Your teacher and the textbook are right. King Philip’s War was a bloody affair for both combatants and non-combatants on both sides. By August 1676 more than twenty-five New England towns were burned or abandoned, and English settlement was hanging on by a thread of coastline. Like the near loss of Carolina during the Yamasee War, and the near loss of Virginia during the Powhatan Wars, there was serious talk about abandoning Massachusetts during King Philip’s War. In New Mexico the Pueblo Revolt did succeed in rolling back the northern border of the Spanish Empire for a decade as the Spanish were pushed south of the Rio Grande. The popular history narrative often ignores the ebbs and flows of colonial and indigenous power. We therefore forget the tenuous nature of colonial footholds, and their ever-present reliance on the expressed permission of indigenous nations to stay in the New World for the first several hundred years of colonial existence. The damage was sufficient in New England. After the war it took nearly three decades to repair the damage from the conflict.

Your question also touched on an important issue when you asked why the Iroquois, instead of allying with King Philip/Metacomet, chose to support the English cause. They were not the only ones. At various points in the conflict Pequot, Mohegan, and Indians residing in Praying Towns in Massachusetts (“Christian Indians”) also fought alongside the English.

At the time of King Philip’s War our modern racial categories were just beginning to be defined and negotiated. Some scholars, like Jill Lepore, point to King Philip’s War as one of the prime movers for the eventual development of an American identity distinct and separate from England, as well as the beginnings of white and Indian as racial categories. King Philip’s War changed Plymouth’s rhetoric regarding Native Americans. Where once they regarded national differences between tribes, and saw them as redeemable potential converts to Christianity, after the war indigenous communities in New England are far more often seen as irredeemable savages, offering a foil to the enlightened and peace-seeking English.

This unfortunate turn of identity influenced future Indian policy in the colonies, and was adopted by the new United States after independence. The irredeemable savage narrative allowed for total war policy of indiscriminate killing of combatants and non-combatants, destruction of entire villages and crops, territorial displacement, and the continuation of the native slave trade. We see the initial germination of this seed during King Philip’s War. For example, since wigwams were not really homes, and Indian settlements not really towns as the English understood them, they could be destroyed with impunity at the Great Swamp Fight. Since every Indian was the enemy, non-combatants could be killed or enslaved when captured. Indeed, after Metacomet’s death his wife and child were sold as slaves and shipped to the West Indies. His head mounted on a pike at the entrance of Fort Plymouth, where it stood for two decades. And what of the Christian Indians in Massachusetts Praying Towns like Natick that allied with the English? In October 1675 while the warriors fought, their families were forced to relocate to Deer Island off the coast of Boston where they subsisted with minimal, inadequate provisions, and were subject to raids by slavers seeking a quick profit. When Christian missionaries visited their former flock that winter they met more than 500 starving men, women, and children trapped on the desolate island.

Within Indian country the notion of a pan-Indian identity would not emerge for almost another century. Prior to English arrival the area we now call New England was a dynamic place. The inhabitants lived in a land that saw thousands of years of warfare and peace, alliances and trade, intermarriage and fractures. Shortly before 1620 a small-scale epidemic constricted the population away from the coast, and prompted Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy and Metacomet’s father, to abandon the long-standing policy of opposing long-term European settlements in his homeland. The epidemic weakened the Wampanoag Confederacy, while leaving their Narragansett enemies unscathed. Massasoit hoped an alliance with Plymouth would shift the balance, and helped the struggling English settlement after their disastrous first winter. Likewise, a generation later, other New England nations would see alliance with the English as a means of survival. Those near the English settlements in Massachusetts, like the leader of the Sakonnets in Rhode Island, put their people under the protection of Plymouth to purely outlast the war. Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, saw alliance with the English as a way to maintain autonomy, and possibly even gain more power, with the defeat of Metacomet and his allies. Members of the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee came to aid the English in exchange for trade goods, specifically access to firearms needed for raiding not just Massachusetts, but for fueling their expansion into the greater Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

In the end, it took a considerable force of allies to maintain English presence in Massachusetts. “If Philip’s forces had been better supplied and had not had to fight three wars at once- one with the English, one with their Pequot, Mohegan, and Christian Indian allies, and one with the Mohawks- the colonists might well have lost everything. And they knew it.” (Lepore, p.176)

Lepore The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity

I am a local historian from Marlboro, Massachusetts. I've written and lectured extensively on local aspects of King Philip's War and the Praying Indians as both were heavily involved in our local history. From my perspective, Metacom was a very strong influencer but a very weak leader of men. There are few winning battles where he was the actual leader. In the period where the Indians were most successful, Metacom had been relegated to a lesser role at least in part because of his failure to engage the Mohawks in his cause. The episode with the Mohawks was instructive. Many of the Indian leaders were suspicious of Metacom to begin with. The Mohawks were reticent. In an effort to get their support, Metacom ambushed a Mohawk group and made it look like the English were responsible. Unfortunately, one of the ambushed Mohawks escaped and Metacom was subsequently attacked. Only his talent for escape allowed him to return to central Massachusetts, but without a very large portion of his tribe which were lost to the Mohawk attack. I'm in the process of writing about the War on my local history website at https://marlhistpage.com/