From Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick:

It had come down to just a handful of Philip's toughest and most loyal men. There was the young warrior who was reputed to have fired the first shot back in June of 1675. He would be one of the first to die that morning. There was also the consummate survivor: Annawon.

The old warrior had fought alongside Philip's father, Massasoit, decades before this. It is likely that he had been one of the warriors to carry the dying Alexander on his shoulders back to Mount Hope. For more than a year now, he had been with Philip every step of the way. In just the last month alone, they had covered hundreds of miles as they crisscrossed their homeland, always on the run.

When they had fallen asleep that night, their exhaustion had been mixed with more than the usual tension and fear. After the desertion of the brother of the executed warrior, they all knew the English would be coming soon. As day approached, Philip awoke from a dream. They must leave immediately, he told Annawon and the others. In his dream he had been taken by the English. They had been betrayed.

One of the warriors stood up to relieve himself. A musket fired, and the yelling began. As had become a reflex with him, Philip leaped to his feet, threw his powder horn and petunk (a pouch containing bullets) over his shoulder, and with his musket in hand started to run. It would be left to Annawon and the others to gather their belongings and hold the English off for as long as possible.

The first crack of the musket took Church by surprise. He thought one of his soldier's guns might have gone off by accident. Bur other shots soon followed, and he knew the ambush had begun.

In the eastern portion of the swamp stood two men: twenty-five year-old Caleb Cook and the Pocasset named Alderman. They could see an Indian coming toward them. He was running, they later reported, "as fast as he could scamper." He was dressed in only his small breeches and stockings. They waited until he had come within range, and now confident that he was one of the enemy, Cook pulled the trigger of his musket, but his weapon refused to fire. It was left to Alderman.

The Pocasset had an old musket with a large touchhole, which made the weapon less susceptible to the early-morning dampness. He pulled the trigger, and the lever holding the flint, known as a cock, I swung forward against the metal frizzen or battery, and the resulting spark dropped down through the touchhole into the firing pan filled with priming powder. The explosion that followed ignited the charge of gunpowder in the musket barrel, hurling two bullets, one of which pierced Philip's rapidly beating heart.

He fell facedown into the mud with his gun beneath him. The warriors coming up from behind heard the shots and veered off in the opposite direction. Concealed amid the dark shadows of the swamp and not yet aware of his sachem's death, Annawon could be heard calling out in a booming voice, "Iootash! lootash!"-"Fight! Fight!"

* *

Alderman and Cook rushed over to Church and told him that they had just killed Philip. He instructed them to keep the news a secret until the engagement was over. The fighting continued for a few more minutes, but finding a gap in the English line on the west end of the swamp, most of the enemy, now led by Annawon, escaped.

Church gathered his men on the rise of land where the Indians' shelter had been built and told them of Philip's death. The army, Indians and English alike, shouted "Huzzah!" three times. Taking hold of his breeches and stockings, the Sakonnets dragged the sachem's body through the mud and deposited him beside the shelter-"a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast," Church remembered.

With his men assembled around him and with Philip's mudsmeared body at his feet, Church pronounced his sentence: "That for as much as he had caused many an Englishman's body to lie unburied and rot above ground, that not one of his bones should be buried." He called forward a Sakonnet who had already executed several of the enemy and ordered him to draw and quarter the body of King Philip.

The Sakonnet took up his hatchet, but paused to deliver a brief speech. Philip had been a "very great man," he said, "and had made many a man afraid of him, but so big as he was he would now chop his ass for him." Soon the body had been divided into four pieces. One of Philip's hands possessed a distinctive scar caused by an exploded pistol. Church awarded the hand to Alderman, who later placed it in a bottle of rum and made "many a penny" in the years to come by exhibiting the hand to curious New Englanders.