Philip’s father, like so many other Indians of New England, took heed of the outcome of the war fought in 1636 by the Puritans against the Pequot Indians of Connecticut, a war that came close to exterminating the entire Pequot tribe. As a result, Massasoit placated the English by continuing to sell land. The Wampanoags, given their proximity to the largest white settlements, were particularly under pressure to accept English culture and laws.

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Despite the challenges facing his father and his tribe, Philip lived most of his life in peaceful obscurity. He took one of his cousins as his wife, a woman named Wootonekanuske. Together they lived not far from Sowams, in a village called Montaup (which the English settlers called Mount Hope). The historical records are vague about Philip’s children; he and Wootonekanuske may have had several sons and daughters, but the extant sources mention only one son. Little is known about Philip’s private and family life because the white colonists paid relatively little attention to him.

Until the 1660s, that is. In the winter of 1661, Massasoit died at the age of 81. Philip’s older brother, Wamsutta, became the principal sachem of the tribe. In a gesture of friendship and fidelity, the two brothers appeared before the Plymouth Grand Court and took the English names of the two legendary princes of ancient Macedonia, Alexander and Philip–names appropriate to their high station among the Wampanoag people.

Yet the friendly gestures soon melted away in the heat of suspicion and distrust. The English colonists quickly came to believe that Alexander and Philip were hatching plans for a war against the whites. In 1662, Plymouth authorities sent an armed guard to arrest Alexander and bring him to trial in an English court. When Alexander pledged his undying friendship to the white settlers, the court released him and allowed him to return home, but he had contracted a serious illness in the English settlement and died on the trail before reaching home. Many Wampanoags believed that Alexander had been poisoned by the settlers at Plymouth, and some of the Indians wanted to avenge his death by attacking the colonists.

King Philip, probably in his mid-20s at the time, assumed the duties of principal sachem and managed to calm down the hotheads in the tribe. For the next nine years, he sustained peaceful relations with Plymouth and the other Puritan colonies, all of which had grouped together under a regional governmental body called the United Colonies of New England.

As the Puritan colonies banded together for strength, the Indians of southern New England grew increasingly weak in numbers and influence. During these years of peace, Philip continued his father’s practice of selling lands to the whites. But he soon found himself on a slippery slope. As he sold more and more land, the white settlers established towns closer to the Wampanoag villages, including the settlement of Swansea, not far from Montaup and Sowams. The colonial authorities also decided to regulate Philip’s real estate transactions by requiring him to obtain permission from the Grand Court before selling any more land.

Increased contact between Indians and whites bred increased suspicion and distrust on both sides. Repeatedly during the late 1660s and early 1670s, the Plymouth magistrates–often the victims of their own paranoia and gullibility–suspected that King Philip was plotting with the French in Canada or the Dutch in New Netherlands to attack the settlements of New England. Philip denied any involvement with the French or Dutch, but he failed to convince the Plymouth officials of his innocence. In 1671, after the colonists’ suspicions became a conviction that Philip was planning to attack their towns, they forced him to sign a new treaty that pledged his friendship to them. They also extracted a promise to pay them an annual tribute of 100 pounds sterling and to surrender his warriors’ muskets to the Plymouth authorities. Not all of Philip’s men gave up their guns, however, and the Plymouth officials saw the lack of total compliance as another threat of war. On September 29, 1671, King Philip signed yet another treaty with the whites that brought about what he had been trying to avoid all along: the subjugation of his people under the laws of Plymouth colony and the English king.

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