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Fall
the towns settled by Englishmen in the midst of Indians, none was more
thoroughly peaceful in its aims and origin than Deerfield, in the old Pocumtuck
valley. Here under the giant trees of the primeval forest the whitehaired Eliot
prayed, and beside the banks of the sluggish stream he gathered as nucleus for
the town the roving savages upon whom his gospel message had made a deep
impression. Quite naturally, therefore, the men of Pocumtuck were not disquieted
by news of Indian troubles. With the natives about them they had lived on
peaceful terms for many years, and it was almost impossible for them to
believe that they would ever come to shudder at the mere presence of redskins.
Yet history tells us, and Deerfield to-day bears witness to the fact, that no
town in all the colonies suffered more at the hands of the Indians than did this
peaceful village in Western Massachusetts.
In 1702 King William
died, and "good" Queen Anne reigned in his stead. Following closely upon the
latter event came another war between France and England, a conflict which, as
in the reign of William and Mary, renewed the hostilities between the French and
English colonies in America. At an early date, accordingly, the settlement of
Deerfield discovered that it was to be attacked by the French. At once measures
were taken to strengthen the fortifications of the town, and to prepare, so far
as possible, for the dreaded event.
WILLIAMS HOUSE, DEERFIELD, MASS.
The blow fell on the night of the twenty-ninth of February, 1704, when Major
Hertel de Rouville, with upwards of three hundred and forty French and Indians,
arrived at a pine bluff overlooking Deerfield meadow, about two miles north of
the village – a locality now known as Petty's Plain. Here he halted, to await
the appropriate hour far an attack, and it was not until early morning that,
leaving their packs upon the spot, his men started forward for their terrible
work of destruction. Rouville took great pains not to alarm the sentinels in his
approach, but the precaution was unnecessary, as the watch were unfaithful, and
had retired to rest. Arriving at the fortifications, he found the snow drifted
nearly to the top of the palisades, and his entire party entered the place
undiscovered, while the whole population were in profound sleep.
Quietly distributing
themselves in parties, they broke in the doors of the houses dragged out the
astonished inhabitants, killed such as resisted, and took prisoner the majority
of the remainder, only a few escaping from their hands into the woods. The house
of Reverend John
Williams was
assaulted at the beginning of the attack. Awakened from sleep, Mr.
Williams
leaped from his bed, and running to the door found the enemy entering. Calling
to two soldiers who lodged in the house, he sprang back to his bedroom, seized a
pistol, cocked it, and presented it at the breast of an Indian who had followed
him. It missed fire, and it was well,
for the room was thronged in an instant, and he was seized, bound without being
allowed the privilege of dressing, and kept standing in the cold for an hour.
Meanwhile, the savages amused themselves by taunting him, swinging their
hatchets over him and threatening him. Two of his children and a
negro woman
were then taken to the door and butchered. Mrs.
Williams was
allowed to dress, and she and her five children were taken captives. Other
houses in the village were likewise attacked, one of them being defended by
seven men, for whom the women inside cast bullets while the fight was in
progress. But the attacking force was an overpowering one, and De Rouville and
his men had by sunrise done their work most successfully with torch and
tomahawk. The blood of forty-nine murdered men, women and children reddened the
snow. Twenty-nine men, twenty-four women, and fifty-eight children were made
captive, and in a few hours the spoil-encumbered enemy were en route for Canada.
Through the
midwinter snow which covered the fields the poor captives marched out on their
terrible pilgrimage. Two of the prisoners succeeded in escaping, whereupon Mr.
Williams was
ordered to inform the others that if any more slipped away death by fire would
be visited upon those who remained. The first night's lodgings were provided for
as comfortably as circumstances would permit, and all the able-bodied among the
prisoners were made to sleep in
barns. On the second day's march Mr.
Williams was
permitted to speak with his poor
wife, whose youngest child had been born only a few weeks before, and to
assist her on her journey.
"On the way," says
the pastor, in his famous book,
"The Redeemed Captive," "we discoursed on the happiness of those who had a right
to an house not made with hands eternal in the heavens; and God for a father and
friend; as also it was our reasonable duty quietly to submit to the will of God,
and to say, 'The will of the Lord be done.'" Thus imparting to one another their
heroic courage and Christian strength and consolation, the captive couple
pursued their painful way.
At last the poor
woman announced the gradual failure of her strength, and during the short time
she was allowed to remain with her husband, expressed good wishes and prayers
for him and her children. The narrative proceeds: "She never spake any
discontented word as to what had befallen her, but with suitable expressions
justified God in what had happened. . . . We soon made a halt, in which time my
chief surviving master came up, upon which I was put into marching with the
foremost, and so made my last farewell of my dear wife, the desire of my eyes,
and companion in many mercies and afflictions. Upon our
separation from each other, we asked for each other grace sufficient for
what God should call us to."
For a short time
Mrs.
Williams
remained where her husband had left her, occupying her leisure in reading her
Bible. He, as was necessary, went on, and soon had to ford a small and rapid
stream, and climb a high mountain on its other side. Reaching the top very much
exhausted, he was unburdened of his pack. Then his
heart went down the steep after his wife. He entreated his master to let
him go down and help her, but his desire was refused. As the prisoners one after
another came up he inquired for
her, and at length the news of her death was told to him. In wading the river
she had been thrown down by the water and entirely submerged.
Yet after great
difficulty
she had succeeded in reaching the bank, and had penetrated
to the foot of the mountain. Here, however,
her master had become discouraged with the idea of her maintaining the march,
and burying his tomahawk in her head he left her dead. Mrs.
Williams
was the daughter of Reverend Eleazer Mather, the first minister of Northampton –
an educated, refined, and noble woman. It is pleasant, while musing upon her sad
fate, to recall that her body was found and brought back to Deerfield, where,
long years after, her husband was laid by her side. And there to-day sleeps the
dust of the pair beneath stones which inform the stranger of the interesting
spot.
Others of the captives were killed upon the journey as convenience required. A
journal kept by Stephen
Williams,
the pastor's son, who was only eleven years old when captured, reflects in an
artless way every stage of the terrible journey:
"They travelled," he
writes, "as if they meant to kill us all, for they travelled thirty-five or
forty miles a day. . . . Their manner was, if any loitered, to kill them. My
feet were very sore, so I thought they would kill me also."
When the first
Sabbath arrived, Mr.
Williams was
allowed to preach. His text was taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the
verse in which occurs the passage, "My virgins and my young men have gone into
captivity."
Thus they
progressed, the life of the captives dependent in every case upon their ability
to keep up with the party. Here an innocent child would be knocked upon the head
and left in the snow, and there some poor woman dropped by the way and killed by
the tomahawk. Arriving at White River, De Rouville divided his forces, and the
parties took separate routes to Canada. The group to which Mr. Williams was
attached went up white River, and proceeded, with various adventures, to Sorel
in Canada, to which place some of the captives had preceded him. In Canada, all
who arrived were treated by the French with great humanity, and Mr. Williams
with marked courtesy. He proceeded to Chambly, thence to St. Francis on the St.
Lawrence, afterward to Quebec, and at last to Montreal, where Governor Vaudreuil
accorded him much kindness, and eventually redeemed him from savage hands.
Mr. Williams's
religious experiences in Canada were characteristic of the times. He was there
thrown among Romanists, a sect against which he entertained the most profound
dislike – profound to the degree of inflammatory, conscientiousness, not to say
bigotry. His Indian master was determined he should go to church, but he would
not, and was once dragged there, where, he says, he "saw a great confusion
instead of any Gospel order." The Jesuits assailed him on every hand, and gave
him but little peace. His master at one time tried to make him kiss a crucifix,
under the threat that he would dash out his brains with a hatchet if he should
refuse. But he did refuse, and had the good fortune to save his head as well as
his conscience. Mr. Williams's own account of his stay in Canada is chiefly
devoted to anecdotes of the temptations to Romanism with which he was beset by
the Jesuits. His son Samuel was almost persuaded to embrace the faith of Rome,
and his daughter Eunice was, to his great chagrin, forced to say prayers in
Latin. But, for the most, the Deerfield captives proved intractable, and were
still aggressively Protestant when, in 1706,
Mr.
Williams
and all his children (except Eunice, of whom we shall say more anon), together
with the other captives up to the number of fifty-seven, embarked on board a
ship sent to Quebec by Governor Dudley, and sailed for Boston.
A committee of the pastor's people met their old clergyman upon his landing at
Boston, and invited him to return to the charge from which he had, nearly three
years before, been torn. And Mr.
Williams
had the courage to accept their offer, notwithstanding the fact that the war
continued with unabated bitterness. In 1707 the town voted to build him a house
"as big as Ensign Sheldon's, and a back room as big as may be thought
convenient." This house is still standing (1902), though Ensign Sheldon's, the
"Old Indian House in Deerfield," as it has been popularly
called, was
destroyed more than half a century ago. The Indian House stood at the northern
end of Deerfield Common, and exhibited to its latest day the marks of the
tomahawk left upon its front door in
the attack of 1704, and the perforations made by the balls inside. The door is
still preserved, and is one of the most interesting relics now to be seen in
Memorial Hall, Deerfield.
For more than twenty
years after his return from captivity, Mr. Williams served his parish
faithfully. He took into his new house a new wife, by wham he had several
children; and in this same house he passed peacefully away June 12, 1729, in the
sixty-fifth year of his age, and the forty-fifth of his ministry.
Stephen
williams, who
had been taken captive when a lad of eleven, was redeemed in 1705 with his
father. In spite of the hardships to which he had been so early exposed, he was
a fine strong boy when he returned to Deerfield, and he went on with his rudely
interrupted education to such good. effect that he graduated from Harvard in
1713 at the age of twenty. In 1716 he settled as minister at Longmeadow, in
which place he died in 1872. Yet, his manhood was not passed without share in
the wars of the time, for he was chaplain in the Louisburg expedition in 1745,
and in the regiment of Colonel Ephraim
Williams in
his fatal campaign in 1755, and again in the Canadian campaign of 1756. The
portrait of him which is here given was painted about 1748, and is now to be
seen in the hall of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, within fourscore
rods of the place where the boy captive was born, and from which he was carried
as a tender child into captivity.
It has been said
that one of the greatest trials of Mr. Williams's stay in Canada was the
discovery that his little daughter,
Eunice, had been taught by her Canadian captors to say prayers in Latin. But
this was only the beginning of the sorrow of the good man's life. Eunice was a
plastic little creature, and she soon adopted not only the religion, but also
the manners and customs of the Indians among whom she
had fallen. In fact and feeling she became a daughter of the Indians, and
there among them she married, on arriving at womanhood, an Indian by whom she
had a family of children. A few years after the war she made her first visit to
her Deerfield relatives, and subsequently she came twice to Massachusetts
dressed in Indian costume. But all the inducements held out to her to remain
there were in vain. During her last visit she was the subject of many
prayers and lengthy sermonising on the part
of her clerical relatives, an address delivered at Mansfield August 1, 1741, by
Solomon
Williams,
A. M., being frankly in her behalf. A portion of this sermon has come down to
us, and offers a curious example of the eloquence of the time: "It
has pleased God," says the worthy minister, "to incline her, the last
summer and now again of her own accord, to make a visit to her friends; and this
seems to encourage us to hope that He designs to answer the many prayers which
have been put up for her."
But in spite of these many prayers, and in spite, too, of the fact that the
General Court of Massachusetts granted Eunice and her family a piece of land on
condition that they would remain in New England, she refused on the ground that
it would endanger her soul. She lived and died in
savage life, though
nominally a convert to Romanism. Out of her singular fate has grown another
romance, the marvel of later times. For from her descended Reverend Eleazer
Williams,
missionary to the Indians at Green Bay, Wisconsin, who was in 1851 visited by
the Due de Joinville, and told that he was that Dauphin (son of Louis XVI. and
Marie
Antoinette),
who, according to history, died in prison June 9, 1795. In spite of the fact
that the evidence of this little prince's death was as strong as any which can
be found in history in relation to the death of Louis, his father, or of Marie
Antoinette,
his mother, the strange story – first published in Putnam's Magazine for
February, 1853 gained general credence, even Mr. Williams himself coming
gradually to believe it. As a matter of fact, however, there was proved to be a
discrepancy of eight years between the dates
of Williams's and the Dauphin's birth, and nearly every part of the clergyman's
life was found to have been spent in quite, a commonplace way. For as a boy,
Eleazer
Williams
lived with Reverend Mr. Ely, on the Connecticut River, and his kinsman, Doctor
Williams,
of Deerfield, at once asserted that he remembered him very well at all stages of
his boyhood.
Governor Charles K.
Williams,
of Vermont, writing from Rutland under date February 26, 1853, said of the
Reverend Eleazer and his "claims" to the throne of France, "I never had any
doubt that
Williams
was of Indian extraction, and a descendant of Eunice
Williams.
His father and mother were both of them at my father's house, although I cannot
ascertain definitely the year. I consider the whole story a humbug, and believe
that it will
be exploded in the course of a few months." As a matter of fact, the story has
been exploded, – though the features of the Reverend Eleazer
Williams,
when in the full flush of manhood, certainly bore a remarkable resemblance to
those of the French kings from whom his descent was claimed. His mixed blood
might account for this, however. Williams's paternal grandfather was an English
physician, – not of the Deerfield family at all, – and his grandmother the
daughter of Eunice
Williams and
her redskin mate. His father was Thomas
Williams,
captain in the British service during the American Revolution, and his mother a
Frenchwoman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was part English, part Yankee, part
Indian, and part French, a combination sufficiently complex to account, perhaps,
even for an unmistakably Bourbon chin.
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