The author has scoured the contemporary seventeenth-century documents in order to compile as complete as possible an account of the men who served in King Philip's War in New England in 1675 and
1676. Thousands of young men served in this conflict, and hundreds died in the
fighting or from diseases.
Most of the information in this volume has been taken from the financial accounts maintained by John Hull, the treasurer for Massachusetts Bay Colony for these years. From these records, the author was able to construct company-by-company accounts of the progress of the war. He followed each group of men on its marches and in its battles, showing for many of the men the exact time served and the pay that they received.
George Bodge searched many other sources as well and included in this volume letters written by participants in the fighting, or petitions for relief that were filed many years later. Searches in the colony archives yielded many official accounts of action, some written at the time of the fighting and some written years later.
The important final chapter provides information on the so-called Narragansett towns. One of the ways in which the soldiers were compensated was by gathering them into groups, frequently by town of residence at the time of the war, and granting to the group an entire township in the wilderness. These grants were not acted on until decades after the conflict, and the eighteenth-century lists of grantees frequently match the soldier's name with the name or names of heirs who actually received the land many years later.
An appendix gathers together information on the organization and the logistics of the military operations in Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonies.
High quality scanned images of the whole of the original book. This CD has been bookmarked for easy navigation, and pages can be searched, browsed, enlarged and printed out if required.
