The 1704 Raid on Deerfield — the pre-dawn attack, and the captives marched 300 miles to Canada through the February snow.
Just south of here sits the old town of Deerfield, and I have to tell you what happened there, because it's the hardest story this trail carries — and it happened on this very path.
It was the dead of winter, the last night of February, seventeen-oh-four. Deerfield was the furthest-out English town on the whole frontier, a little stockade in the snow. And in the black hours before dawn, a war party came over the walls on drifts frozen hard as stone — French soldiers down from Canada, and Mohawk, Huron, and Abenaki fighters with them, better than two hundred strong. By the time the sun came up, near fifty townspeople lay dead and the houses were burning.
But the worst of it wasn't the fighting. It was after. They took a hundred and twelve captives — men, women, children, babies — and marched them north. Three hundred miles, in the teeth of a New England winter, on foot, over these very mountains, all the way to Canada. Many didn't survive the march; those who couldn't keep up in the snow didn't come home.
And here's the piece that haunts folks still. Some of those captives, once they reached Canada, chose to stay. A minister's own young daughter, Eunice Williams, was taken as a girl of seven, adopted by a Mohawk family, and grew up among them. She married a Mohawk man, took their faith, and when her heartbroken father came to ransom her back, she wouldn't come. She lived out her whole long life in Canada and died there, more than eighty years old. Her family in Massachusetts never got over it. That's the frontier for you — not a clean line at all. A place where people got carried across, and sometimes chose the other side. Drive on easy. That snow's a long time melted, but the story never quite does.
Photo: Historical Perspective 2 · CC BY 4.0
