Settlers Send Military Expedition to Destroy Wampanoag Town at Mount Hope in Retaliation for Swansea Attacks
On the testimony of a Native American witness, Plymouth Colony arrested three Wampanoags, including one of Metacom's councilors.
A jury among whom were some Indian members convicted them of Sassamon's murder; they were hanged on June 8, 1675, at Plymouth. Some Wampanoag believed that both the trial and the court's sentence were an insult to Indian sovereignty. In response, on June 20, a band of Pokanoket, possibly without Philip's approval, assaulted several isolated homesteads in the small Plymouth colony settlement of Swansea. Laying siege to the town, they destroyed it five days later and killed several settlers and others coming to help the settlers.
Officials from Plymouth and Boston responded quickly; on June 28 they sent a military expedition that destroyed the Wampanoag town at Mount Hope (modern Bristol, Rhode Island).
At first the fighting was mainly in those villages of Plymouth Colony which were nearest Narragansett Bay; then it spread to the valley of the Connecticut River and the neighborhood. Deerfield, Springfield, Brookfield, Groton, and many other places in Massachusetts were attacked. The Indians would creep up stealthily in the night, burn the houses, carry off the women and children prisoners if they could, kill the rest of the inhabitants, take their scalps home and hang them up in their wigwams.