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The Conquest of New France - A chronicle of the colonial wars by George McKinnon Wrong
page 32 of 161 (19%)
children. The village of Deerfield, on the northwestern frontier
of Massachusetts, consisted of a wooden meeting-house and a
number of rough cabins which lodged the two or three hundred
inhabitants. On a February night in 1704 savages led by a young
member of the Canadian noblesse, Hertel de Rouville, approached
the village silently on snowshoes, waited on the outskirts during
the dead of night, and then just before dawn burst in upon the
sleeping people. The work was done quickly. Within an hour after
dawn the place had been plundered and set on fire, forty or fifty
dead bodies of men and women and children lay in the village, and
a hundred and eleven miserable prisoners were following their
captors on snowshoes through the forest, each prisoner well
knowing that to fall by the way meant to have his head split by a
tomahawk and the scalp torn off. When on the first night one of
them slipped away, Rouville told the others that, should a
further escape occur, he would burn alive all those remaining in
his hands. The minister of the church at Deerfield, the Reverend
John Williams, was a captive, together with his wife and five
children. The wife, falling by the way, was killed by a stroke of
a tomahawk and the body was left lying on the snow. The children
were taken from their father and scattered among different bands.
After a tramp of two hundred miles through the wilderness to the
outlying Canadian settlements, the minister in the end reached
Quebec. Every effort was made, even by his Indian guard, to make
him accept the Roman Catholic faith, but the stern Puritan was
obdurate. His daughter, Eunice, on the other hand, caught young,
became a Catholic so devoted that later she would not return to
New England lest the contact with Protestants should injure her
faith. She married a Caughnawaga Indian and became to all outward
appearance a squaw. Williams himself lived to resume his career
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