Posted on 02/28/2004 10:21:31 AM PST by Pharmboy
On the Old Burying Ground in Deerfield, Mass., stands a four-foot-tall grassy mound with a gravestone. The inscription on one side simply says 1704. It is a reminder of the 50 men, women and children who died that year in a predawn raid by the French and Indians on Deerfield. The village was then the northwesternmost town in New England.
This weekend is the 300th anniversary of the raid on Feb. 29, 1704, popularly known as the Deerfield Massacre. The town is focusing not on the destruction of the village but on the 112 survivors and their captors: Canadian-born nobles, enlisted militiamen and American Indian warriors from the Pennacook, Mohawk, Huron and Iroquois of the Mountains.
The story is complicated.
"The traditional way of looking at this event was as a military event, but the value of it historically is cultural," said Philip Zea, president of Historic Deerfield Inc., Deerfield's museum of Connecticut River valley history and culture. "Many players came together on that landscape that day and what happened to them then and afterward has some application to today's headlines. We are trying to illustrate the value of teaching history today as a way of looking at all sides of an event."
Mr. Zea and Suzanne Flynt, the curator of the Memorial Hall Museum, a museum of local and Native American history in Deerfield, will open their first joint exhibition tomorrow at Deerfield's Flynt Center.
"Remembering 1704: Context and Commemoration of the Deerfield Raid" presents captivity narratives, French Canadian historical artifacts, vintage photography, contemporary Native American films and art to show how the telling of the 1704 story has changed, century by century. It tracks the construction of the local Anglo-American identity and the stereotyping of American Indians in the New England region.
Eight Indians and two Frenchmen were killed during the raid. The surviving captors marched their captives through 3 feet of snow almost 300 miles north to Montreal. Some 88 captives made it; the others died en route, many hacked to death when they couldn't keep up with the pace of the forced march. Once the nearly starving group got to Canada, it split up.
Most of the Indians sold their prisoners to the French, who ransomed about 60 people back to the British over a three-year period. A few people fled or escaped. Of the Deerfielders who stayed in Canada, several girls eventually married French or native men. Seven young girls were taken in by the Mohawks at Kahnawake, a village near Montreal.
"History changes," Ms. Flynt said. "It's not static. There are different ways of remembering things."
The show, which will continue through April 3, will include a few predictable items: the door of the Old Indian House, which survived the raid but whose door has deep hatchet marks from 1704; the Rev. John Williams's Geneva Bible (preferred to the St. James version by the Puritans); a pair of 300-year-old snowshoes; a two-handled silver cup owned by Deerfield's first school mistress, who had rescued her class in an earlier Indian raid; and a piece of blood-stained linen from a Deerfield survivor that was passed down in a Yankee family. (Mr. Zea calls it "Deerfield's shroud of Turin.")
The show is also full of surprises. Eunice Williams, the 7-year-old daughter of Reverend Williams, the village's pastor, refused to be ransomed after she reached Canada, despite her father's repeated efforts. Known as the "unredeemed captive," she married a Mohawk named Arosen and they lived in Kahnawake. In the 1740's, she and her family returned to the Connecticut River valley three times to visit her English family.
The show has the gifts she and her husband took to her brother, the Rev. Stephen Williams of Longmeadow, Mass.: a bullet pouch decorated with porcupine quills, a woven wool sash, a painted hide tobacco pouch and a red slate gorget, a ceremonial ornament. "These gifts testify to the bonds created between English and native families in the aftermath of 1704," Ms. Flynt said.
Early in the 20th century, after Elizabeth Sadoques Mason heard stories about her ancestor, Eunice Williams, she wrote a paper on Eunice Williams's descendants in 1922. It was subsequently published, and the show has photographs of several generations of these descendants, beginning in 1872, all borrowed from private collections.
Such friendly relations among supposed enemies on the colonial frontier were more common than one might suspect. Evan Haefeli, a history professor at Tufts University, and Kevin Sweeney, a history professor at Amherst College, recently published a definitive new account of the raid: "Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). Mr. Sweeney will speak Sunday in Deerfield.
The authors reconstruct the events surrounding the raid from multiple points of view. They also explore the motivations of the various players, from Paris to Boston. Louis XIV's ministers in Canada, for example, were trying to prevent further English colonization north of Massachusetts, so they supported the raid.
The French government had many willing fighters: nobles who were officers born in Canada wanted to prove themselves in war and win promotions. There were working-class French immigrants who enlisted in militias and French Canadian woodsmen trained in the fur trade, who knew how to live in the snow with little food and no shelter. There were also Catholic missionaries in Canada who wanted to convert the English Protestants.
And the French wanted more people for their tiny settlements, to be servants, farmers and laborers. The English settlers knew how to build sawmills and weave fabrics; they were useful captives to have.
As the authors point out, the Indians who participated in the raid were allies, not subordinates, of the French, but each tribe had its own reasons for participating. Some wanted captives they could use as slaves or for ransom. For them, the English were much better alive than dead.
Some were seeking captives for adoption, which they called "mourning war" captives. Indian women demanded raids to replenish the tribe after the loss of a family member. This need became particularly acute after the smallpox epidemic of 1701. Some wanted plunder and revenge, because the English had taken their rich farmland in the Connecticut River Valley and they had been forced to move east, west and north. Others wanted scalps.
The English became involved in internal political disputes that delayed the return of several captives.
Starting Sunday, you can read all sides of the story on a new Web site: www.1704.deerfield.history.museum.
Not quite sure how Mr. Zea separates out "military" from "cultural" since--especially at that time--military issues were interwoven with daily existence. Hmm...libs re-writing history. Again. Well, at least the writer admits to it.
This house--here depicted during the attack--still stands in Deefield.
Hahahaha... the Puritans probably disliked the "St. James" Bible because it was in Greek and didn't have the other three Gospels :-)
I find this stuff absolutely fascinating. The massacre, capture, northern trek and what eventually happened to these people would seem to be a great story for a screenplay.
So do I! Thanks for the article.
Please rewrite this piece including/creating only facts that place all blame on the evil, wealthy white Christians and describe the Indians as noble, peaceloving, spiritual helpers, interested only in the sacred aspects of trees and other, well, sacred things.
Make no mention of the whiskey stolen and consumed by these Indians and it's effect on them nor the brutal way they treated their non-sacred squaws. Include only facts that make the Indians fit the current day stereotype and fit the historical revisionism objectives of the NYT.
To paraphrase your comment: history changes, facts don't. Ms. Flynt.
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