People from the Pokanoket Tribe, later known as the Wampanoag, first settled the town of Warren, and the Pokanoket controlled land from Plymouth to the eastern shores of Narragansett Bay. In 1620, Osamequin, meaning Yellow Feather, was their Massasoit, or head Sachem, and lived in Sowams or Sowamset, where Bristol, Warren, and Barrington, RI, are located today. On March 22, 1621, Osamequin and sixty members of his tribe visited the Pilgrims in Plymouth and made a treaty that neither side would harm the other and that they would protect each other from their enemies. The treaty remained in effect for forty years, until Osamequin’s death in 1661. In July 1621, Governor Bradford sent Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins to visit Osamequin in Sowams. By 1632, colonists had established a trading post on the banks of the Kickemuit River, where English goods were traded for furs and other items. After 1653, when land was purchased from Osamequin for 35 pounds, a settlement of about a dozen houses began. In the fifteen years after Osamequin’s death, his son Metacomet grew more distrustful of the English and eventually led an alliance of tribes into King Philip’s War, one of the deadliest wars between Native people and English settlers. The war spread beyond Pokanoket territory into Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine and lasted from June 1675 to August 1676. The first attacks took place just east of the Kickemuit River on the farm of Job Winslow, and within days all forty or so colonists’ houses were burned. Because of his friendship with King Philip, settler Hugh Cole was warned and escaped to Portsmouth before the fighting began; the well he dug next to his house still survives along the Bike Path behind Kickemuit Middle School on the east side of the Kickemuit River. The war spread as far as Northampton, MA, took thousands of English and Native lives, and permanently changed relations between the two groups. Most defeated tribal people were killed or forced from their homeland to places as far away as New York and Maine, while others were sent to Barbados to be sold as slaves. English settlers moved into the remaining land in the Town of Swansea, established in 1667, and their numbers continued to grow. Members of the Pokanoket Tribe have since returned to the area, and more than two hundred now live near Warren.
