Despite these initial successes, as the summer of 1676 approached, a combination of the shortcomings of the Indian leadership and the superior technology of the English was pushing Phillip and his Algonquian allies to the brink of defeat.  On August 12, Phillip was shot during a raid by a party of English soldiers led by a deserter to the Wampanoag camp.[1]  After this defeat, the Algonquian resistance quickly crumbled on all fronts.  Although fighting continued in Maine into 1677, violence in Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts soon ended.  At this point, King Phillip’s War was effectively over.  In the aftermath, most of the remaining Indians who had not been killed in the war moved to New York or Canada, choosing to leave rather than stay and face the same aggression and pressure to sell their lands from the English.  Many of those who did stay were forced to live on supervised reservations or were sold into slavery in the West Indies.  In Bristol, the number of Indians living in town in 1774 was just sixteen.  By 1785, that number dropped to two.[2]  Native presence in southern New England has never disappeared, but it significantly diminished after King Philip’s War.



[1] Ibid, 68-69. 

[2] George Locke Howe, Mount Hope; a New England Chronicle (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 61.