The cold came early to Deerfield that winter and never broke. By the last night of February 1704 the snow had drifted higher against the north wall of the stockade than anyone in the town could remember, and the farmers grumbled about it the way farmers do. Nobody asked what a drift that high against a palisade might mean.
Before dawn on February 29, a force of French soldiers and their Abenaki, Wendat and Kanienkehaka allies came over the wall on the snow. When they withdrew, some fifty townspeople were dead and more than a hundred were being driven north through the winter woods toward Canada. Among the captives were the minister, John Williams, his wife Eunice, who would be killed on the march, and their seven-year-old daughter, also named Eunice.
The raid grew out of a war between empires fought along a borderland of Native nations, and its captives became the currency of that war. Years of letters, ledgers and ransom diplomacy between Boston, Quebec and the mission towns decided who came home and who stayed. Young Eunice stayed. She was raised at the Mohawk town of Kahnawake, became a Catholic, married a Mohawk man, and turned down every plea to return. The raid's long afterlife in memory, and the bond it left between the Williams family and Kahnawake, close the book.
Her father spent the rest of his life trying to bring her home. She had already decided where home was.
