USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 13
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New England towns had no toleration in this period for the pauper. Inheriting the English notion that they were to be kept work- ing or kept moving, the favorite shelter against the burden of their support was "warning out." It was a method applied to undesirables generally, including those of differing religious faith or no faith, but most used to inform the prospective poor that they must look else- where, and no public concern taken to discover where the elsewhere might be found. It was the limit of town consideration when the Shattuck family were given maintenance until they should be able to leave.
For sixty years Northfield had remained the ultima thule of civili- zation's advance up the Connecticut valley. No white man's habitation had come between it and Canada. The bound had been set by the perils of exposure to Indian attack, not by nature. The Connecticut
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had built its broad meadows much farther up the river. The plains reaching back to wooded hills offered their ready availability for homes and villages. There were rushing streams beyond the Ashuelot and Broad brook, tendering their service to the wheels of possible saw-mills and grist mills. The province of Massachusetts claimed jurisdiction for more than forty miles northward from this northern- most town. At least so far, the authority of the General Court only awaited the occupation of the favoring region by new towns. Now that peace and seeming security prevailed, legislative warrant for new townships was besought by restless people in various parts of the province, with an eye to the rich meadows and ample plains, upon which no price was set except the promise of occupation, and in January, 1736, that supreme legislative body ordered the laying out of four townships on the east side of the Connecticut above Northfield.
With the south boundary of Township Number One four and a half miles above the southerly end of Merry's Meadow, and the towns to be of the uniform size of six miles square, the top line of Number Four would be forty miles above the village of Northfield. Promoters of such development rose up from the eastern towns so promptly that the enterprise overleapt the Connecticut and two more towns were plotted on the west bank. Up the Ashuelot, in a section known as "Upper Ashuelot," beyond Arlington, some actual settlers had appeared.
The immediate effect was the new impulse to occupy the upper reaches of the Northfield area, which had been unbroken except by the cart track that ran up the east bank for communication with Fort Dummer on the other side, by the only ford that was practicable.
Captain Daniel Shattuck was the pioneer of this northern North- field territory. He was of Watertown birth, had lived in Groton and Worcester and arrived at Northfield with his second wife, a Boltwood, and two daughters, a family that had increased by the birth of two sons and a daughter in the new town. The home he built on his lot in Merry's meadow, not far from opposite Fort Dummer, was to all intents and purposes a fort. It was of heavy logs, presently duplicated by a similar structure on the other side of the brook with a plank palisade connecting and a stockade of strong pickets surrounding both.
Robert Cooper, who had come from Deerfield, now in his sixtieth year, had fifty acres of land on a bluff commanding the Connecticut's great bend, and he built upon it in 1737. John Evens, a young fellow
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who had married Lydia, daughter of Parson Doolittle, followed with a house just south of the Ashuelot in 1741. Meanwhile Josiah Sart- well, who lived in the village, had obtained a grant of one hundred acres on the west side and during 1738 and 9 built a blockhouse a little below Fort Dummer, stout enough to be another fortress. He was presently joined (1742) by Orlando Bridgman, whose farm was to the south of Sartwell's and who put up another of the enemy-proof dwellings. Crowning all these ventures, in point of defensibility, came the commanding fort-like house of Ebenezer Hinsdell, who had been chaplain at Fort Dummer for fourteen years when he built on the east bank in 1742.
In the year of peace, 1743, just when the long period of calm was coming to an unforeseen end, the greatest hero of the valley's struggles, New England's most resolute scout, Captain Benjamin Wright, went to his reward. His eighty-three years covered the entire period of the colony's Indian Wars, save only the last French and Indian incursions. The year of his birth was the one in which the death of Massasoit, faithful friend of the Pilgrims, signified to an extent not then sensed the end of the comity between the native and the invading races. He was the grandson of Samuel, the early emigrant from London who was among the first of the settlers at Springfield, and again of Northampton, and he could remember the day, when he was five years old, on which that founder of the family died sitting in his chair as if asleep. His mother was of that family of Burt which had played a leading part in the first century of the Connecticut valley's stirring pioneer history.
Leaving Northampton, where Benjamin had been born July 13, 1660, Samuel Wright and his family were among the first white people to find a home at Northfield, in 1673. There were seven chil- dren, Samuel, 19; Joseph, 16; Benjamin, 13; Ebenezer, 10; Eliza- beth, 7; Eliezer, 5 ; Hannah, 2. These were gathered into the stockade that frightsome day, September 2, 1675, when the Indians fell upon the little settlement-all but the father, who was in command of the company that had been provided for defense and who fell, first victim of Indian bullets on Northfield soil. Only Samuel, the oldest son, suffered physical harm, receiving into his body a bullet to remain there all the rest of his eighty years. But into the heart of each of
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them was carried a wound that would cause it to pulsate in resent- ment all their days. They shared the unspeakable terror of the nights and days of imprisonment in the little fort, heard together the distant shots of the Beers battle, suffcred as one the awful silence that fol- lowed it and joined in the journey down the valley which left the town of their pioneer hopes a desolate waste.
Benjamin's years from fifteen to an early matured majority were spent in Northampton. He was among the first in the reoccupation, in 1683, and of the last to leave when the village had dwindled to a handful. Through the quarter-century of Northfield's existence only in name, he served in every soldierly adventure, began his scouting career in 1688, when pursuing the red men after attack upon Deerfield had rescued the two boys from their Indian captors at the then far- north point, opposite the mouth of the Ashuelot river, and was in the thick of the ventures and the defenses of the eleven years of Queen Anne's war. In 1708, he had led a ranging party far up the Con- necticut, the first of those ventures which came to mark him as the premier ranger of the colonies, and the next year, with his few men, had crossed the Green Mountains to the Champlain country, boldly attacked the enemy, killed eight of them, destroyed a small fleet of canoes and thus shut off one of those French-sent invasions of the valley, to what saving of lives and homes is only to be guessed.
In 1709, then in his sixtieth year, he had written the letter, immortal in frontier annals, with its offer to the governor of the colony, "Here am I. Send me." Again he was first in Northfield pioneers, when the permanent foothold was gained. At the second settlement, he had brought his young wife, Thankful, and their little Benjamin, born in 1681. Thankful was the daughter of that Captain John Taylor, who was killed while leading the pursuit of French and Indians after they had wiped out the hamlet at the base of Mt. Tom. She had died in 1701, leaving him seven children, and he, with the celerity that marked all his conduct and was not unseemly even in this event, had within four months married Mary Baker of Springfield. William, Mary and Experience had been added to the household, and there were ten, not to mention the Thankful, Rachael and Martha, his son Benjamin's children, and the first baby of his son, Remem- brance.
There were thirty years yet to be lived by this resolute pioneer. They were filled with activities that were equally distinguished when
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civic and when military. In both, he led. His personality marked every advance step of the town. Even his stand against the liberal departure of the beloved minister from the stout faith of the Calvinists was token of his rugged character, never yielding, never finding a ground of compromise. His mounted journey to Boston to save some hun- dreds of acres to the town in its northeasterly reaches, the unhesitat- ing venture of a man of seventy-two years, and the deference paid him at that seat of government, displayed his own vigor and the esteem in which he was held throughout the Bay Colony.
His military leadership ran through the three years of Father Râle's war, when he was well along in the sixties. He was sixty-five when the Governor called upon him to raise a company of rangers and he led them through the far northern wilds in pursuit of the sly Gray Lock, whom he only failed to meet because that sneaking warrior, who never met white men in the open, clung to the woods for watching the movements of a warrior he dared not encounter. The second time in a year, he led his fourth far-flung venture, the last only because the death of the French governor put an end to strife.
In the ripe years, he had the gratification of seeing his own spirit animating his much younger brother, Benoni, who was born ten days after that fateful attack on the village in which his father was killed, and his own sons, Benjamin, Remembrance, Daniel, who were in the first garrison at Dummer, and the youngest, Daniel and William, holding commission in the fighting militia. Of the girls Thankful had married a Connecticut Woodruff and Mindwell was the wife of Stephen Belding, the new miller of the town. One son alone, Jacob, had left the home country and was settled in far-away South Carolina.
All that the town of varied fortunes was and all it was to become were linked to the devoted leadership of Benjamin Wright. That its street was the broad avenue it came to be was the product of his far- visioned planning at the outset of the second settlement. He met rebuffs at the hands of his townsmen, another evidence of his out- rightness. He was for the moment ignored in the earliest incorporated elections. He was defeated in his stand against the minister, when Edwardsism and Arminianism came to battle. But he was revered and beloved. In the story of Civilization's advance over interior New England, he stands out in a form that would be called typical of the pioneer only that it was pre-eminently individual. Stronger character is nowhere traced in the personal features of a new country's heroes.
CHAPTER XVII ANOTHER END TO PEACE
Far-away Louisburg Draws Inland Citizen-Soldiers
WHY, AFTER YEARS OF PEACE, was it needful to keep up forts and train all the men in the militia? Why did Shattuck build his house in Merry's meadow as if it were to resist an invasion, setting a fashion that was soon followed by his neighbors, Evens and Cooper, and presently by Sartwell and Bridgman directly across the river and, a little later and outdoing them all, by Ebenezer Hinsdell on the east bank?
Some of the new settlers in the village were warranted in asking such questions. It was no answer to say "Indians" to them. They were seeing Indians every day-harmless rovers, hunting and trapping and trading, thieves to be sure in a small way, easily made drunk and harmlessly so, unless upon sobering they found they had been cheated in a fur trade. Was aught to be feared from such placid survivors of a race once warlike but now quiet, slinking and slothful? What sense in regarding as a menace the kind of a red man who was given old clothes and allowed to sleep by the fireplace, even in the houses of men who talked about keeping up "the posture of defence"?
There was one fireplace no Indian had ever stretched his body before on a winter's night. It was Captain Wright's. Perhaps there were memories of him on the red side which would make even a native restless inside his house; but there would be no chance of it, for the old ranger had never lost his notion that the only desirable place for an Indian was far, far off. It was his counsel, and that of those who with him had been through the long seasons of warfare with a sly and treacherous foe, which kept up all the old defences and constantly built new ones against a day that might come whenever England and France again took up arms against each other.
Remote as were these valley towns, they had learned that their fortunes were closely linked to the politics, the intrigues and the rivalries of the European nations. Their wise heads watched the far-
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away events, stored as they were with memories of the quick transfer to the New England frontier of any conflict between the mother country and France. They knew that Georgius Secundus, who had been on the British throne since 1727, had an abiding "longing to engage in war" and had only been held in check by the crafty Wal- pole, his chief minister, whose statesmanship ran to developing British industry, commerce and wealth, and with great success. They sensed that when Walpole's administration of peace came to an end, as it did in 1741, it was certain that instant evidence of inevitable war, when it came, would be slaughter and rapine in their now quiet valley.
Nowhere in New England was it lost to mind that the major issue as to whether England or France was to dominate North America had not been settled and that until it was determined there would be no final security for these colonies, certainly none for frontiers such as the Connecticut valley, down which there was the well-worn warpath from Canada, and in which still lingered the purchasable experts in the use of tomahawk and scalping knife.
The band France had drawn around England in America was unbroken. It stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, more than two thousand miles. Its breadth was the unknown breadth of the continent beyond that narrow belt of British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, save only that far-north lodgment of the English on Hudson's Bay. It extended its tentacles down into disputed regions, along the valleys of the Kennebec, the Merrimack and the Connecticut and now and then flung a flaming flourish into the Hudson's borders. It held the northerly seaboard and kept ever in dispute the bounds of what was loosely granted to Eng- land in the peace of Utrecht.
That there were by the middle of the century but eighty thousand French in America, along this attenuated line, while there were a million and a half of English on the seaboard from New Hampshire to Georgia-an advantage the colonists rested upon even though they did not know it with numerical accuracy-was no final assurance of security. By sea, there were engagements to be fought with no promise of superiority and, by land, there were merciless savage allies, whom the French had proved they could command by the doubling of reward and superstitious control.
French designs culminated in the building of the strongest, as
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well as the costliest, fortification on the continent, the towering cita- del of Louisburg. After the cession of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to England, France looked for a favoring site for a fortress which should be the shelter of her navy and the protection of her fisheries on the Canadian coast. A harbor previously known as Havre à l'Anglois, on the Island of Cape Breton, was chosen and given the name of Louisburg in honor of the King. There, at an expense of 30,000,000 livres, equal to £1,200,000 sterling, even though never completed, was built a fort with walls, granite-faced ramparts more than thirty feet high, and a ditch eighty feet wide, over which was a drawbridge for communication with the town. It had six bastions and three batteries with platforms for one hundred and forty-eight cannon and six mortars. On an islet at the mouth of the harbor was placed a battery of thirty guns, of twenty-eight pound calibre, supplementing the fort's battery in command of the entrance. Within the fortified tract were nunneries and palaces, terraces and gardens.
Such was Louisburg-a watch-tower over all the English settle- ments and a threat upon the New England seamen in their fisheries on the banks. Remote as it was from the Connecticut valley, its significance in relation to French designs, which could be counted upon to find murderous fulfilment in this inland region, was keenly sensed and the determination of the English government to destroy it was soon to have a closer meaning to citizens of the inland frontier. Moreover it was but the most visible of the preparations carried on through the years by the French government for that struggle which should settle the domination of North America as between it and England.
On a day late in May, 1744, a mounted messenger rode into town, sought out Captain Zechariah Field and delivered a message from Colonel Stoddard that France had declared war against England and England had answered with like declaration. Two months had passed before Governor Shirley had received the news, although it had been known at Louisburg a full month before. The next morning a war- rant for a town-meeting to be held the same day was posted and at six in the evening the townsmen gathered in the church, to take action for the defense of the town.
A committee was chosen and upon its report, June 9, it was voted to build four mounts, each nineteen feet high and surrounded by a
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stockade. One was to be located on the historic site for defense, where the first fort stood, now Captain Zechariah Field's homestead; an- other on high ground far up the street where Deacon Ebenezer Alexander had already on his own initiative built such a fort; the others at the minister's and at a commanding place on the other side of the street, nearly opposite the Clary fort of other days.
The town's feverish activity in putting up defences was but an item in the enterprise of all the exposed communities and of the General Court. The colony was aware of its perils and alive to prep- aration. The General Court, in session through the summer, ordered troops to be impressed and distributed on the front towns, a line of forts to be built from Colrain, a new town ten miles west of North- field, to the Dutch Settlements in New York, of which the most important was Fort Massachusetts near the great mountain at the westerly end of the state.
At last there was a fortified frontier. Northfield, sheltered as never before by the forts on its northerly border and by the one at Number Four (Charlestown) far up the river, as well as by Fort Dummer and the stockaded houses in its neighborhood, became the central point in a defended area, the distributing post for supplies, and the departure station for the troops as they went out on their details to the forts.
The year passed without attack in the valley. It was known that Indians were lurking in the woods. The friendly ones had disap- peared from the towns. There were no traders in furs, no loafing natives to get food and shelter in white men's kitchens. The six trading commissioners stationed at Dummer to represent the Indian traffickers had gone at the first sign of trouble. No surface quiet beguiled the seasoned dwellers in the exposed towns, with wisdom as to Indian ways and French designs, grown out of their long experi- ence.
Early in the next year the colony rose in strength to support Governor Shirley's project of an attack on Louisburg. The General Court had refused his proposal but a wave of popular approval swept away legislative objections. Three thousand men enlisted. The gov- ernments of states to the South came to support of the expedition in money and supplies. Northampton was the recruiting point for a company under command of Seth Pomeroy, who was major in the 4th Massachusetts regiment as well as this company's captain. John
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Alexander, son of Joseph and long a soldier at Fort Dummer, and Jonathan Janes, who was one of the family in the deadly raid at Pascomuck in 1704, went on the roll of Pomeroy's company. Ebe- nezer Alexander, now sixty-one years old, who saw service in Râle's war and had been with Captain Wright in his scouting ventures, was given a lieutenant's commission in another company and won another as captain at the hands of Sir William Pepperell for his service in the siege of the Louisburg fortress.
The citizen-soldier, who in two or three generations had been developing out of the stout stuff of pioneer settlers, was now for the first time called from the familiar scenes of his home valley to bear his share in the same battle between nations in a region hundreds of miles away. To reach it, he would join in the march to Boston and spend days and nights on shipboard, putting a strain on his physical system which Major Pomeroy described with only too precise partic- ulars in a journal that recorded every turn in the weather and in his unaccustomed stomach.
To reduce a citadel like Louisburg was an undertaking from which trained captains might shrink and through which highly drilled soldiers would be led to expected slaughter. The land forces in this venture were commanded by a Maine merchant, whose lack of military knowledge was as much an advantage as was the want of discipline in the ranks of his army, every man in which was an adept in single-handed combat, made so in the tactics the Indian had com- pelled them to develop. After the siege was over, it was recorded that the uncouth but on the whole effective movements of the invaders greatly perplexed the garrison and the strangeness of the attack to have in a measure unnerved them. Terrific cannonading from Com- modore Peter Warren's ships supplemented the amateur movements of fearless fighters on land, one vantage point after another was cap- tured and, on June 16, the garrison surrendered.
So signal a victory as the reduction of the major fortress of the scattered French posts, while it heartened the colonies greatly, fell far short of ending the war. The Connecticut valley, armed and fortified as never before, awaited the thrusts of the French, using the familiar tool, the hired Indian. It began in characteristic fashion.
In July, William Phipps, in Great Meadow-not Northfield's great meadow but a locality so named far up the valley-had a com-
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bat with some Indians. The valley's warfare began not with a gun but with a hoe- the implement with which the deacon struck down a red man. Presently he shot another and was himself killed and scalped. Five days later another man was waylaid and scalped, this happening at Upper Ashuelot, Deacon Josiah Fisher being struck down on his way to pasture.
There was an assault in October by four score French and Indians on the fort at Great Meadow with no greater loss than the killing of one man and the taking captive of another, companions in a canoe on the river. It was enough to set the valley troops in action, and Ensign Stratton, who was in command of Northfield's forts, and Captain Alexander, who had enlisted a company of his own, fruitlessly led separate ranging parties up the valley, and back again.
There followed an undisturbed winter, with more troops than ever before billeted on the valley towns. The spring brought vicious attacks on Number Four and Upper Ashuelot. Northfield felt its first outrage when Joshua Holton, who was sent to Boston for money to reimburse its people for the support of the troops through the past winter, was waylaid at Lunenburg, killed and scalped and the money carried away-forty-six pounds and seven and a half pence.
CHAPTER XVIII BATTLEFIELD OF NATIONS
European Conflict Finds the Valley a Testing Ground
THIS WAS WAR, as the Connecticut valley had come to know war. Here a murder and there an ambush; a worker in the meadow shot down; a man driving home the cows, picked off ; venturers from a fort fallen upon, killed, scalped, taken captive ; an exposed farmhouse fired upon and defenceless mothers and babes slaughtered or carried off. Intervening days, or it may be weeks, with no outrages; but the woods peopled with the savages, watching where to strike; bands of French and Indians floating about, seldom seen but revealed to the restless scouts ; nowhere an engagement that by the usage of the Old World could be named a battle. "Every man for himself," the com- mand of Captain Beers in the earlier days, was now the accepted rule of tactics learned through the years of encounters with a skulking foe.
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