Great Swamp Massacre Monument

West Kingston, Rhode Island

The Narragansetts, locked in a protracted war with white settlers, built their hideout in a Rhode Island swamp, but a deep freeze in December 1675 made it easy to walk in, and the colonists did, massacring everyone in sight. By the time the killing was over between 500 and 1,000 Indians had been shot, stabbed, or burned to death, most of them women and children.

In the 1930s the few surviving Narragansetts learned that white Rhode Islanders were hosting teas at the massacre site. That was stopped, and the Narragansetts now meet at the monument once a year for a ceremony that includes ritual wailing by women.