Leap Day Deerfield Massacre
1704 Raid on on the Massachusetts Frontier
On February 29, 1704, Abenaki warriors allied with the French during Queen Anne's War attack the English settlement at Deerfield, Masschusetts, taking over 100 prisoner.
On Leap Day in 1704, Abenaki warriors attacked Deerfield on the Massachusetts frontier, killing 48 colonists.
The settlers at Deerfield maintained a stockade around 10 acres. It was never really a proper fortress for a settlement of about 300 people.
In the preceding October of 1703, two men were ambushed out in the surrounding meadow. Though they fired upon their attackers, they were captured and taken to Canada. Such episodes made up part of the reality of the frontier, especially during the current Queen Anne’s War. Captives were sometimes redeemed for ransom. Some were never heard from again. In a few cases, some chose not to come back at all, having assimilated with their captors’ community.
Attacks on English settlements in Berwick, Maine; Exeter, New Hampshire; and Haverhill, Mass. were reported in February 1704. On February 24th, twenty “muskiteers” were assigned to the garrison at Deerfield, a distant outpost of English settlement in western Massachusetts, as a precaution.
In the pre-dawn hours of February 29th, a group of about 40 Abenaki men, slipped into Deerfield and routed the villagers, smashing doors and windows. The call to alarm woke the sleeping colonists, and some managed to leap from windows and run into the fields and woods for cover, even escaping to other settlements. Some hid in cellars. Others were killed, including two small children of minister John Williams, and a woman named Parthena, who was a family slave of Williams.
Williams, his wife, and surviving children were taken captive. In all, 112 were taken prisoner. Twenty died on the forced march to Canada, including a male slave who was murdered by the Abenaki. Williams’ wife was killed with the single stroke of a hatchet, perhaps because she was in a weakened condition having recently given birth, and was a liability to travel. Her infant was one of the Williams children killed back in Deerfield.
Eight weeks later, Williams arrived at a French fort in Canada, which was also a Jesuit missionary outpost. Three of his children were redeemed by local French families, and eventually released.
Between the Indians and the French, and the English who negotiated for release, many captives were released over the next few years. John Williams and two of his children were released and returned by ship to Boston in November 1706. He eventually returned to Deerfield, and wrote a famous account of his captivity.
His daughter, Eunice, who was 7 years old at the time of her capture, was held by the Mohawks at Kahnawake, a village near Montreal, where she assimilated with her captors’ community. At 16, she married a Mohawk man, whose French name was Francois Xavier Arosen, in a Roman Catholic ceremony. One of the native communities tied politically to the French in Canada, they had adopted the religion of the French as well. Eunice’s father, a Protestant minister, likely was as divided in his distress equally over his daughter having converted to Catholicism as he was over her marrying a Mohawk and resolving never to return to her New England community.
Eunice, whose adopted French name was Marguerite, though she was also known by different Kahnawake Indian names including A’ongote, gave birth to several children, only two of whom appear to have survived to adulthood. In later life, she and her husband returned for visits to her long-estranged family of siblings in New England, but she never lived among them again.
Today, Historic Deerfield, which maintains several museum houses representative of the 18th through 19th centuries, continues to commemorate the 1704 Leap Day raid on Deerfield, a pivotal moment in American colonial history.
Sources:
Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive (NY: Alfred A. Knopf) 1994
The WPA Guide to Massachusetts (Federal Writer’s Project, WPA. NY: Pantheon Books) 1983
Historic Deerfield website: http://www.historic-deerfield.org
