USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 13
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With one more assault hostilities in the Valley region came to an end. This was the attack of June 12 upon Hadley.
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The Bay Colony authorities, after they had succeeded in redeeming a number of the English captives, among them Mrs. Rowlandson, but had failed in efforts for peace, since the Indian negotiators " did but dally," at length joined with the Connecticut government to force Philip from his stronghold at Wachusett, and to drive the enemy still remaining in the Valley. Two " armies " were ordered to come together at Brookfield or at the Hadley headquar- ters. Captain Samuel Henchman with four hundred horse and foot was ordered up from the Bay; while Connecticut sent forward Major John Talcott with two hundred and fifty troopers and two hundred Mohegans under Oneko. Talcott set out from the military rendezvous at Norwich, Connecticut, on June 2; and Henchman started from Con- cord, Massachusetts, three days later. Talcott reached Brookfield first. He arrived on the 7th, " having killed or captured seventy-three Indians on the way." Not ventur- ing alone to attack Wachusett, he pushed on to Hadley, which he reached next day. Establishing himself at Northampton, he sent down to Hartford for ammunition and supplies. These arrived on the 10th, convoyed by Captain George Dennison (he who had been one of the cap- tains at the capture of Canonchet) and his company. There were now at or about headquarters in Hadley five hundred and fifty men. Captain Jeremiah Swain, who had succeeded Captain Turner, was in command of the Hadley garrison. Captain Henchman was daily expected, when the combined forces would number upward of a thousand. Upon his arrival they were immediately to push up to Deerfield, where Major Talcott had been told were collected five hundred warriors. The main body of "hostiles," however, were apparently farther up the River at a place provided by Passacus after the Great Falls fight. It is
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presumed that they were aware of Henchman's march from the east, but ignorant of the movements of Talcott and Dennison, and that the assault upon Hadley was to fore- stall Henchman's arrival here.
For this assault seven hundred warriors swooped down from Passacus's new headquarters, and were before the town on the morning of the 12th. Strong bands were ambus- caded at the north and south ends of the town, and awaited the movements of the townspeople. Two men who had left the stockade contrary to orders fell among the am- bushed band at the south end and were killed. Thus this band were discovered to the garrison, and Captain Swain instantly sent a force out after them. While they were engaged with the garrison soldiers, the band at the north end sprang from their ambush. Rushing toward the stock- ade they found it lined with soldiers and Mohegans, and amazed, fell back in disorder. On the retreat some of them tarried to plunder a house, when it was struck by a missile from a small cannon. This was a weapon strange and awful to them, and they came " tumbling out in great terror." All were now on the run. The soldiers chased them for two miles northward. Disheartened by the repulse and the discovery of troops returned to the Valley with Indian allies, the fugitives reached their headquarters to find that in their absence their camp had been sacked by Mohawks and fifty of their women and children left dead in the ruins. This was the final blow, and they scattered aimlessly in the wilderness.
Henchman arriving two days after the Hadley assault, on the 16th the forces moved up the Valley to scour both sides of the River. Talcott's division took the west side ; Henchman's the east side. As they marched no Indians were seen. Deerfield was deserted of the five hundred said
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to have been there. At night both divisions met at the Great Falls, drenched by a cold northeaster. The storm continued through the next day and night, spoiling much of their provisions and ammunition. Then they returned to Hadley, leaving scouts farther to range the woods.
Now the "hostiles" were reported to be all in a continual motion, shifting gradually, some working toward Wachu- sett, others towards Narragansett, while Philip and his fol- lowers had left Wachusett for their old country, bent on whatever mischief they could do along the way. So the armies marched off, Henchman to the eastward, and Talcott to Hartford, leaving Captain Swain again in command in the Valley with the garrison men. Shortly after scouts from the Hadley garrison went up to what it now Green- field and destroyed a deserted Indian fort on Smead's Island, with a stock of provisions in the " barns," thirty canoes, and a hundred wigwams. A month and a half later Swain received orders to collect the soldiers from all the garrisons " and march to Deerfield, Squakheag, and the places thereabouts, and destroy all the growing corn, and then march homeward." The carrying out of these orders on August 22 was the final act in Philip's War in the Valley.
The finishing strokes, with the passing of Philip, were given in the Narragansett country where the war had begun. While the scouting parties were at their work along the River, Major Talcott with Connecticut troops, in conjunc- tion with the Bay and Plymouth forces, was in that region driving the enemy. By July, Philip and the remnant of his Wampanoags had reached his old lair at Mount Hope, deserted by all of his allies. The Narragansetts were scat- tered. The Nipmucks were drifting toward Maine and
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Canada. The broken Pocumtucks were mostly working westward to find refuge with the Mohicans. A small band of refugees fled to the Hudson. By Governor Andros's order they were secured, but their surrender at the demand of Connecticut refused. Lest others following might return with recruits, scouts ranged the woods about the lower Val- ley towns, while guards protected the people at their work in the fields. Late in July a body of several hundred re- fugees passed near Westfield going westward. The garrison soldiers gave chase, but they kept their way, taking "a southwest course as if to cross the Hudson at Esopus, to avoid the Mohawks." Three weeks later another band of two hundred crossed the Connecticut at Chicopee on a raft and disappeared beyond Westfield. They were overtaken at the Housatonic, and a number killed or captured. The rest got away also to the westward. These bodies of re- fugees were finally absorbed in the Mohicans.
On the day that the orders went out to Captain Swaine at Hadley to destroy the corn (August 12), Philip, at last driven to bay by the great Indian fighter, Captain Benjamin Church, - his ablest braves slain, deserted, betrayed, bereft by the capture of his wife and only son, crying in his grief, "My heart breaks, now I am ready to die," -fell, and his head was carried in triumph to Plymouth on the day ap- pointed for a public thanksgiving, there long to be exposed on the battlement of Plymouth fort. His boy, the last of the Massasoit race, was sold as a slave in Bermuda.
The proud Wampanoags and the prouder Narragansetts had now suffered the fate of the Pequots. The Nipmucks also were broken up and had migrated north and west with the few surviving Narragansett warriors who had escaped capture. The treatment of the captured to the last was relentless. "Death or slavery was the penalty for all
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known or suspected to have been concerned in the shedding of English blood." Many chiefs were executed at Boston and Plymouth on the charge of rebellion. Many captives not killed were distributed among the colonists as " ten- year servants."
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The sum of the war's results to the colonists was grave. Of the able-bodied men in the colonies affected, one in twenty had been killed or died of wounds, and the same proportion of families had been burnt out of their homes. At least thirteen towns had been wholly destroyed ; others had been sorely damaged. More than six hundred houses, near a tenth part of New England, had been burned. "There was scarcely a family in which some one had not suffered." Six hundred men, most of them in the prime of life, and twelve tried captains, had fallen on the battle-field; more, surviving the conflict, bore scars of their desperate encoun- ters. The cost of the war, in expenses and losses, reached a total of half a million dollars, truly " an enormous sum for the few of that day."
The group of Valley towns that had suffered the greatest hardships slowly recovered from the ravages of this war. With the advent of spring immediately following the close of hostilities an attempt to resettle Deerfield was made. This ended tragically. Later settlers effected a permanent lodgment, and it again became the frontier town, so to re- main for a third of a century, except the interval of five years during which Northfield was occupied.
But Indian affairs continued unsettled. The hostile Valley clans, though expelled and scattered, were not sub- dued, and roving bands coming down from the north re- peatedly harassed the upper towns till the French and Indian wars broke upon the Valley.
1
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Still life at this period was not all sombre in the River towns. There were various mild diversions, chief among them the lecture days and training days. Not a little cheeriness was mixed with the perils of the River folk. Recalling their manners and their ways of living as the seventeeth century was closing, Roger Wolcott remarked the " simplicity and honesty of the generality." Their blemishes he observed to be too much censoriousness and detraction. " And as they had much cyder many of them drank too much of it."
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XIII
The Sack of Deerfield.
The Settlement, again the Outpost, repeatedly raided in the early French and Indian Wars-The first Captives marched to Canada from Deerfield and Hatfield -Knightly Quest of two Hatfield Men - Bootless raid of Baron de Saint-Castin - Motive of de Vaudreuil's Expedition resulting in the Sack-Deerfield as it appeared before the Onset-Completeness of the Sur- prise by De Rouville's Army - The Palisades scaled over Snowdrifts- Scene at the Parsonage - Siege of the Benoni Stebbins House - Start of one hundred and twelve Captives for Canada.
D EERFIELD, as the outpost in the Valley from the time of its reoccupation by permanent settlers in 1682, had borne the brunt of the Indian raids upon the River towns during King William's War of 1690-1698, and in Queen Anne's War of 1702-1713, till the second year of the latter war, when the Marquis de Vaudreuil, French governor of Canada, sent out a midwinter expedi- tion directly for the destruction of this "frontier of the Boston government." It was the awful work of that ex- pedition, in the burning of the town, the massacre or cap- ture of nearly all its inhabitants, and the marching of one hundred and twelve captives, the minister with his flock, three hundred miles over the ice and snow to Canada, which has become familiar in history and legend as "The Sack of Deerfield."
More than a quarter of a century earlier some Deerfield settlers had formed a part of the first of all bands of cap- tive whites to be taken on this cruel journey through the wilderness, along which so many in subsequent parties fell
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Door of the " Ensign Sheldon House," with its " Hatchet- Hewn Face." Relic of the sack of Deerfield, February, 1703/4.
-- யுற்றுபற்றிய படும்
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by the way, less through exhaustion and exposure than from the Indians' tomahawk and scalping knife.
The story of the captives' march that followed the Sack of 1703-4 is but a repetition, on a larger scale and with more tragic detail, of the story of the first one of 1677.
The party of 1677 comprised twenty-eight men, women, and children. They were Hatfield and Deerfield folk, captured by a band of refugee Pocumtucks and a single Nar- ragansett, who had come down from Canada under a Cana- dian chief, in September of that year, - the year after the close of Philip's War. The Deerfield portion were survi- vors of a group of a half-dozen settlers, led by Quintin Stockwell, of "Stockwell Fort," destroyed in Philip's War, who had ventured the resettlement of the town in the preceding spring. The raiders, unaware of the ven- ture at Deerfield, had first fallen upon Hatfield, supposing it to be the outmost settlement. The truth was discovered to them by the Deerfield camp-fire at twilight, after they had pillaged Hatfield and were starting up river on their return march, with their captives and plunder. Creeping down from the woods on East Mountain, they completely
surprised the camp as supper was preparing.
Though
valiantly resisting the sudden assault, the little group of settlers were crushed by the superior numbers that sur- rounded them. Four of the six, with a Hatfield boy who happened with them, fell into the enemy's hands and were joined to the other captives on East Mountain. The Hat- field captives were composed of broken families, mostly the women and children. Of the full company of twenty-eight beginning the northern march, three or four fell by the way. John Root of the Deerfield group and the Hatfield boy, Sammy Russell, -- who had lost his mother and younger brother in the slaughter at Hatfield, - were early
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killed by their captors; and later a little Hatfield girl, Mary Foote, was killed, probably, like the boy, for stragg- ling. Benoni Stebbins, of the Deerfield group, managed to escape early in the journey, and got back to Hadley with the first authentic news of the destination of the cap- tives. Quintin Stockwell weathered the journey with much distress from wounds which he had received in the fight at Deerfield, and was subsequently ransomed. "Old Sergeant Plympton," - not so very old, being under sixty, -another of the Deerfield group, who had served with Captain Moseley in Philip's War, was burned at the stake after the arrival in Canada. A woman captive was forced to lead him to the fire, we read, though the stout-hearted fellow approached it not only unflinchingly but "with cheerfulness." Three wintry months were consumed on this first march, on which long halts were made at Indian camps far up the River; and at its end the captives were scattered in French and Indian villages.
A rescue party composed of soldiers and volunteers from Hatfield and the towns next below had hurried out in pursuit of the raiders, but after a bewildering chase for nearly forty miles up the Valley without result they re- turned disheartened. The wily foe had doubled on their tracks, and crossed and recrossed the River, so confusing all traces. Then followed a knightly quest by two Hatfield men, Benjamin Waite and Stephen Jennings, whose entire families were among the captives. Armed with papers from the Bay council authorizing their expedition, and with letters from the Bay governor to the French governor and to a great Indian sachem, making overtures for the redemp- tion of the captives, the two men started off on their lonely pilgrimage in the desolate season of December. After ex- traordinary exertions and grave perils, these adventurous
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men met with the fullest success. Their families were restored to them, and finally, through the help of Frontenac at Quebec, the ransom of the whole party was effected. The reader of the narrative which Hubbard gives of this quest will be disposed to agree with him that it would have afforded " Matter for a large Fiction to some of the ancient Poets." It was, as he says, unparalleled by "any attempt of that nature since the English came into these parts." Other similar and heroic pilgrimages followed in after years, the record of which ennobles the annals of New England colonial wars.
For most of the time between the break-up of Quintin Stockwell's camp and the return of permanent settlers the fruitful plantation of Deerfield lay " a wilderness, a dwell- ing for owls and a pasture for flocks." The reoccupation in the spring of 1682 was effected by a handful of former settlers who had been scattered in the towns below. They were enabled to set up their few houses and rehabilitate the old fort unmolested till the opening of King William's War. Of that war the most threatening event in the Valley was an assault by an expedition of French and Indians from Canada, sent out against Deerfield in the autumn of 1694, under the Baron de Saint-Castin. He was that fiery young Frenchman, Jean Vincent, who, com- ing out in the first regiment of regular troops sent over by the French government to Canada, afterward settled among the Indians of the Abenakis at Pentagoet, now Castine, on Penobscot Bay, and allied himself with their chief, Madockawando, whose daughters he took for wives, and became to the clan as their tutelar deity. Castin had accomplished the long march from the north undiscovered, skilfully eluding the English scouts then ranging the woods,
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and had led his force down from East Mountain, intending to attack Deerfield at the north gate and take it by sur- prise, when a boy in the meadows chanced upon the creep- ing foe. The boy was shot before he could give the alarm, but the report of the gun gave it in his stead. At the signal the townsfolk hastened within the stockade, and the men took position for defence, drilled as they had been for just such a sudden attack. The school-dame and her flock of children were the last to get under cover. As they were rushing to the gate they were chased and fired upon ; and they had barely reached it, with bullets whist- ling about their ears, when the general assault began. It was of short duration, for the stockade was successfully defended and the enemy were discomfited. Then they were " driven ignominiously back to the wilderness."
The Deerfield upon which Vaudreuil's expedition of February, 1703-4 fell had grown to embrace forty-one houses and two hundred and sixty-eight inhabitants. It was built as now along the length of the plateau of the Town Street. Fifteen of the forty-one houses were within the line of the stockade, twelve north and fourteen south of it. Meetinghouse Hill is now marked by the monu- ment which commemorates the settlers and the men of the Civil War, and stands in the Common midway on Deer- field Old Street, within the lines of the old fort. The minister's little house, forty-two by twenty feet, with a lean-to, and his barn, both of which the town had built for him, stood back on the Common, where is now the academy. Benoni Stebbins' and Ensign John Sheldon's houses, im- portant features in the Sack of the town, stood nearby to the northward. An inscribed tablet on the Common, beneath old elms, marks the site of the former; and a few rods
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above a similar tablet marks that of the latter. The Sheldon house at the time of the Sack was the largest in the place. These three houses were a group by themselves twelve or fifteen rods from the houses on the east and south.
Grave apprehensions of trouble, based on reports of the enemy's movements, had been felt some time before it came, and the townsfolk had all been living inside the fort. In the previous May the council at Boston had provided a guard for the town, and the soldiers composing it were quartered among the inhabitants. Two were latterly as- signed to the minister's house, one of these being John Stoddard, son of the Northampton minister, who afterward, as Colonel John Stoddard, became the chief military man in the Valley. In October, the minister, John Williams, sent to Governor Dudley at Boston a particular account of the distress of the town under the dangers to which it was exposed. The townspeople, he wrote, had been "driven from their houses and home lots into the fort," where were then but ten house-lots. Similarly wrote Solomon Stoddard, the Northampton minister. "Their houses are so crowded, sometimes with soldiers, that men and women can do little business within doors, and their spirits are so taken up with their dangers that they have little heart to undertake what is needful for advancing their estates. . . . Sometimes they are alarmed and called off from their busi- ness, sometimes they dare not go into their fields; and when they do go, they are fain to wait till they have a guard." Almost the only communication between the houses, according to another account, was by passages underground from cellar to cellar.
Such was the little village within the rude walls of the picketed fort on the night before the attack, on the last of
.
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February. When that night closed down Sheldon counts two hundred and ninety-one souls here. Of these, he finds, twenty were garrison soldiers; two were visitors from Hatfield; three, Frenchmen from Canada ; one, a friendly Indian; and three, negro slaves. The rest were the towns- people, of all ages, "from Widow Allison of eigthy-four years, to John, the youngling of Deacon Trench's flock, of four weeks." In the minister's house with him were his family, - his wife Eunice, a daughter of Eleazer Mather, the earlier Northampton minister, and seven of their eight living children, with two negro slaves, a maid and a man, - and the two soldiers as guard. In the Stebbins house were three families and a guard. In the Sheldon house, - the ensign's family, and his newly married son with his bride, born Hannah Chapin of Springfield, whose wed- ding journey had been a winter's trip from Springfield to this house on horseback, the bride riding a pillion behind the groom. Outside, the snow lay heavily on the meadows, and piled in drifts against the stockade.
Vaudreuil's expedition was undertaken ostensibly in aid of the Abenakis of Maine, in response to an appeal from some of these Indians for help to revenge upon the English a real or fancied wrong suffered at their hands ; but more particularly in the hope of embroiling the Eng- lish with the Abenakis and breaking their treaty of peace. As de Vaudreuil reported after the Sack, " Sieur de Rou- ville's party, My Lord, has accomplished everything that was expected of it; for independent of the capture of the fort, it showed the Abenakis that they could truly rely on our promises ; and this is what they told me at Mon- treal on the 13th of June when they came to thank me." A side motive which Sheldon discloses in his ingenious brochure, New Tracks in an old Trail, was the French
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governor's desire to secure the person of Parson Williams to hold for the exchange of Captain Baptiste, the French prisoner in Boston, to whom the minister makes a passing allusion in his Redeemed Captive, as Captain Battis, who was a more important personage, at least to de Vaudreuil, than appears in the histories.
The expedition was carefully planned and abundantly equipped for the journey down and back to Canada. It was composed of two hundred French soldiers, and one hundred and forty Indians, part French Mohawks, or " Macquas," probably, Sheldon says, in civilized dress, and part Abenakis, in native costume. Hertel de Rouville, the commander, was an officer of the line, leader six years before of the attack upon Salmon Falls Village, in New Hampshire, and afterward, in 1708, leading in the pitiless massacre at Haverhill, Massachusetts. Second in com- mand was his brother, Lieutenant de Rouville. The soldiers were provided with snowshoes, and came down the Valley with little difficulty over the crusted snow and the frozen River. An extra supply of snowshoes and moccasins was brought for the use of the captives they expected to take. Provisions were conveyed on sleds, some drawn by dogs, as far as the mouth of West River, at the present Brattle- borough. Here the sleds and dogs were left with a small guard, and the rest of the way was made with scant supply of food in the packs which each man carried. Before the end of the march the band were obliged to subsist on such game as the Indian hunters could kill. As the town was approached the French soldiers were half starved and on the brink of mutiny.
The party were made ready for the assault under cover of night on the bluff overlooking North Meadows, a mile and a half northwest of the fort. Crossing Deerfield River
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on the ice near Red Rocks, a halt was again made till spies had gone forward and learned how affairs stood in the vil- lage. All about the fort was found in deep quiet ; even the watchman was asleep. Tradition tells that the wearied sentinel, while on his beat in the depth of the night, had heard from one of the houses "the soft voice of a woman singing a lullaby to a sick child," and leaning against the window of the room where the child lay to listen to the song had himself dropped asleep under "the soothing tones of the singer." Moving cautiously across North Meadows and down to the village, the invaders stole upon their prey. It was now two hours before daybreak. Easily scaling the palisades over the snowdrifts against them, at the northwest corner of the stockade, De Rouville's men were inside and scattered among the houses before a soul was aware of their presence. The surprise was complete. The roused sentinel discharged his gun and gave the cry of " Arms!" before he was overcome, but the alarm was drowned in the din that instantly arose. The signal for general attack was an assault by twenty of the Indians upon the minister's house, the French soldiers meanwhile " standing to their arms and killing all they could that made any resistance."
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