February 29, 1704—After trekking 300 miles through winter snow and cold, a combined French-Indian war party of nearly 300 attacked the frontier town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, while the inhabitants were still fast asleep. With a night watchman away from his post and heavy snowdrifts muffling sound, the settlers inside the fort were taken completely by surprise.
By the end of the attack, 56 men, women and children lay dead; 109 were carried away into captivity; and half of this Connecticut River Valley town’s houses were burned.
I wrote “end” in the last sentence, but the ordeal had only begun for the survivors of the Deerfield Massacre.
I wrote “end” in the last sentence, but the ordeal had only begun for the survivors of the Deerfield Massacre.
In a certain sense, long after the English colonists had died, the vocabulary used to describe the experience continued to live on in American literature and, in a curious half-life, even classic Hollywood films.
I visited Deerfield in October 2001 (when I took this picture), only a month after another surprise attack in which Americans viewed scenes of burning and mourned their dead: the World Trade Center bombing. Talking with the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying, I relived my shock on 9/11 and my numbness in the days immediately afterward.
Some of the same feelings must have been experienced by the survivors of the Deerfield Massacre—human nature hasn’t changed all that much over three centuries.
The massacre formed just one incident in a long series of wars that took place between the English and French colonists, with Native-Americans assuming a complex, often dreaded, role.
I visited Deerfield in October 2001 (when I took this picture), only a month after another surprise attack in which Americans viewed scenes of burning and mourned their dead: the World Trade Center bombing. Talking with the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying, I relived my shock on 9/11 and my numbness in the days immediately afterward.
Some of the same feelings must have been experienced by the survivors of the Deerfield Massacre—human nature hasn’t changed all that much over three centuries.
The massacre formed just one incident in a long series of wars that took place between the English and French colonists, with Native-Americans assuming a complex, often dreaded, role.
In my high school, a troubled administrator demonstrated, in a small but telling way, why he had been deeply admired as a history teacher when he told our class one morning an excellent mnemonic device for recalling these assorted conflicts that almost nobody cared about anymore—the acronym WAGS, standing for King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War, and the Seven Years War.
Deerfield played a significant part early on in WAGS.
Deerfield played a significant part early on in WAGS.
In September 1675, Indian forces led by King Philip beat English settlers at Bloody Break, only two miles from Deerfield, then proceeded to massacre 64 Deerfield men. The town was abandoned twice before settlers finally were able to erect, with the help of stronger fortifications, a permanent settlement.
Or, at least, what looked permanent until the night of February 29, 1704.
The First “Long, Twilight Struggle”
Francis Parkman’s history of the period is called A Half Century of Conflict. In an unusual parallel, nearly three centuries later, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union might be described in the same way. And, with no end in sight to the West’s encounter with Islamic fundamentalism, I would argue that we live in an age that might last just as long.
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy memorably called on Americans to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” In the early years of his state, especially in Deerfield, citizens were asked to engage in a struggle of similar duration and uncertainty.
Though most Indian raids seldom reached the bloodbath levels of Deerfield, settlers were continually picked off one or two at a time, away from fortifications, when they were most isolated and vulnerable.
Or, at least, what looked permanent until the night of February 29, 1704.
The First “Long, Twilight Struggle”
Francis Parkman’s history of the period is called A Half Century of Conflict. In an unusual parallel, nearly three centuries later, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union might be described in the same way. And, with no end in sight to the West’s encounter with Islamic fundamentalism, I would argue that we live in an age that might last just as long.
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy memorably called on Americans to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” In the early years of his state, especially in Deerfield, citizens were asked to engage in a struggle of similar duration and uncertainty.
Though most Indian raids seldom reached the bloodbath levels of Deerfield, settlers were continually picked off one or two at a time, away from fortifications, when they were most isolated and vulnerable.
“This system of petty, secret, and transient attack put the impoverished colonies to an immense charge in maintaining a cordon of militia along their northern frontier--a precaution often as vain as it was costly,” observed Parkman.
The volume on Massachusetts in the justly famous “American Guide” series, produced by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, called Deerfield “a beautiful ghost,” representing “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and acute moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.”
I don’t think I’d go that far: after all, the town retains the tony prep school Deerfield Academy, the Yankee Candle headquarters (in nearby South Deerfield), and enough money made off of tourists to keep the tumbleweeds away.
The volume on Massachusetts in the justly famous “American Guide” series, produced by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, called Deerfield “a beautiful ghost,” representing “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and acute moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.”
I don’t think I’d go that far: after all, the town retains the tony prep school Deerfield Academy, the Yankee Candle headquarters (in nearby South Deerfield), and enough money made off of tourists to keep the tumbleweeds away.
But as I walked the mile-long stretch of Old Deerfield Street, with its carefully preserved colonial homes, I sensed something unique about the setting.
I didn't grasp what it was until I came across the statement by historian Richard Slotkin that, with its incessant demands for vigilance, "The frontier made Europeans into Americans."
The “Redeemed Captive” and the Unredeemed One
An entire literary genre evolved, a kind of spiritual crisis memoir, written by survivors of attacks by Native Americans: captivity narratives. The first I encountered in Carl Hovde’s brilliant American Literature class at Columbia University was Mary White Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, A Minister's Wife in New-England (1682).
The “Redeemed Captive” and the Unredeemed One
An entire literary genre evolved, a kind of spiritual crisis memoir, written by survivors of attacks by Native Americans: captivity narratives. The first I encountered in Carl Hovde’s brilliant American Literature class at Columbia University was Mary White Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, A Minister's Wife in New-England (1682).
These “captivity narratives” combined two literary forms: the jeremiad, or a call on the faithful to return to the way of truth before it’s too late, and a cracking good adventure story.
Another landmark of the form was produced by the most important Deerfield captive, the Reverend John Williams. His 1707 account of the massacre, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, became the colonial equivalent of a bestseller, going through six editions by the end of the eighteenth century.
Far more palpable than Williams’ gratitude to God for deliverance from his ordeal, however, was his revulsion at witnessing the slaughter of his wife and a couple of his children.
Another landmark of the form was produced by the most important Deerfield captive, the Reverend John Williams. His 1707 account of the massacre, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, became the colonial equivalent of a bestseller, going through six editions by the end of the eighteenth century.
Far more palpable than Williams’ gratitude to God for deliverance from his ordeal, however, was his revulsion at witnessing the slaughter of his wife and a couple of his children.
While the minister was one of 88 prisoners who had survived the forced march to Canada, and among the 59 eventually ransomed, he was horrified that his daughter Eunice was among the 29 captives who refused to return.
According to a penetrating analysis in Richard I. Melvoin’s New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield, Eunice and the 28 other intransigents were overwhelmingly young and female. Thus, they had few if any memories of the life and culture from which they had been snatched, and were more open to psychological manipulation by their captors.
Three years after the attack, the minister’s daughter had forgotten to speak English and her catechism. Nine years later she married a Caughnawaga Indian, thereafter going by the name of Marguerite A’ongote Gannenstenhawi—with its evocation of her new Catholic and Native-American identity, a double poke in the eye of the Puritans.
In 1740, a decade after her father’s death, Eunice/Marguerite was prevailed upon to visit Deerfield again with her husband, and made three more trips after that. On the one occasion when she stepped inside her old church in her “civilized” garb, “she impatiently discarded her gown and resumed her blanket,” wrote Parkman.
In their loathing of Eunice/Marguerite’s Catholicism, the Rev. Williams and Parkman sound an awful lot like late 20th-century parents ready to hire a deprogrammer to snatch a child from religious cults.
Yet another feeling, more alien now to a country in a post-civil rights era, also emerges in their accounts: fear of miscegenation. It’s the same panic, in a different setting, shared by Southern slaveholders over the possibility of mixture of blood with another race.
According to a penetrating analysis in Richard I. Melvoin’s New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield, Eunice and the 28 other intransigents were overwhelmingly young and female. Thus, they had few if any memories of the life and culture from which they had been snatched, and were more open to psychological manipulation by their captors.
Three years after the attack, the minister’s daughter had forgotten to speak English and her catechism. Nine years later she married a Caughnawaga Indian, thereafter going by the name of Marguerite A’ongote Gannenstenhawi—with its evocation of her new Catholic and Native-American identity, a double poke in the eye of the Puritans.
In 1740, a decade after her father’s death, Eunice/Marguerite was prevailed upon to visit Deerfield again with her husband, and made three more trips after that. On the one occasion when she stepped inside her old church in her “civilized” garb, “she impatiently discarded her gown and resumed her blanket,” wrote Parkman.
In their loathing of Eunice/Marguerite’s Catholicism, the Rev. Williams and Parkman sound an awful lot like late 20th-century parents ready to hire a deprogrammer to snatch a child from religious cults.
Yet another feeling, more alien now to a country in a post-civil rights era, also emerges in their accounts: fear of miscegenation. It’s the same panic, in a different setting, shared by Southern slaveholders over the possibility of mixture of blood with another race.
More than that, it speaks to a violation of hearth and home—a psychic and even physical rape—and the impotence of the white male protector of community and family order.
The Redemption Narrative on Film
That same disgust is the coiled spring that propels the plot of the great John Ford western, The Searchers. In that 1956 film, an Indian attack on the Edwards homestead at the edge of the wilderness leaves all dead but for two young daughters carried off by the war party.
At the heart of the Puritan venture into the New World was what minister Samuel Danforth called, in one of the most famous jeremiads, an “errand into the wilderness.”
The Redemption Narrative on Film
That same disgust is the coiled spring that propels the plot of the great John Ford western, The Searchers. In that 1956 film, an Indian attack on the Edwards homestead at the edge of the wilderness leaves all dead but for two young daughters carried off by the war party.
At the heart of the Puritan venture into the New World was what minister Samuel Danforth called, in one of the most famous jeremiads, an “errand into the wilderness.”
Yet the isolation of the wilderness not only afforded the colonists unfettered freedom to worship as they pleased but also exposed them to Satan’s temptations: desire, for sex and for vengeance for wrongs committed against them.
The religious element does not enter into the Ford film, but the same elements of the captivity narrative endure: homes in a fragile outpost between civilization and wilderness, where people long for freedom and a chance to advance in life, suddenly left smoking ruins (in a scene alluded to in George Lucas’ Star Wars); a young girl carried off to God-knows-what fate; and a long, often fruitless multiyear search to bring her back to her relatives.
Now, however, in a subtle shift, the captivity narrative morphs into a redemption narrative, with the emphasis now on a would-be savior who seeks not only to return a long-lost loved one but to redeem a family, a community, and especially his own heart hardened by bitterness.
The agent of that redemption is the Edwards’ uncle Ethan, with little of the Rev. Williams’ piety but every bit of his revulsion over the disturbing mixture of blood.
The religious element does not enter into the Ford film, but the same elements of the captivity narrative endure: homes in a fragile outpost between civilization and wilderness, where people long for freedom and a chance to advance in life, suddenly left smoking ruins (in a scene alluded to in George Lucas’ Star Wars); a young girl carried off to God-knows-what fate; and a long, often fruitless multiyear search to bring her back to her relatives.
Now, however, in a subtle shift, the captivity narrative morphs into a redemption narrative, with the emphasis now on a would-be savior who seeks not only to return a long-lost loved one but to redeem a family, a community, and especially his own heart hardened by bitterness.
The agent of that redemption is the Edwards’ uncle Ethan, with little of the Rev. Williams’ piety but every bit of his revulsion over the disturbing mixture of blood.
Ethan Edwards is surely one of the most problematic heroes in American culture. As embodied by John Wayne in perhaps the most complex role he ever took on, he is gifted with all the hardy self-reliance and know-how of the archetypal American frontiersman, but also cursed with a loner streak that has left him fatally unable to have a family of his own.
Mix into all of this Ethan’s guilt over his unacknowledged love for his brother’s wife and over his inability to prevent what the movie implies is her torture, rape and death. By the time Ethan learns that one of his nieces, Debbie, has become the squaw of the Native American mastermind of the raid, the rescuer has become an avenger ready to destroy what he now regards as his polluted flesh and blood—and whatever soul he himself has left.
The climax of the film shows Ethan finally catching up with his niece, years later, roughly seizing her and lifting her body toward the sky. The question is posed in its starkest terms now: Will the hero become the destroyer?
Mix into all of this Ethan’s guilt over his unacknowledged love for his brother’s wife and over his inability to prevent what the movie implies is her torture, rape and death. By the time Ethan learns that one of his nieces, Debbie, has become the squaw of the Native American mastermind of the raid, the rescuer has become an avenger ready to destroy what he now regards as his polluted flesh and blood—and whatever soul he himself has left.
The climax of the film shows Ethan finally catching up with his niece, years later, roughly seizing her and lifting her body toward the sky. The question is posed in its starkest terms now: Will the hero become the destroyer?
But suddenly, the presence of God so often missing from the film returns as the force of love. The white racist, the mirror image of Debbie's Indian husband, the appropriately named chief Scar, softens. With utter tenderness, Edwards says softly, “Let’s go home, Debbie.”
Like Ethan Edwards and the Rev. Williams, America in the age of terror looks to snatch back something seized from it—a dream of innocence, a moment of peace—and, as the anxious initial days turn to years, it struggles with feelings of resentment.
Like Ethan Edwards and the Rev. Williams, America in the age of terror looks to snatch back something seized from it—a dream of innocence, a moment of peace—and, as the anxious initial days turn to years, it struggles with feelings of resentment.
Facing the necessary task of remembering and rebuilding, we are less far removed than we imagine from our wilderness origins.