THE first, the last—the only King the Americans ever had, was dead. It was the 13th day of August, in the year 1676. The human emotions of the Puritan people of Massachusetts tugged at the shackles of a long repression and broke them asunder, in the seemly town of Plymouth. King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the Wampanoag Indians, had been slain. His warriors were scattered and slaughtered. His war was ended.
Through the streets of Plymouth poured a vast throng of people. Men, women and children, they ran and walked, surrounding a buff-colored army that filled the thoroughfares like a turgid flood. This was the regiment which Captain Benjamin Church had led to the final camp of King Philip, in the swamps at Mt. Hope and Pocasset, where the last scene in the sanguinary drama had been enacted.
Here was a troop of sixty horse, with officers. They were well mounted, caparisoned with glittering back, breast and headpiece, and armed with clanking sword, 10shouldered carbine, and great pistols, that flopped at the waist. Behind them were foot-soldiers, brown Puritans—stern, mirth-denying, lusty at fighting. Some of these bore no weapon other than a pike. Another frequently had upon him sword, pistol and carbine. Above the heads of these men on foot waved a thin forest of pike-staves, on the tips of which bright steel threw back the dazzling rays of the sun. There was clatter of scabbards on the pavement, thud and thud of hoofs and feet in the roadway, and above all, shouts of men and gabble of children.
Philip Verrill Mighels (April 19, 1869 – October 12, 1911) was an American writer and novelist. His early poems, short stories, and several of his novels, including his best-selling Bruvver Jim’s Baby and The Furnace of Gold, are part of the Sagebrush School of American literature. He was also a versatile and prolific author, recognized for his science fiction novels, romances, and political commentary. Less-known are his detective novels (published under the pseudonym of Jack Steele).[
He was born and raised in Carson City, Nevada, a younger son of pioneer journalists Henry Rust Mighels and Nellie Verrill Mighels Davis. Tutored to be a lawyer by his stepfather, Samuel Post Davis, he passed the Nevada bar in 1890, but moved to San Francisco, California to pursue a career in journalism and as a writer. After his mid-1890s move to New York City, his popularity grew with stories—on cowboys and prospectors, lost civilizations and ape-men, detectives and automobiles, and questions on race, modern sex, and political commentary—serialized in newspapers and major magazines such as Harpers, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and McClures. Over a dozen of these serialized works were published as novels. His most popular novels, Bruvver Jim's Baby and The Furnace of Gold, were set in desert mining camps during Nevada's early twentieth-century mining boom, with touches of humor, romantic Westerners, and sagebrush country characters. After his death, at least two of his works were made into silent movies (Subterfuge, 1912, and If Only Jim, with Harry Carey, 1920).[3]
Between 1897 and 1901, he and his wife Ella lived in London, in the Bloomsbury district. After returning to the United States they resided in California and, primarily, New York City, with visits to his Nevada home for research trips. While gathering material on the cattle round-up at the Bliss Ranch in Nevada he accidentally shot himself. He died four days later at nearby Winnemucca, at age 42.[4] He is buried near his parents in Carson City's Lone Mountain Cemetery.[5] One early Nevada historian stated that Phil Mighells, “probably the most brilliant creative genius of the younger set, was a voluminous writer, contributing to almost every branch of literature.”[6]