In 1675, an Indian uprising in Massachusetts touched off a year of violent conflict throughout New England. Hundreds of English, and untold thousands of Natives would lose their lives in King Philip's War -- a desperate campaign by one group of Native tribes to destroy the expanding English colonies.

“This was a war of significant proportions,” explains Dr. Kevin McBride of the University of Connecticut and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.  “It probably, in terms of its material costs and population costs, was the most devastating war proportionally to the population in American history.”

The war did not involve the Pequots at the start, but it had the English seeing every Indian as a potential threat. 

“I strongly suspect that there was no way for the Pequots or any other native group to sit out this conflict,” says McBride.  “You either had to be with the English or against the English.” 

For the Pequots, the choice was clear.  They had been with the English, and subject to their authority, since the end of the Pequot War.  And it was the Pequots' longtime enemies, the Narragansetts, who now posed the greatest threat to the colonial settlements of Connecticut.

“The Pequots were situated along the eastern frontier of Connecticut Colony,” says Dr. McBride, “and Connecticut was at war against the Narragansetts, the Nipmuks, and the Wampanoags.  All those groups lay to the north and east of Mashantucket.  So to get to the English in Connecticut, you had to go through the Mashantucket reservation.”

Connecticut Colony would depend on Pequot assistance throughout King Philip's War.  Companies of Pequot warriors fought in every major campaign, and the Connecticut militia were quick to draw on their expertise in the techniques of Native warfare.

“Throughout the war, Connecticut militias suffered the lowest casualty rates, they were never ambushed, and they were regarded as the most effective of the colonial forces,” says Dr. McBride.  “It was quite clear that without Pequot and Mohegan participation the Connecticut war effort would have been dramatically different.” 

King Philip's War cemented the Pequots' alliance with the colonial powers, but it wiped some defeated communities off the map of New England forever.  Groups like the Pequots who survived King Philip's War would face less violent but equally serious threats to their own existence in the years and decades to come.