Flashes of Panic

I am fascinated by the history of the places I live, if only because it shows the many connections between the small world I move around in and the larger outside world. This is why, on a recent used-book raid, I picked up a copy of John Demos’ The Unredeemed Captive.

The Unredeemed Captive starts out telling the story of John Williams, the popular and influential minister in the frontier town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Williams and most of his family were captured during the 1704 raid on Deerfield by French-directed Indians from Canada, sometimes known as the “Deerfield Massacre”. There was a skirmish some thirty years before, at a nearby waterway since known as Bloody Brook, and dozens of incidents up and down the river valley during the “French and Indian Wars”. In this raid, 48 residents of the town were killed and 112 taken captive, with 140 left “alive at home.”

Williams’ wife was killed on the journey back to Canada; Williams and four of his children were eventually released and returned to New England. Two other children were killed during the raid. It is the seventh child who turns out to be of principal interest to Demos: Eunice Williams never returned to New England to live. She “forgot” what English she had known (being barely old enough to talk at the time of the raid) and was adopted into an Indian tribe near Montreal, where she chose to stay for the rest of her relatively long life.

Here’s where things get even more interesting to me: the town where Eunice Williams lived out her life was called Kahnawake by Demos, but was given other spellings elsewhere, and I realized that Kenneth Roberts’ Rabble in Arms, one of my favorite books over the decades since I first read it, passed a chapter in “Caughnawaga”, an Indian town near Montreal. Roberts’ characters, who would pass through in spring of 1777, describe several Williamses among the town’s residents, a nod towards Eunice (who had only one living grandson, however, but was still alive herself along with two daughters in 1777). They also described an elderly “Mr. Tarbull” who told them he had been captured in Groton, and Demos often mentions a pair of “Tarbell” brothers from Groton who lived in Kahnawake.

That was one connection. But it wasn’t until I reached the section dealing with King George’s War that I realized that Ephraim Williams Jr., who gave his name to a particular college northwest of here, was one of Eunice’s cousins.