USA > Connecticut > The Connecticut River and the valley of the Connecticut, three hundred and fifty miles from mountain to sea; historical and descriptive > Part 15
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At the mouth of White River, now White River Junc- tion, Hertel de Rouville broke up the company into small parties who continued the journey in different directions. The party to which Mr. Williams with his children, other than Stephen, was attached followed the valleys of the White and Winooski rivers, Lake Champlain, the St. Lawrence, and Sorel rivers, to the French village of Chambly, fifteen miles below Montreal, being a little over a month on he march. Stephen Williams was carried with the band that continued up the Connecticut and into the Coos country. After months of wandering, they struck across to the Winooski and made their way to Chambly and the Indian fort of St. François above, which was
White River Junction, and West Lebanon, New Hampshire Side.
سمسية سيقد (بروف شعمل،، إنزع
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reached in August. The hardships of the minister's party were but little relaxed through the remainder of their jour- ney. Early on the way another child, a little girl of four, was killed, her Macqua master finding the snow too deep for him comfortably to carry both the child and his pack. Still there were some worthy exhibitions of savage kind- ness. The minister's children fared exceptionally well. The youngest daughter, Eunice, aged seven, was " carried all the journey, and looked after with a great deal of ten- derness." The youngest boy, Warham, four years old, was " wonderfully preserved from death ; for though they that carried him or drew him on sleighs were tired with their journeys, yet their savage cruel tempers were so overruled by God that they did not kill him, but in their pity he was spared, and others would take care of him; so that four times on the journey he was thus preserved till at last he arrived in Montreal." So also the elder son, Samuel, and the eldest daughter, Esther, " were pitied so as to be drawn on sleighs when unable to travel." Mr. Williams himself was occasionally helped along by his master. The latter made a pair of snowshoes for him, and the first day of wearing them he travelled twenty-five miles. Along one of the hard passages, when he was foot-sore, the mas- ter relieved him of his pack by drawing it with his own heavy one on the ice. One day they travelled from forty to forty-five miles. On the lake the devout minister had another " wonderful experience " of the miraculous efficacy of prayer, as he could not doubt :
" When we entered on the lake the ice was rough and uneven which was very grievous to my feet that could scarce bear to set down on the smooth ice on the river. I lifted up my cry to God in ejaculatory requests that he would take notice of my state and some way or other relieve me. I had not marched half a mile before there fell a
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moist snow about an inch and a half deep, that made it very soft for my feet to pass over the lake to the place where my master's family was. Wonderful favors in the midst of trying afflictions !"
At length arriving at Chambly, Mr. Williams was hos- pitably received into a French gentleman's house and thank- fully enjoyed once again the luxury of a civilized table and rest at night on " a good feather bed." The greater part of the other captives had arrived before him and were dis- tributed among the Indians. His four children, who before the end of the journey had been separated from him, were, all but little Warham, in or about Montreal, in the Indians' hands. Warham had been bought by a French gentle- woman in Montreal as the Indians passed by. Nothing was at this time to be learned here of Stephen's fate. Later taken up to Montreal, Mr. Williams was placed under the guardianship of the governor, by whom he was held for exchange for Captain Baptiste. So far as it related to his "outward man" the governor's treatment of him was " courteous and charitable to admiration." He was as a guest in the governor's house. He was provided with clothing as became his station, given a place at the gover- nor's table, and " a very good chamber" for his living room. The governor also exerted himself to get the min- ister's neighbors out of the hands of the savages, and espe- cially to redeem his children, in which latter efforts the governor's lady lent her kindly aid. All the children were ultimately redeemed excepting the daughter Eunice, whom the Macquas would not give up at any price. So she re- mained permanently with them, growing early to their ways and customs, losing her native language and religion, becoming a Catholic under the teaching of nuns in her girlhood, and in time marrying a Caughnawaga chief who adopted her name of Williams. Young Stephen suffered
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White River Junction and Lebanon Bridge, at High Water.
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many hardships and some romantic adventures, though " wonderfully preserved " through his long months of In- dian life, during a time of "famine whereof three English persons died." He became skilful in the arts of the Indian hunter, and an adept in woodcraft. He was finally ran- somed, and rejoined the father in the village of Château Riche, fifteen miles below Quebec, after a separation of more than a year.
But while the minister's "outward man" was so com- forted by his treatment by the governor and other French- men, his heart was torn by the miseries of his captive people through the Jesuit schemes to force them into " Popery." He too was in constant battle in defence of his orthodoxy. Every art was employed to win or entrap him into the Romish fold. He was cajoled, threatened, reasoned with, badgered incessantly, the pressure tightened with his unbending resistance. Once, at Quebec, when the intendant offered to collect all the captives and his children together with him, and secure him "a great and honorable pension from the king every year," large enough for his and their " honorable maintenance," if he would be- come a Catholic, his spirited reply was, "Sir, if I thought your religion to be true I would embrace it freely ; but so long as I believe it to be what it is, the offer of the whole world is of no more value to me than a blackberry." Earnestly entreated by his lordship to accompany him in his coach to the great church on a saint's day, he replied, " Ask me anything wherein I can serve you with a good conscience, and I am ready to gratify you, but I must ask your excuse here." Shortly before his redemption, when he had been in Canada for two years, the " superior of the priests," remarking his now ragged clothes, told him that his " obstinacy against the Catholic religion prevented their
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providing him better" ones. "It is better going in a ragged coat than with a ragged conscience," he retorted.
He was denied intercourse with the other captives lest he should hinder the work of proselytism. But ways of communicating with them, and of sustaining them in their resistance were found. For the comfort of those who secretly visited him, he drew up, in his " solitariness," some " sorrowful, mournful considerations " on the situa- tion, in verse of " a plain style," although he was "un- skilled in poetry," - as the opening lines attest :
"The sorrows of my heart enlarged are, Whilst I my present state with past compare. I frequently unto God's house did go, With Christian friends his praises for to show ; But now I solitary sit, both sigh and cry, Whilst my flock's misery think on do I."
When the negotiations for the exchange of prisoners were finally completed the tussle with the French priests was at its sharpest. "I cannot tell you," the minister writes, " how the clergy and others labored to stop many of the prisoners. To some liberty, to some money and yearly pensions were offered if they would stay . . . Some younger ones were told if they went home they would be damned and burnt in hell forever, to affright them. Day and night they were urging them to stay . . . At Montreal especially all crafty endeavors were used to stay " them. But the minister corralled most of the lot, and fifty-seven took passage on the homeward bound ship with him. This vessel sailed from Quebec in October, 1706, and in a month reached Boston. With Mr. Williams came two of his children, - Samuel and little Warham. Stephen had returned a year earlier, with Colonel William Dudley,
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Governor Dudley's son, who had gone out with proposals for an exchange of prisoners. Esther, the eldest daughter, had preceded Stephen, having been brought home by En- sign John Sheldon with two of the latter's children and Mary (Chapin) Sheldon, his young daughter-in-law.
Ensign Sheldon had made the first expedition for the redemption of the captives, and the first of three undertaken by him, quests as knightly as those of Waite and Jennings a quarter of a century before. On this first trip, made in the winter season, on snowshoes, by way of Albany and the lakes, he had two companions : Captain John Livingstone of Albany as pilot, and young John Wells of Deerfield, who had lost a sister in the Sack, and whose mother was among the captives. Ensign Sheldon himself had four sons and daughters in the captive band, and his dead wife's brother with a large family. He carried pro- posals from Governor Dudley to Governor de Vaudreuil, but this mission was successful only in the ransom of part of his family and Esther Williams, and the return with him of Captain Courtemanche as a commissioner for the French side in the negotiations for exchanges. His second trip, again with Young Wells and another in Livingstone's place, made in the late winter of 1705-6, was more suc- cessful, for it secured the ransom of forty-three captives, the greater number of them Deerfield folk, who returned with him by ship from Quebec. His third pilgrimage was in the spring of 1707, and resulted in the return of seven captives, by the overland route, with an escort by Mon- sieur de Chambly, a brother of Hertel de Rouville.
When Parson Williams returned from his captivity and came back to Deerfield, in December, 1706, the place was yet little more than a military post. The minister's resto-
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ration to them, however, put new heart into the few towns- people, and something of the old town life was renewed. The town at once voted to build a new house for the min- ister, as "big as Ensign Sheldon's," which we have seen was the largest in the place; and before the close of his first year back at home he was comfortably settled in the new parsonage with his children (save Eunice) again about him, and with another wife. The new house was placed on the site of the old one, and there it remained for more than a century and a half, the homestead, after the minis- ter's day, of generations of Williamses, and after them of another old Deerfield family. Then it was moved off a few rods westward, to make way for the academy; and here it still stands, facing the minister's original home-lot, with an end on Academy Lane, a landmark protected with jealous care by its fortunate possessor. On the edge of the green which it fronts an inscribed tablet gives the passer the data of the home-lot and of the two houses. The min- ister's second wife, to whom he was married in September after his home-coming, was a cousin of the martyred Eunice, and, like her, a grandaughter of the Rev. William Warham, first minister of the Connecticut Windsor. She was Abigail, widow of Benjamin Bissel of Hartford, when she married the minister.
Of Eunice Williams's children in the new household, three of the sons became ministers, and the daughter a minister's wife. These sons were put through Harvard Col- lege, graduating respectively, Eleazer in 1708, Stephen in 1713, and Warham in 1719. Eleazer, the eldest, was ab- sent at school at the time, and thus escaped capture in the Sack. He became the settled minister of Mansfield, Connec- ticut, in 1710, and remained there till his death in 1742. Stephen, three years after his graduation, was settled at
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Longmeadow, down the River, and, in charge of that parish, spent his long life, which closed in his eighty-ninth year. He was a chaplain in the army in three expeditions of the later French and Indian wars. Warham was min- ister in Waltham, eastern Massachusetts, and died in that office in 1751, after twenty-eight years of service. Of his children three daughters married clergymen, and a son be- came a minister, professor, editor, and historian. He was Samuel Williams, LL.D., author of the first history of Ver- mont. Samuel, Eunice Williams's second son, became town clerk of Deerfield. He returned from captivity speak- ing the French language fluently; and for this reason, in the latter part of Queen Anne's War, being then also a soldier, he was assigned to escort a party of French pris- oners overland to Canada. He died early, - in 1713, - never quite recovering from the hardships of his captivity. Esther, Eunice's daughter, married a minister of Coventry, Connecticut.
Eunice, the daughter who remained with the Indians and married an Indian chief, was afterward found, but could not be induced to return to civilized life. Every effort to redeem her had failed, though strong influences had been exerted for her recovery. When, as chaplain in the expeditions of 1709 and 1711, Mr. Williams returned to Canada, the hope of rescuing her was strong in him; and again when, in 1714, he and Captain John Stoddard were there as commissioners to treat for the return of prisoners, this hope was uppermost in his mind. Negotia- tions for her ransom were instituted by officials at Boston and at Albany ; but all to no purpose. The father never reached her. Years after, Stephen Williams, having found her, induced her to visit him at his home in Longmeadow. She came in her Indian garb, bringing her husband and a
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train of grave-visaged Indians. She greeted her brother with affection ; but she was firmly attached to the life of the forest, and civilization had no attractions for her. Her party would not lodge in her brother's house, but occupied during their stay a wigwam, which they set up in the or- chard behind the parsonage. This incident of her visit has been related by a great-granddaughter of Stephen Williams: " One day my grandmother and her sisters got their Aunt Eunice into the house and dressed her up in our fashion. Meanwhile the Indians outside were very uneasy; and when Eunice went out in her new dress they were much displeased, and she soon returned to the house begging to have her blanket again." She lived to a great age, dying in her forest home after the close of the Revolution. Two of her great-grandsons, John and Eleazer Williams, spent some years of their boyhood in Longmeadow, receiving their education under "Deacon " Nathaniel Ely, who had married a granddaughter of Stephen Williams. One of them, Eleazer, became a minister and a missionary among the western Indians. He attained a greater notoriety in his later life through his acceptance of the claim that he was not of Indian blood, but of royal French, -the real " lost dauphin " of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette.
He was that claimant over whom controversy waged warm fifty years ago, and good men became heated to angry invectives against each other. Older readers will recall the circumstantial story of the Rev. John H. Hanson in his papers, "Have We a Bourbon among Us ?" and "The Bourbon Question," published in the Putnam's Monthly of 1853, which opened the dispute, and his sub- sequent book, " The Lost Prince," restating the story, and with not a little skill dealing with the critics and ridicu- lers of the claim. They will recall also the battle of the
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pamphleteers for and against the claim which continued after the death of the claimant in 1858. And lately the story has been revived for modern readers in an English publication, based almost entirely upon Dr. Hanson's book, but with slight if any consideration of the strong evidence adduced by his contemporaries against his theory. The basis upon which the Williams claim was made principally to rest was in three propositions : the alleged declaration of his identity as the dauphin made to him by the Prince de Joinville at Green Bay, Wisconsin, in October, 1841, upon the occasion of de Joinville's second visit to America, with the request that he should sign an abdication of the throne, which he declined to do ; of Williams's remarkable likeness to the Bourbons, and particularly to Louis XIV in feature and figure ; and of the appearance upon his person of a scar, at the exact point indicated where it should be, showing the mark of a crescent-shaped lancet which the Duchesse d'Angoulême had said, when she rejected the claim of Naun- dorf, would be found on her brother, made by the surgeon at the time of his inoculation, for the purpose of identifi- cation. Against these assumptions or declarations, counter evidence was brought (with the documents assuming to attest the death of the real dauphin in the Temple) to show that the fabric had been principally erected on Williams's "say so"; that there was nothing substantial in support of the tale of the secret bringing of the dauphin to America and his sequestration with the Iroquois chief, the reputed father of Eleazer ; that the likeness of Eleazer to the Bourbons, if not largely imaginary, had no signifi- cance; that he had the pronounced marks of the half-breed ; that his Indian birth was sufficiently authenticated; and that his head was turned by stories of his "royal origin " told him by some French officers. The last words in the
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controversy were said in Putnam's Magazine in 1868, against the claim, by the Rev. C. F. Robertson, afterward bishop of Missouri, who was the literary executor of Eleazer ; and for the claim, by the Rev. Francis Vinton of Brooklyn, afterward of Trinity Church, New York. In Dr. Vinton's statement were related incidents which he had not been allowed to publish during the life of the persons concerned, the principal one being an astonishing recognition of Wil- liams as a Bourbon by Prince Paul William, Duke of Wurtemburg, in Mr. Vinton's Brooklyn church on a cer- tain Sunday in 1853, when Williams was assisting in the service ; while Dr. Vinton clinched the whole matter, at least to his own satisfaction, with the declaration that he himself had seen the identifying mark of the crescent on the back of Williams's shoulder. Widely differing charac- ters were given Eleazer by the contending partisans. Cer- tain soldiers, General Cass and General A. E. Ellis among them, who knew him and ridiculed his " claim," declared him to have been a vain deceiver and dissembler. The Episcopal ministers defending his cause pictured him as a simple-minded man, devoted to his missionary work, a loyal Indian leader in the War of 1812, abashed rather than elated by the notoriety of the " claim." Perhaps the truth lies between the two. But the claim to the French prince- dom has passed into oblivion, a closed romance of history.
Parson Williams's second wife bore him five children. The eldest of them, Abigail, named for the mother, became three times a wife. The fourth child, Elijah, developed into an important man in the last two French wars. In the " Old French War" of 1744-48, as captain, he had charge of scouting parties from Deerfield to cover the fron- tier on the north and west. In the final war, 1755-63, he was a major and assistant commissary, with headquarters
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in Deerfield. He was also a judge, a civil engineer, a rep- resentative in the General Court, and town clerk and selectman for a quarter of a century. Like his elder half- brothers, he was college bred, graduating from Harvard in 1732, and receiving an A. M. degree in 1758. He married first a Dwight of Hatfield, and second a Pynchon of Spring- field. His son, also Elijah, Harvard 1764, and an A. M. Dartmouth 1773, a lawyer by profession, was a Tory in the Revolution and served as a captain on the British side. He had a hard time with the "Liberty Men " when he came home to arrange some business matters, but he man- aged to escape with his life.
The story of this remarkable Williams family has been enlarged in this chapter because it is the story of so many of the sturdy stock of early New England.
Parson Williams died in the summer of 1729, in his sixty-fifth year, and was buried in the old graveyard by the side of the martyred Eunice. Abigail Williams sur- vived him a quarter of a century. When she died, at the age of eighty-one, she was buried by the minister's side. The three gravestones with their inscriptions are the first to be sought by the traveller as he enters this serene en- closure on the meadows. In near neighborhood are the graves of Ensign and Hannah Sheldon. In a corner of the yard is the mound beneath which was the common grave of the victims of the Sack, marked "The Dead of 1704."
In Memorial Hall are displayed against the walls of an upper room inscribed tablets commemorating each of the captives of 1704. In the library of the Pocumtuck Memo- rial Association, housed in other rooms, is preserved the manuscript of Stephen Williams's journal of the march of the captives.
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Upper River Settlement
Northfield the Outpost in 1714 - Fort Dummer at the present Brattleborough The Pioneer Upper Valley Town -The "Equivalent Lands " - " Num- ber 4" at the present Charlestown- Father Rale's War - Gray Lock - Scouting-parties of River Men - Chronicles of their bold Adventures up the Valley - Schemes for new Townships - The " Indian Road " - Six Up- river Town Grants - The Massachusetts-New Hampshire Boundary Dis- pute - The Old French War - Abandonment of the new Plantations - Heroic Defence of "Number 4" -Story of a Remarkable Siege.
T HE plantations in the Valley above the north Massa- chusetts line were few and precarious till the close of the last French and Indian War with the conquest of Canada in 1760. None in the region was attempted till after Father Ralle's (or Ralé's) War of 1722-1725. At the end of Queen Anne's War there was no English lodg- ment on the River beyond Greenfield, then Green River Farms, a district of Deerfield. The following year, 1714, Northfield, now permanently reestablished, became the frontier town. Its territory at this time extended above the present Massachusetts line, and embraced parts of Hinsdale and Winchester, now in New Hampshire, and Vernon over the Vermont border. With its forts and fortified houses it remained a strategic point of impor- tance through the succeeding border wars. During Father . Ralé's War the English military outpost was advanced up the west side of the River above Northfield with the erec- tion of Fort Dummer at what is now Brattleborough, Ver- mont. With the close of that war Fort Dummer became
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a truck-house for trading with the again peaceful Indians coming down from Canada, and soon a slender settlement, mostly of traders, grew up about it. This was the pioneer settlement of the Upper Valley. It was the nucleus of Brattleborough, chartered and named some years later, the first English township in what is now Vermont. It remained the only Upper Valley settlement till or about 1740.
Fort Dummer was erected by the province of Massa- chusetts, which then claimed jurisdiction northward up the River forty miles above the present state line, eastward as far as the Merrimack River, and due west indefinitely. The fort was designed for the protection of all the north- western frontiers of Massachusetts and Connecticut. It was ordered at first to be garrisoned by " forty able men, English and Western Indians," friendly Mohawks. They were to be employed in scouting up the River and its tributaries Canada-ward, and easterly above Great Monad- nock, to sight the enemy approaching any of the frontier towns. The fort was placed on a section of the " Equiva- lent Lands " above Northfield, which extended along the west bank of the River between the present limits of Brattleborough, Dummerston, and Putney. The " Equiva- lent Lands " comprised four parcels of unoccupied tracts in different localities, one hundred and seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-three acres in all, that Massachu- setts had transferred to Connecticut when the boundaries between these two colonies were determined in 1713, as an " equivalent " for certain townships (among them Enfield and Suffield on the River) previously in the Massachusetts jurisdiction, but falling southward of the defined line, which Connecticut granted to remain with Massachusetts. Thirty years after, these townships, complaining of Massachusetts
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taxation and assuming to have been originally within the Connecticut charter, again shifted to Connecticut of their own motion. Shortly after the acquisition of the " Equiva- lent Lands," or in 1716, Connecticut sold them in a lump at public vendue in Hartford and gave the proceeds to Yale College. They were bid off by a group of Massa- chusetts, Connecticut, and London capitalists, who got them for a little more than a farthing an acre. The pur- chasers making a partition of the lands the parcel above Northfield fell to four Massachusetts men. These were William Dummer, then lieutenant-governor and acting- governor of the province, William Brattle of Cambridge, and Anthony Stoddard and John White of Boston. Hence the name of the fort for the lieutenant-governor, and of the township, subsequently established, for the Cambridge nabob.
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