USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 14
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All through the summer of 1746, the succession of murders kept up. In May, a man shot at Number Four; Upper Ashuelot beset ; at Lower Ashuelot two captured ; Fall town assaulted ; at Fort Massa- chusetts, two men fired upon; a Colrain farmer killed, his wife and daughter wounded, Indian fashion ; troopers, venturing out to see where others had been killed, attacked by "a large force," as forces were reckoned, five killed and a Sartwell taken prisoner-this at Number Four.
There was an alert governor at Boston-William Shirley-with no intention that such victory as was won at Louisburg should be negatived by defeat and destruction along the inland frontier. He ordered up successive troops of horse, none too well aware that horses were a burden and a peril in warring with a foe that shot from behind trees or lay in ambush in the bush and rank grass. Three companies of such rode through Northfield in mid-May on their way to Number Four, now the northernmost defence. When the Governor led the General Court to approve a grand expedition to strike an effective blow
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by invasion of Canada, the fighting settlers sprang to enlistment ; and the expedition never moved.
In June-the 19th-came the nearest approach to an actual battle, when at Number Four, which the French were plainly enough determined to remove, Captain Brown and a company of Sudbury and Framingham men, stood their ground in the open and won. There was a design, too tardily sensed by the English, to draw the valley troops to the upper posts and lay the older towns open to attack. Northfield was a point of Indian concentration and now for a period the centre of activity. On the 24th, men outside Bridgman's fort, on the west side, were attacked, two killed and Daniel How, Jr., and Captain John Beaman made captive but not until the captain had killed an Indian. On the same day skulking Indians fell upon men near Fort Dummer and made away with their arms and clothes.
July's record was of an ambuscade near Hinsdell's fort, into which men from Dummer, who had crossed the river for grist, fell but were saved by a bold dash by Captain Willard, the Indians making off and leaving their valuable packs behind. This month, Number Four was actually besieged for two days and, while the fort withstood the onslaught, the horses and cattle were killed, all the houses and the mill were burned. It was now clear that this outpost, standing where it commanded the favorite route of the enemy from Canada to the valley, was untenable and on Governor Shirley's order troops were sent there to take off the women and children, the beginning of aban- donment, which was completed the following winter.
Northfield villagers were fully warned by these events and none of them went about their work unarmed. They were unhurt until on August 11, young Benjamin Wright, son of Remembrance and grand- son of the late captain whose name he bore, was shot through the body, while riding to pasture, but stuck to his mount and made the village, there to fall from the horse and to die at midnight. Four days later, four men outside Shattuck's Fort were shot at but escaped. On the 25th, a party detached from the forces of General de Vaudreuil, which had made attack on Fort Massachusetts, fell upon Deerfield, killed five, wounded one and carried away one captive.
When the news reached Northfield that Fort Massachusetts had fallen before an attack by a French and Indian army of eight hun- dred warriors, after a gallant defence by Sergeant John Hawks and twenty men, it was realized that the town was in way to its oldentime
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exposure as an unprotected outpost. That stoutest of all the frontier forts destroyed and Number Four abandoned, the passages from Canada, down the valley and by the Lake Champlain route, were opened and there could be no escape from assault by forces far more numerous than in earlier days.
The peril was greater and the burden heavier because the govern- ment of New Hampshire steadily refused to give the least support to the defence of the territory lying within its bounds by reason of the new line run to the Connecticut in 1741. The region had been settled by Massachusetts and the forts within it served their main purpose in protection of towns still within that colony-such was the logic by which New Hampshire covered its money-saving policy of abandoning its own people to the chances of slaughter.
The spring of 1747 brought the realization of the fears of the Northfield people. It was known that the French had fitted out an unnumbered army and planned to send it out in large detachments for a widespread campaign against New England. The town had been through the late winter the headquarters of Captain Melvin in command of a troop of sixty rangers. He was called out in late March to pursue a pack of Indians who had fallen upon Shattuck's fort and half destroyed it by fire, following them to Great Meadow, where he satisfied himself that they had rejoined larger forces to the north. Up the river, early in April, Captain Stevens had met a large army under Mgr. Debeline on the site of abandoned Number Four and after three days under siege had drawn off leaving only two killed.
Mgr. Debeline's forces were now the threatening presence in the region. Where he would strike was covered under the uncertainty that had always shrouded advances into the valley. An ambush just above the village was revealed when, on April 15, Nathaniel Dickin- son and Asahel Burt were fired upon as they rode into Pauchaug meadow, both of them killed and scalped.
The outcome would have been panic among people less accus- tomed to such outrages and less constantly expectant of repetition. The actual outcome was the sending of more troops into the town and the addition of heavier burdens for the maintenance of the men and the feeding of their horses. The General Court ordered two com- panies sent here, forty-two men in each, for scouting and guarding, but the order was not carried out-an instance, Parson Doolittle noted
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in his carefully kept diary, of the impotency of the colony's govern- ment in its pretended defence of the frontier.
Commander-in-chief of the military forces in defense of the val- ley, Colonel John Stoddard of Northampton, throughout the period, was showing a grim determination that Northfield should be saved and its people sheltered. There was a personal tie, formed in the period when he served for several years as clerk for the unincorporated town, non-resident though he was, a service the settlers had recognized by a liberal grant of land. He had served the colony with distinction as one of the governor's assistants and his own town in every civic relation, its representative for many years, selectman, judge. He was Governor Shirley's friend, a closeness of relation somewhat resting upon the fact that he had firmly stood for "the prerogative," as against the extremists who were for fuller colonial self-government. In the religious differences that had recently riven the people of Northampton and the other towns, he was again the defender of the established order, friend and counsellor and champion of Jona- than Edwards.
Colonel Stoddard's military genius was as marked as his civic abilities. It was through no fault of his that the military provisions were inadequate and that the enterprises of his friend, Governor Shirley, again and again failed of support by the General Court. He spoke his mind in one of his letters to the Governor, dated April 22, 1747, and besides pleading for a larger army revealed one of the weaknesses in a cutting reference to Colonel Joseph Dwight, who had been titular commander of the expedition to Canada, the ardent volunteers for which had been distributed about the towns to their evident disappointment. He had mentioned to Dwight the need of a guard for the builders of the fort at Number Four and had received a short answer, followed by no action, and in his letter to the Governor he set out the situation by saying-
Your excellency will discern what work Colonel Dwight and I shall make of doing business together. I have advised him in the best manner I have been able, but he is almost too great to be spoke to, and seems to look upon the committee as so many spaniels.
There were military rivalries, it may be noted, in colonial affairs, to the hurt of the cause that had ample difficulties besides. Colonel
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Stoddard was not swerved by them from his serious duties and in the same letter he pictured for the Governor the distressing state of things within his command. "I perceive," he said, "that the Indians are continually about Northfield, and the people there are in a great measure confined to the town."
Confined they were, with the result that the land lay almost idle and instead of grain being garnered and stored for their needs there was being accumulated and stored want and distress for the seasons to come. Every able-bodied man was under arms for whatever service any moment might demand. The hoe and the musket could not be manipulated at the same moment and the gun could not be laid aside without instant peril. No more could the youth, not yet trained to arm-bearing, be exposed in the meadows, not an acre of which was unwatched by the wily enemy. Whatever measure of security there was, beyond the few men held at the forts, lay in the continual scout- ing. It was a service which attracted the venturesome young men, led out into the woods by seniors in whom survived the spirit of the hero-in-chief, Benjamin Wright.
When Elias Alexander, in May, asked who of the men of the town would join him in a ranging expedition to the north he met with prompt response from more of them than he thought it wise to take, and with the blessing of his father, Captain Ebenezer, the hero of Louisburg. The veteran, now beyond sixty and still active as a fighter, had been Captain Benjamin Wright's leftenant in just such expeditions. The son was not restrained from the hazardous venture by the concern of his wife for his fate and the future of their five chil- dren. Each of the men he chose was of heroic stock and most of them had been tested in some dire experience of their own.
Ensign John Sergeant, the oldest of the company, was the son of Digory, who was the one man to stay on the territory of Worcester after 1688, when the town was destroyed, and was killed there in 1704, when his wife and five children were carried away to Canada. John had stayed in captivity twelve years, when he bought his own redemption, leaving behind him a brother and a sister, who never returned. He had been with Kellogg at Fort Dummer until that heroic leader had left the fort. He too was parting from his wife and five children.
Joseph Petty was the son of redeemed captives, taken from Deer-
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field at the time of the 1704 massacre. He was now thirty-eight and in his home were four children, the oldest a girl of thirteen. Thomas Taylor, now twenty-eight, was the son of that Thomas who had been wounded in De Rouville's second attack on Deerfield and who had been drowned in the Connecticut at Northfield in 1717. He was descendant of the emigrant, John, lost at sea in the ship, whose phan- tom reappearance in the sky full sailed and floating in the heavens, so near as almost to be within the throw of a stone, had been related with great particularity by Rev. John Pierpont, a tale that Cotton Mather had accepted as true and preserved in his "Magnalia." Thomas would leave with his young wife their little Thomas and Thank- ful.
The younger men were Eliezer Stratton and Daniel Brooks, each twenty-five, and as yet unmarried. Eliezer's father, Hezekiah, was still a vigorous warrior and scout, carrying the scar of a wound received in the attack on Northfield in 1723. Daniel was the son of Joseph Brooks, one of a family of seventeen children, two of whom had been killed by Indians and another carried captive to Canada, with his family, the children in which had never been recovered.
Neither such backgrounds nor such seasoning experiences in war- fare were exceptional. Captain Alexander could have drawn with less discrimination from his neighbors with the certainty that his men would have had like baptism. It was the common lot and heritage, yielding dauntless characters, to whom the journey into infested forests and across exposed streams was no more than the performance of an almost routine duty.
The little company vanished into the wilderness May 15. It made its way up the valley and across to Otter Creek. No tragedy befell it, and anxious wives and children were to welcome the return of all the men within a month ; but it set fresh example of fearless meeting of constant peril, and incited one after another like expeditions in the months to follow.
Throughout the summer of 1747, when men were soldiers who should have been tillers of the soil, there fell here and there, at inter- vals the length of which none could predict, splashing drops from the dark clouds overhanging the valley-blood-red splashes coming before the storm that might sweep civilization from these dearly bought regions. Into the deeper shadows of the cloud, ranging parties bravely
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ventured. One in August, in which Aaron Belding was Northfield's volunteer, went far to the north and was twenty-two days out of the sight and knowledge of their homes. Seeing no Indians, well the rangers knew they were seen at every step by the countless lurkers in the woods who chose the time for their foul strokes when possible victims were less alert.
On one of the October days when under the bright sun the forests gleam with the reds and yellows of advancing autumn, a party of three men was travelling a familiar path from Winchester along the valley of the Ashuelot towards Northfield, when they were startled by frightened cattle rushing from the pastures. The three were Captain Ebenezer Alexander, veteran of Râle's war, chief leftenant to Captain Wright and hero of Louisburg; Captain Josiah Willard, Jr., and young Ebenezer Hall.
"There are Indians about," exclaimed Captain Alexander as he poised his flintlock for action. On the instant a man in the uniform they recognized as that of a French officer was seen coming towards them and when he saw them dodging behind a tree. Captain Alex- ander immediately fired. From behind his shelter the man staggered, came nearer to them, made handsome salute and fell in the path. Blood flowing from a wound in his breast, the Frenchman was too far gone when they reached him to answer the captain's query as to who he was.
"He cannot live-nor shall we if we tarry here," the old fighter, Captain Willard, said to his companions. "No Frenchman is here alone. Eyes out for Indians." There was no stopping to bind the officer's wound nor to search the pockets of a blood-soaked uniform for evidence as to his identity.
Five days later, as Captain Alexander was sharing duty at North- field, there staggered up to him a man in bedraggled uniform, whom he recognized as the officer they had left for dead near the Ashuelot. There was no polite salute this time; instead, the plea from a well- nigh starved man for his life. Calling for others to help him, the captain aided the straggler to Parson Doolittle to have his wound dressed and his life nourished back to strength.
In such English as the Frenchman could command he related to Mr. Doolittle as to the day he was shot, that Indians, hearing the gunfire that brought him down, came to him and when he had
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revived carried him to the river's bank, where again he fainted. Rally- ing again, he had found himself alone. For the second time, now by the Indians who also feared discovery, he had been left to die. For days following he had wandered about, fed upon nuts and berries, sought some human path and now found himself in the hands of the villager whose straight aim had brought him low.
Out of the stained uniform's pocket was taken a paper that identi- fied him as Sieur Raimbault, cadet in a French company. Signed "Bonberthelot," it was a commission "to go at the head of forty savages to the cities of the government of Orange, in order to make war against our enemies of whatever nation they be, armed as war- riors"; charging him "to restrain as far as he may be able the savages accustomed to practice outrages against the prisoners they take." It was dated, "Montreal, Septem., 1747."
Not less, but more, consideration was paid him than he had been directed to see that the savages gave to prisoners-treatment for his wound, restoratives, food and care until he should be taken to Boston for exchange. All that humane captors could do for a seemingly honorable enemy was done for Cadet Raimbault.
There he was soon taken, well treated by the authorities and, upon his promise to bring about advantageous exchange of prisoners, sent to Canada under escort of three Deerfield men. The journey was undertaken in mid-winter and on snowshoes. They were gone three months and on the last day of April arrived home bringing with them Samuel Allen of Deerfield and Nathan Blake of Keene.
When the Deerfield men returned from Canada, they told a story of long struggle with the French officials to accomplish the release of even the two captives whom they brought home but of greater interest was the knowledge they had gathered of the designs and hopes of the enemy for possession of the continent. They confirmed the rumors of the ventures of the French into the interior, of the forts that had been built along the northern borders all the way from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the headwaters of a far-away river called the Sas- katchewan, and of the report of the discovery of enormous mountains far beyond the lakes and the Mississippi river. They had been told, in reckless boasting, of the great productiveness of the plantations on a river named by the French the Illinois, which had, the second year before, sent 800,000 weight of flour down to the great colony at New
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Orleans, in a region that had been lost by England to France when Law's scheme, the Mississippi bubble, had burst.
From the French officer to whom they had given escort and whom they familiarly called "Rainbow," they had been supplied with pic- tures of the grandeur of his people's hopes, of their control over the Indian tribes, of their great military strength and their assurance of one day driving the English from their narrow stretch of territory between the Atlantic coast and the first inland range of mountains. The war still raging in Europe was to determine the mastery of France or England and with it the future of regions now held by the English, along the Mediterranean Sea, in far-eastern India and in whatsoever part of North American continent.
Translated into terms of the future of the Connecticut Valley, the townsmen of Deerfield and Northfield could read from the frag- ments of fact and boasting gathered by these men the doom of their homes and the fate of their households. They did not accept it at full value. They recalled Louisburg, they knew there were Indian tribes like the Iroquois and the Foxes who stood across the path of French advance inland, they had learned of the ventures of people from Pennsylvania and Virginia over the mountains, they had rea- soned that in the end the issue would be settled on sea as much as on land, and they piously rested their hopes, whatever ills might for the time befall them, upon the faith that the forces of anti-Christ would not prevail.
CHAPTER XIX ABANDONMENT AGAIN PROPOSED
Foreign Peace Fails to Give Frontier Security
IT HAD BEEN A WINTER OF DEEP DISTRESS. The neglect of the farms in the year before had brought a serious shortage of supplies, only to be made up at great cost and trouble from the lower towns. Garrisons had to be maintained and soldiers fed, whatever the depri- vation of the dwellers. The Indian marauding, under French com- mand, had continued into the late autumn. Out of an ambush at Millers river, below the town, John Smead of Sunderland, who had but recently returned from Canadian captivity, was killed and scalped. Fort Bridgman, nearest of the sheltering forts at the north, had been attacked by forty Indians, late in October, one man taken captive, and the fort burned.
Should Northfield be abandoned? The old question, which had twice been answered by removal and more than twice by stout denial, reappeared. Colonel Stoddard, in a report of March 1, 1748, stated it anew as a problem "Whether to tarry or to remove to places of more safety." After another disaster, close to the town, opened the spring with evidence of the continuance of peril, the valley's com- mander could make more insistent his demand that if this town and others in the valley were to be kept they must be better protected. In late March, Lieutenant John Sergeant with five in his party, setting out from Fort Dummer for Colrain, had been fallen upon a mile from the fort by twelve or fifteen Indians, two killed, two escaping, one, the leftenant's son, Daniel, carried away. The colonel's letter was acted upon at Boston and Colonel Melvin was put in command of scouts, largely recruited from the valley, including Northfield men, whom Stoddard had said were ready to go out and were "some of the likeliest in our country."
Colonel Eleazer Melvin, who was from Concord, had been for two years leading scouting parties in the valley. He was fearless and daring, the perfected type of the venturesome ranger the colony's
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campaigns against a lurking foe had developed. His first venture with his new company was from Fort Dummer, May 13, taking eight- een of his best men with him, four of them from Northfield. At Number Four, the next day, he was joined by Captains Stevens and Hobbs with sixty men, and after the sun had set on the next Sabbath, the large company started across the hills to the west of the Con- necticut.
Reaching Otter Creek, they divided, Melvin striking out for Crown Point on Lake Champlain, a French fortification. At the lake, he sighted two canoes carrying Indians, and fired upon them in full view of the fort. Instantly there poured out a party of one hundred and fifty Indians to pursue him. He eluded them and after five days' march over the hills, halted on a branch of West River in confidence that he was beyond pursuit.
Their packs laid aside, scattered about, eating a midday meal, shooting salmon in the river, the men were surprised by gunfire from behind logs and trees. At close range they returned the shots from such shelter as they could find. Melvin was himself pursued and by the stroke of a hatchet lost his belt with all but one of his bullets. He reached Dummer the next day, one of his men ahead of him and eleven more straggling in before night. Six had been killed and Joseph Petty, wounded, had been left near a spring, on a bed of pine boughs, to live if he could until a rescue party should reach him.
Word of the disaster the day before reached Northfield, the after- noon of June 1, and Parson Doolittle sent a messenger to Hatfield, with the result that a party of thirty men from down the river, joined by others from Northfield reached Fort Dummer the next day. Cap- tain Stevens had come in and at once with his men started up West River to the scene of Melvin's disaster thirty-three miles away. They found and buried all the dead but failed to locate Sergeant Petty. The search for the wounded man fell to a Northfield party of seven- teen men, four of whom bore the name of Wright and the others equally familiar ones such as Alexander, Field, Dickinson, Belding, Evens, Lyman and Stebbins. They were out four days, on horseback, finding and burying the body of Sergeant Petty.
Joseph Petty was one of Northfield's best citizens. He was just under forty years, the son of another Joseph and Sarah Edwards, both of whom were captives from Deerfield in the 1704 massacre and had been among the first redeemed. His father, who had been at North-
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field in the second settlement and after living in Coventry, Connecti- cut, had returned for the third, had died two years before, his mother being still alive, as was the sergeant's wife with her five children.
The town was now plunged into what was long to be known as "the dark time." The full force of the French design upon the Eng- lish settlement was being sensed by its people through a succession of disasters. Peril attended every task and every hour. The stout hearts of its people quailed not. No advocacy of surrender and removal met with response.
Reverently the people besought divine aid and in the shadow of distress appointed their own day of fasting, calling the Reverend Mr. Ashley of Deerfield to preach the sermon. The last words of his dis- course were accompanied by the sound of guns, proving to come from near the mouth of Broad Brook, where a squad of fourteen going from Ashuelot to Fort Dummer was waylaid by a large party of Indians- three killed, seven made captive, four escaping to the fort. The great gun at the fort echoed and Captain Ebenezer Alexander led out a relief party to bury the dead and survey the scene of the fresh disaster with its "great signs" of the enemy.
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