French Raid Deerfield: 56 Killed in Queen Anne's War

The attack came at four in the morning during a February blizzard, and the snowdrifts that were supposed to protect the town became the instrument of its destruction. French soldiers and their Abenaki and Mohawk allies walked over snow piled against the ten-foot stockade at Deerfield, Massachusetts, dropped into the sleeping village, and launched one of the most devastating raids of Queen Anne's War. By dawn on February 29, 1704, fifty-six residents were dead and more than a hundred had been taken captive for the three-hundred-mile forced march to Canada. Deerfield sat on the northern edge of English settlement in the Connecticut River valley, a frontier town of roughly 270 people that had been raided before. The stockade, built after earlier attacks, enclosed the central village and several garrison houses. But the winter of 1703-1704 had deposited exceptional snowfall, and the drifts against the northern wall reached nearly to the top of the palisade. A raiding force of roughly 50 French soldiers and 200 Native warriors from multiple nations had traveled overland from Canada on snowshoes, arriving undetected. The raiders overwhelmed the town's defenses within minutes. They set houses on fire and killed those who resisted. The town's minister, John Williams, was captured along with his wife and five children. His wife, Eunice, weakened from a recent childbirth, was tomahawked and killed on the second day of the march when she could not keep pace. Their seven-year-old daughter, also named Eunice, was adopted by a Mohawk family at Kahnawake near Montreal, married a Mohawk man, converted to Catholicism, and refused to return to New England despite repeated attempts by her family over the following decades. The Deerfield raid was one of dozens of frontier attacks during the French and Indian conflicts that plagued New England for nearly a century. John Williams was eventually ransomed and returned to write "The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion," one of the most popular captivity narratives in colonial American literature. His daughter Eunice's choice to remain with the Mohawk challenged English assumptions about the superiority of their civilization and became one of the most studied cases of cultural assimilation in colonial history. The reconstructed village and memorial in modern Deerfield remains one of the best-preserved sites of early American frontier conflict.