Some allied with the colonists.

Some changed sides.

There was no single Indigenous political position, and the war cannot be understood as a simple two-sided conflict.

Yet the war became known to the English as King Philip’s War, placing Metacom’s name at the center of one of the most destructive conflicts in early New England history.

In 1676, Metacom was killed.

His death did not simply end a military campaign.

It became a symbol of the destruction of Native political power in much of southern New England.

English authorities treated his body as a trophy.

His head was taken to Plymouth and displayed publicly for years.

That image is shocking enough to make the story memorable.

But the head on the blockhouse was only the final, visible piece of a much larger history.

The real story begins decades earlier, when the Wampanoag and the English still believed they might be able to live beside one another.

PART ONE — BEFORE THE WAR, THERE WAS A DIFFERENT WORLD

When the Mayflower reached the coast of what became Massachusetts in 1620, the Wampanoag were not a people waiting for history to begin.