This cunningly designed French-made weapon dates from the 17th century. Helmeted soldiers made of cast brass decorate the hilt and the pommel. The owner could use it as a dagger or as a “plug” bayonet that would be wedged it into a musket barrel. A family story of the owners stated that an ancestor acquired this bayonet about the time of King Philip’s War (1675-1676). They claimed that it “was taken from the hand of an Indian chief who was killed while in the act of scalping a white man he had killed in one of the skirmishes between colonists and indians.”