So I've now finished reading a fine book on King Philip's War and I have no one to tell about it. I don't even know what I can say I've learned from all those pages of intellegent discourse on the meanings of language during wartime.

What concerns me as a resident of this street in this town near "Moosiap" is that a war in 1676 could wipe out or push out such an enormous population of native residents. Where are the signs of their vigorous lives here, other than in that one word? One Algonquian word naming one local place.

I now know that Walpole was at the time considered the Massachusetts frontier. It was not yet settled, like our neighbor Medfield. This place, including Moosiap, was all native -- probably Nipmuc and certainly Wampanoag villagers were temporarily settled all through our woodlands.

But after this bloodiest of wars, they removed themselves (those who were left) and joined other tribes in Plymouth colony and on the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. They gradually assimilated in Christianized Indian towns like Natick, or were held imprisoned on Deer Island in the Boston Harbor. According to Jill Lepore's book, THE NAME OF WAR, we Massachusetts Bay pilgrims and puritans sent the "heathens" packing off to slavery in Barbados, or into servitude with Christian masters throughout the four colonies of New England.

For many years after the war, there was much distrust, and continued violence, on both sides, prompting colonists to fear that they had degenerated from their Christian identity and become like the barbarous naked ones they lived among.

Personally, I'd like to be walking the Moose Hill trails and run across either a pious puritan or a nearly naked descendent of Massasoit. As it is, I find young mothers from the nearby town of Sharon, out for morning walks.

Last week I walked the Billings Trail with a small group and we passed a large (former) pasture. We were trudging noisily through so many leaves that I'd have thought we would have run off anything living -- puritans, natives, or creatures. But through the birch and maples, on the other side of the pasture, I spotted the white tail of a buck. He'd probably been watching our approach for a long time and it was a pleasant testimony to his confidence that he stayed and continued feeding for a time.

But all signs of early man in these woods is recent. There are the granite stone walls of divided pasture lands, and big jagged boulders stacked next to each other marking old agricultural activity. I suppose this is evidence of much later local culture, long after Walpole was incorporated as a town in the 1700s, and long after the Nipmucs had lived here in moveable wigwams.
...

King Philip, the great sachem of the Wampanoag, was captured in 1676 and decapitated near Mount Hope in Rhode Island. His head was displayed for months and months on a pole, until it had rotted beyond humanity. If only he had never come to Plymouth or to Massachusetts. If only the religious fanatics here had not been so afraid of Christian "backsliding." If only there had been no white captives taken, ransomed, released. If only no one had written so zealously about the war, the captivity, and the efforts to bring the Church to the wilderness of New England. If only the war hadn't captured the imagination of Americans from the colonies to England and Europe. If only we hadn't killed King Philip.

Legend only, but legend still: writers later (1820s) said that Philip had cried:

"My curses on you, white men! May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in his war voice from the clouds! Murderers! The last of the Wampanoag's curse be on you! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path the red men shall trace!..."

This is all melodrama. My regional musings are too. Yet, it's hard to walk the "windy hill" of Moosiap without looking for the traces of more than one word, one curse, and one silent buck.