Moseley’s raiders were not the only people looking for Wanalancet. Like many neutral groups, the Pennacook accepted refugees from war-torn areas farther south, including many Nipmucs and others who had fought with Philip. In July of that year, Wanalancet signed a peace agreement with the English stating in part “that none of said Indians shall entertain at any time any of our enemies, but shall give present notice . . . when any one come among them.” When Wanalancet made his mark on the treaty, he may have already been sheltering a number of former combatants, as well as many simply trying to get away from the fighting. No piece of paper, however, was going to prevent him from fulfilling what he saw as his duty to abide by common decency.
As the English leadership had already made clear in its attack on the neutral Narragansett, they did not share the Algonquian view that hospitality was an obligation. After Philip’s death and the collapse of the uprising, they dispatched soldiers to hunt down fugitive fighters. Two companies were sent north to the settlement that was still known in those days by its western Abenaki name, cochecho or qouchecho, “rapid foaming water,” now Dover, New Hampshire. Commanded by Captains Joseph Syll and William Hathorne, the 130 soldiers had orders to “seize all Indians.” Instead of a direct confrontation, Major Richard Waldron, who had traded with the Pennacook for years at Cochecho, suggested a different approach—an elaborate trap, one for which he would eventually pay dearly.
Waldron invited the Pennacook and their guests to a parley under a flag of truce. The idea, the Indians were told, was to stage a mock fight, enroll the Algonquians into English service, and then celebrate the peace with food and drink. “Sham battles” had been a common form of public spectacle since medieval days, and everyone turned out for the festival, including roughly 350 Indians.
The Abenaki men were arrayed in their finest regalia, which showed a mix of traditional and European influences—moose-skin moccasins, wool blanket robes, cloth shirts in such magically potent colors as dark blue and red, woven sashes, breechclouts and leggings decorated with the distinctive double-curve designs of Abenaki quillwork or embroidery of dyed moose hair and beads. Some of the women would have been wearing high-peaked cloth caps, of a design based on French styles, and long skirts made of skins or trade cloth. Tin bangles, silver brooches, and even English shillings, drilled to hang as ornaments, flashed from the garments of men and women alike. On an early-autumn day, the field in front of Waldron’s blockhouse trading post at Cochecho was certainly a kaleidoscope of color, movement, and sound.
The English soldiers, including two companies of local militia, formed ranks and drilled across the open land, even helpfully offering a cannon to the hundred or so Abenaki men, who grabbed the towlines and pulled it onto the field, not noticing when the English gun crew repositioned it to cover the Indians. As planned, the Abenaki “attacked” first, all the men firing their single-shot muskets into the air in one loud, harmless volley. Suddenly, their own weapons empty, they found themselves facing soldiers with loaded guns leveled at them and realized that the cannon, too, was aimed in their direction. There are reports that the cannon actually went off, killing some of the warriors, but most accounts say that Waldron pulled off his ruse without a shot being fired. The Natives were “taken like so many silly herring in a net,” one smug New England historian later wrote. But many of the English living at Cochecho were uneasy about the deception, worried that a fire was now smoldering.
Only a few Pennacooks escaped, including a boy who was sheltered by a woman named Elizabeth Heard—an act of kindness that would have profound implications for her years later. The rest, including Wanalancet, were hauled off to Boston. Although he and most of the rest of the Pennacooks were eventually released, almost two hundred of the refugees living with them were sold into slavery, and eight directly implicated in the war were hanged.
Waldron—a trader and soldier much respected by the colonists, but who had an unsavory reputation among the Indians for thievery—may have truly believed that he was doing his Pennacook neighbors a favor, since a direct confrontation would have led to many deaths. The Algonquians didn’t see it that way. As a result of Cochecho, and another incident the following winter in which Waldron and an English contingent killed several Wapánahki sachems under another flag of truce, the old major became a marked man. Wanalancet would go to his grave trying to live in peace with the English, but his nephew, a fiery war leader named Kancamagus, would not—and Waldron was among the first items on his long list of debts to be settled.
Chapter 6
“Our Enimies Are Exceedeing Cruel”
It was the kind of falsely hopeful dawn that winter sometimes brings: a bright start to the day, air so calm that a person’s breath hangs before his face in a lingering fog, the first shafts of weak orange light peeking through the dark spires of the spruce. But a treacherous day: the clear sky quickly crowded out by clouds muscling in from the south to clot the horizon. A day that forces the hapless traveler to realize he may have made a serious mistake by straying far from shelter and a warm fire.
John Gyles sniffed the air, smelling the damp threat of snow, and pulled his worn moose-pelt jacket tighter. If he was suspicious of the weather, it was with good reason, because he was schooled beyond his years in how to stay alive when others had not. Barely a teenager, he was an English boy a long way from his home on the coast of Maine, having been captured in 1689 at age ten and taken to a Maliseet village in Canada, where he was kept as a slave. He’d watched other captives tortured; had close friends die; endured hardship, hunger, and beatings; and resigned himself more than once to his own death. But by luck and gumption, he’d survived.
In summer, Gyles and his captors lived near the palisaded village of Meductic, along the lower St. John River, growing corn and squash, gathering berries and groundnuts, fishing for salmon and sturgeon. But with the coming of winter each year, the extended family that owned Gyles left for their northern hunting grounds, moving constantly from camp to camp across thousands of square miles of what is now northern Maine, New Brunswick, and southern Quebec, rebuilding bark wigwams in which to live while the men hunted moose and bear.
A moose is a huge animal, with bulls weighing twelve hundred pounds or more. Sometimes, instead of carrying the meat to camp, the hunters would cache it at the kill site, trusting to the midwinter cold to keep it sound. Some days earlier, the hunters had killed several moose far from camp, and Gyles and a Maliseet boy had been sent to fetch some of the meat.
The morning weather had quickly soured, however, the clouds piling up thick and fast, as cold and gray as a pewter plate, and the temperature falling steadily. The two young men snowshoed all day through the deep drifts, but twilight had fallen by the time they reached the cache. It was too dark even to build a shelter; the best they could do was quickly gather wood for a small fire. The snow began lightly at first, then developed rapidly into an all-enveloping storm that roared throughout the night. The boys huddled around their sputtering fire, shivering as their bodies tried to keep them warm, their clothes growing sodden and heavy with melting snow.
In the morning, they shouldered their packs full of moose meat and began retracing their steps. In the bone-chilling wake of the storm, their wet clothing froze. “My Moose-skin Coat (which was the only Garment I had on my Back, and the Hair was in most Places worn off) was frozen stiff round my Knees like a Hoop, as likewise my Snow-shoes and Snow-clouts to my Feet,” Gyles recalled years later.
The boys trudged on, the pain in Gyles’s feet growing extreme, until at last the agony subsided into weary, numb relief. His Indian companion, who had better clothing and had suffered less from the elements, quickly left him behind, and Gyles moved haltingly through the silent white world alone. He was gripped with bouts of debilitating nausea, his empty stomach heaving, but there was no way to cook the frozen moose meat he was carrying. Periodically, his energy would desert him, leaving him almost unable to move, but then he would rally and feel “wonderfully rev
iv’d again” for a short time. Before long, he would be consumed once more by a potent desire to lie down and sleep.
Gyles knew he was freezing to death, just as his closest friend, an English captive named John Evans, had done the winter before. Weak from hunger, his legs gashed by the icy crust through which he repeatedly fell, Evans had been left behind by the rest of his master’s band. Exhausted, he’d curled up in the snow with a dog in his arms. When the Maliseets found them the next morning, both he and the dog were frozen solid.
It would have been simple to lie down, Gyles recounted, “but again my Spirits reviv’d as much as if I had receiv’d the richest Cordial.” Hours after dark, his erstwhile companion long since home and warmed by the fire, Gyles staggered into one of the Maliseet lodges with his snowshoes still strapped to his blue, ice-cold feet. “The Indians cry’d out, The Captive is froze to Death! They took off my Pack, and where that lay against my back was the only Place that was not frozen.”
The Maliseets cut off Gyles’s moccasins and put him by the fire. As the sensation returned to his frostbitten feet, “which were as void of feeling as any frozen Flesh could be,” they began to swell and turned purplish black, erupting in blood-filled blisters. The pain was excruciating.
The Maliseets had seen it before and knew what it portended. “The Indians said one to another, His Feet will rot, and he will die,” Gyles recalled. Within days, the skin sloughed off below his ankles, “whole like a Shoe, and left my Toes naked without a nail, and the ends of my great Toe-bones bare, which in a little while turn’d black, so that I was obliged to cut the first joint off with my Knife.”
At this point, the Maliseets knew, victims of deep frostbite can contract gangrene. But Gyles was a survivor. His captors gave him rags with which to bandage his feet and told him to treat the tender flesh with gum from the balsam fir. As a slave, he was responsible for his own care, so he scuttled about the snow on his rear end, pushing himself with sticks from tree to tree, gathering gum that he melted over the fire to make a salve.
Within a week, he could walk gingerly on his heels, supporting himself with a staff. By the time the band was ready to move a week after that, they had made two round snowshoe-like hoops for his feet, on which he could hobble behind them. “I follow’d them in their Track on my Heels from Place to Place; sometimes half [a] Leg deep in Snow & Water, which gave me the most acute Pain imaginable, but I was forced to walk or die.”
Just as Gyles survived winter storms and frostbite, he survived the other dangers of a captive’s life, and years later he wrote a remarkably candid account of his time with the Maliseet. More than most captive narratives, Gyles’s story provides a window into a period of tremendous flux, offering harrowing glimpses of the ways in which average people on both sides were caught up in the ever-widening war along the frontier.
After King Philip’s War, the northern frontier had about ten years of relative peace. The English were slow to return to the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, but by the 1680s enough had resettled there that tensions were again on the rise. The colonists were refusing to pay the annual tribute in corn that they’d agreed to, and one settler had strung so many nets across the Saco River that he’d all but blocked off the salmon run on which the Indians depended. There were “the Common Abuses in Trading viz. Drunkenness, Cheating, etc.,” said the Cochecho minister Reverend John Pike, but once more, the biggest complaint was the English habit of stealing land, “at which [the Indians] were greatly Enraged, threatning the Surveyor to knock him on the Head if he came to lay out any Lands there.”
Nor were the conflicts only with Natives. The governor-general of New France, the Comte de Frontenac, looked at the rapidly growing English presence to the south and began to wonder whether he should be at least as concerned about them as about their allies the Iroquois, who were stifling fur trade as far away as the western Great Lakes and raiding to the very outskirts of Montreal. One logical counterweight would be to further strengthen French ties with the Abenaki, especially since Frontenac had what should have been an ace in the hole: a former French officer married to the daughter of the powerful Penobscot sagamore Madockawando.
But Madockawando and the other Abenaki leaders were in a tight spot themselves. Although they had forged many bonds with the French, from intermarriage to religion (a few of the Catholic priests not only preached to them but also went to war with them), the Wapánahki depended on the resurgent English settlements and their supply lines to Boston for most of their trade goods. This was an increasingly precarious middle ground for the Indians to occupy, especially as France and England squared off more and more aggressively over control of their colonial possessions.
By 1687, shots were again being fired in anger. Tired of Iroquois depredations on western Indians, the French laid waste to Seneca villages in New York, ratcheting up tensions between New France and the English colonies. The next year, Indians from Canada struck into New England. Massachusetts buzzed with expectations of further raids, and the council in Boston ordered the capture of Indians engaged in hostilities. Unfortunately, commanders on the Maine frontier simply kidnapped about two dozen Wapánahkis, mostly women and children but also including a sagamore named Hope Hood, and shipped them to Boston. The Indians retaliated by taking sixteen English hostages, and before the royal governor, Edmund Andros, could negotiate an exchange, there was a skirmish in mid-September that resulted in the execution of several of the English prisoners.
Full war broke out not long thereafter; it must have seemed like a reprise of King Philip’s War to victims on both sides. But King William’s War, as it became known, was different—the first of many violent, intertwined feuds between France, England, and Spain as the three empires wrestled for dominance in the Old World and the New, even as their Indian allies maneuvered for their own benefit and defense.
In fact, what played out as King William’s War in North America was simply the local manifestation of the Nine Years’ War in Europe—also known as the War of the League of Augsburg or the War of the Grand Alliance, since it pitted the French king Louis XIV against the English, Dutch, and Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I. For the first time, imperial struggles thousands of miles away spilled directly into a new theater of war in the forests of America and Canada, and over the next three-quarters of a century, scarcely a year would pass without war or the threat of war as European armies, colonial militias, and their Indian allies contested for the First Frontier.
Wanalancet, the Pennacook sagamore who had tried for so long, and in the face of so many provocations, to keep peace with the English, had finally left the Merrimack Valley, moving to the western Abenaki village of St. Francis in Canada. As the war clouds gathered, his nephew Kancamagus assumed an important leadership role, and he was not inclined to turn the other cheek. None of the Pennacooks—and few Wapánahkis anywhere along the frontier—had forgotten the way they had been cheated and deceived, especially by Richard Waldron.
It wasn’t merely the outrageous deceits, such as the sham fight thirteen years earlier or the killing of sagamores under a white flag of truce. Waldron had been the first trader on the upper Merrimack River in the 1660s, and cheating Indians seems to have been as natural to him as breathing. His thumb was always finding its way onto the scale, and he claimed his fist—pushing down heavily on the balance against stacks of beaver pelts—weighed just a pound. Abenakis paying off their accounts found that Waldron had a habit of forgetting to cross off their debts in his books.
Now in his seventies, Waldron still ran his well-fortified trading post in Cochecho. In the summer of 1689, his neighbors were doing what they could to buttress their own defenses, including reinforcing their blockhouses. During times of trouble, those living nearby in unprotected homes sheltered at night in these garrisons, emerging cautiously in the morning to work the fields. Able-bodied men were often assigned to help build, man, and defend particular blockhouses, under the command of the owner.
This was
one of those troubled times. Everyone was nervous—everyone, it seemed, except Richard Waldron, who believed he knew Indians better than anyone else. That summer, when the townsfolk worried aloud to him about raids, he told them to “plant their pumpkins” and said he’d let them know when there were Indians about.
The evening of June 27 was “dull weather,” chilly and damp, and as dusk came on, pairs of Indian women appeared at the door of each of the blockhouses around Cochecho, asking to be allowed to sleep by the fire. This was a common request, and except for one home, where they were bluntly turned away, they were allowed inside, even shown how to unbar the main gates so they could go outside to relieve themselves.
In addition to the women, the sachem Mesandowit appeared at Waldron’s door and was invited to dinner. Over their meat, Mesandowit mentioned the presence of many “strange Indians” who had come to trade their beaver pelts and asked, “Brother Waldron, what would you do if strange Indians should come?” Waldron breezily answered that he could raise a hundred men as easily as raising his finger. Then he went to bed.
Well south of Cochecho, a runner was en route with a letter to Waldron from Boston, warning him that according to friendly Abenakis, an attack on the town was imminent, with Waldron a particular target. The messenger, delayed at the Newbury ferry, would arrive a few hours too late.
The First Frontier Page 22
