USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 3
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THE MISSION
off, awakening to find all their possessions in the hands of the traders. Sergeant struggled indefatigably with this vice. "Their beloved Destruction," he called it.
The present arrangement of living was wholly unsatisfac- tory. The Indians were able to pitch their wigwams around the meetinghouse for only a short period in the winter. In February they dispersed to the woods for the sugar season, and the rest of the year they spent at their own settlements, Kon- kapot and his group retiring into the dangerous neighborhood of Van Valkenburgh, and Umpachene to the outskirts of the upper Housatonic township. During this time Sergeant taught school at one settlement and Woodbridge at the other. Woodbridge lodged with Konkapot and had a large attend- ance of pupils, but Sergeant writes of him at this time that he had a "tedious task of it . . . [and] lives a very lonesome life." The distance between the two missionaries was a great disadvantage, and although the Indians were all supposed to come to the central meetinghouse on Sunday, the inclemency of the weather or a Saturday night's "frolick" would often provide them with excuses used in recent times by more civilized churchgoers.
Sergeant made little in his letters to the Commissioners of the difficulties of his situation but dwelt upon the fact of forty converts in one year. Not a large number, certainly, but his enthusiasm was contagious. He wrote gaily of a further plan of sharing in the Indians' lives: "Our Indians are this week gone out to make sugar. Mr. Woodbridge and I design to go out to them next day after tomorrow and live with them, till they return if we can hold it out. Perhaps we shall be so taken with them and their way of living that we shall take each of us a wife from amongst, and sadly disappoint all other fair ones that may have any expectations from us. And indeed I am almost of the opinion that this will be our wisest course; lest if we don't disappoint them, they will us."
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STOCKBRIDGE
All this winter he had been working upon a scheme for establishing the Indians in one spot. It would be a model village established entirely for the Indians and owned by them, except for a small extent of territory reserved for him- self and Woodbridge and perhaps four other English families. A few English living among them, he thought, would serve as patterns of everything that the Indians should strive to be. He had talked the plan over with the Governor at the time of his ordination at Deerfield, and the Governor had consented to lay the matter before the General Court. The Court had appointed a committee to go to Housatonic and offer the township to the Indians. Colonel John Stoddard was ap- pointed with two other men, and in March they arrived to make the proposal. It was for a township beyond the mountain, which would be. six miles square and include Konkapot's reservation. The area would also include Van Valkenburgh's forty acres in the Great Meadow and his 250 acres of upland adjoining it. All that was asked of the Indians was that they give up the land they owned at Skate- hook, a small tract compared to what they were getting.
The committee expected opposition from Van Valken- burgh, but they were surprised to meet with reluctance on the part of some of the Indians. They were given a month to consider the proposition, and when Stoddard returned in April for their answer, Umpachene told him that he had been turning over a number of things in his mind and would like to ask a few questions. Although he confessed himself grate- ful to the English for all they had done in providing instruction in the gospel, and in teaching the children to read, and said that his gratitude for these things brought tears to his eyes, and he was convinced of the truth of the Christian religion, as far as he understood it, still a number of things "stumbled" him. Why had the English neglected preaching the gospel to them for so long, and why was this sudden favor
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THE MISSION
toward them? Was it all love and good will? If so, he was thankful for it, but it was just possible there might be some other motive. Again, if the Christian religion was so good and so true, as he believed it was, why were there so many vicious Christians? Also how were they, the Indians, to establish titles to their lands? These things were not written down with them as they were with the white man, and yet their titles were quite as good according to their own law. Finally, he wondered about this large six-mile tract which was to be given them? Would there not, some day, arise conten- tion between their children and the children of the English as to the ownership of this land?
Colonel Stoddard used all his tact and knowledge of Indians to smooth these ruffled feathers, for he was well aware of Umpachene's influence over the tribe and realized that at this late date he might upset the whole plan. He began by quoting from the charter that one of the original intentions of the white settlers had been to preach the gospel to the Indians and, not dwelling upon the neglect of this intention for twenty-six years, he extolled the labors of Mr. Eliot. He said that the Government had always been eager to propagate the gospel, but that since Mr. Eliot's time, their efforts had met with little success. As for the titles to their lands, they held their lands in the same manner as the English, and therefore could have no reason to fear that they would be taken advantage of. He agreed that the viciousnesss of some Christians was a shameful thing, but it sprang from the cor- ruption of men's hearts and not from any defect in the religion they preached. These remarks and the authoritative manner in which they were delivered by Colonel Stoddard carried conviction to the skeptical mind of Umpachene, and he declared himself satisfied.
The committee came up against a more solid obstacle in Van Valkenburgh. He would not listen to an exchange of
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STOCKBRIDGE
his lands for an equivalent elsewhere in the province. Kon- kapot was his friend and had given him the land, business was good, and there he was going to stay. Sergeant was much disturbed by this obstinacy, and he was obliged to pursue his plans around Van Valkenburgh, who sat immovably upon his acres. In spite of him, the Indians were established in the new town in time to plant their crops in the spring of 1736.
The clergy of the Connecticut River valley looked upon this venture of a model Indian town with much sympathy. Nehemiah Bull, Stephen Williams, Samuel Hopkins, Peter Reynold, and Jonathan Edwards (interested through his uncle, John Stoddard) all cast a kindly eye upon the Mission. These men were, in fact, the godfathers of the town and presided over its birth with anxious solicitude. It would be impossible, they felt, to send the "glorious and everlasting gospel among the Indians, among whom Satan's kingdom had remained so long undisturbed," while Van Valkenburgh, a veritable Satan, dwelt among them. The small amount of money that these gentlemen could command would be insuffi- cient, they knew, to tempt him from his profitable trading base. It was three years after the Indians had moved into the new village that a solution to this problem was finally provided through the agency of resourceful Colonel Stoddard.
As chairman of the committee for the establishment of the town, he selected the four families who were to be introduced into the village as patterns of English life, and his first choice fell on Ephraim Williams of Newton. Williams was the typical, hard-headed pioneer who carves his way through forests, builds roads, throws out bridges and in the process rolls up for himself a handsome fortune. Stoddard considered him a man of sound common sense, with the added advantage of having a certain amount of capital to invest. Williams arrived in 1737, with his children in panniers on the sides of the horses, and various schemes in his head for becoming
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THE MISSION
a large frog in a small pond. He grasped the difficulty about Van Valkenburgh and in 1739, in partnership with the clergymen of the Connecticut River valley, put up most of the money to buy him out. The plan which Williams suggested, and the clergymen enthusiastically accepted, was that they should buy the 290 acres of Van Valkenburgh, and give it to the Indians as a gift, on the understanding that the Indians would repay them by giving them 4,000 acres out of the "wild" and unappropriated land of the province. Although the 290 acres were under cultivation and the 4,000 were wild, still this bargain in real estate was clearly the work of a very fine business head. Williams well knew that it was only a short time before all this country would be opened up to settlers and land was therefore a profitable investment. The 4,000 acres adjoined the Indian township in the north- east, and Williams, as principal investor, took as his portion a 900-acre tract lying around what is now Laurel Lake in Lee. His associates had small tracts, the size depending upon the amount of their investment.
Although the Indians moved into their new town in 1736 and settled their wigwams along the winding course of the river in the Great Meadow, it was not until a year later that Williams and the other three English families arrived. They were Ephraim Brown of Watertown, Josiah Jones of Weston, and Joseph Woodbridge, the brother of Timothy, who came from West Springfield. They all settled themselves on the ridge of the hill to the north where they believed the air to be more wholesome and where the view was of surpassing love- liness. These earliest aristocrats of the valley did not have much time to think about the view, but from that day to this the cream has always risen to the top, and the largest and finest houses have been built on the crest of Prospect Hill.
Sergeant characteristically chose to build his house among the Indians at the western extremity of the village where the
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STOCKBRIDGE
Indians were soon to build the church, and where the school- house would be. Timothy Woodbridge decided to settle next to Konkapot, whose boarder he had been for the past two years.
In this same year, the General Court made a formal grant of the township to the Indians, with the exception of the small amount of land allotted to the English. A part of the grant reads thus: " . The Soils, Swamps, meadows, rivers, rivulets, Ponds, Pools, woods, underwoods, Trees, Timber, Herbage, Feeding, Fishing, Fowling, and Hunting, Rights members Hereditaments, Emoluments, profits, privileges and appurtenances thereto belonging or in any ways appertaining TO HAVE AND TO HOLD, the said Tract of land or Township . unto the said Housatannuck Tribe of Indians . . . TO their use and behoof forever . . . '
This grant embodies the impractical dream for which Sergeant and Woodbridge were to give their lives. The Stockbridge of today, swept clean of its old owners, the Indians, is the actuality which Williams and the other English families up on the Hill have built for us.
Chapter II
THE INDIAN TOWN
T HIS experiment in philanthropy was now fully launched, and the Indians were like pleased children, enchanted with their shiny new toy of an English village all their own. They could not do enough for Sergeant. Clumsily but faithfully, under his direction, they built the meetinghouse and the schoolhouse. The government had allowed them some small amount of financial aid for these buildings, and the Indians, in a burst of gratitude, insisted on giving the Governor a present in return: one mile on each side of the road from Housatonic to Westfield-a not incon- siderable gift. This was accompanied by a graceful speech from Umpachene and a further present of skins. The Gover- nor sold the skins to buy books for Sergeant and thus the compliments flew back and forth.
The Indians were determined to apply themselves to this difficult task of becoming civilized, and they worked at it as hard as their indolent natures would allow. They decided to put away from them the worst of their temptations, and imposed a fine of £40 on anyone bringing rum into the village. "The Ethiopian is really going to change his spots and the Leopard his skin," Sergeant reflected thankfully as he gazed upon these fruits of his labors. A traveler passing through Stockbridge at this time was very gracious about them in an account published in the Boston Post-Boy: "I have lately visited my friends in Stockbridge and was well pleased
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STOCKBRIDGE
to find the Indians so improved. I saw several young women sewing; but I was in special gratified to find them so improved in learning. Some of them have made good proficiency and can read in their Bibles and several can write a good hand." Boston responded to this praise by presenting the town with an enormous conch-shell, which someone had brought back from the East Indies. This shell has become inextricably woven into the story of the mission and, long after the Indians had vanished from the scene, oldest inhabitants would tell their grandchildren about the first church bell of Stockbridge. For the Indians, to their delight, found that by blowing it like a horn, it uttered a penetrating and baleful note that quavered from one end of the village to the other. Metoxin, an Indian of gigantic lung power and dependable character, applied himself to it enthusiastically every Sabbath for many years, to summon the worshipers, red and white, to the meetinghouse.
Channels of communication ran from the little mission to Boston and from there across the ocean to the great world of London. The romantic picture of Sergeant preaching to his strange hybrid flock in the heart of the wilderness caused some passing notice in Boston. But it didn't make a very deep impression. People were thoroughly accustomed to the idea of Indians. The woods were uncomfortably full of them, and memories of the tomahawk and the scalping knife, wielded by Eliot's "praying Indians" in a peculiarly vicious manner, caused them to be skeptical about their red Christian brothers. However, Sergeant's idealism was heavily backed by the commissioners for The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and some of these gentlemen sat in high places. Besides Governor Belcher, whose faith in the mission was unbounded, old Dr. Benjamin Colman, minister of the church on Brattle Street in Cambridge, corresponded constantly with Sergeant, and it was he who became the
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THE INDIAN TOWN
connecting link between the Stockbridge Indians and fashion- able London society. Dr. Colman had spent some years in England and was well acquainted with the sympathetic interest which ladies, who sat in cushioned luxury, and gentlemen with fat bank rolls took in the sad plight of the Indians in the New World. Tragedy close at hand is apt to be uncomfortable, but at a distance it is picturesque. So Dr. Colman wrote to Sergeant of his correspondence with his London friends as early as 1735: "I have read with great pleas- ure your first discourse to those poor Natives, and have ventur'd a copy of it to the Earl of Egmont and the associates of the late eminent Dr. Bray at London. I have observ'd to his Lordship that yours is a proper original; and how justly adapted to the genius and capacity of the savages! May God make you a father to them, and beget them to Christ by the Gospel . . . I gave some account to the excellent Dr. Watts, of London, of the strange disposition of the Housetunnuck tribe to receive the Gospel, and of the good spirit on you to leave the College and go among them."
Money, presents of books, and letters of advice as to how to deal with the heathen in their native haunt, were proffered freely and soon beat a path between London and Stockbridge. The mission became a fashionable charity. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent £300, a welcome addition to Sergeant's slender funds, for he needed ploughs and axes, clothes and books for his Indians, to persuade them that these were the blessings which the white man brought, rather than the rum and gunpowder that Van Valkenburgh had so highly recommended. Mr. Isaac Hollis of London, an eccentric Baptist minister of ample means, sent money but attached definite strings to it. It must clothe, feed, and educate twelve boys a year, and they must live in an English family. He stipulated that they must be boys. He did not care to invest in heathen girls. But Mr. Samuel Holden gave Sergeant a
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STOCKBRIDGE
free hand with the £100 he contributed. Why not try board- ing out the Indian girls? Here Sergeant again encountered that unaccountable obstinacy in Umpachene, who if he did not bite the hand that fed him, always had a tendency to pull away from it. The Indian girls, he declared, were modest, retiring creatures, who did not want to leave their homes. Sergeant did succeed in sending two of them out among the English, but through a childish fondness for home they did not stay long. The experiment with the boys was more rewarding, because for a year and a half he took them into his own house. He was by this time quite conversant with their language, and with sympathetic understanding he was able to reach into the slow minds and incline them to listen to the story of Christ. Like twelve little dogs they gravely went through their tricks, uncomprehending but blindly devoted. At the end of their stay they were in a state of blissful con- fusion as to the Savior of mankind and the savior of the Mahican Indians.
Dr. Colman received a voluminous letter from Dr. Watts, the celebrated Non-Conformist leader preaching in London at this time. He was very much interested. He was, he said, "always looking out to any quarter of the world for such Appearances. May Jesus the Head of the Church and of nations, attend your young Missionary with extraordinary assistance and success. Methinks I love him upon your report, for his courage and zeal . My little Catechisms to to teach ye rudiments of ye Gospel . . . is ye most proper book for his purpose wch I ever wrote." He would do the books up at once and send them on the next packet, adding to the bundle his Divine Songs for Children and also his Treatise on the Mind for Sergeant's leisure hours. But he confessed that he thought little headway would be made with the Indians without some such grand effusion of the spirit of God as should manifest itself by tongues and miracles. He
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THE INDIAN TOWN
was thinking of the religious revival which had taken place in Northampton not long before under Jonathan Edwards, with which he was deeply sympathetic, and he felt that if tongues and miracles were necessary to impress the "polite nations," they were imperative to stir the sluggish souls of the heathen.
A town was gradually emerging out of the forest. The name of Housatonic, which vaguely covered all the territory included in the two original townships, was too inclusive a term for a community which was being noticed in Boston and applauded in London. It was time to name and incorporate the town. Lessons in government, an important part of the educational program, could best be taught by setting up the machinery of the New England town meeting, and allowing the Indians to take their part in it. They decided to call the town Stockbridge and it is thought that the name was chosen by Timothy Woodbridge.
Woodbridge was to the Indians' material concern what Sergeant was to their spiritual. He listened to all their grievances about the white families up on the Hill, how the Joneses had appropriated to their use a much larger piece of land than they were entitled to, how Ephraim Williams had his eye on a particularly rich meadow. Woodbridge was a quiet, reasonable man, who slowly pondered on these things and gave them a fair decision. Although he himself had come from West Springfield, his family had been among the first settlers of Andover, Massachusetts, and they had been instrumental in naming the town after Andover in England. Now Andover, Hampshire County, England, is next to Stockbridge. What more natural than that Woodbridge should have chosen the name of the town neighboring his ancestral home, especially as he was now living in the County of Hampshire. The town was formally incorporated under the name of Stockbridge on June 22, 1739, and the Indians swelled with pride when they received the order from the
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STOCKBRIDGE
Great and General Court: "Ephraim Williams esqr., Capt. John Kunkapaut and Lieutt Paul Umpeecheanah, principal Inhabitants of the Plantation, in the County of Hampshire on Housatannuck River, lately erected into a Township by the Name of Stockbridge, be and hereby are fully authorized and impowered to assemble the Freeholders and other qualified Voters there, as Soon as may be, in Some Convenient place in Said Town in order to Chuse a Town Clerk and all other Town Officers . . . " At this meeting Ephraim Williams was chosen moderator, John Konkapot and Aaron Umpachene, selectmen, and Josiah Jones, constable. It seemed as if Sergeant's prayer were answered, and that the two races, so utterly different, would really be amalgamated. Here was an Indian town with an English name, the New England town meeting appointing Indian officers, and on the Sabbath, summoned by Metoxin's fervent blast upon the conch-shell, Indians and English kneeling down together in their common worship.
In that same year Sergeant married pretty, high-spirited Abigail Williams, daughter of Ephraim, up on the Hill. Her common sense, like her father's, was a useful commodity in a pioneer community, and her gaiety and elegance charmed the serious-minded missionary. He adored her, and he steps out of the rôle of saint -- into which the historians have rigidly cast him-to write to his friend, Dr. Colman, as a very human bridegroom: "You will forgive me, Sir, if I think that most ingenious Woman is not the smallest gift of divine bounty that I have receiv'd since I undertook a life tho't to be so self- denying. The more tenderly I love her the more thankful I am to Heaven, who has form'd her as if on purpose for me, and giv'n her to me as if (like the father of mankind) he tho't it not good for me to be here alone." Some faded letters, a pair of satin slippers, a cookbook and the fine house that Sergeant built her on the Hill are all we have left of Abigail
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THE INDIAN TOWN
Williams who, like all her family, was to stamp her personality indelibly on the community in which she lived. She found Stockbridge a struggling mission to the Indians; she left it a growing English town. Handsome and worldly, she had not come to Stockbridge to hide her light under a bushel. Her interest in converting the Indians, while undoubtedly genu- ine, could never have been the absorbing passion of her life as it was with Sergeant. The mission with her, as with her father, was the means to the end of developing the town of Stockbridge, and with it the fortunes of the Williams family. She had no intention of coming to terms with the wilderness. The wilderness was somehow to clear itself out of the way of those elegant little brocaded slippers with the silver buckles. Her house, preserved today as a museum and known as the Mission House, is a monument 200 years old to Abigail's taste. The handsome carving of the front door, the paneling in the parlor, with its charming scalloped recess, were touches difficult of attainment in a frontier village. Two chimneys were set in the slope of the roof, for some reason best known to Abigail. The usual house of that type had a central chimney built across the rooftree. She evidently knew what she wanted and went to some pains to get it. It is said that the carving was brought by ox team from Connecticut- surely a laborious and costly proceeding. How much easier it would have been to have built the simple log cabin of the other settlers. But Abigail Williams did not believe that gentlefolk lived in log cabins, and it was worth running even her husband into debt to achieve a suitable establishment. It is characteristic of her that long after everything else she and Sergeant stood for has been swept into the ash can of oblivion, her house should still be standing, the handsomest house in the village.
Here they led their busy lives. Abigail wove and spun the cloth for sturdy jackets against the cold Berkshire winter,
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STOCKBRIDGE
baked pies, and raised her family. Electa, the first white child born in Stockbridge, had appeared punctually a year after their marriage and was followed by two boys, Erastus and John. Sometimes in an interim of household tasks, Abigail would take a hand with the Indians that flocked to her husband's study at the back of the house, smiling upon this one, snubbing that one, much as she did the children. While they waited outside the house to see Sergeant-a most con- genial occupation, for they had an infinite capacity for relaxation-they would tell Abigail's children stories handed down to them from their ancestors. Long before the white man came to Stockbridge, they said, there had been a gigantic eagle who had brooded over the land. And right on their father's land, there was a rock in which the mark of his right claw could still be seen, spur and all, to prove the existence of the bird. So vast was he that while his right claw rested on the Hill in Stockbridge his left claw was in Lee, his tail in Lenox, and his head in Great Barrington. The impression in the rock is still here, a witness to the Indian tale of the days when their destinies were presided over by the miraculous and benevolent eagle.
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