USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume I > Part 14
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The Indians forced their way into the Dustin house, and finding the wife in bed ordered her to dress, which she did so hurriedly as to forget to put on one of her shoes. After pillaging and setting fire to the building the savages made ready to retreat. One of them snatched the infant from the arms of Mrs. Neff and dashed out its brains. They lost no time in getting away. They had learned from experience that their only chance of successful attack on the English was to descend stealthily, kill and loot with all possible haste, and make off quickly with what could be easily taken away, before the neighboring settlers could recover from the surprise and organize a pursuing force. At Haverhill the different parties departed in various directions, most of them, however, for a rendezvous at Pennacook, near the site of the New Hampshire city of Concord.
"Mrs. Dustin (with her nurse)," continues the old narrative, "notwith- standing her present condition, traveled that first night, about a dozen miles, and then kept up with their new masters in a long travel of a hundred and fifty miles more or less, within a few days ensuing, without any sensible dam- age in their health from the hardships of their travel, their lodging, their diet, and their many other difficulties.
"These two poor women were now in the hands of those whose tender mercies are cruelties. But the good God, who hath all hearts in his own hands, heard the sighs of these prisoners, and gave them to find unexpected favor from the master who laid claim unto them. That Indian family consisted of twelve persons; two stout men, three women, and seven children. And for the shame of many an English family, that has the character of prayerless upon it, I must now publish what these poor women assure me. 'Tis this : In obedience to the instructions which the French have given them, they would have prayers in their family no less than thrice every day; in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Nor would they ordinarily let their children eat or sleep, without first saying their prayers.
"Indeed these Idolators were like the rest of their whiter Brethren, Perse- cutors; and would not endure that these poor women should retire to their English prayers, if they could hinder them. Nevertheless, the poor women had nothing but fervent prayers to make their lives comfortable or tolerable; and by being daily sent out, upon business, they had opportunities together and asunder to do like another Hannah, in pouring out their souls before the
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Lord. Nor did their praying friends among ourselves, forbear to pour out supplicants for them. Now, they could not observe it without some wonder, and their Indian master, sometimes, when he saw them dejected, would say unto them, 'What need you trouble yourself? If your God will have you deliver, it shall be so!' And it seems our God would have it so to be."
The threatening stories told them by the Indians were probably fully credited by the prisoners, for they could not have been unaware of the customs of the savage tribes. They must have been steeled to any desperate deed. Regardless of prospective sufferings, Mrs. Dustin's mind must have been keenly alive to possibility of escape. She was that kind of woman. Finally she evolved a plan for exterminating her captors, men, women and children, and communicated it to her two companions. To Samuel she entrusted the task of learning from his master Bampico just where one must strike with a tomahawk to kill instantly, without outcry from the victim. The Indian gave freely of the information, in telling how he had killed the whites. Also, he told the boy how he had scalped them.
On the night of April 29, they camped on what is now known as Dustin's Island, in the Merrimac at the mouth of Contoocook River, a small island embracing only about two acres, and in those old days heavily wooded. The Indians were very tired, for the day's journey had been a hard one. They promised to sleep soundly. Mrs. Dustin determined that the time to act had arrived. Not long after midnight she awakened Mrs. Neff and the boy. Each armed with a tomahawk, they crept stealthily to a position at the head of the sleeping savages. Then they struck. One Indian after another received the death wound. Bampico died by the hand of the lad who had been his slave. Ten of the twelve were killed outright. A badly wounded squaw escaped into the woods, and so did an Indian boy whom Mrs. Dustin had spared to take away with them.
There were boats there, why and how is not related. The fugitives scuttled all but one of them. In that was placed all the food they could find, and the tomahawk with which Mrs. Dustin had killed her master, and his gun. The last act before leaving the island was to remove the ten scalps, to carry with them back to civilization, should they reach it, in confirmation of their astonishing tale.
The slow voyage down the Merrimac, though not without its dangers, was uneventful so far as discovery by their enemies was concerned. They took turns in rowing, or perhaps it was paddling, during the daylight hours, and at night drifted with the current, one steering while the others slept. After what seemed endless days they reached Haverhill and their overjoyed friends who had given them up as forever lost. Presently Mrs. Dustin was reunited with her husband and children, and Samuel Leonard with his people, who, in
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the meanwhile, had moved from Worcester, deeming it too dangerously situ- ated, and established a home in Connecticut, well back from the frontier.
The episode made a great sensation at the time. None could say too much in praise of Mrs. Dustin, and young Samuel was heralded as a great hero. The Legislature in remuneration for the scalps, voted Mrs. Dustin twenty- five pounds and Mrs. Neff and the boy twelve pounds ten shillings each. Word of the escape went over the country, and other tokens of appreciation came to the heroic trio. "But none," wrote Cotton Mather, "gave them a greater taste of bounty than Col. Nicholson, Governor of Maryland, who, hearing of their action, sent them a very generous token of his favor."
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CHAPTER XIV.
Lovewell's or Father Rasle's War
Of all the long series of wars in which Worcester County men have fought, none is so little known as Lovewell's or Father Rasle's War. It is almost a forgotten war. One finds no reference to it in the school histories. It is hardly mentioned in local annals, excepting casually to mark the time of Indian raids on Rutland. Yet it played a very important part in the existence of the inhabitants in the years of its duration, from 1722 to 1726 in the constant dread of Indian attack, in holding back the foundation of new towns, and in the opportunity, eagerly seized for the young men, to make money hunting Indians for their scalps.
The Massachusetts Colony paid one hundred pounds for the scalp of every Indian male over twelve years of age, and half that sum for every woman or younger child of either sex, alive or dead. Bands of rangers were organized and made repeated expeditions into Maine and northern New Hampshire, lured by the huge bounty. Their captains built up heroic reputations as Indian killers. The most famous of them all was Captain John Lovewell. So roman- tic a figure did he become that the war came to be named for him. The Eng- lish generally knew it as Father Rasle's War, because they believed that great missionary was the instigator of all the trouble. It would be much truer to fact to call it the Abenaki War, for the real malefactors, if they were in the wrong, were the chiefs of that Indian nation. It was a case of King Philip's War over again. The Maine Indians fought for their ancestral lands, which included the valleys of the Penobscot, Androscoggin and Kennebec rivers, to which they gave the names.
Father Rasle was a Jesuit priest whose missionary activities were com- parable with those of John Eliot in Massachusetts. The English authorities truly believed that his influence alone kept his followers on the warpath, and that consequently the responsibility rested wholly on him for their many attacks on the white settlements along the Maine coast and rivers and the
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massacres and cruelties which sometimes accompanied them. That he was preaching, with great success, the Catholic faith, was to their minds an unfor- givable offense. That he was a Frenchman, closely affiliated with the French governor at Montreal, was another cause of dark suspicion. Cotton Mather, in his Decennium Luctosum: or the Remarkables of a Long War With the Indian Savages, published in 1699, fanned the flame of hatred. For he told countless stories of the most horrible and abominable cruelties inflicted by these same Indians in earlier hostilities, which had their beginning back in I688.
In this quaint old book he openly charged the good priest as actually become obnoxious to the Abenaki sachems, because he would not permit them to enjoy peace with the English. Telling of negotiations for a treaty of peace in 1698, he wrote: "When our English messengers argued with them, upon the perfidiousness of their making a new war, after their submission, the Indians replied, That they were instigated by the French to do what they did, against their own inclinations; adding, that there were two Jesuits, one toward Androscoggin, the other at Narridgeway, both of which they desired the Earl of Bellomont, and the Earl of Frontenac to procure to be removed ; otherwise it could not be expected that any peace would continue long."
By Narridgeway was meant Father Rasle's Indian village on the Kenne- bec. Mather painted highly colored pictures, and probably would have been put to it to substantiate many of his statements. But they helped to give the English authorities the fixed idea that Father Rasle was the author of all their Indian afflictions. In their campaigns always the chief objective was to take the priest himself.
"At Norridgewock, on the banks of the Kennebec, the venerable Sebas- tian Rasle, for more than a quarter of a century the companion and instructor of savages, had gathered a flourishing village round a church, which, rising in the desert, made some pretensions to magnificence," wrote George Bancroft. "Severely ascetic-using no wine, and little food except pounded maize-a rigorous observer of the days of Lent-he built his own cabin, tilled his own garden, drew for himself wood and water, prepared his own hominy, and, distributing all that he received, gave an example of religious poverty.
"And yet he was laborious in garnishing his forest sanctuary, believing the faith of the savage must be quickened by striking appeals to the senses. There he gave instruction almost daily. Following his pupils to their wigwams, he tempered the spirit of devotion with familiar conversation and innocent gaiety, winning the mastery over their souls by his power of persuasion. He had trained a little band of forty young savages, arrayed in cassock and surplice, to assist in the service and chant the hymns of the church; and their public processions attracted a great concourse of red men. Two chapels were built near the village-one dedicated to the Virgin, and adorned with her statue in
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WORCESTER COUNTY'S SECOND COURT HOUSE
Which stood on Court Hill, Worcester, from 1751 to 1801. Sold to make place for new court house, it was hauled By twenty yoke of oxen to Trumbull square, where it was the home of three generations of the Trumbull family. Doomed again, in 1899, its timbers and finish were purchased by Miss Susan Trumbull, and the mansion was rebuilt on Massachusetts Avenuc, where it stands today, a simple, dignified Colonial residence set in an old-fashioned garden. The old arched courtroom, occupying the entire southern left side of the second floor, is in every ancient detail as it was when learned and austere judges in wig and crimson gown, dispensed justice. In this very doorway, Gen. Artemus Ward, chief justice, challenged and rebuked the participants in Shays' Rebellion, here encamped
THE OLD DAVID MAYNARD HOUSE IN WESTBOROUGH Built in 1698, known as example of "mansion house" of the late 17th century
Photo by Dr. C. H. Reed
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relief-another to the guardian angel; and before them the hunter muttered his prayers, on his way to the river or the woods. When the tribe descended to the sea-side, in the season of wild fowl, they were followed by Rasle; and on some islet a little chapel of bark was quickly constructed.
"The government of Massachusetts attempted, in turn, to establish a mis- sion; and their minister made a mocking of purgatory and the invocation of saints, of the cross and the rosary. 'My Christians,' retorted Rasle, 'believe the truths of the Catholic faith, but are not skillful disputants.' But the Prot- estant minister, unable to compete with the Jesuit for the affections of the Indians, returned to Boston, while 'the friar remained, the Incendiary of Mischief.'" This incident did not quicken English affection for the Jesuit, and was not forgotten.
In the treaty of Utrecht, which marked the close of Queen Anne's War, the French surrendered to the victorious English Acadia and Nova Scotia, "with its ancient boundaries." Under the Massachusetts interpretation of this transfer of territory, the eastern and northern frontier of Massachusetts, which then included Maine, was far within the lands of the Abenakis. The chiefs of that nation, alarmed by the attitude of the English, demanded of the French Governor Vaudreuil if France had surrendered their country. He answered that there was no mention of their lands in the treaty. Thereupon their chief resolved to resist the Massachusetts claim. "I have my land," said he, "where the Great Spirit has placed me; and while there remains one child of my tribe, I shall fight to preserve it."
The Massachusetts authorities showed little tact and consideration in their dealings with the Abenakis. Several chiefs were seized and held as hostages, though a stipulated ransom had been paid for their release. The Indians demanded that their territory be evacuated and the prisoners given up, else reprisals would follow. The answer was the seizure of the young Baron de Castin, a half-breed, who not only held a French commission, but was an Indian war chief. The English ordered that Father Rasle be surrendered to them. This was refused.
A strong military force was sent against Norridgewock while the warriors were absent on a hunt, but the priest and the old men were warned and found safety in the forest. Then the savages went into action. A series of bloody attacks on English settlements followed.
"The clear judgment of Rasle perceived the issue. The forts of the Eng- lish could not be taken by the feeble means of the natives. 'Unless the French should join the Indians,' he reported, 'the land would be lost. Many of the red people retired to Canada ; he bid them go; but to their earnest solicitation that he should share their flight, the aged man, foreseeing the impending ruin of Norridgewock, replied, 'I count not my life dear unto myself, so I may finish with joy the ministry I have received.'"
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On August 23, 1724, Massachusetts troops arrived at Norridgewock unper- ceived. They had actually fired their guns before Father Rasle and the Indians were aware that the enemy was at their doors. The warriors rushed out and fought to protect the flight of their wives and children and old people. The priest, roused by the clamor, refused to flee, and saved his flock by draw- ing upon himself the attention of the assailants, while the savages by wading and swimming crossed the river. The English pillaged the cabins and the church, and then, heedless of sacrilege, set them afire.
"After the retreat of the invaders," said Bancroft, "the savages returned to nurse their wounded and bury their dead. They found Rasle mangled by many blows, scalped, his skull broken in several places, his mouth and eyes filled with dirt; and they buried him beneath the spot where he used to stand before the altar. In New England he was regarded as the leader of the insur- gent Indians; the brethren of his order mourned for him as a martyr, and gloried in his happy immortality as a saint. . . The overthrow of the mis- sions completed the ruin of French influence. The eastern Indians concluded a peace which was solemnly ratified by the Indian chiefs at St. John. The eastern boundary of New England was established."
The Scalp-hunting Rangers-In the nearly half century which had elapsed since the first of the Indian hostilities, the frontiersmen of the Massa- chusetts Colony had become highly skilled in the art of forest warfare. Many of them were the equals, if not the superiors, of the red men themselves-as keen on the trail of the enemy, as instinctively alert, as adept in the ambush and as cunning and resourceful in battle. The rangers who ravaged the lands of the northern tribes comprised large numbers of such Englishmen. Their leaders were outstanding in their knowledge of Indian ways and character, and their successes were correspondingly great.
One of the best of them was Captain Samuel Willard, of Lancaster, and many men of his town and other county settlements sought the chance to enlist with him. In one way, these expeditions against the Indians seem to have been in the nature of sporting events-man-hunts organized as men nowadays conduct big game hunts. Love of adventure was coupled with money greed. But it must not be forgotten that long years of war with the savages had bred a hatred so strong and deep, that an Indian was to an Eng- lishman more dangerous and treacherous and deserving of destruction than any beast, no matter how powerful and fierce. To take a scalp had not more sinister meaning than to take the brush from a dead fox, or the rattles from a snake.
No record remains to reveal how the spoils were divided among the mem- bers of these ranger bands. It may have been every man for himself, or there may have been some system of shares in a common pool, as whaling crews divide the proceeds of a voyage. But the old records show that scalps
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were plentiful. The expeditions did not penetrate far into the Maine country as a rule. The Pennacooks of the upper Merrimac and the Pequawkets of the Saco Valley and other New Hampshire tribes were in league with the Abenakis, and therefore were fair game. The final outcome was the disap- pearance of the Indians from the White Mountain country of New Hamp- shire, for the survivors migrated into Canada and did not return. The tribes made the unwilling gift of considerable wealth to the county. The rangers in their drives upon Indian villages discovered much new country, and particu- larly, as the knowledge affected settlement, the fertile lands along the rivers and on the shores of the many lakes. One of Captain Willard's exploits was to lead what he termed "an army," consisting of two companies of ninety men each on a march of five hundred miles through the forests, during which he reached the headwaters of the Pemigewasset and Saco rivers.
John Lovewell seems to have stood in a class by himself in the estimation of his contemporaries, but perhaps one reason for this was his gallant fight against overwhelming odds with the Pequawket warriors under Sachem Paugus. Twice he had returned with a great booty of scalps. In the third expedition the tables were turned against him. He had thirty-four men with him when he reached the pond in Fryeburg, Maine, which ever since has been known as Lovewell's Pond. There, at no great distance from the most impor- tant of the Pequawket villages, they made camp near the lake shore. On Saturday morning, May 6, 1725, the rangers were gathered round their chap- lain on the beach, while he conducted prayer. The peaceful quiet was broken by a rifle shot. Leaving their packs on the beach, the company advanced toward the intervale, from which direction the sound of the shot had come. They met an Indian, who fired and wounded Lovewell, as it proved mortally, and the band retreated.
In their absence, Paugus, their commanding chief, had counted their packs, and with full knowledge of their strength, laid an ambush into which they marched. "The magnanimous Paigus ordered his men to fire over the heads of the English and then to bind them." The chief offered quarter, but the dying Lovewell spurned him. "Only at the muzzle of our guns !" he cried, and the fight began. For eight hours it raged, until darkness fell and the Indians retired. They left thirty-nine of their number dead or dying on the ground. With them were fifteen dead or dying English, including Lovewell. The survivors, most of them wounded, did not pause in their retreat until they reached the white settlements.
The Raids on Rutland-The huge township of Rutland, which cost the proprietors, buying from the Indian owners, twenty-three English pounds, was not settled until 1716, when an advance party of men began to clear the ground. Yet in 1720 fifty families were living on the plantation.
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Rev. Joseph Willard had been invited to become the minister of the settle- ment and had taken up his residence there. Chiefly because of the uncer- tainty resulting from Indian troubles, his installation was deferred, but at length the day was fixed in the autumn of 1723. "But he lived not to see the day, being cut off by the enemy." On the afternoon of August 14, 1723, Joseph Stevens and his four sons were making hay in what is now known as Meetinghouse Meadow, to the northwest of the village, when they were sur- prised by five Indians. The father escaped in the bushes, two of the boys were killed, and Phineas, the eldest, and Isaac, the youngest, were made captive.
That same afternoon two of the Indians who had been lying in wait for another man and his son, at work in a neighboring meadow, tired of waiting, and returning to join their companions, came upon Minister Willard. They turned their guns on him, but one missed fire and the other missed its mark. He was armed and returned the fire, badly wounding one of the pair. The other grappled him, according to the story told by Phineas Stevens upon his return from Canada, who, a prisoner, was an onlooker. The clergyman would probably have overcome his assailant, had not the other Indians joined in the attack. They killed and scalped him and stole his clothes.
The Stevens boys were held in Canada for a year. Phineas carried his little brother much of the way on the long trail northward. There the lad, being so young, acquired Indian habits. Among other things, he learned the art of Indian fighting from the boys, with whom he engaged with lance and other weapons in warlike games, until "his body was punctured and scarified." Isaac became so attached to his Indian mother that he gladly would have stayed with her. Joseph Stevens ruined himself in procuring the redemption of his sons. He was compelled to make two journeys to Canada before he succeeded in bringing them back to Rutland.
A second raid on Rutland, August 3, 1724, resulted in the killing of three settlers. Three days later was fired almost the last shot of any war in Worces- ter County, and a woman, name unknown, pulled the trigger. Governor Hutchinson relates in his history : "On the 6th of August, 1724, four Indians came upon a small house in Oxford, which was built under a hill. They made a breach in the roof, and as one of them was attempting to enter, he received a shot in his belly from a courageous woman, the only person in the house, who had two muskets and two pistols charged and was prepared for all four. But they saw fit to retreat, carrying off the dead or wounded man."
The final shot, so far as anyone knows, was from the gun of a Canadian Indian in Athol, which wounded Jason Babcock and caused his captivity. A short time previously, Ezekiel Wallingford, one of the proprietors of the town, left the fort to protect his cornfield from the bears, and was shot in the thigh, breaking it, and making him an easy victim of a tomahawk. But these tragedies did not come until 1746, in one of the later French wars.
CHAPTER XV.
Nipmuck Country Becomes Worcester County
The Nipmuck country of central Massachusetts became Worcester County on July 10, 1731. The shire was formed of fourteen towns, thirteen towns of which are now within the borders of the county, the other, the town of Woodstock, which later was turned over to Connecticut in the process of straightening the boundary line between the states. The new shire was noteworthy for its relatively great area, and, as travel was reckoned in those days, its magnificent distances.
Its population, however, was insignificantly small. No records exist, so far as known, from which can be got even a close approximation of the number of its people. We know the only old towns were Lancaster, Brook- field and Mendon, and that for many years their growth had been checked by Indian troubles, and that these and other retarding influences had delayed the settlement of the other original towns. None of the latter had been peopled earlier than 1713, and some of them had not come into existence until well into the 1720's. Lunenburg, for instance, had only ten occupied houses as late as 1726. They had not had time to grow. Perhaps the county started life with five thousand white people. There may have been more, but not many more. It is not to be wondered at that many men in public life in the more populous communities nearer the coast looked askance at a plan to elevate to the dignity of a shire a region having a population of not more than five to the square mile.
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