Metacomet, the sachem who led King Philip's war.

that the Europeans intended more than just establishing a few towns. About the time Connecticut's Central Valley and Coast had been completely colonized and the first movements into the Uplands frontier were beginning, war broke out between the Indians and the Puritans. European and native American ways of doing things just did not mix.

The Indians were led by Metacomet (for whom the Metacomet Ridge is named), a sachem of the Massachusetts-based Wampanoag tribe. The colonists knew him as King Philip and they named the conflict King Philip's War. Although begun by a Massachusetts tribe, the uprising soon spread to many other (but not all) Indian groups, including the Nipmucks and Narragansetts in Connecticut. The war lasted two years, 1675-1676, and was often brutal. Thousands of Indians and hundreds of colonists were killed. The Indians burned a dozen towns (including Simsbury in Connecticut), and the colonists razed many dozen Indian settlements. The war finally ended shortly after Metacomet was shot and killed in a skirmish in Rhode Island. The Indians had lost and were left decimated, disheartened, and forever dispossessed of their lands.

With the onset of King Philip's War, new town settlement in Connecticut had its first hiatus since the establishment of Wethersfield in 1635. From 1675 to 1686 - eleven years - no new towns were incorporated, the longest dry spell in the first 150 years of Connecticut's settlement history. The colonists had been badly scared by the Indian uprising (several of the smaller towns at the frontier's edge were even abandoned) and settlers were loath to expand into the Uplands, the Indians' last stronghold. Throughout the war, the Indians had gained considerable advantage from their intimate knowledge of the Uplands' dense forests and tricky topography. Using what today would be called guerrilla tactics, small bands of Indians would make short raids and then disappear into the cover of the wild woods. Even after the war's end, colonists still feared the wooded Uplands, perhaps envisioning savage, angry Indians lurking in every forest shadow.

But after a decade of peace, it became clear that the Indian threat in southern New England was forever quashed. Would-be settlers' fears were relieved, and in 1687 expansion into the Uplands finally began. Over the next 48 years (1687-1736), 27 new towns were incorporated in the

39