township of Norwich.  Encumbered with a coat of mail which his friend Gorton had given him, Miantonomo was overtaken and captured.  By ordinary Indian usage he would have been put to death with fiendish torments, as soon as due preparations could be made and a fit company assembled to gloat over his agony; but Gorton sent a messenger to Uncas, threatening dire vengeance if harm were done to his ally.  This message puzzled the Mohegan chief.  The appearance of a schism in the English counsels was more than he could quite fathom.  When the affair had somewhat more fully developed itself, some of the Indians spoke of the white men as divided into two rival tribes, the Gortonoges and Wattaconoges. [16] Roger Williams tells us that the latter term, applied to the men of Boston, meant coat-wearers.  Whether it is to be inferred that the Gortonoges went about in what in modern parlance would be called their “shirt-sleeves,” the reader must decide. [Sidenote:  Miantonomo and Uncas]

In his perplexity Uncas took his prisoner to Hartford, and afterward, upon the advice of the governor and council, sent him to Boston, that his fate might be determined by the Federal Commissioners who were there holding their first regular meeting.  It was now the turn of the commissioners to be perplexed.  According to English law there was no good reason for putting Miantonomo to death.  The question was whether they should interfere with the Indian custom by which his life was already forfeit to his captor.  The magistrates already suspected the Narragansetts of cherishing hostile designs.  To set their sachem at liberty, especially while the Gorton affair remained unsettled, might be dangerous; and it would be likely to alienate Uncas from the English.  In their embarrassment the commissioners sought spiritual guidance.  A synod of forty or fifty clergymen, from all parts of New England, was in session at Boston, and the question was referred to a committee of five of their number.  The decision was prompt that Miantonomo must die.  He was sent back to Hartford to be slain by Uncas, but two messengers accompanied him, to see that no tortures were inflicted.  A select band of Mohegan warriors journeyed through the forest with the prisoner and the two Englishmen, until they came to the plain where the battle had been fought.  Then at a signal from Uncas, the warrior walking behind Miantonomo silently lifted his tomahawk and sank it into the brain of the victim who fell dead without a groan.  Uncas cut a warm slice from the shoulder and greedily devoured it, declaring that the flesh of his enemy was the sweetest of meat and gave strength to his heart.  Miantonomo was buried there on the scene of his defeat, which has ever since been known as the Sachem’s Plain.  This was in September, 1643, and for years afterward, in that month, parties of Narragansetts used to visit the spot and with frantic gestures and hideous yells lament their fallen leader.  A heap of stones was raised over the grave, and no Narragansett came near it without adding to the pile.  After many a summer had passed and the red men had disappeared from the land, a Yankee farmer, with whom thrift prevailed over sentiment, cleared away the mound and used the stones for the foundation of his new barn. [17] [Sidenote:  Death of Miantonomo]