Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid

Introduction

1 IntRoduction O  morning of February 29, 1704, 250 to 300 Hurons, Mohawks, Abenakis, Frenchmen, Pennacooks, and Iroquois of the Mountain attacked Deerfield, the northwesternmost village in Massachusetts. By evening half of the village’s population was gone, men, women, and children. The raiders killed 50 and captured 112, the largest number ever taken in a single raid on the New England frontier. The English death toll and the number of captives made it one of the most devastating assaults on a colonial village anywhere in the Northeast. At the same time, it was one of the costliest expeditions ever launched against New England by the French and their Native allies. Eleven of the raiders had been killed and at least 22 wounded, some mortally.1 Despite the devastation, the stories of the captives taken to Canada—those who returned as well as those who did not—have created the enduring legacy of the Deerfield raid. Since 1704, contemporaries and their descendants in many of the communities involved in the attack have struggled to make sense of the violent encounter by telling stories of the raid. These stories have played an important role in shaping historical memories of the colonial frontier. By affirming the communities’ sense of who they were and therefore are, the stories do more than simply recount the past. They also preserve and defend homelands, erect and cross frontiers, and otherwise engage the dilemmas left by America’s colonial past. T S For the English, the village of Deerfield in 1704 marked a frontier or boundary, the edge of New England. But for Native peoples it sat on an ancient crossroads . For centuries the site, marking an intersection between the MohawkMahican trail that ran east and west and the route running north and south that followed the course of the Connecticut River (map 1), had been a home to Native peoples. Its most recent inhabitants were an Algonquian-speaking people called by the English the Pocumtucks. As Europeans entered the region in the 1630s, great changes followed the trade routes into Pocumtuck. First came deadly diseases that killed over 90 percent of the people in some villages along the Connecticut. Next came fur traders and with them growing indebtedness to English merchants who eventually sought to take Native land as repayment . Just to the south, Hadley and Northampton were built on the lands 2  of the Norwottucks. In the 1660s, war with members of the Five Nations of the Iroquois League destroyed the village at Pocumtuck and dispersed its people . They became prisoners of the Iroquois or sought refuge elsewhere in the Connecticut valley or in Canada.2 English colonists moved into Pocumtuck around 1670 and took possession of the rich meadowlands and Native fields. But its Native residents had not forgotten their homeland. Many joined in the attacks on English settlements during what came to be known as King Philip’s War (1675–1677). Late in the summer of 1675 the beleaguered English settlement at Pocumtuck was abandoned . On September 18 many of its adult males died in a battle at Muddy Brook, which was subsequently renamed Bloody Brook. Serious fighting continued along the Connecticut River into the spring of 1676. On May 19 several hundred Natives from the region and refugees from elsewhere perished in an English attack on a Native village at Peskeompscut. A final offensive by English forces in the summer forced most of the remaining Native peoples to seek refuge elsewhere. But they did not abandon their ties to Pocumtuck.3 Some of the Natives driven from the Connecticut valley during King Philip’s War returned in the late summer of 1677. On the morning of September 19, Natives under the leadership of Ashpelon, a Norwottuck or Pocumtuck, attacked Hatfield and Deerfield. Benoni Stebbins reported that the raiding party contained twenty-six people, two of them women, who were all “Norwooluck [i.e., Norwottuck] Indians save only one which was a Naraganset.”4 At Hatfield they killed twelve, wounded four, and captured seventeen. That evening they moved north to attack a small group of men attempting to re-establish the English settlement at Pocumtuck. Here the raiders killed one and captured four, including Stebbins and Quentin Stockwell. They then marched their prisoners north to Canada, making these captives the first of hundreds of New Englanders who would be carried north to Native and French villages along the Saint Lawrence River. Three of the captives were...