Second Battle of Nipsachuck

North Smithfield, Rhode Island, contains a piece of ground that once witnessed violent conflict and now bears the name Second Battle of Nipsachuck Battlefield. Much of the land consists of swamp, and on July 2, 1676, it hosted one of the final clashes of King Philip's War fought anywhere in southern New England. What draws military historians to this particular engagement is the colonists' unusual decision to deploy a cavalry charge, a tactic seldom seen elsewhere during the conflict. In 2016, the location earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

Setting

The engagement unfolded across a marshy stretch now called Mattity Swamp in North Smithfield, bounded by a hill on its western edge, with a handful of small patches of firm ground scattered throughout the wetland. Chroniclers of the era gave the swamp a memorable label, calling it "a great spruce swamp."

History

By the middle of 1676, English colonists held the advantage in King Philip's War, with the tribes arrayed against them retreating on most fronts. Southern Rhode Island's Narragansett people had largely scattered toward the Connecticut River valley following the Great Swamp Fight of December 1675, when a combined force of English and Indian fighters launched a crushing strike on their principal settlement. That summer, roughly one hundred Narragansetts under the female sachem Quaiapen made their way back to the northern part of Rhode Island, apparently hoping to retrieve stores of seed corn they had hidden for planting.

John Talcott commanded four hundred men who fell upon this group, drawing on three hundred militiamen from Connecticut alongside close to one hundred Mohegan and Pequot fighters. Before striking, Talcott's forces had surveyed the Narragansetts' encampment near the swamp's western boundary and devised a plan to approach from over and around a hill situated to the west. Some of the Connecticut militia rode as dragoons, and historians consider this clash one of the rare instances during the conflict where mounted troops engaged in actual combat on horseback.

Pushed into the swamp itself, the Narragansetts suffered heavy losses. Among the dead were Queen Magnus, also known as Quaiapen, along with Watawaikeson, who served as a messenger for Pessicus, and Stonewall John, the man responsible for constructing Queen's Fort. With Quaiapen's death, any coordinated Narragansett resistance in the war effectively came to a close. Talcott himself later described the encounter at a place he called "Nipsachooke," stating that his men had, within three hours, killed or captured one hundred seventy-one people. Of that number, forty-five were women and children whom the Indians had kept alive, while the rest were slain outright; thirty-four men died in the fighting, and fifteen weapons were seized. Most who survived the engagement were later taken prisoner, put on trial, and ultimately either executed in public or sold into servitude.

Archaeology

The marshy, waterlogged nature of this ground kept it largely untouched by later construction, with nothing more than light farming and a handful of houses appearing near its fringes. When the National Park Service conducted digs there, the effort turned up items from Narragansett households alongside remnants of military life, including lead shot, musket balls, a horseshoe, and a bridle rosette.