..... By far the greater part of the red refugees, however, joined the Canadian tribes. Here Catholicism gained a firm hold on childlike imaginations never captured by the austerites of Puritanism.... The Jesuits, moreover, told the Indian that the killing of heretics would assure his soul a place in Paradise, and the French military offered him immediate mundane reward for prisoners taken after war between France and England.

Only one had foreseen this when, soon after the might of the River tribes had been broken at Peskeompscut, a few of the hardest Deerfielders came back to raise new cabins on their blackened cellar holes. Even before the fresh los weathered, the old dread war whoop rent the autumn woodlands, and redskins leading a party of frenchmen burst upon the village, captured most of the people, and carried them into th forest where, in consternation, they saw many of their Hatfield neighbors tied to the trees. Then began the fist of those weary marches up the River to bondage taken by River folk during the next eighty years. In this party were twelve children not one over eight years old. (see note below) Night after night they were spread-eagled on the ground and there staked out by thongs on wrists and ankle - a torture in itself - only to be forced to rise morning for the continued march up the River and it's tributary until in January all, except two weaklings murdered enroute, at least arrived in Canada.

Note: Mary, Martha and Sarah Waite; Nathaniel and Mary Foote; Sarah and another Coleman child; two Gillett children; Samuel Kellogg, Abigail Bartholomew, and Abigail Allis, whose grandmother, mother of young William killed in the Falls Fight, had that day been scalped.

To submit an article of this type, you may use the mailbox below.
Please place in the Subject Line:
WEBPAGE-HISTORY