nists immediately assembled a small
band of brave men, fell upon them by surprise in the midst of their
carousals, shot forty and dispersed the rest.

On the same day in which Marlborough was destroyed, a very disastrous
defeat befell a party of soldiers belonging to the old Plymouth
colony. Nanuntenoo, son of the renowned Miantunnomah, was now the head
chief of the Narragansets. He was fired with a terrible spirit of
revenge against the English, and could not forget the swamp fight in
which so many of his bravest warriors had perished, and where hundreds
of his women and children had been cut to pieces and burned to ashes
in their wigwams. He himself had taken a large share in this fierce
fight, and with difficulty escaped. This chieftain, a man of great
intrepidity and sagacity, had gathered a force of nearly two thousand
Indians upon the banks of the Pawtucket River, within the limits of
the present town of Seekonk. They were preparing for an overwhelming
attack upon the town of Plymouth.

The colonists, by no means aware of the formidableness of the force
assembled, dispatched Captain Pierce from Scituate with seventy men,
fifty of whom were English and twenty Indians, to break up the
encampment of the savages. Nanuntenoo, informed of their movements,
prepared with great strategetic skill to meet them. He concealed a
large portion of his force in ambush on the western side of the river;
another body of warriors he secreted in the forest on the eastern
banks. As Captain Pierce approached the stream, a small party of
Indians, as a decoy, showed themselves on the western side, and
immediately retreated, as if surprised and alarmed. The colonists
eagerly crossed the stream and pursued them.

The stratagem of the wily savage was thus perfectly successful. The
colonists had advanced but a few rods from the banks, near Pawtucket
Falls, when the Indians, several hundreds in number, rose from their
ambush, and rushed like an avalanche upon them. With bravery almost
unparalleled in Indian warfare, they sought no covert, but rushed upon
their foes in the open field face to face. They knew that the
colonists were now drawn into a trap from which there was no possible
escape. As soon as the battle commenced, the Indians who were in the
rear, on the eastern bank of the narrow stream, sprang up from their
ambush, and, crowding the shore, cut off all hope of retreat, and
commenced a heavy fire upon their foe. Utter defeat was no