Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
When we have realized the awful pang in a mother's heart, wakened from sleep by that shrill, triumphant yell of the Indian, and knowing that in a moment she will see her children's faces covered with the blood and brains from their crushed skulls, we shall have nothing more to learn from Indian warfare. How many mothers felt that pang in the pale dawn of that frosty morning in Deerfield?
In consequence, the farm was sold after the death of the grandfather, and the home broken up. The mother with her two children, went to the neighboring village of Charlemont on the banks of the Deerfield. There the elder son took up his residence with his guardian and relative, a man of position and influence in the community, who was the owner of a large farm.
The building of Fort Shirley in 1744 and the naming it after the new Governor, as well as the building a little later of the two forts to the westward, Fort Pelham in Rowe and Fort Massachusetts in what is now North Adams, all within a couple of miles of the new boundary line, showed a concern of the colony for its now greatly curtailed northern limits, as well as a much greater concern for the defence of the scattered settlements west of the Connecticut river from the French and Indians, who had several well-trod war-paths to the English settlements on the Connecticut and the Deerfield.
The famous massacre and burning of Deerfield took place on September 12, the surviving inhabitants fleeing to Hatfield, leaving their town in ruins. Hatfield, Northfield, Springfield, and Westfield were attacked in turn, and though the defense was sometimes successful, more often the defenders were ambushed and killed.
One Ebenezer Hawks, shooting partridges, came so near the ambushed warriors that they could not resist the temptation of killing and scalping him. This alarmed the haymakers and the children, who ran for their lives towards a mill on a brook that entered Deerfield River, fiercely pursued by about fifty Indians, who caught and scalped a boy named Amsden.
Few of the whites escaped. They fought bravely, and killed a great many of the Indians, but were nearly all slain. Captain Mosely marched from Deerfield to reinforce Captain Lathrop. Arriving too late, he was compelled to sustain the onset of the whole force of the enemy, until Major Treat came to his relief, and put the Indians to flight.
In Connecticut, there were towns along the coast, some of them respectable, but in the interior all was a wilderness beyond Hartford. On Connecticut River, settlements had proceeded as far up as Deerfield, and Fort Dummer had been built near where is now the south line of New Hampshire.
I have no means of judging what may have been the experience in Deerfield, Mass., for instance; but I am confident that many a mechanic's daughter, and indeed many young women of much higher position in life, would consider her lot a fortunate one in becoming the wife of a farmer whose homestead lay on the beautiful street of this old village.
Captain Mosely had been left in the garrison at Deerfield with seventy men, intending to go the next day in search of the Indians. As he was but five miles from the scene of the massacre, he heard the firing, and immediately marched to the rescue of his friends. But he was too late. They were all, before his arrival, silent in death.
Later still, only three years before the birth of Benjamin, the town of Deerfield was attacked and burned by these savage tribes, instigated and led on by the French, and "upwards of forty persons were slain, and more than a hundred were made prisoners."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking