ndians had crept up to attack the place.
They set the village on fire and killed or carried off some twoscore
prisoners, chiefly women and children. The village of Deerfield, on
the northwestern frontier of Massachusetts, consisted of a wooden
meeting-house and a number of rough cabins which lodged the two or three
hundred inhabitants. On a February night in 1704 savages led by a young
member of the Canadian noblesse, Hertel de Rouville, approached the
village silently on snowshoes, waited on the outskirts during the dead
of night, and then just before dawn burst in upon the sleeping people.
The work was done quickly. Within an hour after dawn the place had been
plundered and set on fire, forty or fifty dead bodies of men and women
and children lay in the village, and a hundred and eleven miserable
prisoners were following their captors on snowshoes through the forest,
each prisoner well knowing that to fall by the way meant to have his
head split by a tomahawk and the scalp torn off. When on the first
night one of them slipped away, Rouville told the others that, should
a further escape occur, he would burn alive all those remaining in
his hands. The minister of the church at Deerfield, the Reverend John
Williams, was a captive, together with his wife and five children. The
wife, falling by the way, was killed by a stroke of a tomahawk and the
body was left lying on the snow. The children were taken from their
father and scattered among different bands. After a tramp of two hundred
miles through the wilderness to the outlying Canadian settlements, the
minister in the end reached Quebec. Every effort was made, even by his
Indian guard, to make him accept the Roman Catholic faith, but the stern
Puritan was obdurate. His daughter, Eunice, on the other hand, caught
young, became a Catholic so devoted that later she would not return to
New England lest the contact with Protestants should injure her faith.
She married a Caughnawaga Indian and became to all outward appearance a
squaw. Williams himself lived to resume his career in New England and to
write the story of the raid at Deerfield.

It may be that there were men in New England and New York capable of
similar barbarities. It is true that the savage allies of the English,
when at their worst, knew no restraint. There is nothing in the French
raids on a scale as great as that of the murderous raid by the Iroquois
on the French village of Lachine. But the Puritans of New