Jim and Anne's Road Trip 2: June 2014

This morning we crossed more bridges and arrived in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Bristol is known for its well preserved and maintained 18^th- and 19^th-century homes.

And Bristol has had a Fourth of July parade every year for the last 229 years—the oldest in the country.

They have even painted the center line on their main downtown street red, white and blue.

Bristol is located on Narragansett Bay.

We stopped at the Rogers Free Library to get directions to King Phillip’s Throne.

When the Pilgrims arrived in December 1620, they endured a brutal winter during which fifty percent of them died. Eventually, they encountered and were befriended by the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Over the next forty years, the Indians and English maintained an essentially friendly relationship despite physical and political hardships, a growing influx of English numbering in the thousands who demanded more land from the Wampanoags, and attempts by the English to Christianize the Indians.

That all changed with the death of Massasoit about 1660. He was succeeded by his son Wasutta who, in 1662 was captured by colonists and taken to Plymouth where he died under questionable circumstances. Leadership of the Wampanoags then fell to Massasoit’s second son, Metacom. Metacom, sarcastically dubbed “King Phillip” by the colonists, decided that the devastation of tribal lands, customs and way of life by the English must be stopped. In 1675, he and other tribal leaders decided to wage war on the colonists. It would be a decision that would strike terror in colonists throughout New England, and come to be known as King Phillip’s War. The war lasted only a year and ended with Metacom’s assassination by a tribal member in the pay of the colonists, and the subsequent mutilation of his body. Metacom would be immortalized in engravings by Paul Revere a hundred years later.

We found “King Phillip’s Throne”—a “throne”-shaped indentation in a massive rock formation high in the wooded bluffs overlooking Narragansett Bay. Tradition holds this is where Metacom met with his tribal advisors and where, near the bottom of the bluffs, he died. We had difficulty finding this because it's on land owned by Brown University who treat it as what it is--a sacred site of the Wampanoag; unmarked, unheralded, and hauntingly beautiful.