Uncommon readings: New World borders

Published on Friday 23 October 2009 21:06

DAVID ROBINSON on a fascinating history of colonial America

THIS is a story that begins in Deerfield, Massachusetts, at four o'clock in the morning of Monday 29 February 1704. It ends in a church there in 1832.

In between, all of history's great events – Wolfe winning Canada at Quebec, American Independence – happen off-stage, unseen and barely heard. A different strand of history is being unravelled here. It is about the first stirrings of the melting pot, about reconciliation, about family, about love. I can't understand why nobody has filmed it.

John Demos's The Unredeemed Captive starts with a massacre in the snow. The winter of 1704 was harsh, the rivers unfrozen, the snowdrifts not banked all the way up to the palisades of Deerfield's fort. The French Indians drop over the sides and start killing in the dark.

They take 112 of the town's inhabitants – including John Williams, its puritan preacher leader and his children – and set off on a forced march north. Those, like Williams's wife Eunice, who are too weak to carry on, are killed en route.

But there is another Eunice Williams, the preacher's seven-year-old daughter, and this is really her story. While Williams and his sons achieve their freedom within a few years, Eunice never does. Or at least not in terms that her father could ever understand.

What follows has all the dramatic intensity of John Ford's classic The Searchers. Eunice is held captive by the Mohawks at Kahnawake, near Montreal.

Word comes, first, that the Mohawks "could no sooner part with her than with their own hearts". The French governor of Canada offers to buy her back, but a messenger reports "she has steel in her breast" against it. In 1713, John Williams finally sees his daughter. "She will not even," he wrote, "give me a pleasant look."

John Demos is an expert on early American history and the story he tells here has stayed with me for years. Perhaps that's because of the ending. It is 1832, and this time the Kahnawake Indians have come in peace to Deerfield. Eunice Williams's descendants, all 23 of them, visit the grave of the first Eunice Williams, killed by their other ancestors all those years ago.

The sermon preached that Sunday in Deerfield is about forgiveness, even for the barbarous cruelties of the 1704 massacre, the preacher even hinting that their own town had, after all, been built on stolen Indian land. The unredeemed captive has been redeemed at last.