May 19, 1676 — the dawn raid on the Native fishing camp at Peskeompskut, one of the darkest days of King Philip's War.
I told you the Great Falls down there was a gathering place, older than memory. Now I have to tell you what happened there one spring morning, because you should know it, hard as it is.
The year is sixteen seventy-six, and all of New England is on fire with the war they call King Philip's War — the great, bloody uprising of the Native nations against the colonists who kept taking their land. It's the worst war, by share of people killed, in the whole history of this country. And that spring, hundreds of Native people — many of them women, children, and old folks, refugees driven from the fighting to the south — had gathered at the falls at Peskeompskut, at the old fishing place, to net the shad running upriver and try to feed themselves.
They thought they were safe up there. They were wrong. Before dawn on the nineteenth of May, a hundred and fifty English soldiers under a Captain William Turner crept up on the sleeping camp and opened fire into the wigwams in the dark. It was a slaughter — better than three hundred killed in a matter of minutes, most of them not warriors at all. Some drowned trying to escape over the falls in their canoes.
But it didn't end clean, the way these things never do. The fighting men from the other camps nearby heard the guns, and they came, and they fell on the soldiers as they retreated — and cut them up badly, and killed Captain Turner himself in the chase. And the town that grew up there later, they named it for him. Turners Falls. Named for the man who led the massacre.
So that lovely quiet water below the bridge — that's the place. I don't tell you this to spoil the view. I tell you because a road that runs a thousand years deep carries the dark with the beautiful, and the people who lived and died here have earned being remembered true. Drive on gentle now.
Photo: Paul Revere · Public domain
