This is the first volume of a series this channel (Fishing Historic Places) will be releasing on King Philip’s War which is in it’s 350th anniversary year! The event highlighted in the January 30, 2025 video, John Sassamon’s Murder, or Accidental Death on Assawompset Pond in Lakeville Massachusetts. Click here for the 7-minute video.

Sassamon’s death is often seen as the cause of King Philip’s War, the most brutal conflict between a myriad tribes of Native Americans in New England and the several English Colonies along the coast and up the Connecticut River Valley.

In this series, we are trying to get to the actual sites where these historic events took place and beyond that, add a little fresh light to darkness of this most important, yet forgotten early American Conflict.

Sassamon was a praying or Christianized Nipmuc Native whose body was found under the ice at Assawompset Pond. Three Native men were subsequently tried and executed for the murder just weeks before the outbreak of King Philip’s War.