#182 King Philip’s War 4: “Wheeler’s Surprise” and the Problem of Counterinsurgency

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Maps of New England during King Philip’s War

At the end of July 1675 two important things were happening at once. King Philip, known as Metacom to his people, and the sunksqua Weetamoo, were in flight along with at least 250 of their people. Reports coming into the colonial militias in the Fall River area suggested that Philip and Weetamoo intended to cross the Providence River and head for Nipmuc country.

Farther north, at almost exactly the same time, Massachusetts Bay Colony had heard rumors that the Nipmucs had joined, or were soon to join, King Philip’s Wampanoags. The Nipmucs occupied the strategically important territory between the settled towns of Massachusetts Bay near Boston and places like Springfield on the Connecticut River. From the Bay’s point of view, it was important to determine whether the Nipmucs were in the war or would remain neutral. Since Edward Hutchinson had succeeded in extracting a purported treaty from the Narragansetts, Massachusetts dispatched him into Nipmuc country with Thomas Wheeler and twenty horsemen to do the same.

Sadly for all the people of New England, Hutchinson and Wheeler would set in motion a chain of events that would cause this awful war to spread everywhere in the region east of the Connecticut River. The New English would find themselves waging a brutal counterinsurgency, with all the tactical problems of irregular war in our own time.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

Matthew J. Tuininga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 182.
0:11.0	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on April 27, 2025, in Austin, Texas.
0:19.4	We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism.
0:28.0	We've had a nice surge of new followers in the last couple of weeks, largely because of very generous endorsements on the fifth column and reason roundtable podcasts,
0:39.6	both of which I enjoy very much.
0:42.4	Matt Welch, the common denominator between the two,
0:45.6	was especially gracious about our two-part sidebar episode on Paul Revere's Ride,
0:51.5	which was the occasion for the short break in our telling of the story of
0:55.9	King Philip's War.
0:57.8	We are now back at that momentous conflict, almost exactly 100 years before the start of the
1:04.9	American Revolution.
1:07.0	It is late July 1675, and as always, this episode will be more interesting if you've recently
1:15.0	listened to the previous three King Phillips War episodes.
1:20.2	At the end of July, two important things were happening at once, and these will be easier to
1:26.1	understand if you can look at the blog post Maps of King
1:29.8	Phillips War, which is linked in the show notes for this episode. King Philip, known as Metacombe to his
1:37.0	people, and the Sunksquah Wiedamoo, were in flight along with at least 250 of their people.
1:50.2	They'd taken refuge in seven miles of swamps roughly at today's Fall River, Massachusetts,
1:55.6	and after fending off several English attacks, had escaped to the north,
1:58.6	crossed the Taunton River at today's Somerset,
2:03.0	and then proceeded west between Swansea and Rejobeth to the Providence River. On July 30th, they were spotted by settlers in the region, and pursued by
2:09.9	English militia, and now 50 Mohegan's who had come to Rojoboth after the Mohegan,
	...

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