Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts, Part 3

Author: Parsons, Herbert Collins, 1862-1941
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: New York, Macmillan Co.
Number of Pages: 602

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Here were all the conditions needed for calm co-tenancy of the frontier valley. Time was to prove that they were surface conditions. Two peoples presented in this arena the boldest contrast. The new- comers were of the world's best, cultured, devout, ambitious for homes and good ordering of all their affairs. The neighbors, as they sought to regard them spiritually as well as physically, were barbarians with only the edges of primitivity removed. That they were gathered in villages, the one social fact that set a likeness to the newcomers, was by the chance that they had sore need of keeping in groups for pro- tection against their enemies. They were indolent in all save what exertion would preserve life. They were clothed in the skins of the wood and streams. Their food was uncooked and, to Englishmen, repulsive. They had taken fire into their service-to burn over lands needed for their corn and pumpkins, to save themselves from freezing and to smoke the fish for winter store. They had fashioned tools of stone for no greater woodcraft than the making of canoes and paddles. Only the fantastic imaginings of days far removed has decorated these children of the earth with any of the graces of civi- lization.

The dwelling together of the brief period when savagery was not rampant in the Connecticut valley was never more than a truce-an unwritten truce conditioned upon the simple gains that the contact gave the native trapper and trader. It lacked even a trace of natural unity. It was fragile to the point of breaking, whenever restraint

THE ABORIGINES

should fall upon the natives' free ranges or whenever a leader of their own kind should awaken the savagery that was only sleeping.

Efforts to Christianize the Indians had their full trial. The Con- necticut valley had no Nonantum, the praying-Indian enterprise of John Eliot and his associate, Daniel Gookin. But its annals bear wit- ness to attempts to bring the natives into some semblance to Chris- tianity. They were too miserable a people to respond. And the period of time was a short one before they were stirred into enmity.

What, indeed, made white settlements in the valley possible was the demoralization of the tribes that held it. Disease had fearfully depleted their villages. The raids of the Mohawk enemy had devas- tated the entire region. They were a dispirited and a cowed remnant of a people which a half-century earlier would have resisted the white invasion with vigor. The four tribes, scattered as they were from Agawam to beyond Squakheag, numbered no more than 1200. They could muster no more than 300 warriors. These are the estimates be- fore the Mohawks had wrought destruction in their slaughtering visit of 1663. The reduction had gone to such extreme that Temple and Sheldon in their Northfield History conclude that the Squakheag region was utterly abandoned. But the committee from down the val- ley, whom we shall presently see following the suggestion of the Gookin exploring party that a plantation be established here, at least found claimants with whom to deal.

In this largely depopulated region, as the first white people saw it, there were only the traces of the villages that had been the homes of a numerous tribe. Tracing an earlier geography had no place in the enterprise of the first settlers. They were amply occupied in marking out and defending a new one. That industrious team of antiquarian searchers to whom Northfield must be forever grateful, Temple and Sheldon, drew a pre-historic map of the region on the secure foun- dation of physical remains of forts and shallow cellars, of skeletons unearthed in numbers, of fragments of utensils and weapons. Little was the aid given them by the records of Pynchon and Stoddard, the last item in whose scant observations was turned to account. There will be none to dispute the locations they were content to accept as proved by their assiduous searchings.

Down where the Connecticut went racing out of this region, and the "French King" stood mid-stream in a rocky grandeur, later sub-

A PURITAN OUTPOST

dued by the setback from a twentieth century dam, once stood a popu- lous village. Its wigwams ranged from the north bank of Four-mile brook to the great river. White man never saw it. Its granaries were observable as late as 1789. Its soil yields remains of implements of stone without an item of iron to indicate a contact with civilization.

Across the river, in the domain of the Pacomptocks, was Natanis- along the bluff commanding Bennett's meadow and reaching to King Philip's hill, the commanding knoll treasured in local lore until in 1927 or 1928 its heart was pierced by the steam shovel of road- straighteners. Certain it is that on the high plateau above the meadow was the home of Souanett, the Pacomptock chieftain, lord and owner of the region. We shall meet his daughter, Asogoa, when we accompany the first grantees into this territory.

The two brooks now at the southerly end of Northfield's village marked the lines of Squenatock, divided as it was into two villages, one of which clustered on what in time was to become Beers Plain, the fort sheltering them standing on the high bluff east of the Janes mill- site, between the two brooks.

Coassock-Massemet's domain-ran to a line east and west of Mill brook, and the wigwams clustered about the falls of the pictur- esque glen, extending down the sharp slope to the first terrace. Opposite Coassock on the bluff just north of Moose Plain brook, a family of high rank was some time seated. To the day when this retracing of primitive villages is written, the corner of this plain yields abundant chips of white stone, brought from some unknown distance for the manufacture of the glistening arrow-points.

Broadest of all the domains within the Squakheag region was Nawelet's land, stretching away from the Great River on both sides, and up to Wanasquatok, the Broad Brook of later annals and now far out of Northfield territory, and beyond the forts of the last white defences, Dummer and Stockwell. Within it was Pauchaug, the name proclaiming it the tribe's playground, and here the last remnants of Indian population held their homes down to a time well within the white man's annals, as late indeed as 1720. Nawelet's people, the traces of their homes and graves proclaim, were numerous and pow- erful. They were big men in stature, let the skeleton of a six-and-a- half footer prove. They were enterprising, as the subjugation of broad planting fields proves. They were warlike, as the age and strength of

THE ABORIGINES

their fort establishes. They were traders with the white men, as is evi- denced in the utensils unearthed on their territory. Over the plains and along the bluffs of this broad region the antiquarian searchers have had their rich reward and been told, out of the earth and its surface evidences of granaries and workshops in stone, the story of its tribal occupation. Less rewarding but not unfruitful still, the boys of the twentieth century may carry on the search for evidences which their grandfathers found in abundance.

It was the summer of 1669. Out from the East, down from the Merrimac country, over the trail into Pauchaug, came the revengeful braves, fired by the eloquence of their sachems and led by Chicka- tawbut, principal sachem of the Massachusetts, for the incursion into the Mohawk region which should expiate the raid of 1663 and end the prowess of the western nation. Gookin and his comrades return- ing from the Squakheag country after their pioneer visit in May had added evidence to the signs of a massing of the tribes for this grand foray. The events of the following weeks lent confirmation. The leaders of the Bay colony besought the sachems to abandon the plan but the savage mind was fired with wrath that could spend itself only in the tour of revenge.

Back from the Mohawk country, repulsed, depleted, dismayed, came the surviving braves at the summer's end. In a single ambus- cade, fifty of their number had yielded their scalps and among the slaughtered were the captain of the host, Chickatawbut himself, and the best of the sachems. The prowling march towards a grand revenge had ended in the fuller preparation of the lands of the Squakheags for occupancy by a new race.

CHAPTER III SETTLEMENT

Up the Valley Went the Prospectors

NOW THE ADVANCE REPRESENTATIVES of the white men were to come from the south, up the valley which step by step was being won for civilized settlements. What was the country the General Court had said should be the seat of a new plantation? This was the ques- tion that framed in the minds of the men of Northampton and Had- ley. Secure in their villages, beginning indeed to feel "straitened for room," they shrewdly reckoned that the distraught owners of the up-valley regions would be ready to part with their lands on favoring terms. They would go "upon discovery."

Leader in the councils for pioneer adventure was the transported Englishman, Joseph Parsons, companion of William Pynchon in the march from the Bay to Agawam, where he witnessed that first deed in the Massachusetts portion of the Connecticut valley, from the chieftains of the Agawam tribe, dated July 15, 1636. First again was he in the planting of the Northampton settlement, where he had lived fifteen years when he proposed that the region beyond Pocumtuck be visited. We shall see him and his comrades on the trail through Hadley, along the river, under the shadow of Wequomp to the Squakheag region, but not as in his other pioneering to make for himself a new home. It was thirty-four years since he had come to the valley and he was nearer the point of retracing his steps to his first abode there. From Northampton he returned in 1679 to Springfield, where he won his lasting title of "Cornet" and died in 1683-or was it 1684 ?- outstanding pioneer of the new frontier whose struggles and advances and defeats and disasters he had witnessed for near a half-century. His descent may be followed in the region of his two homes and through his son, Joseph, judge, representative from Spring- field and later from Northampton, builder of a cornmill in Deer- field in 1695-through him in the numerous Northampton preservers

SETTLEMENT

of the name. To Northfield he stands only as the leader in the first possession, never a resident.

Age and youth shared in the going upon discovery up the Valley. Parsons is entitled to be regarded as the patriarch chief of the little company. He was sixty and within the range of his manhood years were memories of Old England, of the voyage to the Puritan new home-land on the Massachusetts bay, of Dorchester, Springfield and the earliest days of Northampton. With William Janes, he could compare the New England with the Old, whence both had come in young manhood and now in the round of sixty years. Somewhat of the rivalry, albeit tempered with kinship, between the Boston settlers and those of Connecticut crept into their talk as they trudged away from Hadley towards a new region, for Janes' lot had been cast with the New Haven colony until he had come to Northampton in 1657.

Against English claims of worth, George Alexander could throw the earnest avowal of Scotch pre-eminence and the resemblance of the crags they passed to the hills of his youth. Very well, as they trod along and soberly speculated upon the hopes and plans of the new country, could Micah Mudge listen to his seniors and let them sense as they might that in him was personified the first fruits of a new nation's planting. He alone of the four was American born and he was hardly turned twenty. He liked the way Scotland was defended in the good-natured encounters of the march or as they sat by the stream that comes down to the Connecticut through the then unex- plored hills of a later Montague. He was English enough but there was waiting down in Northampton a Mary Alexander, as Scotch as was her father, with whom he was now exploring-Mary who within the year was to be his wife.

The four men who made up the exploring party to the region, which through their bargaining was to be the domain of the new plan- tation, had much in common. They were Puritans. They were of that second planting in New England which was impelled by revolt against the bigotry of the church of England-churchmen, in contrast to the dissenters of the Plymouth colony. They shared the impulse to estab- lish a new freedom of worship in a new land. But they had come from widely different communities in the old country and radically different social levels. They had their first homes in four distinct pioneer settlements. And they had come by these four paths to the

A PURITAN OUTPOST

newest of these towns, Northampton. The one of them who was American born, and still a youth, made use of their brief tarryings by the way to draw out from his seniors all that he could induce them to tell of their earlier days in their native land.

"Tell us, sire," as he respectfully addressed the leader of the group, "of the way you came to this new country."

The answer was brief. Joseph Parsons was not given to personal revealings. "If you must needs know," he responded, "I am sprung from old Devonshire. I was in the company that came from the farms of England and set sail on the fourth day of the month of July in sixteen and thirty-five from Gravesend in the staunch ship Transport. Here I had the fortune to join in with William Pynchon, he who was from Springfield in the old Land, to go with him when he was sent to take the lands at Agawam, which by this chance shall henceforth bear the name of the town whence he came. You may see, if you choose, my name as witness to Pynchon his name on the deed he took from the Indians at Agawam. It was there we were joined in the next year by the brethren who came out of Roxburgh, the near town to Boston. Thence came I to the region of Nonotuck, to be thrown by the grace of God into the blessed company of such as these who are my companions on this further search for abiding place of those who shall wish to make new venture."

It was long discourse for this man of few words and much action. Young Micah stored it in his mind and sought at the next favoring moment to draw as much from that wise and serious teacher, Elder Janes.

"Mine has been quite other a path to this land of promise," yielded the Elder, who, if he could have known it, was at this moment on the way to a region where he was to share the direst suffering of an afflicted outpost and where his seed should remain and reproduce through all its succeeding generations. Now he is telling of his past.

"As you know, my home in the new land has been New Haven, that colony which has already supplied the example of a free people, free from control even by the King of England. Yet am I English, well-nigh half my life having been spent in Essex, the place of my birth. It was the ship Theophilus that brought our favored company over the great waters to Boston in 1637 and to New Haven in April of the next year. Happy above all the earlier years had vouchsafed

A PURITAN OUTPOST

"Tell us, sire," as he respectfully addressed the leader of the group, "of the way you came to this new country."

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(Drawn for this work by Helen Bodley)

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SETTLEMENT

was my sharing with these my companions here in the marking out of our new town, Northampton, in 1656. Is not this enough?"

Omitted from the story was his descent from a Norman general of the time of Henry II, his companionship with the substantial Lon- don people who made up the emigrant company to found New Haven, and his own service as the teaching elder of that and the Northampton settlements.

Micah, thrilled anew by companionship with these patriots, now on new pioneering march, sought the first moment to draw out from the big and strong, fair-haired and ruddy man who was the father of that Mary, back in Northampton, some rehearsal of a past the youth knew was full of adventure.

"A Scotchman am I," began this first of American Alexanders.

"How far from being an Irishman?" interrupted the leader, the often jocular son of Devonshire.

"By a watery six leagues," was the quick reply. It was the width of the north channel that parted Ireland from the peninsula that runs out from Ayrshire on Scotland's west coast.

"Better answer would it not be to say by so much as descent from Robert Bruce?" queried Elder Janes.

But Micah was in search of nearer facts and his persistent query- ing brought out from the Scot that he was of that resolute party that was in revolt against the pretensions of Charles I and that his coming to America was in some part escape from a land where he was in peril of his life. Not there, but safely here, he could admit his friend- ship with the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, of whom he knew more than even here he was free to relate. He had been of the com- pany that under the guidance of Davenport had placed a strong foot- hold in the Connecticut valley at Windsor.

So it was their tramping stories established the presence here of four as seemingly distinct pioneer settlements as Springfield, Windsor, New Haven and New London, each with its distinguishing reason for being, with their peoples drawn from as distinct settings in the old country but one people here in the bond of search for freedom for their consciences and their faith.

Their trail led them across the rushing stream that tumbles into the Connecticut where it bends sharply to the west, along the bank of the great river with its roaring rapids in the midst of which rose a

A PURITAN OUTPOST

majestic boulder thenceforth to be a landmark and some day to acquire the regal name of French King, past remains of deserted In- dian villages, around the foot of the hill where, if they had known it, the first discoverers had the year before caught their first vision of the Squakheag country, and to the wigwams of the village Squenatock, almost depopulated but still an Indian abode.

Here they tarried for such information as they could gather from the frazzled remnant of a tribe that held the region by the now slender claim of ancient possession. Could their lands be bought? They were not left in doubt. There was a certain note of welcome in the native greeting and an evidence of knowledge of what the pale- face traders could offer, for there had been barter and sale with them through their neighbors, the Pacomptocks.

They must see the land. Beyond was the treeless plain, level stretch between the picturesque hills of the valley's eastern bound and the broad meadows. Then the meadows, the lower level of rich soil, of the same river-enriched sort they tilled at Northampton, only less extensive than those on both sides of the river at Hatfield and Hadley. As they went on, another stream, rushing to the Connecticut, and farther on other stretches of bottom land, Pauchaug, as they caught the name, with the story that it had been the playground and feasting place of summers more joyful than this.

No feature of this new promised land escaped the trained eyes of these seasoned viewers of new country. They sensed its complete- ness of invitation for civilized homes. Its broad expanses lay ready for people with a singular notion of being "straitened for room." Its streams were mill-sites. Its terraced levels, above the river's reach at flood, were spacious homesteads. Its forested hills were ready for the axe of steel. They were virgin abode of untold game. And they were to be had on terms that the only dismayed and crushed tribal owners would readily yield.

The frost was but out of the valley soil another spring and the trails fit for horses' tread, when the four who had made the summer survey and reported its discoveries to their neighbors at Northamp- ton, were again tracing the way to the new region. With them now was Caleb Pumry, another product of Connecticut, out of the Dor- chester emigration to Windsor, one of the sons of Eltwed, the émigré, who had but just come to Northampton-sons who in them-

SETTLEMENT

selves and their offspring were to be leaders in the affairs, civil and church, in the now only prospected settlement. Stalwart, resolute, ready for adventure, he added the young maturity not yet at his thirtieth year. He was leaving at home his young wife, Hepzibah, with their little Samuel and expectation of another in what was to be their production of ten.

From the level of the first terrace above the meadows there rose to the height of a few feet a broad flat rock. It seemed to have claim upon the Indian mind as the place for transactions of consequence. If there were native equivalent for "council rock" this was its name. Here the purchasing committee was led by the tribal owners, claim- ants to the broad region. Squatting about, clad in their fur-skins, with such adornment of feathers as would indicate their importance were Massemet, proudest landlord of the group, Panoot, Pammook, Wompeley and Nesacoscom. Here too was the one woman whose consent to the impending transaction was essential by reason of her title as the squaw of Pammook, whose name is to be preserved in record as Nenepownam. Her presence is the token of the recognition among the natives of the ownership on the part of certain of the women by her own right or as wife.

Joseph Parsons is the draftsman of the deed. The Great River is the central feature in the description. The names of villages and streams are gathered from the half-hissed, half-grunted utterances of these grantors. The consideration is to be as definite as the word valuable may be-and indefinite enough to give rise years later to a dispute which had to be relieved by further tender from another set of grantees.

The region conveyed is no mean domain. It lies on both sides of the Great River. It reaches away to Coassock, a region now to be found some miles away in the state of Vermont, and is to come down on the west side to where it encounters the Pacomptock claim, Masse- petot's land, on which stood King Philip's hill of later name. On the east from the same northerly line, it sweeps south to Quanatock (or Squenatock), the Beers Plain country to be. To both east and west it is to run six miles into the woods. Here is all of the Northfield of the latest day of exact bounds and much more cut away by the arrival of the state lines of New Hampshire and Vermont-save that there is still to be acquired those Pacomptock holdings including the

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Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts, Part 3

Author: Parsons, Herbert Collins, 1862-1941 Publication date: 1937 Publisher: New York, Macmillan Co. Number of Pages: 602

Author: Parsons, Herbert Collins, 1862-1941
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: New York, Macmillan Co.
Number of Pages: 602