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OLD HOUSE IN DEERFIELD

This old house escaped the conflagration in 1704.

What was a clear claim? The Indians thought they had a clear claim, and warlike tribes like the Iroquois and the Creeks fought for that conviction. The English claimed the Mississippi Valley because they wanted it, and took advantage of the four international wars of the eighteenth century to make that claim good by further right of conquest. After the second war, by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, the first territory was clipped off from the French possessions; Acadia (Nova Scotia) passed to the English, and with it they acquired whatever the French claims had been to Newfoundland and Hudson Bay. At the end of the third war, in 1748, they were holding Louisburg; but gave it back. Then in 1754 came the great struggle of the French and Indian War, in which the English attacked the French on the upper Ohio, on Lake Ontario, at Louisburg, and finally at Quebec, all with triumphant success. The Canadian French were outnumbered five or six times to one in America, and their home government had its hands full with European and naval wars, and could not help them.

FRONTIER WARFARE

SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT, DEERFIELD

This monument stands on the common in Deerfield, on the site of the church of 1704.

All this fighting was not according to the nice, formal, observe-the-laws-of-war methods, such as are now followed between civilized nations: it was more like a campaign in the Balkans, or the amenities of the Zulus in Africa. Europeans were not particularly gentle in their warfare. The early colonies were planted when the Thirty Years’ War was raging in Germany, a war in which the unoffending peasants expected both sides to rob them of their little property, and then to torture them because they had no more to give. The Indians were not the only race that found pleasure in inflicting awful suffering on other human beings. The cultivated English colonists and the French trappers and hunters were not above taking scalps on occasion; and, though they did not torture their prisoners, allowed their Indian allies to indulge themselves in that amusement.

DEERFIELD MEMORIAL

This stone marks the grave of the victims of the Deerfield massacre on February 29, 1704.

GENERAL MONTCALM’S HEADQUARTERS AT QUEBEC

The French were better wood fighters than the English, and throughout these struggles had a disagreeable habit of raiding English settlements. Twice they captured villages within a day’s march of sacred Boston. Their most spectacular achievement was the raid upon Deerfield in 1704, upon which an epic poem might be written. Depict the French and Indians stealing two hundred miles through the frozen wilderness; the Puritans in Deerfield trusting to their stockade; the sudden dash at dawn; the shots, cries, screams; the Indians chopping away with their hatchets at Parson Williams’ front door, till they made a loophole through which to fire at the family; the file of captives quickly marshaled for the terrible northward trail; the valiant little band from Hatfield pursuing the Indians, many times their number, and getting a bad licking; the wrath and fear of all New England at this appearance of the fearful enemy!

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