Edwin L. Sabin

Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters Edwin L. Sabin

Captain Benjamin Church, born in Plymouth Colony of old Massachusetts, was a rousing Indian fighter. He earned his title when in 1675 the Pokanoket League of nine Indian tribes, under King Phillip the Wampanoag, took up the hatchet against the whites. Then he was called from his farm in Rhode Island Colony, to lead a company into the field. So he bade his family good-by, and set forth. He was at this time aged thirty-six, and built like a bear?short in the legs, broad in the body, and very active. He knew all the Indian ways, and had ridden back and forth through the Pokanoket country, between his Aquidneck home on Rhode Island, and Plymouth and Boston on the Massachusetts coast. In his Indian fighting he never turned his face from a trail. The famous Kit Carson of the West was no bolder. King Phillip's War lasted a year and two months, from June of 1675, into August of 1676.[1] Captain Church soon became the Indians' most hardy foeman. He was constantly trailing the King Phillip warriors to their "kenneling places," routing them out and killing them, or taking prisoners, whom he spared for scouts. At the terrible battle of Sunke-Squaw, when in dead of winter the colonist soldiery stormed the Indian fort in southern Rhode Island, he was struck by three balls at once. One entered his thigh and split upon the thigh-bone; one gashed his waist; and one pierced his pocket and ruined a pair of mittens?which was looked upon as a real disaster, in such cold weather.