Quanopen, - 1676

Quanopen, alias Sowagonish, a Narragansett sagamore, was a son of Cojonoquond and nephew to Miantonomo.  His brothers were Sunkeejunasuc and Ashamattan.  "A midling thick-set man of a very stout fierce countenance," Quanopen had at least three wives, Onux, Weetamoe, and a younger woman by whom he had two children.  

In the prelude to King Philip's War, he was a member of a Narragansett diplomatic envoy who met their English counterparts at Worden Pond.  Later that year, Monoco, who took Mary Rowlandson, presented her to Quanopen and Weetamoe, and she lived captive among them for a brief time as a seamstress and servant.  In her own words, Rowlandson described Quanopen as "the best friend that [she] had of an Indian, both in cold and hunger, and quickly so it proved.” 

As a prominent commander of the Narragansett in the war, Quanopen fought in battle with his cousin Canonochet at the Narragansett Swamp Fight, participated in attacking William Carpenter's house at Pawtuxet, and took arms against the English at Nashaway. A Rhode Island Court found him guilty of aiding Metacom in the war and executed him and Sunkeejunasuc in Newport in August 1676. 

Elisha R. Potter, "Early History of Narragansett," Collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society, Vol. 3 (Providence: Marshall, Brown and Company, 1835), 98, 173.  Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682, repr. Lancaster, MA: 1833), 86, 91, 94-95.  Mandell, King Philip's War, 61-62, 95, 122-123.  For modern perspectives on Quanopen, see Rebecca K. Smith, In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America (2017), Lepore, The Name of War (1999), and Merril D. Smith, Sex and Sexuality in Early America (1998).  For a Native perspective of Quanopen's relationship with Weetamoe and their involvement with Mary Rowlandson, see Brooks, My Beloved Kin, 237, 257, 270-287.