THE DEERFIELD MASSACRE

A consequence of centuries-long imperial rivalries, the 1704 Deerfield Massacre in Massachusetts revealed what could befall settlers of the colonial interior: captivity, terror, and slaughter.

The event, which Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, correctly calls “one of the most dramatic episodes in colonial American history,” didn’t greatly alter New England’s settlement. However, it did exemplify the extraordinary risks that pious, land-seeking colonists were willing to take to settle and farm lands claimed not only by Britain, but also by France and Indigenous people always threatened by Europeans’ dispossession. On the snowy Massachusetts frontier that January day, Deerfield lost 63 of its 300 inhabitants to tomahawks, rifles, and arson; 112 others were seized, of whom 89 survived a 300-mile, two-month trek into Quebec. The story’s central figure is the Rev. John Williams, who lost his wife and one child but whose daughter survived to spend her life voluntarily among the Native Americans who’d captured her. Relating the harrowing story, its survivors’ three-year captivity, and the international context in which their release unfolded, Swanson doesn’t add much to what’s long been known. His fresh contributions appear in the chapters on the massacre’s aftermath over the next four centuries. Native raids continued, spurring politicians, orators, and clerics to draw various lessons—many moral, some opportunistic. Townspeople and heirs of the victims erected memorials to the victims, and pageants built around heritage became a tradition. Films were shot, preservation undertaken, nostalgic tears shed for simple ways lost, and, recently, descendants of the Native assailants warmly received. “By 1776,” writes Swanson, “the Deerfield Massacre was a long distant past in a place that the Founders would have found unfamiliar, strange, and even alien to them.”

A solid, up-to-date, briskly told history of death, resilience, and recovery in the American past.