Native+Americans+in+Deerfield+Mass.++Background+Information

Lesson 1  //Powcumtuck Tribe in Deerfield, Massachusetts//

The Pocumtuck people, whose homelands included the land that would eventually be named Deerfield by the English settlers, were connected culturally and through language to the Algonquian people. In addition to Pocumtuck, the Norowottuck, Sohoki, Abenaki, Mahican, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pennecook, Pigwacket, Pequot, and Mohegan were a part of the Algonquian "network."  The Pocumtucks moved seasonally through their homelands which were connected by a network of paths. They lived in wigwams, created palisaded villages, and, by the time of the birth of Christ, planted cornfields on the flood plain. The women were responsible for the agriculture and the raising of the children; the men hunted and fished for food. Their culture and their livlihood centered around the use of the land and they were dependent upon it. To guarantee sustenance, shelter, and security they killed animals, cut trees, and cleared and farmed lands to support populations that grew with the domestication of crops. Fire was the tool they employed to render seeds palatable, to make habitats for animals they ate and used for clothing and shelter, to ready land for planting, and to make travel easier. They used the land to survive.

 When on May 22, 1665, Dedham men came to the Connecticut River Valley to investigate "a tract of good land... about 12 or 14 miles from Hadley," they declared ownership to lands in a place where they were aware that "other people" had lived. Furthermore, they recognized that the Indians might well "clayme a title" to those lands. What appeared to the English to be a fertile and empty land was a country with a deep and complicated history. In the Native world, land was not "owned" individually but rather collectively and was shared; in the English world land possession meant wealth and was the major key to improving one's station in life. The English typically considered the Indians to be homeless nomads who could not own land since they did not "improve" it, while at the same time believing those same Indians could legally sell their land to eager English purchasers.

 Initially, however, contact between whites and Natives was peaceful. Starting with the first Connecticut River Valley colonization in the 1630s, Indians and English had lived side by side. The power balance, with the Indians assisting the settlers with needed corn supplies to stave off starvation and a fur trade beneficial to both sides, was maintained generally until the mid-to late 17th century. The frontier was active with trade and interaction between cultures - Indian and Indian and English and Indian.

 But the tensions were building in the second half of the 17th century. Over-hunting had resulted in depletion of the beavers. Native groups encroached upon other Native hunting lands in their efforts to satisfy the European demands for furs. European contact had resulted in unfamiliar diseases among the Indians with escalating higher death rates, circumstances which not only threatened the Native population, but also their faith in traditional beliefs and in the healers who were unable to help.

 The Pocumtucks were drawn into conflict with the Mohawks, which resulted in the Pocumtucks dispersing throughout Massachusetts. Some fled to Northampton to join the Nonotucks while others remained in other areas of their homelands. Little evidence has been found of Native presence in the 1671 English settlement of Deerfield. Resentment of the initial village by Natives was manifested in the burning of the town in September of 1675 by Indians allied with King Philip and by the attack at Bloody Brook on Deerfield men who had returned to harvest crops in the adjoining fields. Resettlement by the English took place seven years later in 1682 on the same piece of land. In the first fifty years of settlement, Deerfield was attacked by Indians more than thirty times, but the town was never abandoned again.

 In 1690 a palisade was constructed by the citizens after news of an Indian attack on Schenectady, New York reached the town. According to Pliny Arms (1778-1859) the palisade was "made of sticks of timber sharpened at the upper end and set in the ground with their edges in contact - they were about ten feet high." It was fourteen years before a wholesale attack on Deerfield occurred on February 29, 1704. The attack, led by French from Canada, was composed of forty-eight Frenchmen and 200 Indians: Hurons, Pigwackets, Penacooks, Pocumtucks, and Mohawks who, with the aid of a recent heavy snowfall, gained access to the palisaded center of the town. Forty-two Deerfield residents were killed plus five soldiers assigned to protect the town. In pursuit of the enemy in the north meadows, nine more Deerfielders lost their lives. The attackers lost eleven in the battle. Captives were taken, 109 men, women, and children, and marched north to Canada; only twenty-four men remained in the town, now truly an outpost, after the surviving women and children were sent to towns further south in the Valley. One of the captives was Elizabeth Price, who, on December 6, 1703 had married Andrew Stevens, "an Indian." About Mr. Stevens we know nothing more, but it does remind us that the Native presence was felt in the domestic life of Deerfield in the earliest years of the eighteenth century. The attack was another reminder that the town was on the edge of the frontier, the northernmost in the small settlements up the Connecticut River Valley from Long Island Sound.

 The 1704 raid on Deerfield was one of a series of joint military expeditions carried out by the French and Indians during the years 1702 to 1713 in the War of the Spanish Succession or Queen Anne's War. The attack was an effort by the French and Indians to halt the gradual expansion of English settlement and political control. Almost without exception, however, the English interpreted Indian assaults as expressions of mindless savagery or as divine retribution rather than as calculated assaults on the English way of life.

Haefeli, Evan and Kevin Sweeney, "Revisiting the Redeemed Captive: New Perspectives on the 1704 Attack on Deerfield," in //After King Philip's War, Presence and Persistence in Indian New England//. Colin G. Calloway, editor,. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1977, pp. 28-71.

 Jennings, Francis, //The Invasion of America, Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest.// New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976.

 Lepore, Jill, //The Name of War, King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity.// New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

 Melvoin, Richard I., //New England Outpost, War and Society in Colonial Deerfield.// New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989.

 Williams, John, edited by Edward W. Clark, //The Redeemed Captive.// Amherst, Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1976. ||