The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  In the predawn hours, the Abenaki women in each blockhouse crept to the gates, slid back the bars, and whistled. War parties of Pennacook, Kennebec, and Maliseet men, led by Kancamagus, poured in. The Heard family—Elizabeth, the woman who had helped a Pennacook boy escape after the sham fight, and her children—were away, but their neighbor William Wentworth was watching their garrison house for them when he heard a barking dog. Racing to the gate, he found several warriors forcing their way in. He managed to shove them out, then flopped down on his back and braced the door shut with both feet. He screamed for help, holding the door closed while musket balls punched through the wood around him, until others arrived to bar it.

  Generally, though, the attacks were brutally effective, with twenty-three people killed and twenty-nine taken captive. Not everyone came in for the same degree of punishment. The raiders spared the residents of one home after forcing the farmer simply to empty his moneybag on the floor, as the Indians scooped up the coins.

  No such mercy was shown at Waldron’s house, but the trader, though old, still had plenty of pluck. Pulling on his trousers and defending himself with his sword, Waldron forced the attackers back through several rooms. But when he turned away for a moment to grab his guns, he was hit on the head with a hatchet. Thrown into a chair, he sat stunned and bleeding as his house was ransacked and his family forced to bring the raiders food. Then the Indians, who had been cheated so often at Waldron’s store, slashed their knives across his chest and stomach, each saying, “I cross out my account.” They cut off his fingers, asking him how much his fist weighed now. Then they sliced off his nose and ears, stuffing them in his mouth. Finally, they let Waldron collapse on the point of his own sword to die.

  Elizabeth Heard, whose home had been saved by the barking dog, was returning by boat with her children from Portsmouth just as the attacks began. They fled to Waldron’s home but found Indians in control there. The family scattered, and Heard hid in the bushes through what remained of the night. At daybreak, she was found out by an Abenaki man, pistol in hand. He walked up to her and stared hard, then walked back to the house. He reappeared and stared a while longer, saying nothing. Her nerves ragged, Heard demanded to know what he was going to do. Still, the Indian said nothing, and when the war party left a short while later, they ignored her. It seems the Pennacook lad she’d saved thirteen years earlier after the mock fight was in the war party and made sure no one harmed her.

  As the summer of 1689 wore on, the situation along the Maine and New Hampshire frontier only grew worse. “Our Enimies are Exceedeing Cruell & Rejoyce & say they will bee Into Boston be for Chrismass,” one letter writer lamented. The danger of an Indian attack was rising just as military protection collapsed. The Catholic King James II had abdicated the English throne in favor of his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. This delighted the Protestant New Englanders, who in turn rioted against Edmund Andros, whom James had appointed royal governor of the newly created (and largely despised) Dominion of New England.12 Andros was blamed for coddling the Indians (in fact, he was one of the few colonial governors to gain their respect and a reputation for dealing fairly with them), and he was accused of colluding with the French. Andros tried to escape Boston dressed as a woman but was caught when someone noticed his boots peeking out beneath his skirts.

  Unfortunately, Andros’s arrest led to mass desertions by militiamen at frontier posts. At Fort Loyall near Falmouth, Maine, for example, seven soldiers slipped away, first helping themselves to a long list of supplies, including “one watch coate Dufels one Bed case,” a fair amount of powder, and “Tow hwendred musquitt & Corbine shott,” not to mention swords, shoes, stockings, scarves, bottles, and “Briches” from their fellow soldiers.

  At Pemaquid, Maine—a town settled by English fishermen in the 1610s and thus older than Boston (a point of fierce local pride)—Fort Charles was garrisoned by only a few dozen men, although community leaders were strenuously lobbying Boston for reinforcements. One of Pemaquid’s leaders was Thomas Gyles, who had come from England to settle along Merrymeeting Bay, buying a two-mile-long tract of land at the mouth of the Muddy River in 1669. Scared off by the first round of Indian wars, he moved his growing family to Long Island. But “the air of that place not so well agreeing with his constitution,” Gyles took advantage of the tenuous peace that followed King Philip’s War to move his family back to the New England coast, settling at Pemaquid, in what was then part of New York.

  Gyles had inherited a fair sum, enabling him to buy up several tracts of farmland, and he was appointed chief justice by the governor. He was respected by the other English families in Pemaquid—most of them, at least, since this was a region where people had long been accustomed to living as they pleased. One of his sons recalled him as a man who held strictly to the Sabbath and who had “considerable Difficulties in the Discharge of his Office, from the Immoralities of a People who had long lived Lawless.”

  August 2, 1689, broke with a warm morning, promising a hot day. Gyles had taken three of his sons—John, who was nine or ten, fourteen-year-old James, and nineteen-year-old Thomas—along with fourteen farm hands, to work in the family’s fields, which lay several miles from the village. They toiled through the rising heat, cutting hay and barley, until their growling stomachs prompted a noontime rest for a meal. Gyles and the boys ate their dinner in a farmhouse near the fields.

  As the laborers rested, armed men were slipping through the forest—a war party of several hundred Abenakis. They had paddled hard down the coast in sixty or seventy canoes, landed well away from the settlement, and then stripped down for battle. The band apparently included Algonquians from throughout the Maritime Peninsula— local Penobscots and Kennebecs, as well as Maliseets from the St. John River—led by Madockawando, the Kennebec sagamore Moxus, and two Frenchmen.

  One of the Frenchmen was a Jesuit, Louis-Pierre Thury, who so frequently participated in raids against the English, whom he saw as Protestant heretics, that they called him “the Fighting Priest.” In the Penobscot Bay stronghold of Pentagoet, he had left a group of Wapánahki women praying a perpetual rosary until the war party returned. The other Frenchman was Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, Baron de Saint-Castin, a member of the French nobility, although anyone seeing him would likely have been hard-pressed to distinguish him from the Abenaki warriors. Governor Frontenac, in Quebec, often had a similarly hard time knowing which side Saint-Castin was on, since the former military officer was as happy to trade with the English as with the Indians and French.

  Saint-Castin had come to Quebec in 1665 as a teenage ensign with the Carignan-Salières, the first European military regiment to fight in North America. He was one of eighty officers and twelve hundred enlisted men—all volunteers who signed on for a three-year hitch—charged with putting down the Mohawk, whose escalating war of raids and counterraids with French-allied Indians was crippling the interior fur trade.

  Before coming to Canada, the Carignan-Salières had fought in the Thirty Years’ War, but their initial forays against the Mohawk were a catastrophe. Even though it was winter and the men were poorly clothed, ill with flu, and without skilled carpenters, they were ordered south to Lake Champlain to build forts along the main Mohawk warpath. Rather than allow the soldiers to hole up there for the winter, the new royal governor quickly ordered them to attack deep into Mohawk territory.

  The results would have been farcical had they not been so tragic. The men set out in late January without Native guides. They spent weeks wandering through the woods of New York, floundering in the deep drifts without snowshoes (the governor had turned down a merchant’s offer to donate fifty pairs), dying from the cold and exposure. What’s more, they encountered virtually no Mohawks, who, settled in their towns for the winter, didn’t even have the courtesy to realize they’d been invaded. Eventually, the French forces found themselves in English territory near Schenectady, where they acquired from their colonial adversaries enough supplies to li
mp back to Canada. Without that help, doubtless far more would have died. As it was, four hundred of them perished.

  If Saint-Castin was on the expedition, it must have been a sobering introduction to the New World. Yet he stayed, growing comfortable with the languages and customs of the mélange of Algonquian peoples, especially the Abenaki, who circulated through the French towns. In 1670, he was second-in-command of a French force that retook Penobscot Bay from the English. Settling into the fort community of Pentagoet, near present-day Castine, he grew to know and admire the Wapánahki who lived along the coast. This friendship paid quick dividends. When Dutch privateers in the employ of Boston attacked the fort and captured the garrison, Saint-Castin was tortured but managed to escape, hiding with the Abenaki as he made his way to Quebec.

  In 1674, his elder brother died, leaving the title of baron to him. But Saint-Castin, now in his early twenties, had already cast his lot with the Wapánahki. Out of the military but acting on private orders from the governor-general of New France to encourage Indian loyalty, he set himself up as a trader at Pentagoet. His own loyalty to the French government was flexible—he often traded with English settlers and fishermen—but he cemented the only bond that increasingly mattered to him through marriage.

  Like Saint-Castin, almost a third of the men who had originally come to Canada with the Carignan-Salières remained when their enlistments ended. Many of them took wives from the Filles du Roi, or “King’s Daughters”—French women, frequently orphans, who were recruited to emigrate and marry settlers. Saint-Castin, however, married Pidianske (or Pidiwamiska), the daughter of Madockawando. “The Baron of Saint Castiens,” wrote Louis Armand, Baron Lahontan, some years later, “having liv’d among the Abenakis after the Savage way, above twenty years, is so much respected by the Savages, that they look upon him as their Tutelar God.”

  The Wapánahki did no such thing, of course, but they did respect Saint-Castin as an able leader. He rose to become a well-regarded chief among the eastern Abenaki, who, like most Indians, cared less about ancestry and skin color than about judgment and ability. Although his father-in-law had rebuffed French solicitation, by the late 1680s Saint-Castin’s arm’s-length relationship with the English had frayed to the breaking point, as had Madockawando’s patience with the English. The final straw came in 1688, when English troops sacked and burned Saint-Castin’s home at Pentagoet, leaving nothing untouched except the private chapel. It’s easy to imagine that in August of the following year, landing with the Abenaki force at Pemaquid, both men had revenge on their minds.

  After they were finished eating, Gyles’s farm hands went back to work, with his oldest son, Thomas, accompanying them. The elder Thomas and his two younger sons remained behind near the farmhouse; everyone was on edge, what with the recent attacks at Cochecho and elsewhere. In the distance, several cannons thundered from Fort Charles. Thomas wondered aloud to his sons if it meant good news—perhaps the council in Boston had sent soldiers to regarrison the fort. But before the boys could answer, musket shots erupted from the woods behind the barn, as thirty or forty Abenaki warriors opened fire.

  The attackers had split their forces, putting some between the fort and the village and the others between the village and the fields, where they swept in on the Gyles farm. “The Yelling of the Indians, the Whistling of their Shot, and the Voice of my father, whom I heard cry out ‘What now! What now!’ so terrified me,” John Gyles recalled years later. His father groped for a gun as John ran in one direction and James in another. Looking over his shoulder, John saw he was being pursued by an Abenaki armed with a musket and a cutlass “glittering in his Hand, which I expected every Moment in my Brains.” Instead of trying to escape, the boy simply sank to the ground and waited.

  Rather than killing him, the Indian took John by the hand. He “offered me no abuse, but seized my arms, lift[ed] me up, and pointed me to the place where the People were at Work about the Hay.” They passed John’s father, who moved haltingly and looked very pale. John saw several dead men, while others cried out in pain, bleeding from tomahawk wounds to their heads.

  James had been captured as well, although their older brother, Thomas, had managed to escape. The captives were marched a short way from the fields, then Moxus came to the elder Gyles and apologized, saying that “strange Indians” had been the ones who had shot Gyles and that he was sorry. “My Father replied, that he was a dying Man, and wanted no Favour of them, but to Pray with his Children.” The boys spent a few moments with him. He commended them to God, gave them final words of advice, and told them they would all meet in a better place.

  “He parted with a chearful voice, but looked very pale by reason of his great loss of blood, which boil’d out of his shoes,” John recalled. “The Indians led him aside—I heard the blows of the hatchet, but neither Shriek nor Groan!” John learned later that his father had suffered as many as seven bullet wounds in the initial attack.

  As the farmsteads burned and gunfire echoed around the fort, the captives were herded into a swamp, and John found that his mother and two younger sisters had also been taken. His youngest brother, though, had been playing near the fort and managed to get inside, where a small contingent held out against the attackers for two more days before surrendering the stockade and being allowed to leave unharmed, sailing to Boston in a sloop that belonged to a slain villager.

  After a similar raid on the nearby town of New Harbor, the war party headed back north. The five members of the Gyles family, along with the other English hostages, were loaded into canoes, and the Abenaki paddled northeast to Penobscot Bay. John had been able to pass a few words with his mother since their capture, telling her of his father’s death, and now, as they traveled, their canoes came together. “She asked me, How I did? I think I said, Pretty well, (tho’ my Heart was full of Grief). Then she said, O, my child! how joyful & pleasant it would be, if we were going to Old England, to see your uncle Chalker and other Friends there? Poor Babe! we are going into the Wilderness, the Lord knows where! And she burst into Tears, and the Canoes parted!”

  When they at last reached Saint-Castin’s fort at Pentagoet, Father Thury showed an interest in buying John from his captor, tossing pieces of gold to the Wapánahki. The priest gave John a biscuit, but the boy was taking no chances with Catholic sorcery, of which he’d heard many stories. “I . . . dare not eat; but buried it under a log, fearing that he had put something in it to make me Love him, for I was very Young, and had heard much of the Papists torturing the Protestants.”

  John’s mother was equally horrified when she found out. “I had rather follow you to your Grave! or never see you more in this World, than that you should be Sold to a Jesuit: for a Jesuit will ruin you Body & Soul.” In that way, she got her wish. Although she and her two daughters were later redeemed, she died without ever seeing John again.

  Hers was not a unique perspective. Capture and death, horrible as they might be, were not considered the worst fates that could befall a Puritan along the New England frontier. Death at the hands of Satan’s agents, after all, was a sure path to martyrdom and heaven. Far worse, in English eyes, was to see a believer fall into the grip of heathenism and Catholicism, something that happened with distressing frequency and remarkable speed to even the most ardent Puritans.

  For example, in the famous 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, most of the Williams family was taken by western Abenakis and French-allied Mohawks. Those made captive included the Reverend John Williams; his wife, Eunice (a cousin of Puritan chronicler Cotton Mather), who was weak from a recent childbirth; and six of their children. Two other Williams youngsters, a six-year-old and an infant, were killed out of hand, as were many other very young children in the village, whom the attackers felt could not withstand a winter trek to Canada. Mrs. Williams was killed on the march when it became clear she could not keep up.

  The Travels of John Gyles

  Captured in August 1689, Gyles was taken first to Pentagoet, then along the we
ll-traveled canoe paths through the interior, and finally down wolastokuk (the St. John River) to the Maliseet town of Meductic, where his life as a slave began in earnest. (Modern boundaries added.)

  In the captivity that followed, Reverend Williams tried to protect his remaining family and parishioners—but less from the Indians than from the Jesuits, calling his flock “scattered sheep among so many Romish ravenous wolves.” In this he had mixed success. His fifteen-year-old son, Samuel, ransomed by a French merchant, converted briefly to Catholicism but recanted after a series of badgering letters from his father.

  Williams’s daughter Eunice, however, became his greatest loss and a lifelong grief. Only seven when she was taken and cared for gently by her captors (something even Williams gratefully acknowledged), Eunice was adopted by a family of Catholic Mohawks at Kahnawake, near Montreal, and accepted as full replacement for their dead child—a degree of acceptance common among Indians but unheard-of among the English, who as King Philip’s War made plain, viewed even Christian Algonquians with lasting suspicion. Within a few years, Eunice forgot how to speak English and converted to Catholicism, taking the name Marguerite, although her Mohawk name was A’ongote. Despite her father’s best efforts after he and his other four children were redeemed, she remained firmly a Mohawk for the rest of her life.

  John Gyles, by contrast, was having none of the papist poison, and his master soon took him from Pentagoet. The band traveled by canoe up the Penobscot, stopping at the village of Mattawamkeag (Madahamcouit), about seventy miles upriver. “At Home I had seen Strangers treated with the utmost Civility, and being a Stranger, I expected some kind Treatment here: but soon found my self deceived,” Gyles later wrote. An Abenaki captive in the hands of an enemy would have known what to expect, but the boy—like most European captives—understood nothing of the highly ritualized process by which captives were either killed, sold, or accepted into the community.