Review: "The Deerfield Massacre," James L. Swanson

By Paul Carrier

In The Deerfield Massacre, James L. Swanson's wide-ranging examination of the 1704 French and Indian raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, Swanson claims that the event once was "the most famous episode in early American history." Now, he writes, it has been forgotten.

Whether the devastating attack on the tiny settlement ever was better-known than anything else that happened in colonial America is debatable. But quibbling aside, there's no denying that what occurred in Deerfield in the predawn hours of the last day of February 1704 once held a much more prominent place in American memory than it does today.

The key facts are well-documented. Close to 50 French soldiers and militiamen from New France (Canada) and about 240 Indigenous warriors allied with the French invaded the palisaded village 100 miles west of Boston under cover of darkness. The attackers killed dozens of residents, burned several homes and seized more than 100 captives — men, women and children — who were forcibly marched 300 miles north, to New France. Some died or were murdered en route.

The Deerfield raid was one of many such attacks along the borderlands between New France and New England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In part, they were an extension of European conflicts between Britain and France. As Swanson points out, however, the Deerfield attackers had motives of their own, which transformed a seemingly random display of wanton violence into a carefully planned act of war.

For the French, the raid was “part of an offensive move designed to stop English expansion” into French territory, Swanson writes. The Indigenous participants had various motives. Warring against the English allowed tribes to enjoy French patronage. Moreover, natives who had been displaced from lands in the Deerfield area sought revenge against the English. And combatants from some tribes hoped to adopt captives as replacements for deceased tribal members. Captives also were “valuable commodities” to Native captors, who could use them as servants or slaves, sell them to the French, or ransom them to the English.

The raid quickly assumed a rarified spot in the annals of warfare along the early American frontier, largely because of the wildly popular “captivity narrative” written by John Williams. The Puritan minister of Deerfield, Williams was captured in the 1704 assault along with much of his family, but he later returned to New England, to great acclaim. Williams’ perspective was hostile toward Indigenous people, but even more vitriolic toward the Catholicism of the French and their allies.

Although many captives made their way home over time, others stayed behind in New France, as adopted members of Indigenous or French communities. Williams’ daughter Eunice married a Mohawk man in New France and refused to return to Deerfield, except for occasional visits after her father had died. (Eunice’s mother was killed during the march to New France.)

I had a working knowledge of the Deerfield raid before I read Swanson’s book because I have genealogical connections to it,  on both the French and Puritan sides. But The Deerfield Massacre is enlightening nonetheless. Swanson does not provide much new information about the raid itself, although he does place it in the context of earlier conflicts in the area. And he sheds a great deal of light on subsequent developments and evolving attitudes.

For example, The Deerfield Massacre pays considerable attention to the fate of the John Sheldon House, later known as the Old Indian House, which was built in Deerfield at the end of the 17th century. A large, imposing structure with a heavily reinforced front door, the house survived the 1704 raid intact. So did its door, built with double planks of lumber and studded with heavy nails. The door was scarred by tomahawk gouges and it has a gaping hole through which a gun was fired, killing one of the inhabitants.

By the 1840s, the then-owner of the house had decided to tear it down or sell it, prompting local activists to launch a botched fundraising campaign. The house was demolished in 1848, but the door, revered locally as what Swanson calls a “holy relic” dubbed the Indian House Door, was preserved.

Then local preservationists, still lamenting the loss of the house,  suffered another setback. In 1863, a newcomer to Deerfield somehow managed to quietly sell the Indian House Door to a Boston-area antiquarian. The door was on its way to its new home before agitated townspeople learned what had happened. It took years, but Deerfield eventually reclaimed its cherished artifact, only to court disaster by displaying it at a local hotel. The hotel caught fire in 1877, but local men rushed in and saved the door, which is now on display in a Deerfield museum. Seeing it firsthand is an electrifying experience.

Swanson goes on to discuss a 1910 movie filmed in Deerfield, historical pageants held there in the early years of the 20th century, the racist tropes of the “colonial revival” movement and the eventual development of Deerfield as a tourist destination, which it remains today. He notes that public and scholarly attitudes toward the raid have changed greatly over time, thanks to the late 19th-century recognition of the Canadian perspective on the raid and a newfound respect in the 21st-century for the Indigenous people who participated in it. Local museum references to “savages,” for example, are now a thing of the past.