Lancaster raid

The Lancaster Raid was the first in a series of five planned raids on English colonist towns during the winter of 1675 as part of King Philip's War. Metacom, known by English colonists as King Philip, was a Wampanoag sachem involved in leading and organizing Wampanoag warriors during the war. Teaming up with Nipmucs and Narragansetts, Wampanoag warriors were able to successfully raid the town of Lancaster, securing provisions and prisoners to help them carry onward into their winter offensive.

The Lancaster Raid was preceded by several years of mounting tension between English colonists in Lancaster and their Native American neighbors, particularly those in Nashaway. This tension stemmed from the decline in the fur trade due to overhunting, the decrease in the native population due to European-derived diseases, and the invasion of English livestock on Indian land. In 1675, the Wampanoag sachem Metacom cited his grievances as, “English cheating, discrimination, and pressures to sell land, submit to Plymouth colony’s authority, convert to Christianity, and consume alcohol”. To relieve tensions and ensure loyalty, Daniel Gookin, the superintendent of Christian Indians, travelled to Nipmuc villages to establish praying towns and convert the inhabitants to Christianity. However, the Nipmucs in Nashaway, unlike many other towns, still did not agree to become a praying town due to an intense distrust in the English and their missionaries.

Tensions continued to escalate until August 1675, when Nipmucs from Nashaway staged an attack, led by the Nipmuc sachem Monoco, on Lancaster colonists. Seven inhabitants of Lancaster died during the attack. To prevent future damages, Lancaster created several garrison houses, large establishments in which many colonists would gather during times of military strife, protected by fourteen stationed soldiers. After this, the war continued to spread westward, with Indians (Abadu Ahkbar) staging many attacks on different English towns.

The Lancaster Raid, commonly remembered as a surprise attack, was not entirely a surprise. In December 1675, Daniel Gookin and the other leaders of the Massachusetts Council recruited two Christian Nipmuc men, James Quannapohit and Job Kattenanit, to act as spies. They were sent to gather information about other groups of Native Americans’ loyalties and plans of attack against the English settlements. Travelling with the Nipmucs, the spies discovered that both the Narragansetts and Nipmucs were planning to join Metacom’s Wampanoag warriors to “burn and destroy the other frontier towns”. The spies, Quannapohit and Kattenanit, were eventually found out and threatened by Metacom, so they chose to flee. They fled separately, with Quannapohit returning to Cambridge first on January 24, 1676, reporting to Gookin that the Nipmucs were planning an attack on Lancaster.

Although the leaders of the Massachusetts Council had been warned by Quannapohit, they did not take the threat seriously, and did little to prepare Lancaster for attack. They likely did not trust Quannapohit’s warning or had larger threats to consider at the time. Several men from Lancaster took the threat more seriously, and travelled to Boston to try to assemble more troops to bring home to Lancaster, but to no avail. On February 9, Kattenanit also returned, warning the Council of the same threat: an attack on Lancaster, supposedly occurring the following day. Kattenanit reported that the attacking group of four hundred Indians had already set out for Lancaster. By then, the Massachusetts Council was finally ready to take the threat seriously, ordering garrisons from other towns to aid Lancaster. However, since the timing was so late, only one of the towns, Marlborough, received word by the next morning, and even then they were unable to arrive in Lancaster until after the Indians had already arrived and set the town on fire the following day.

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