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This cunningly designed French-made weapon dates from the seventeenth century. Helmeted soldiers made of cast brass decorate the hilt and the pommel. The owner could use it as a dagger or wedge it into a musket gun barrel for a bayonet. In European-style battles, the bayonet allowed groups of soldiers to withstand cavalry attacks. The plug bayonent was little used in American warfare, however. The family history of the owners stated that an ancestor acquired this plug 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."