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History 101: The Deerfield War of 1675 [1]

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Date: 2025-02-15

The English invasion and colonization of what they came to call New England began in the seventeenth century with Plymouth in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630. The English claimed the land and the right to rule the people who lived there by a religious legal concept known as the Discovery Doctrine.

The application of the Discovery Doctrine to New England is explained by historian William Cronon in his book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England:

“The Crown derived its own claim to the region from several sources: Cabot’s ‘discovery’ of New England in 1497-98; the failure of Indians to adequately subdue the soil as Genesis 1:38 required; and from the King’s status—initially a decidedly speculative one—as the first Christian monarch to establish colonies there.”

Regarding the English right to rule, historian Francis Jennings in The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire writes:

“It decreed that Indian peoples were subject to the king of England because earlier subjects had ‘discovered’ Indian territories—had looked at their coasts from shipboard. (I am not inventing this; American courts still appeal to this rationale.)”

With regard to the English colonists, Francis Jennings reports:

“From their day of first arrival, every single colonial desired and worked to expand English rule over more territory and more people.”

The English viewed the land as vacant, thus available to be re-created into a new English countryside. Frances Jennings writes:

“Myth has it that Englishmen arrived in America to create colonies on ‘free land’ as though the land’s previous occupants and possessors had not existed, let alone had social and political institutions of property.”

The land which the English found was not, of course, unoccupied. Several Algonquian-speaking tribes had lived there since time immemorial and were farming the land. The present-day state of Massachusetts has taken its name from the Massachusett tribe, which lived in the area around the Great Blue Hill near Massachusetts Bay. The word itself is derived from an Algonquin term meaning "at the large hill" or "at the great hill."

The English tended to view the Americas as a wilderness, a frightening concept with strong religious overtones. In his chapter in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, Edwin Churchill, the chief curator at the Maine Museum, writes:

“They viewed the wilderness as a place where a person might lapse into disordered, confused, or ‘wild conditions’ and then succumb to the animal appetites latent in all men and restrained only by society.”

Within this framework, the English viewed Indians as a kind of wild vermin to be exterminated. With regard to the English and their policies toward the Indians, historian Wilbur R. Jacobs, in his chapter on British Indian policies in the Handbook of North American Indians, writes:

“Native American people were seen as temporary owners of the North American continent rich in minerals, furs, fish, agricultural produce (maize, squash, and other food plants domesticated by Indians).”

While the initial colonies were located at seaports to facilitate continued contact with England, English colonists, seeking more “free land” in the “wilderness” moved inland. The town of Deerfield became the northwesternmost English settlement. It is located in what is now called the Pioneer Valley of the upper Connecticut River. The aboriginal inhabitants of the area, the Pocumtuck Indians, whose population had been decimated by European diseases and warfare with the Iroquoian-speaking Mohawk Indians, were soon driven out and sought refuge in French territory in Canada.

In 1575, a group of about 60 Indians killed a garrison soldier from Deerfield. A week later, Nipmuck warriors led by Sagamore Sam and One-Eyed John attacked Deerfield, killing eight men and burning 17 houses and buildings. Five days later, an English relief force led by a Major Treat reached Deerfield and evacuated more than 100 colonists in a midnight retreat.

A week later, garrison soldiers were ambushed by the Nipmuck warriors but managed to fend them off. The Nipmuck warriors captured horses and looted the soldiers’ foodstuffs.

About 18 days after the initial attack, a relief force from Hadley under the leadership of Captain Thomas Lathrop was escorting an ox train of 17 teams bringing food and household goods to Deerfield when it was ambushed by warriors from several tribes (the English estimated from 600 to 1,000 warriors). In his book The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America, James Swanson reports:

“The Nipmucks were led by Mattgamuck, Sagamore Sam, Matoonas, and One-Eyed John; the Wampanoags by Anawan, Penchason, and Tatason; and the Pocumtucks by Sangumachu,”

James Swanson also writes:

“Lathrop had failed to send out his own scouts ahead of the main column, which might have flushed out evidence of a war party massing. The hapless English, oblivious to the trap, stumbled right into it.”

The thunder of the musket fire alerted Major Mosely and his 60 men who had just left Deerfield that there was a battle going on. James Swanson reports:

“By the time Mosely and his troops arrived, around ten o’clock in the morning, the crack of musketry had subsided, the shouts and cries had died down, and it was almost over. The bloodied corpses of sixty English colonists lay where they had fallen.”

The Indians are surprised by the arrival of the soldiers and Major Mosely orders his outnumbered men to attack. James Swanson reports:

“Over the next five or six hours they stood fast and fought back with intense musketry volleys, resisting every attempt to break their ranks and cut them to pieces.”

A second relief force under the leadership of Major Treat arrived. James Swanson reports:

“His unit of one hundred Connecticut soldiers plus sixty loyal Mohegans under the command of Attawamhod, the second son of Uncas, joined the battle and helped Mosely’s men push the enemy back until dark, and the Indians melted into the night, ending the marathon day of combat.”

The skirmishes between the Indians and the English colonists continued into 1676.

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