USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 8
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The morning after the Spectacle Pond slaughter, the Northfield men saw a party of unfamiliar Indians near the town. Micah Mudge,
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joined by eleven of his townsmen, went out "to see where they now were." By dusk they found several of them by a fire a mile from the town. As he later told the story, as soon as the Indians were come upon "they immediately stood to their guns."
More forts ! By so much did the Northfield people show a concern they would not confess in words. They would stand by, but they would have better shelter from possible attack. The third fort was set on Mudge's home lot, half-way point between the one at Clary's, com- manding Mill Brook, and that on the lot below Merry's. Remember- ing what happened to the meadow workers in the attack of 1675, it was decided to put a small garrison house at the lower end of the street "to secure the passage to and from the Great Meadow."
The men were busy on these fortifications when Colonel Pynchon in person appeared, and with him two others from Springfield and twenty-four men from the towns between. They set about helping on the fort-building, which with such a crew was completed in three days. There was another such visit within the week but the Northfield people had arrived at such sense of security that there seemed no need of tarrying. Pynchon wrote in his diary that things were settled in Northfield.
Settled ! Calm and security and other business in hand than worry about Indian visits. The eleven tourists from the North woods, who "stood to their guns" when Mudge came upon them, had not been seen since. Three weeks had passed and if they had intended harm, there would be no such delay.
The morning of the sixteenth of that August brought another answer. It came in gunfire and Indian yells, out of the glen below Clary's fort, and followed the fleeing miller, his family, his neighbors, up the slope. It ended as suddenly as it began-the Indians were gone -but on the banks of Mill Brook lay the dead body of John Clary, the miller, and that of his Sarah, a girl of 15, and those of two women and of two other men-six victims of the French governor's Indian- hired warfare.
Carpentry was turned to a new task. Boards meant for home for the living were shaped into caskets for the slain. The burying-ground, begun on the meadow bank where Benjamin Wright's father fell, in 1676, was not to be reached without too great exposure. The victims of the new massacre were buried just outside the fort. Even this was
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after Sam Janes, having with him Josias Marshfield, a garrison soldier, had set swiftly out to carry the word to Pynchon at Spring- field.
Janes and his escort could truly report to Pynchon that when they left, the savages were "at the upper end of the town." Not that they were lingering there! Pynchon's company of sixteen soldiers, sent the next day after the murders, under command of Lieutenant Thomas Colton, directed "to surprise and take the Indians and pur- sue them," was back in Springfield by the 23d, with a report of pur- suit but not of taking or surprising.
Then followed a succession of arrivals of soldiers and of depar- tures after brief staying. Lieutenant Taylor and twenty-four men came the same week and went away for further scouting. Ebenezer Graves and John Perry arrived August 2Ist to man the garrison and stayed until September 4th. Sergeant John Bigelow arrived from Hartford before the two men left and stayed until October 9th. On September 6th came Thomas Powell, James Mun and Nathaniel Blackleach for garrison service, bringing twenty-five pounds of pow- der and forty-nine pounds of bullets, and went away after stays of from twenty-two to sixty-nine days, some of the time spent in the unending and fruitless business of scouting. Joseph Marks brought four firelock guns on the 11th and stayed a week.
The peace and quiet of Northfield was lost in the comings and goings of troops and scouts, without added disturbance from the Indians until early November, when the enemy was seen near the town and another runner was sent to Pynchon, who even broke the Sabbath to get off a troop of fifteen, to be recruited up to fifty men from the upper towns. At Northampton he ran into the feud that had sprung out of minds disturbed over Governor Andros's conduct ; Pomeroy and others of the Hampshire patriots would take no orders from an officer who had accepted an Andros commission, as Pynchon had done. Forty men of this expedition arrived, ranged the woods for a few days, discovered nothing and retired to their home towns down-river.
Whatever indictment could be brought against Sir Edmund Andros at Boston-and it was a rapidly lengthening one with ample evidence of his tyranny, he could not be charged with indifference to the frontier's protection. He knew the meaning of the Indian
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outrages. He was sending protests and demands to the Canadian governor and getting no replies or only insolent ones. This was Eng- land's war with France and he was at one of its fronts.
It was on orders from Andros, issued within ten days of the mur- ders, that the Hartford troop had been started to Northfield's relief. It was to him the Northfield committee wrote, October 30th, revealing that the settlers there were not likely to stay. It was as a result of his orders out of a council of war held at Hartford in November that a company of sixty, raised in Connecticut, under command of Captain Jonathan Bull, went to Northfield for permanent shelter to the town.
The doom of the Northfield settlement was clearly fixed by the murderous attack of August, 1688. Half the families took it as notice and left the town. The resolute stayers showed no weakening in their determination to have and to hold. They protested the departure and demanded that land-owners become actual land-holders. They in- stigated a letter, October 30th, to the Governor, pleading for compul- sion upon the owners to occupy their lands and confessing that with- out such aid the town was in peril of complete desertion. The Gov- ernor's council, on November 9th, ordered the settlers to return, an order that had its one chance of fulfilment in assurance of ample mili- tary protection, which the Governor proceeded to secure.
Naught availed to bring a return to Northfield of those who had left in panic nor a new settlement there of those who owned but had not occupied the lands. The military arrived-and stayed. The sol- diers were billeted on the town. They were nearly as many as the population. Every household had added to its burden the main- tenance of from three to five garrison men. Military relief was trans- lated into an economic burden as crushing to hopes and more destruc- tive of resolution than the most that savages had done or could do.
In the face of Northfield's distress and perhaps with a pious pur- pose to better its state by spiritual means, one of the famous family of Puritan preachers, Rev. Warham Mather, was sent in the autumn of 1688, to be a minister there for six months. He expected his pay of fifteen pounds from Andros but was caught to that extent in the calamity that befell the tyrant governor and subsequent records show he waited twelve years for his stipend. Welcome as a spiritual leader should have been and needed if ever distress in a community has a
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claim to ministration, the Rev. Mr. Mather was just one more per- son to be sustained through that afflicted winter.
With the spring of 1689 came the culmination of the colony's conflict with Andros. The bloodless revolution of the 18th of April, in which Boston had one of its days of great excitement, reached its climax in the imprisonment of the royal governor. Attention to a suffering outpost, far away from the central scene of the colony's revolt was impossible. Northfield's people had correspondingly little concern in the disturbance, with greater distress and deprivation than ever. It was all the same to them that Andros was out and the aged Simon Bradstreet was recalled to the governorship. Indeed there was a sense that somehow they had lost a friend in the passing from power of a governor who had provided a real defence of their town, albeit they were having their troubles in feeding the small army of defenders.
The manifold woes of the decimated village were poured out in a long letter to the restored General Court, dated June 27, 1689, which the Rev. John Russell of Hadley, who knew something of ecclesias- tical troubles as well as of frontier deprivations, was persuaded to write. It was a graphic tale of the woe of "objects of pity and com- miseration," whose state was very afflictive. It told of the destruction of the first settlement, the failure of the owners to return to their lands, the murder of the six people the previous summer, the reduc- tion of the population to twelve families, the exhaustion of their estates by the support of garrison soldiers and the crushing burden of fear upon the wives and children. It asked the General Court to do one of two things-compel the return of the owners to their lands, failing in which they should "quit them to others," or to order the remnant now there to "throw up all and leave it wholly to their enemies and their insulting."
Samuel Davis and Micah Mudge, brave souls who had never flinched, were the signers in behalf of all the people that were left at Northfield. Pynchon wrote Governor Bradstreet reiterating the need of action. A committee studied the situation from July to November, an early model of legislative delay, and the General Court passed an order. In every one of these documents there appeared the plea, and in the legislative action the command, for a return of the deserters to their lands.
If the attraction of the location could not induce occupation, by
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what process could the actual owners be compelled to transplant to such unfavoring conditions? None is known to the codes of civiliza- tion. The independence of the settlers who stuck was but nobler kin to the independence of those who fled. It took another long and dreary winter to chill the hearts of Northfield's lingering dozen fami- lies to the point of surrender. On the 25th of June the County Court, seated at the parent town, Northampton, ordered the curtain down.
The climax was not heroic. The inhabitants were ordered to bring off their hogs, horses and cattle within the space of six or eight days or they-the pigs, horses and cattle-would be taken for the use of the country. The cows deserted in the first settlement's disaster had the self-reliance to find their own way down to Hadley. It took a court order to accomplish the same salvage in 1690.
CHAPTER IX THIRD SETTLEMENT
A Quarter Century's Wilderness Reclaimed
IT WAS EVER a new Northfield that engaged the settlers. As all but the slightest traces of the first settlement were visible when the second attempt was made to plant a village, so when the third was undertaken, there were but the stones that had been the foundation of some of the houses to tell of a prior occupation.
Nigh to a quarter century of bloody history had been written in the valley since the second abandonment. Savagery had been the vicious tool of French warfare. It had kept the settlements in con- stant terror. It had wrought the full measure of barbaric assault upon one after another of the towns. The crowning atrocity had been committed in the Deerfield massacre of 1704. The welter and the terror which gains the dignity in history of being called Queen Anne's war had spread over a dozen fearful years. The pioneer spirit that had been twice beaten back from Northfield had resisted the like abandonment, in whatever stress, of the lower towns. Even in the midst of constant peril and under the terrific blow of that February night in 1704, Deerfield, taking its place as the farthest outpost, had continued to be.
Northfield's contribution to the intervening history of carnage had been in the persons of those who had shared in its earlier faltering existence. A Nathaniel Dickinson, Jr., and a Samuel Dickinson, boys of 13 and II, had been killed in the Hatfield meadows July 14, 1698. There were Boltwoods and Kelloggs and a daughter of James Ben- nett in the killed or captured at Deerfield. In the spring after the Deerfield outrage, two sons of Elder Janes, Samuel and Benjamin, and a son, Moses, of Ralph Hutchinson and their wives and children, were caught in the savage assault which wiped out the hamlet at the foot of Mt. Tom. The three men were among the nineteen who were killed, and such of their families as were captured were carried away
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only to be knocked on the head, scalped, left for dead or to vanish in captivity. Captain John Taylor, of the second Northfield, met his death in pursuit of the murderous hirelings.
Out from the stricken years had risen the figure of the supreme hero of his times-Benjamin Wright. The prayer he had made on the fearful night of September, 1675, a boy of fifteen, when his father failed to come back to the besieged stockade, was being answered in the leadership of the bands that pursued the savages as they fled after each murderous blow. It had its echo in the "Here am I, send me" of the letter he sent to the governor of the colony, September 19, 1709, instant answer to the call for troops for a master attack on Canada.
Expectation of peace and security in the valley had been twice shattered. Northfield's two abandonments had been grimly illustra- tive of the course of events which had put to naught the hopes and ambitions of the pioneers-the first a sacrifice to Philip's scheme of white extermination, the second the far-flung symptom of the warring rivalry of England and France for possession of the North American continent.
By the end of the century which had just finished, France had thrown a long, broad band around English America. The world has few stories of personal bravery and dauntless intrepidity to rival that of La Salle. From Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi he had marked for France's own the vast domain of the length of the St. Lawrence, the region of the great lakes and the boundless region drained by the greatest of America's rivers and all its tributaries. Fighter against his rivals in royal favor, cajoler of native chieftains, builder of scattered forts where great cities would some day cluster, endurer of cold and famine and treachery, he had wrought mightily for France before, at 43, he was caught in ambush and killed. He had driven in the outposts of England's advance and reduced her people to geographical inconsequence.
France claimed the Kennebec for her boundary, possessed the eastern coast beyond, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the whole interior of the continent, and was pressing down upon the settlements along the Hudson. Her craft far out- matched English blundering in the game of Indian alliance. Her priests played a game with savage superstition vastly more effective
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than the Christianizing efforts of Eliot and Gookin. By 1688 America belonged broadly to France and her dream was of continental em- pire. But her census showed 11,249 of her people within the broad reaches of her vast possessions, not a tenth of the number of English in New England, not a twentieth of the English in the seaboard col- onies. Against this disparity, there was but to play, in all its wicked possibilities, the weapon of Indian raiding and murder.
The Abernakis of the North were the sole hope of her cause. Had not the English sold 350 captured Indians into foreign slavery? How might not resentment be made to rankle in savage breasts? How tender the ministrations of Jesuit priests, how generous the rewards of French governors-ten beavers for an English scalp-how shelter- ing and kindly the indulgence of her captains. Maine settlements, one after another plundered and destroyed. Schenectady murderously wiped out February 8, 1690. Then the peace of Rysick ending a war that had echoed in Indian yells along the narrow frontiers of New England.
Again the hope of peace in Europe and its reflected calm on American soil. For how long? After La Salle, by years, but serving the same master and the same designs, came Frontenac. New York was to know of him. There were the English allies, the Iroquois tribes of the Mohawk region, an obstacle in the French path, and against them the Canadian Frenchman threw his invading Indians so late as 1696.
A peaceful interlude, it was no more than a moment, between the war in which William and Mary had met the French King and there came another inter-colonial war-Queen Anne's-sending its new de- struction and terrors to the New English frontiers and designing to strike at the heart of the colony by the taking of Boston. In return, expeditions by land and sea to drive France from Canada, like the ill-fated one which brought disaster to the fleet from Boston in the ice of the lower St. Lawrence in 1711, and like the projected one for which Benjamin Wright had uttered his, "Here am I," never to be carried out.
Thus had the long years after Northfield's second abandonment been filled and thus had the spirit of New England been crushed and its resources drained. What Philip had done to the struggling fron- tiersmen of the seventeenth century, French design and Indian alli-
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ances had carried into the first ten years of the eighteenth. The war -- this second outright struggle between the rival nations for Ameri- can supremacy as a pawn in European conflicts-had stretched from 1702 to 1713, when, on April II, there was drawn "the uncertain peace of Utrecht." France now yielded vast regions in North America to England, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, Acadia, leaving issues which "were never to be adjusted amicably."
To the people in the Connecticut valley who knew the full mean- ing of European conflict when it involved the possession of American territory and trained upon their homes the hired weapons of savage alliances, the new peace read like a summons to retake their aban- doned regions and an assurance that now there would be no threat upon their security. It meant, in the Connecticut valley, the repos- session of that farthest and twice yielded outpost, Northfield.
Forty years of history-and now a wilderness! One evening in the late spring of 1714, the men who had led the way to the new possession may be pictured as sitting on Council rock and talking over the situation. Little given as they were to dwelling on the past, there crept into their talk some recollections of the days in the six- teen-eighties when they had shared in the effort to get their fellow land-owners to join them in land possession. There were fainter mem- ories of the brave venture of the seventies and its tragic end. Ben Wright was made to tell of the days and nights when the families were penned up in the stockade, of the waiting for Joseph Dickinson to return from Hadley, of the echoes of the battle out towards the hills from where they now sat, of the mournful leaving and of the gruesome sights along the southward trail. He was next to the oldest of the group, a grim warrior, a man of few words, full of resolution, now at fifty-four the perfect type of the fighting pioneer. He was more concerned at this moment in what was before them and even that of less importance than the days' works directly in hand.
Was there to be another exasperating struggle to get the land- owners to come on? It seemed so. The resolute spirit of the first venture had not shown itself in the second-what was to revive it now? The truth of the matter was that caution had taken possession of the common mind in the valley towns. Why should it not, when incaution had paid costly penalties year upon year, in blow after blow from a detestable, because cowardly enemy? Plainly enough,
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conservatism, a deadly atmosphere to pioneering, had gained possession of people as the comforts of life had increased. Now, at Northampton and at Hadley or farther away in still more secure settlements, the earlier engagers had comfortable homes, large families, privileges such as a settled community develops, church and school chief among them. They were large owners of land, reduced to orderly fertility. Social and vested interests were weighting the heels of a race that in the generation before had been swift to new ventures.
Then the talk shifted to land titles. The articles of agreement they had signed the month before were designed to clear up all doubts, but there was a lingering question or two about the reality of titles that had been so long neglected. How conclusive were the Indian deeds? Could not the natives re-assert their ownership after over twenty years of non-possession by the grantees? Was not the native repossession, which had been undisturbed all this time, as good a foundation for title as most, if not all, of the Indians had ever had?
The incident was recalled of the visit to the second settlement by claimants whose right to further compensation was as fantastic as the paint on their bodies when war was brewing. Were more quit-claims, as spectacular as that document of 1688, to be extracted from as poorly credentialed demandants as the seven Indians of that episode?
Even assuming that white title was good as against the red, who were the owners, when the first engagers were nearly all gone? Had not the General Court, during the second settlement required actual occupancy as a condition of title, a condition that had been grossly unfulfilled by those who never came when they might have done so, and invalidated by all of the owners when they had withdrawn twenty-five years ago? And some time back, had not an accredited governor of the colony formally swept aside all titles and put the bear's-paw interpretation on Indian deeds?
To the extent that such abstractions found place in the minds of the newcomers, they were swept away by the confidence that there would be no dispute among those who had signed the new compact and it was not conceivable there were anywhere on earth people who would be interested to displace them. The committee named by the General Court, Samuel Partridge, Samuel Potter and Henry Dwight, had been clothed with power to settle finally and for aye any question of title. If new people should show a wish to join there was ample
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land to grant them on terms the all-powerful committee should fix. As to the Indians, if any of the old ones or any newly recruited ones with them should try again to exact tribute, let them try it!
Among the men thus on the ground there was settled opinion that rights to title acquired in the first and in the second ventures were continuous. They should be and would be respected as first rights in what was now counted upon as permanent. In the same light did the General Court regard the formerly acquired titles and all the doubts that non-possession and the lapse of time might raise were swept aside. Somewhere in the permanent settlements down the river were to be found the original owners or their heirs or, in a few cases, persons to whom title had passed by purchase. No new claims were recognized save as they linked by heritage or purchase to the old or were granted to new and actual settlers by the proprie- tors and by taking on of new territory within the broad boundaries of the plantation.
The three settlements were linked together by ties of kinship. Sons and grandsons were recorded on the roll of the heads of the new households. As the men who were now marking out the town and laying the foundations for permanence, they faced the fact that there was but slender survival of the brave first engagers. Were there in- deed any of them now living?
George Alexander, leader in the first exploration, had died. So had Thomas Bascom. James Bennett was killed in the Falls fight. Joseph Dickinson was the messenger whose plea had brought Beers to the intended relief of the settlement and had fallen with him in the battle of Beers Plain. The list ran on, the list of those who had died-John Hilliard, Ralph Hutchinson, William and Joseph Janes, Robert Lyman and William Miller. It included, too, Cornelius the Irishman, who had gone southward from Northampton and whose descent would henceforth be traced in Connecticut and on Long Island.
Spared out of the first settlement but not to share in the third, although still on earth, stood out the name of Micah Mudge. He had proved and was still proving his penchant for marking out new towns. He had indulged it as an original proprietor of Lebanon, in Connec- ticut, and was just now more concerned in surveying a new town, Hebron, in the same state, than in coming back to the one where he
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had shared in the discouragement of the second effort to build. With him in this shifting enterprise was the Mary, daughter of George Alexander, of whom he was mooning as he marched up the valley in 1671. They were at this moment presiding over the hospitality of the tavern in Lebanon. Some time, far in the future, as this story runs, it may be that the line of their descent will be traced to the North- field to which they did not return, under the names of Phelps and Belcher.
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