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

Preface

xiii preface C  have a special place in American culture, and Deerfield has a special place in the history of both, thanks to the Reverend John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion. There are clear historical reasons for Deerfield’s prominence in the history of captivity narratives and the narrative of American history. Williams was the first New England minister to be captured by a French and Indian war party. He was one of over a hundred captives taken at Deerfield in the winter of 1704. Returning to Boston through a prisoner exchange, Williams composed the narrative that has been reprinted time and time again since it first appeared in 1707. It was not the first captivity narrative published in America, but it is one of the most famous. Only Mary Rowlandson ’s 1682 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God rivals it in the amount of attention Americans have lavished on it over the centuries. New Englanders and later Americans came to see the 1704 raid on Deerfield and The Redeemed Captive as typical examples of the American frontier experience , an impression that has been enshrined in numerous historical accounts. It helped spark the strong local interest in history that ensured that Deerfield’s story would be better preserved than that of most other New England towns. This attention inspired the foundation of a local historical society in 1870, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and the establishment in 1952 of Historic Deerfield, Inc., making Deerfield an important site for the preservation and study of early American material culture and history. In the words of the historian Geoffrey Buerger, Deerfield has gained “national, and even international fame by its own insular, even parochial, interpretations” of the raid. But, as this collection demonstrates, there is more. There was in fact little that was typical about either the 1704 Deerfield raid or the composition and dissemination of The Redeemed Captive. Compared with other Native and French raids on New England towns from 1689 to 1760, the raiding party that assaulted Deerfield in 1704 was unusually big and exceptionally diverse, including Native peoples from five distinct communities. The raid was also unusually destructive, resulting in the killing or capture of half of the village. Finally, the number of captives taken was remarkably large and they were taken to a wide variety of French and Native communities. An enduring interest in the event in several of these communities has generated other stories that provide rare comparative insights into the creation of historical memory and narratives of captivity. xiv  Because captivity was an experience shared by captives and captors, captivity narratives, including those of Deerfield, have long been seen as valuable sources of information about the lives and cultures of Native captors as well as those of their captives. Those Deerfield narratives, in which captives spend signi ficant amounts of time traveling with and living among Native peoples, show Native men and women as distinctive and even idiosyncratic individuals in a variety of settings, ranging from the heat of battle to the seasonal chore of maple sugaring. What distinguishes the experiences of Deerfield captives from those of many others is that traditions have emerged in several Native communities discussing and commenting on the very same captivity experiences. This situation creates an opportunity to read colonial captivity narratives in the light of not just one but several different Native narratives appearing over the past three hundred years. The Deerfield raid is, therefore, an excellent starting point for re-examining early American captivity narratives and the colonial experience of captivity from new perspectives. Though the oft-reprinted Redeemed Captive stands at the core of this collection, it is juxtaposed to lesser-known stories of captivity composed by other Deerfield residents: Quentin Stockwell, Daniel Belding, Stephen Williams, Joseph Petty, and Joseph Kellogg. These stories challenge current assumptions about what are seen as classic Puritan captivity narratives because they present the raw material of captivity narratives without clerical editing and embellishment. Clerical editors, such as the Reverends Increase and Cotton Mather and their kinsman John Williams, usually “improved” stories of captivity by emphasizing religious trial and spiritual transformation, by sharpening the opposition between captors and captives, and by slighting the particular context in which captivity took place. By including French and Native stories, this collection seeks to establish the broader context of colonial conflict that produced the English captivity narratives . Included are...