898), 1:307-312). Cheever came home in April with Lt. Drinker’s part of the company, and so missed the fight at the Falls in which Turner was killed.

Rehoboth and Providence, 28-30 March. Two days after the fight the enemy burned “about thirty Barns, and near upon fourty dwelling Houses” at Rehoboth (Mather), the town of the Reads, Ides and Pecks of the Tyler side’s Read line. The town’s account of what its men advanced for the war, from Joseph Peck’s £2 10s to “Wid. Rachael Read, with the loss of a gun,” survives (Leonard Bliss Jr., The History of Rehoboth (Boston, 1836), pp. 117-118). Two sons of Nicholas Ide served, John in the Narragansett expedition and very probably Nicholas under Maj. Bradford that summer, with Daniel Read’s brothers Thomas and Israel; between August and December some twenty Rehoboth burials were recorded, among them Nicholas Ide’s wife Martha on 3 November and John Ide in December.

Connecticut, 26-27 March. Simsbury was burned, its people already withdrawn to Windsor, where the council had ordered garrisons at the houses of the east side, “Nath: Bissell’s” among them, where old John Bissell lived (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:410). The next day the council fined his son Samuel Bissell forty shillings: when the constable of Windsor pressed his horse for the army, Bissell “did deceiue him of him, and let him be turned out of his yarde before his face” (2:423).

Sudbury, 21 April. Some hundreds of warriors drew Capt. Samuel Wadsworth and Capt. Samuel Brocklebank into an ambush near Sudbury and killed most of their men. Edward Cowell of Boston, bringing eighteen troopers back from Marlborough, was caught about three miles from the town: “fower of my Company was killed … upon Capt. Wadsworths Ingadgine with the Indian I wentt Backe and Beuryed the fower men which were killed whereof (Lt.?) Thomas Haw[le]y, and Hopkinsies son both of Roxbeury” (Bodge p. 226). Thomas Hawley was the second husband of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb. Cowell swore his deposition before the Council on 19 June, against “this Indian Tom” who had been in the fight: Capt. Tom, Wuttasacomponom, the ruler of the praying town of Hassanamesit, whom Gookin called “a prudent, and I believe, a pious man,” was hanged in Boston three days later, though Christian Indian soldiers had petitioned for his life (Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England (1677), in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1836), pp. 423-534, pp. 476, 528). Brocklebank, who died that day, was the captain of Robert Rand’s winter service and of John Stanwood and his brother Philip, whose credits for the Marlborough garrison were posted in June and July. The same day “(as is judged fifty) Indians burnt nineteen houses and barns at Scituate” (Mather).

Capt. John Holbrook’s company, 27 April-10 May. After Sudbury Massachusetts sent out “the Foot under the Command of Capt. Sill, Capt. Cutler, Capt. Holbrook; the Horse under the Command of Capt. Brattle, Capt. Prentice, Capt. Henchman, Commanders in Chief … April 27, 1676, to range the Woods towards Hassanamesit” (Hubbard 1:224-225). Lt. John Holbrook of Weymouth mustered at Concord on the 29th and wrote: “this Day have mustered my Company … which are but very Small which is a great Discouragement to me … I have neither Drume nor Collors.” His certificate says he was “ordered to take 82 men under my Command together with 28 horses & 14 men to tend them,” from Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Dedham, Braintree, Weymouth and Hingham, and lists who did not come: “From Dorchester non-appearance. Consider Atherton, Henry Wedarton, Ebezar Clape” (Bodge pp. 280-281). Consider Atherton was a son of Humphrey Atherton and a brother of Elizabeth (Atherton) Mather. Weymouth’s share was six men, the draft Capt. Torrey had protested. On 6 May the Natick scouts, “pursuing a Bear,” found a party of the enemy; the horse killed or took about sixteen, and the force went back to its quarters at Medfield, where an “epidemical Cold” broke it up on 10 May. Elisha Foster, a younger son of Capt. Hopestill Foster, very probably rode beside Holbrook’s foot in Brattle’s troop (Bodge p. 264). Holbrook was captain for the expedition; at home he was Weymouth’s lieutenant still, and the colony called him captain only from about 1680.

His sister company’s captain would marry into the Hatten side. Capt. Joseph Sill had been Beers’s lieutenant in the valley, had marched into burning Springfield with Pynchon, held Lancaster after its fall and Groton before it was abandoned, and in September would help seize some two hundred Indians gathered at Dover, many of whom were sold; in October the Court discharged him because “he hath carrjed himself offencively” (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:126). In 1677/8 he married at Lyme the widow of Lt. Reinold Marvin, a Hatten-side ancestor, and their son later married Richard Mather’s daughter.

The Falls, 19 May. About a hundred and fifty mounted men of the valley towns under Capt. Turner rode through the night from Hatfield and fell at dawn on the fishing camps at Peskeompskut, at the head of the falls. “Our soldiers came and put their guns into their wigwams … and did make a great and notable slaughter among them”; the camp held men, women and children, and Judd, Hadley’s historian, thought 130 to 180 “old and young” perished. On the way back the column broke under counter-attack, and Turner and nearly forty men were killed (Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, with family genealogies by Lucius M. Boltwood (Springfield, 1905), pp. 160-167). The roll of 1736, made when the survivors and their heirs were granted land, has “Chapin, Japhett, Springfield”; “Mun, James” and “Mun, John,” brothers of Nathaniel Munn; “Hitchcock, Luke” and his brother John, the husband of Hannah Chapin, who was shot through one arm and had the other broken; and Thomas Stebbins, husband of Abigail Munn (Bodge pp. 250-253; George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (1895), 1:158-160). Two lines that later joined in the Chapins rode in that column: the Munns, and Luke Hitchcock, whose son Ebenezer married Mary Sheldon, granddaughter of Isaac Sheldon and of Cornet Joseph Whiting. The chaplain, Rev. Hope Atherton, another brother of Elizabeth (Atherton) Mather, was separated from the troops in the retreat, offered himself to the enemy as a prisoner, was refused, and found his way back to Hadley (John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, vol. 2 (1881), 2:194). In May 1677 Japhet Chapin, Springfield’s constable for the war year, and John Hitchcock were charged with bringing in “the account … of our expences at ye fals fight” (Burt 2:131).

Hadley, 12 June. A large force attacked Hadley and was driven off by the newly arrived Connecticut army and its Mohegan allies. Samuel Porter of Hadley had “taken care of most of the wounded souldjers at Hadley … laying out of his oune money” and was owed “neere two hundred pounds”; the Court paid him £25 on account in September (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:116-117). His daughter Experience was born in the garrisoned town on 5 August.

By midsummer the Native towns were starving and coming in. Plymouth gave Benjamin Church, a grandson of Richard Warren, a company of English and Native soldiers, many of them Sakonnet men who had come over with their sachem Awashonks, on terms “that the country should find them ammunition and provision, and half the prisoners and arms they took. The Captain and his English soldiers to have the other half of the prisoners and arms, and the Indian soldiers the loose plunder” (Thomas Church, Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War (1716), as The History of King Philip's War, ed. Samuel G. Drake (1825), 1825 ed., p. 74). Early in August Philip’s people, surprised, “left their kettles boiling, and meat roasting upon their wooden spits; and ran into a swamp … Captain Church pursuing, sent Mr. Isaac Howland with a party on one side of the swamp, while himself with the rest, ran on the other side … Captain Church and Mr. Howland soon met at the further end of the swamp” (pp. 90-91). Isaac Howland of Middleborough is a Holbrook-side ancestor through the Ellises, and Church, a grandson of Richard Warren, is kin on the same side; the Warren and Howland lines met again a century later in George Ellis and Phebe Stephens. Church’s men took Philip’s wife and nine-year-old son on 1 August; on 6 August Weetamoo, the sachem of Pocasset, drowned crossing the Taunton River and Taunton men set her head on a pole; on 12 August, in a swamp at Mount Hope, Philip was shot by Alderman, one of Church’s Native soldiers (Mather, pp. 190-194).

At Dorchester Capt. Hopestill Foster, who had sat in the war Courts of May 1675 and May 1676, made his will on 19 July and died in October, two months after the man who had asked him for a coat (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:42-43, 77). His son Hopestill was made ensign of Capt. Thomas Clarke’s Boston company that May (5:127). Lt. Reinold Marvin, Lyme’s deputy, died on 4 August.

In Maine the war went on two years longer. After the Kennebec trading houses fell on 13-14 August 1676, a girl who escaped “ran across over the Land that Night ten or twelve Miles, to give them Notice that lived at Shipscot River … Those of Shipscot taking this Warning escaped away as soon as they could, leaving their Cattel and their Dwellings” (Hubbard 2:157-158). Among them, very probably, was the family of Thomas Messer, whose daughter Lydia Messer said in old age that she lived in her father’s house on the Sheepscot “till she was seventeen years old and married, which time was before the first Indian Wars”; Thomas Messer was among the former inhabitants who met in Boston in 1682 to plan the resettlement, and in 1680 Lydia, widowed, married John Stanwood in Boston (David Q. Cushman, The History of Ancient Sheepscot and Newcastle (Bath, 1882), pp. 60-66; Bolton, A History of the Stanwood Family in America (1899), pp. 32-34).

John Ellinwood of Beverly, Ralph’s brother, was “Imprest & sent to ye Eastward as a souldier … in ye Towne of Wells being then vnder ye Comand of Capt Frost & Leiut Sweat,” and there “sorely wounded in my right hand my fore finger being shott away & ye rest of my hand so greiuously shattered & Torn” that it was “almost altogether vseless” (The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, vol. 7 (Boston, 1892), 7:657). He was most likely hit in the spring of 1677, at seventeen, when the Wells garrison under Lt. Benjamin Swett lost men on the 6th, 12th and 29th of April; Swett himself was killed with some forty English and twelve Natick men at Black Point that June. His certificate in 1701 was signed by Thomas Parlor, who had been on Maj. Appleton’s roll for the Narragansett campaign. The General Court granted him £5 and £3 a year for life. Peace was made at Casco on 12 April 1678.

The war ended Native independence in southern New England and broke up its peoples. Plymouth’s council of war sold 112 “men, weomen, and children” brought in to Plymouth on 4 August 1675, and on 2 September the 57 who had “lately come in to Sandwich … in a submissiue way” were “condemned vnto ppetuall servitude” and sold (PCR 5:173-174). Church, who had promised the Dartmouth people quarter, called their sale “an action so hateful to Mr. Church, that he oppos’d it” (Church, Dexter ed., pp. 45-46). Ships took captives to Cadiz, the West Indies, Bermuda, the Azores and Tangier; Massachusetts’s treasurer sold them by the lot (Bodge pp. 479-480). The ministers argued over Philip’s nine-year-old son; in March 1677 John Cotton wrote, “Philip’s boy goes now to be sold.” On 22 July 1676 Plymouth let its magistrates put the children of those who surrendered “vnto such of the English as may vse them well, especially theire parents consenting thervnto,” until they were 24 or 25 (PCR 5:207). Historians now count more than two thousand Native people taken in the war, perhaps five hundred of them shipped away and the rest bound in New England households, terms that often merged into slavery (Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015); Linford D. Fisher, "'Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves': Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip's War," Ethnohistory 64:1 (2017): 91-114).

The family sat on the bodies that ordered these sales and juries that sent men away. In March 1676/7 Joseph Bartlett, son of Robert Bartlett and Mary Warren, and Mark Snow of Eastham were on the Plymouth jury that found two Native men “very suspisious” of the murders of three Englishmen at Taunton; the court sent them “out of the country speedily, and the other likewise, as hee is prisoner taken in warr” (PCR 5:224). In 1699 Capt. John Holbrook’s will provided “if my Indian Servant Anthony doth behave himself well, that he have his Freedom in twelve years after my decease.” Anthony was probably bound to him after the war rather than taken in it.

The land went too. In October 1678 Massachusetts named “Leift Jn° Holbrooke” one of three men to attend the meeting at Plymouth “to assist in the sale of the concquest lands” (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:204). The colonies paid their soldiers in land as well. Plymouth allowed Scituate’s men land “for such seruice as they pformed for the country” in July 1676, “Leifte Isake Bucke, 10:00:00” first (PCR 5:206); Gloucester gave the three Stanwood brothers soldiers’ lots at Kettle Cove in 1679/80, entered in the town book kept by Thomas Riggs; John Ellinwood had his pension. Half a century later Massachusetts made good the promise of Dedham Plain. In 1728-1733 it granted seven Narragansett townships to the soldiers of 1675 and their heirs: “Ralph Elinwood … (Alive) (By himself)” at No. 3 (Amherst, New Hampshire), Samuel Tyler’s right to “Ebenezer, son,” Rand’s to “Robert Rand, son,” Thomas Low’s to Jonathan Low at No. 1 (Buxton, Maine), “Thomas Holbrook, alive” at No. 5, Thomas Hawley’s to his son-in-law, Abiel Lamb’s to his son, John Wheeler’s to Ebenezer “For his father John” at No. 6 (Bodge pp. 413-438). The clerk of the whole body of grantees was the Boston printer Samuel Kneeland, a son of Mary (Green) Kneeland (William S. Heywood, History of Westminster, Massachusetts (1893), pp. 45-51). Connecticut granted Voluntown to its volunteers; Rev. Moses Noyes of Lyme drew a Cedar Swamp lot there (Bodge pp. 442-445). In 1736 the survivors and heirs of the Falls Fight, Japhet Chapin’s son and the Munns among them, were granted a township of their own.

Most of the Native people in the family’s records appear only because the colonists wrote about them. Read against the grain, the records name: Metacom, writing to Capt. Foster about land and a coat; Squamaug of the Massachusett, contesting his claim; John Sassamon, the witness at Wading River whose death began the war; Owannamaug near Marlborough, whose hay Job Tyler took; Matoonas, who struck Mendon for a son whose head stood on a pole; Toto, living with a Windsor family, who warned Springfield the night before it burned; James Quannapohit and Eleazer Pegin, the Natick scouts who guided Capt. Sill; Amos, who would not leave the wounded Capt. Pierce; Capt. Tom of Hassanamesit, hanged on evidence that included the deposition about Thomas Hawley’s death; the 57 sold at Sandwich, and Keweenam, “an Indian sometimes liueing about Sandwich,” sentenced to be beheaded in July 1676 (PCR 5:205-206); the Natick men killed with Lt. Swett at Black Point; Wenepoykin, the Lynn sachem sold to Barbados, who came home in 1684; the Mohegan under Uncas and Oneco, Connecticut’s allies, whom the council let “dispose of” their captives “by sale or otherwayes” (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:385); and Anthony, in Holbrook’s will. Some of the family lived alongside the praying towns that stayed loyal: the Tuppers of Sandwich preached to the Native people of Herring Pond, Thomas Tupper Jr. sat on Sandwich’s committee for the war’s charges in 1677, and Lt. Matthias Ellis later ran the bounds with the Mashpee. On Long Island, under New York’s government, the war passed the Oyster Bay Friends by: Gov. Andros’s council heard in September 1675 that “many of ye Inhabitants there being Quakers & refusing to beare arms” could not keep the watch, and ordered the defaulters fined, while Nicholas Wright was one of the town’s overseers (Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 14 (1883), p. 697).

The family’s lines did not join for generations after the war, so most of these meetings were among strangers who would later share descendants. Where they crossed:

1. Wading River, 12 July 1670. Capt. Hopestill Foster (Low side) met Philip at the farm of Capt. William Hudson, partner of Humphrey Atherton (Hatten side) in the Narragansett mortgage, with John Sassamon as witness. Lt. John Holbrook (Holbrook side) had been chosen to serve under Hudson in 1664.
2. The fort in the Great Swamp, 19 December 1675. One army held Richard Mather (Hatten side), Samuel Tyler (Tyler side), probably Ralph Ellinwood (Ellingwood side), Capt. William Dodge (brother of an Ellingwood-side ancestor), Thomas Holbrook of Braintree (Holbrook kin), Abiel Lamb (son of a Low-side ancestor), John Wheeler of Concord (Ellingwood side) and John Ide of Rehoboth (Tyler side), with Rev. Nicholas Noyes, cousin of Moses Noyes (Hatten side), as Connecticut’s chaplain. Mather and Dodge rode in the same troop; Tyler and the Beverly men served under the same major, Samuel Appleton.
3. Capt. Brocklebank of Rowley. He signed the Rowley impressment that sent Samuel Tyler to the army in November 1675, commanded Robert Rand (Ellingwood side) on the Hungry March and the Stanwood brothers (Tyler side) at Marlborough, and was killed at Sudbury on 21 April 1676, the day Thomas Hawley, husband of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb (Low side), was killed in Cowell’s party three miles away.
4. Pierce’s company, 26 March 1676. Capt. Michael Pierce (Holbrook side) died with Benjamin Chittenden (son of a Holbrook-side ancestor), Benjamin Nye (son of a Holbrook-side ancestor on the Ellis line), John Read Jr. (brother of a Tyler-side ancestor) and John Walker of Eastham (grandson of Ellingwood-side ancestors, Nicholas Snow and Constance Hopkins). It is the one fight in which both of Frances Holbrook’s and Dick Ellingwood’s families lost men.
5. The town councils of war of 29 February 1675/6. One order of Plymouth’s council (PCR 5:186) put Joseph Warren at Plymouth, Isaac Chittenden at Scituate, Edmund Freeman Jr. at Sandwich, Jeremiah Howes at Yarmouth, and Capt. John Freeman and Mark Snow at Eastham on their towns’ councils: five Holbrook-side families and one of the Ellingwood side’s in a single paragraph.
6. Lancaster, January-February 1676. John Stanwood (Tyler side) in the garrison in the weeks before; Thomas Rowlandson (brother of an Ellingwood-side ancestor) killed in the minister’s house; Capt. Sill holding the town afterwards; Ephraim Roper, the one man who escaped the house, marching beside Richard Cheever (Ellingwood side) in Turner’s company.
7. Holbrook and Sill, 27 April-10 May 1676. Lt. John Holbrook (Holbrook side) and Capt. Joseph Sill commanded two of the three foot companies of one expedition; Sill married the widow of Lt. Reinold Marvin (Hatten side) in 1677/8. With them rode Brattle’s troop, very probably with Elisha Foster (Low side kin); Consider Atherton, drafted for Holbrook’s company, did not come.
8. Springfield and the Falls. Maj. Pynchon and Capt. Sill marched into burning Springfield together on 5 October 1675, where Deacon Chapin and Jonathan Burt had taken refuge; Sill’s company garrisoned the town as the deacon died. At the Falls in May 1676 the Chapin, Munn and Hitchcock men of the Hatten side rode together, and the chaplain was Hope Atherton, of the same side’s Mather-Atherton line.
9. Scituate, July 1676. The court’s list of men to have land for their service puts “Leifte Isake Bucke” (Holbrook side) a few lines from “Charlse Stockbridge, for Benjamine Woodworth” (Frances’s mother’s side) (PCR 5:206).
10. The Plymouth jury of March 1676/7. Joseph Bartlett (Warren kin, Holbrook side) and Mark Snow (Ellingwood side) sat together on the jury whose verdict sent two Native men out of the country (PCR 5:224).
11. Paige’s troop, 1675. Joseph Safford and Joseph Proctor, the son-in-law of Thomas Low and the brother of Abigail Varney, rode together to Mount Hope; their families’ lines joined a century later.
12. The widows. Sarah (Clark) Marvin married Capt. Sill; Eleanor (Lynn) Ellinwood married William Bath, who had been on Gardner’s muster; and two Rowlandson sisters, whose brother was killed at Lancaster, married two Ellinwood brothers who had served.

The family’s war was the colonists’ war in small, and it was fought at the level of the town. Only one of them, John Pynchon, held high command, and one, John Foster, shaped how the war was remembered. The rest were what a New England town needed to fight: lieutenants and sergeants (Holbrook, Buck, Harlow, Ellis), deputies and members of councils of war (Foster, Marvin, Howes, Chittenden, the Freemans), raters and press masters (Timothy Mather, Chittenden), a constable who kept the accounts of a battle (Japhet Chapin), a commissary (Joshua Raymond), a householder who nursed the wounded on credit (Porter), and young men pressed at fifteen to twenty (Cheever, Ralph and John Ellinwood, Samuel Tyler, Richard Mather). It cost them. Ten of their near kin were killed: Pierce, Benjamin Chittenden, Benjamin Nye, John Read Jr. and John Walker at Pawtucket, Peter Woodbury and Josiah Dodge at Bloody Brook, Thomas Hawley at Sudbury, Thomas Rowlandson at Lancaster and Richard Post at Mendon. John Ellinwood lost the use of his hand and John Hitchcock nearly lost both arms; the Tylers and the Messers lost their homes; houses burned at Springfield, Weymouth and Rehoboth.

It was also a war of conquest, and the family took part in that too. Its grievances were in their own court records before it began: their cattle in Native corn, their purchases without leave. Family men sat on the councils and juries that sold the defeated, John Holbrook was named to help sell the conquered land and held a Native servant twenty years later, and dozens of their heirs drew townships granted for the war half a century on. None of this was unusual in their world, and the records do not let us say that any of them stood against it. The nearest the family came to another way is Benjamin Church, a Warren kinsman, who opposed the sale of the Dartmouth people who had surrendered on his word, and the Quaker Friends of Oyster Bay, who would not bear arms at all. We think the honest account holds both together: the family defended their towns and buried their sons, and they were part of a war that ended with the sale of the people they had lived beside. The histories John Foster printed told the war as a deliverance; the rest of it is in the same records, often in the same hand.

A few of the stories the family has long told about the war come out differently in the records:

• Samuel Tyler was not wounded and left for dead at the Swamp. The company’s clerk wrote “Samuel Taylor of Rowley” among the slain by mistake; the man who died was an Ipswich Samuel Taylor.
• Isaac Chittenden did not fall defending Scituate on 20 May 1676; he lived into the autumn.
• Benjamin Woodworth was not killed in the war; he came home to Scituate.
• Richard Cheever was not at the Falls Fight; he had gone home in April with part of Turner’s company.