USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 10
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That Philip had been plotting in secret the union of tribes for such an uprising had repeatedly been charged ;
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but evidence of a deliberate conspiracy was wanting. The haughty chieftain had grieved at the steady curtailment of the dominions of the tribes, repenting with others the "alienation of vast tracts by affixing a shapeless mark to a bond"; had been among the first of the chiefs to fore- see the danger of extermination; and had resented the English claim to jurisdiction over his people. Suspected of hostile intentions, he had suffered the indignity of being compelled to surrender his English firearms, and to enter into certain stipulations with the Plymouth Colony. Ac- cused of failing to fulfil these stipulations, he had been sentenced to pay a heavy tribute. The earlier opening of war upon him by Plymouth had been prevented only through the interposition of the Bay Colony magistrates, to whom he appealed, and his acknowledgment of the un- conditional supremacy of the Plymouth Colony. At about this time he had as a sort of secretary or counsellor a " Praying Indian," one of the converts to the Englishmen's religion and sometime a teacher in the Indian village at Natick, near Boston, who had apostatized and fled to him. Subsequently this Indian, reclaimed through the efforts of the good apostle, Eliot, reported that he was engaged anew in a hostile plot. Thereupon he was summoned to submit to another examination, and the wrath of his fighting men was thus aroused. The informer was waylaid and killed. Three of Philip's men, accused of the assassination, were taken by the Plymouth authorities, tried by a jury com- posed one-half of Englishmen, the other half of Indians, convicted on slender evidence, and hanged. The young warriors of the tribe, panting for revenge, retaliated with attacks upon Swansea. At once the alarm of war spread through the colonies. "Thus was Philip hurried into his ' rebellion,' and he is reported to have wept as he heard
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that a white man's blood was shed. ... Against his judgment and his will he was involved in war." So Ban- croft records. Some other historians, assuming that Philip's plans were to spring the war a year later, account for these tears in his distress at the premature outbreak. The argument of Bancroft appears the more reasonable. "For what chance had he of success ? The English were united; the Indians had no alliance. . . . The English had towns for their shelter and safe retreat; the miserable wigwams of the natives were defenceless ; the English had sure sup- plies of food; the Indians might easily lose their pre- carious stores." The Wampanoags' country had become narrowed to the neck or eastern shore of Narragansett Bay; the Narragansetts, ultimately brought into the con- flict, were hemmed in on the western shore. Other tribes were drawn into the war for similar reasons. " The wild inhabitants of the woods or the seashore could not under- stand the duty of allegiance to an unknown sovereign, or acknowledge the binding force of a political compact ; crowded by hated neighbors, losing fields and hunting grounds ... they sighed for the forest freedom which was their immemorial birthright."
At the beginning of hostilities in the Valley, Northfield and Deerfield were the frontier settlements on the River northward, the former but two years old, the latter scarcely four. Brookfield, about thirty miles back from the River, with the forest intervening, was the nearest settlement eastward. Lancaster, on the Nashua River, about twenty- five miles northeast of Brookfield, was the next frontier Bay settlement. On the west of the River frontier towns was the almost unbroken wilderness extending to the Hud- son. Westfield, ten miles west of Springfield, was the re-
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A River Fishing Camp-Camp Wopowog, near East Haddam.
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motest plantation on this side. Early in the conflict both Northfield and Deerfield were abandoned, leaving Hatfield, Hadley, and Northampton the frontiers.
Hadley became the headquarters of military operations in the Valley, and in late August and early September of 1675 the little town of five hundred inhabitants was alive with the coming and going of soldiers. There were at one time and another during these months, Major Treat with a hundred or more Connecticut troops ; Captain Appleton of Ipswich, eastern Massachusetts, commanding Bay men ; Captain Thomas Lothrop of Beverly, with his choice com- pany, the "Flower of Essex," all "culled " out of the towns belonging to that county, Salem, Danvers, Ipswich, and the rest; Captain Richard Beers of Watertown, near Boston, with his company of foot and horse; Lieutenant William Cooper with Springfield men; Captain Samuel Moseley of Boston, who had commanded a privateer in the waters of the West Indies; and a body of friendly Mo- hegans under a son of Uncas. The higher officers estab- lished themselves at the parsonage, where Parson John Russell and his competent wife provided generous hospital- ity during the campaign, drawing " divers barrels of beer, and much wine," and setting forth a bountiful table.
Looking out, perhaps, upon this martial scene from his place of concealment in the minister's house, and, also perhaps, longing to have part in it, was the "regicide," Goffe, one of the three of the body of judges who con- demned Charles I to the block, who had escaped to New England upon the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, and, finding refuge in Connecticut, had been shifted from place to place by their steadfast friends when the agents of the crown were after them.
We say perhaps, for there is not a scrap of trustworthy
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record associating the old Cromwellian warrior with this momentous time, although he was then concealed in the house of the Hadley minister. The story of his miraculous appearance among the people of Hadley when, at a Fast Day service on the first of September, the meeting-house where they were gathered was suddenly surrounded and attacked by a body of Indians; of the leadership of the venerable stranger, with flowing white locks, and quaint garb, in the rout of the enemy; and of his as miraculous disappearance immediately afterward, leaving the awed people with the conviction that "an angel from God had delivered and saved them "; - this thrilling story, which Scott, Hawthorne, and Cooper, historians, poets, story- writers, and orators have woven in tale and verse and impassioned passage, must be dismissed as pure romance. Reluctant as is even the bloodless historical investigator to abandon it as a substantial historical fact, for there is no more inspiring tradition in the annals of New England, it falls to pieces with the simple search of the records. George Sheldon, the Deerfield historian, has applied this cold test with fatal results. He found the legend published for the first time in Hutchinson's History of Massachu- setts eighty-nine years after the "event," and based upon an unauthenticated anecdote. It is given in connection with Hutchinson's account of the wanderings of the " regi- cides," derived from Goffe's diary covering their adven- tures for six or seven years. No mention of such an inci- dent appears in this diary, and Hutchinson relates it solely as " an anecdote handed down through Governor Leverett's family." From this and this only the legend evolved in print and gained with each narrator till it reached the dig- nity of an accepted fact of history. Not a hint of it is given by the contemporaneous historians of the Indian wars,
Sturgeon Fishing.
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nor does it appear in the relations of Connecticut Valley families.
And from a record as slender has developed the circum- stantial story of the attack on Hadley at the date given. Hubbard in his authorized history of the Indian wars makes no allusion whatever to an attack here at that time. Nor does Solomon Stoddard, the minister of Northampton, mention it in his letter to Increase Mather, minister of the Second Church in Boston, under date of September 15 (old style), wherein he gives a minute account of the events of the preceding three weeks in the Valley towns. In- crease Mather alone has this statement in his history of the wars : "On the first of September 1675 one of our churches in Boston was seeking the face of God by fasting and prayer before him; also that very day the church in Had- ley was before the Lord in the same way but were driven from the holy service by a most sudden and violent alarm which routed them the whole day after." Hutchinson, the next narrator, nearly a century later, repeats Mather's statement, but enlarges the "alarm" into an "attack." Then thirty years after Hutchinson comes President Stiles of Yale, in his History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I, elaborating the "attack " into a battle about the meeting-house, and adding the "angel " part to the " true story " of Goffe's appearance, "told," he says, at the time he wrote, "in variations in various parts of New England." So the wondrous tale grew to its perfection.
On that first day of September (O. S.) Deerfield was violently attacked and burned; and in this affair Sheldon reasonably sees the occasion of the Hadley " alarm " which Mather recorded. Some latter day historians and writers have fitted the Goffe tradition to a date nine months later, or June 12, 1676, when the Indians really did fall upon
1
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Hadley, as Hubbard relates in detail. But this theory Sheldon shatters as completely as he destroys the tradition, by massing these unquestioned facts : that June 12, 1676, " was not a Fast Day ; the inhabitants were not assembled in the meeting-house ; the attack was made upon a small party who had fallen in an ambuscade; it was made early in the morning; the town was not in a defenceless posi- tion," for five hundred Connecticut men under Major Tal- cott had recently arrived, joining others already in the village, so that no Cromwellian leader or " angel" was necessary for its deliverance.
Sheldon's refutation of this cherished tradition was published thirty years ago. But still the tale is told; and the credulous stranger is confidently shown the spot where the "battle" about the meeting-house was fought under the lead of the mysterious captain who appeared "like an angel from heaven." The stranger shall see, however, a genuine landmark in the site of the parsonage which sheltered the mysterious captain.
The war was precipitated in the River towns by an at- tempt to disarm a band of the local Pocumtucks and others who had made a pretense of friendliness, but were suspected of intention to join Philip's allies concentrating in the woods between Hadley and Northfield ; by pursuit of them when they fled from their fort in Hatfield and were actu- ally on the way; and by a fight with them in a swamp south of Sugarloaf peak, from which they escaped. This encounter occurred on one of the last days of August, and engaged Captains Lothrop and Beers with their men. Earlier small garrisons had been posted at Northampton, Hatfield, Deerfield (then Pocumtuck), and Northfield (then Squakheag). The fight under the shadow of Sugarloaf
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was followed by the first overt act, the attack upon Deer- field of September 1 (O. S.). In this affair the settlers had barely time to reach the garrison houses before these shel- ters were besieged. They were successfully defended, but the force was too weak in numbers to sally out and drive the enemy. So the savages were able to plunder and burn several houses and barns before they left.
On the very next day, September 2 (O. S.), the outpost of Northfield was attacked. This infant settlement then comprised a collection of log huts, the central one being the meeting-house, surrounded by a stockade and fort. The enemy surprised the settlers when they were about their daily work. Some were cut down in their houses, others while coming from the meadows. Eight were killed. The rest, men, women, and children, crowded into the fort, whence they witnessed the slaughter of their cattle, the destruction of their grain, and the burning of the few houses outside the stockade. The following day, unaware of this attack, and supposing that the " hostiles" were now all on the west side of the River, Captain Beers was despatched from Hadley with thirty-six troopers and a supply train of ox- carts, to secure the Northfield garrison.
Theirs was a fatal journey ending in the first crushing disaster of the campaign in the Valley.
The post was in the wilderness thirty miles distant from Hadley. The way to it lay along the east side of the River through a forest almost continuous, marked by rough wood-paths or trails, where now are the towns of Sunder- land, Montague, and Erving. At night the command bivouacked in a pleasant spot above Miller's River. The next morning, leaving their horses under guard, they con- tinued on foot with the supply wagons, having no thought of danger in their path. So they marched on unguard-
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edly to a point within about two miles of their destination. Here, in a swampy ravine, the enemy were awaiting them in an ambuscade. They fell into the snare without a mo- ment's warning, and a considerable number were instantly slain. The survivors scattered; but, soon rallied by Cap- tain Beers, they made a stand on the side of a hill above the ravine. This ground was bravely held against an overwhelming force till the captain fell. Then the rem- nant broke, and, leaving the carts and their wounded be- hind, fled back through the forest to Hadley. Of the thirty-six troopers of the command only sixteen escaped. Three taken prisoners were said to have been burned at the stake on the battlefield.
The ground where the trap was sprung is now known in Northfield as "Beers's Plain," and the hill where the captain fought to his death is to-day "Beers's Mountain." It is an eminence in the range which extends on the east side of the town. Here, on the south side, is the captain's grave. Both Beers's Plain and the grave are now suitably marked by tablets. Beers was an officer, we are told, of sterling valor, and a public servant of " approved patriotism and usefulness." At the time that he fell he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court, where he had represented his town for thirteen years. He had been in this Squakheag country five years before as a mem- ber of a prospecting party. So, as the local historians remark, he was among the first of Europeans to see this beautiful and fertile tract, and one of the first to be buried in its soil.
Two days after the Northfield disaster, when the sur- vivors had returned to camp with their story, Major Treat with a hundred dragoons hastened up to succor the Northfield force and settlers, and to take them off if any
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remained. Coming upon the ground of the fight, the troops were startled and most " solemnly affected " by the specta- cle of a row of twenty ghastly heads of the dead soldiers stuck upon poles set up near the roadside; and one awful figure hanging from the bough of a tree by a chain hooked into the under jaw, having the appearance of being thus sus- pended while yet alive. The "doleful sight" quickened their steps. Reaching the garrison the people were found safe inside the stockade where they had been confined for five days. The bodies of the slain still lay on the meadow where they fell, and a detachment was detailed to bury them. In the midst of this pious duty the men were sur- prised by a volley from neighboring bushes in which Indi- ans had been skulking, and Major Treat was hit by a spent ball. In fear of a general attack the work was ab- ruptly stopped, with only one body buried, - that of Sergeant Wright of Northampton, the commander of the gar- rison, - and preparations were hastened for departure. At dusk all were hurried off with what they could carry. On the fearsome return march, constantly apprehensive of some deadly surprise in the sombre woods, they were cheered by an unexpected meeting with Captain Appleton coming up with an additional force. He would have them turn back and with the combined forces give the enemy chase. But the strain had been too much. The " greatest part " advised "to the contrary." So the march was re- sumed, and Hadley at length reached.
After the English evacuation the Indians burned what was left of Northfield, the fort, and the houses. In subse- quent periods of the war, the place was a rendezvous of the River tribes consorting with Philip.
With the abandonment of Northfield, Deerfield became
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the outermost town. It was now a weak hamlet of a few settlers, much exposed by their situation to the enemy. At the outbreak of the war its inhabitants, according to Sheldon, numbered about one hundred and twenty-five, of whom only twenty-five or thirty were men. The houses were scattered the length of the present Deerfield Old Street, the pride of the beautiful town. Three of the houses were fortified with palisades. These were the gar- rison houses or forts. The principal one was the " Stock- well Fort" on Meetinghouse Hill, the natural centre of the town, where it is now the Common with its monu- ments. This was the house of Quintin Stockwell, where the minister boarded. The other two garrison houses were north and south of it. In both these directions the road dropped from the hill into a quagmire, which was covered with a causeway of logs. On three sides of the village were the deep open meadows spreading north, south, and westward to the virgin forest. From the hills on the east and west every movement in the Valley town could be ob- served by the Indian spies. So the post was a difficult one to defend. The outlet to the other settlements was by way of Hatfield, the nearest plantation, on the south.
On September 10 (O. S.), shortly after the return from Northfield, Captain Appleton was sent up to garrison Deer- field with his men. Two days later, on a Sunday, the place was again attacked. The preparations for the as- sault were stealthily made while the soldiers were collected with the settlers in the Stockwell Fort at the Sunday ser- vice. In the swamp north of Meetinghouse Hill an am- bush was laid to cut off the men of the north garrison upon their return. After the service, as a body of twenty-two were crossing the causeway, they were fired upon from this ambuscade. Only one was wounded, however, and all
Salmon River, East Haddam, Idling to the Connecticut.
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managed to retreat to Stockwell's. Then, turning to the north, the enemy intercepted the one sentinel in the north fort, and he was " never afterward heard from." Apple- ton rallied his men and sallying from his cover succeeded in driving the savages from the village. But before this was accomplished the north fort had been set on fire, much of the live stock had been killed or captured, and provi- sions and other spoils had been taken to the Indian ren- dezvous on Pine Hill, north of the Street.
An " express " carried the news of this affair to North- ampton, and by Monday night a party of volunteers, with some of Captain Lothrop's company, arrived to the town's relief. The next morning the combined forces under Appleton's lead marched up to Pine Hill, but to no pur- pose, for the savages had fled. That night Captain Moseley was despatched from Hadley to strengthen the Deerfield garrison.
Now approached " that most fatal day, the saddest that ever befel New England," as Hubbard wrote, - the day of the disastrous " Battle of Bloody Brook."
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The Battle of Bloody Brook
Slaughter of the "Flower of Essex" at South Deerfield while Convoying a Provision Train - The Sudden Attack from Ambush by a Swarm of Braves -Many of Captain Lothrop's Men idly gathering Grapes by the Brookside when the Warwhoop rang out -Desperate After-fight by Captain Moseley -Memorials of the Battle-The Legend of "King Philip's Chair " -Destruction of Deerfield.
T THIS was the calamitous engagement at Bloody Brook, in South Deerfield, less than a week after the Sunday raid upon the Deerfield garrison, in which were miserably slaughtered the "Flower of Essex," surprised by a body of nearly a thousand of the enemy in ambush.
Captain Lothrop had volunteered his command to con- voy a provision train laden with a quantity of threshed wheat from Deerfield to the headquarters at Hadley. This was to be added to the stores for the supply of the forces now concentrating at Hadley preparatory to the undertaking of aggressive operations in the field, in accord- ance with new orders from the council of war at Hartford, issued after the Northfield affair. With eighty of his picked men Lothrop had reached Deerfield without hin- drance, and was on the return march to Hadley with the train of ox-carts with Deerfield men as drivers, when the trap was sprung.
The procession, headed by the troops with the string of carts following, had filed through Deerfield Old Street, passed up Bars Long Hill, and proceeded slowly and
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carelessly along the old Hatfield road, then the narrow Pocumtuck Path through the primeval woods. "Confi- dent in their numbers, scorning danger, not even a van- guard or flanker was thrown out " by the captain. From the top of Long Hill the path, as Sheldon in his Deerfield history definitely outlines it, lay through the dense forest for a mile and a half; then approached on the left a nar- row swampy thicket trending southward, through which the brook crept sluggishly; then skirted this swamp an- other mile to a point where the brook narrowed and turned to the right ; here crossed the brook diagonally, leaving the marsh on the right. The soldiers had reached thus far . and halted on the other side of the brook while the teams behind were slowly dragging their heavy loads through the mire. So care-free were they that many of them put their guns in the carts and left the path to gather the luscious grapes then in abundance on the wayside. These " proved dear and deadly grapes to them," says Mather. For close by, as Sheldon pictures, "the silent morass on either flank was covered with grim warriors prone upon the ground, their tawny bodies indistinguishable from the slime in which they crawled, or their scarlet plumes and crimson paint from the glowing tints of the dying year on leaf and vine. Eagerly, but breathless and still, they waited the signal." The hidden mass of near a thou- sand comprised Nipmucks, Philip's Wampanoags, and the local Pocumtuck clans, led by the sachems who had di- rected the surprise at Northfield. Suddenly the fierce war- whoop rang in the ears of the astonished Englishmen, and a murderous volley burst from the morass.
A considerable number dropped at the first fire. Lothrop held to the theory of fighting Indians in their own way. Quickly recovering from the surprise, he apparently directed
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his men to take to the cover of the nearest trees and pick off the enemy, each singling out his man, after the Indian mode of warfare. At the first assault the " godly and courageous commander " himself fell fighting, leaving the command without a head. Almost immediately they were surrounded. And so the fine, brave fellows, "none of whom was ashamed to speak with the enemy in the gate," were miserably crushed by overwhelming numbers, and finally sank, "one great sacrifice to the tomahawk." Only seven or eight escaped the dreadful onslaught. Of the Deerfield men who had charge of the carts as teamsters, ยท seventeen in all, none survived.
Captain Moseley, ranging the woods in another direc- tion with sixty men, heard the firing and hastened to the scene. When he arrived the massacre was complete, and many of the victors remaining on the field were stripping the dead and plundering the carts. Charging into the disorganized mass, he drove them from their prey. Some of the eastern Indians among them recognized him, and as they stood off with the rest dared him to combat. "Come, Moseley, come," they shouted derisively, "you seek Indians, here's Indians enough for you!" With his force in a compact body he at once " swept through them, cutting down all within the reach of his fire." Thus he fought for five or six long hours, checking all attempts of the Indians to surround his men, or get at the wounded. Still he was unable to rout them or keep them long off their rich plunder. At length, when about to withdraw from the unequal conflict, relief suddenly came. Major Treat appeared with a hundred Connecticut soldiers, and a band of Mohegans led by a son of Uncas. Treat had been marching up from Northampton, and on the way had heard the firing. Following the sound he came upon the
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conflict. With his arrival the enemy broke. They were pursued through the woods and swamps till nightfall ended the chase. Moseley's loss in the day's engagement was slight.
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