The first Pilgrims came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in Plymouth in 1620. They lost nearly half of their number to sickness and starvation in the first winter. The Pokanoket people (an indigenous people of the Wampanoag Tribe) felt sympathy for the Pilgrims’ and helped them, showing them how to and what to plant in the New World. Although they were the native people mythicized in the first Thanksgiving feast, they, in fact, broke no bread with the English settlers.

Fifty-five years later, they’d go to war with the English and attack over half the towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Pokanoket would get progressively more upset with the influx of English settlers in the ensuing years, that they’d go to war with them.

At the cessation of hostilities, the Pokanoket people would refuse to sign the Treat of Casco in 1678. The first shots were fired in King Phillip’s War on this day in June 1675.

The Wampanoag chief, Metacomet had adopted an English name, Phillip because his father had been on good relations with the English since the Mayflower days. But tensions had been steadily rising as the native Americans were being steadily pushed out of their ancestral lands.