The Raid on Deerfield: February Twenty-Nine, Seventeen Oh Four

Before dawn on February twenty-ninth, seventeen oh four, the frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts was asleep. Scouts had checked the perimeter. The night watch had fallen asleep. Deep snow had drifted against the palisade walls high enough that attackers could walk over them.

A force of approximately three hundred men, fifty French soldiers and two hundred fifty Native American warriors under the command of Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, had snowshoed three hundred miles south from Montreal through the winter wilderness. They had waited in the cold outside the palisade until they were certain the village was unguarded. Then they poured over the walls.

In the attack that followed, forty-seven or forty-eight villagers were killed. One hundred twelve were taken prisoner and marched northward through brutal winter conditions toward Canada. Those who could not keep up were killed along the way. About twenty captives died on the march. The village itself was partly burned.

Among the captives was the Reverend John Williams, Deerfield's Puritan minister. Williams survived the march and was held for more than two years in French-controlled Montreal, where the French attempted to ransom high-value English prisoners. He was finally released in seventeen oh six and published an account of his captivity the following year, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, which became one of the most widely read books in colonial New England.

But his daughter Eunice was not redeemed. Seven years old at the time of the raid, Eunice Williams was adopted by the Mohawk community of Kahnawake near Montreal. She converted to Catholicism, took a Mohawk name, and married a Mohawk man. Her father and siblings spent decades urging her to return. She refused, every time. She visited her English relatives occasionally as an old woman, dressed in Mohawk clothing, speaking little English. She died among the Mohawk in seventeen eighty-five, having chosen, over a lifetime, which world was hers.

The raid on Deerfield was part of Queen Anne's War, the North American theater of a European conflict. It was one of dozens of such raids, but it became the most famous because of Williams's memoir and because of Eunice's decision, which New England never quite got over.