CHAPTER V. SECOND FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR. [1754-1759.] State of the Plantation. - Position of Housatonic Indians. — Homicide of Waumpaumcorse. - Indian Massacre at Stockbridge and Hoosac. - Flight from Poontoosuck. Poontoosuck Military Post. - Building of Fort Anson. — GarrisonLife at the Fort. - The Settlers during the War. Fort Goodrich. - Fort Fairfield. Fort at Onota. — Oliver Root. — William Williams. NIE Plantation of Poontoosuck had, in August, 1754, made respectable progress; and the proprietors were ready, as the votes we have quoted show, to prosecute their corporate work with increasing vigor. Most of the sixty home-lots had been taken up; and, although in some instances two or more were purchased by a single settler, the population of the place must have been nearly two hundred. The dwellings were as yet all of logs; but Charles Goodrich was preparing to build on Wendell Square, if he had not already partially erected, the first frame-house in the township. The pioneers of 1743 still felt the depressing effects of the failure of their enterprise, but were gradually overcoming the difliculties which it placed in their way. The settlement was attracting men of substance, and some of that class had already joined it. Had no new misfortune intervened, it would have been close upon that prosperity which it only actually attained after long struggles with poverty and pecuniary embarrassments, struggles whose marked influence upon the character of the people of Pittsfield was especially manifest in the internal political troubles which accompanied the Revolutionary War. Between the years 1725 and 1754, the territory now embraced in Berkshire gained a population of perhaps something more than fifteen hundred,—almost all of it south of Poontoosuck. The towns of Sheffield and Stockbridge were incorporated; and settlements were planted in New Marlborough, Sandisfield, Tyringham, Alford, Egremont, and Mount Washington. Northward, a few families had made their homes in Williamstown and Lanesborough; and a little land was cultivated, at times, under the guns of Fort Massachusetts. Here and there, among the green woods, solitary hunters and trappers hardier even than the pioneer farmer-planted patches of vegetables in the scant clearings where they built their lonely cabins, seminaries which produced the boldest and most successful scouts in the coming war. -- The Indians formed a more considerable element in the population of the Valley than at any previous date since its settlement by the English, showing a census of probably about three hundred. The mission commenced in 1734, and established at Stockbridge in 1735, had in twenty years produced an admirable change in the condition of the Mohegans; but it had not wrought a miracle upon them. Ever well disposed towards the white man, and, upon the whole, well treated by him, they received at his hands the gifts of education and religion with a readiness which was not to be expected in tribes whose experience had been of a different character; and they adopted the usages of civilized life with astonishing facility. They did not, however, leap at once from the depths of barbarism to the plane which the Saxon, race had reached only after ages and generations of painful climbing. Much less did they clevate themselves above the human passions and frailties from which their teachers were not themselves free. There was, moreover, as in all such cases there inevitably must be, a vagabond class, who had lost the virtues of savage life without submitting to the restraints of civilized society,-loose fellows, who hung around the settlements, selling the fruits of their hunting and trapping for rum, and then roaming from farm-house to farmhouse, committing the annoyances of which mention has been made. They were frowned upon by the more respectable and numerous class of the tribe; but they created a bitter prejudice in the minds of the unthinking against all of their color. The inhabitants of the Mission Village were collected from many sections of country, some of them as distant as the banks of the Susquehannah;1 and, 1 Rec. Gen. Court, Jan. 27, 1752. although this long pilgrimage in search of Christian instruction afforded a presumption in their favor, a few disappointed the hopes formed of them, and all, in those days of suspicion, were objects of jealousy as strangers. Nor were the annoyances to which the settlers were subject wholly unprovoked on their part. The Provincial Government, its agents, and the better part of the people, did, indeed, treat the Mohegans, not only with scrupulous justice, but with tender and earnest regard for both their temporal and spiritual welfare, and with generous forbearance towards the frailties and perversities of their wild neophytes. But there were too many exceptions to this rule, even among men in some small authority, who had come from sections of the Province where the Indian, without distinction of person or tribe, was known to the masses only to be detested. And, if the Mohegan suffered injustice from the hands of those who should have been in some degree restrained by the well-known wishes of the government, the treatment was simply intolerable which he received at the hands of a rude soldiery, hereditary haters of every red-skin, and ignorant or regardless of the long-tried fidelity of the tribe of Uncas to the English cause.1 In addition to these just causes of complaint, the Mohegans had become discontented with the disposition which they had made of their lands, and alleged, although apparently without truth, that, in bargaining them away, they had been misled by false representations, and that, in some cases, they had been seized without purchase. 1 " They say, and we are, and too often have been, witnesses of the many insults and abuses which they (the Mohegans) have suffered from the English soldiery, their lives and scalps threatened to be taken, and they called every thing but good, charged with the late murders, and actually put into such terror as to not know which way to turn themselves."-Col. Dwight to Col. Israel Williams, October, 1754. 2 "We would say something respecting our lands. When the white people purchased from time to time of us, they said they only wanted the low lands: they told us the hilly land was good for nothing, and that it was full of woods and stones. But now we see people living all about the hills and woods, although they have not purchased the lands. When we inquire of the people who live on these lands what right they have to them, they reply to us, that we are not to be regarded, and that these lands belong to the King. But we were the first possessors of them; and, when the King has paid us for them, then they may say they are his." — Speech of the Stockbridge Chiefs to the Commissioners of the Six Provinces, at Albany, July 8, 1754, N. Y. Doc. Hist., Vol. ii. p. 599. The means thus offered for fomenting distrust and ill-will in the jealous minds of the savages were not neglected by the agents of France, who contrived to inspire in many of them the belief that the English were on a design of exterminating the Indians within their reach." 1 In the spring of 1753, an unhappy event occurred, which was used with surprising effect to increase the ferment, and strengthen in the minds of the natives the belief that the English designed their destruction. It appears that one Wampaumcorse, a Schaghticoke Indian, domiciled at Stockbridge, being in Sugar Camp at Hop Brook in Tyringham, saw two men, Cook by name, passing by with horses which he suspected to be stolen. Pursuing them, and an altercation arising, he was shot dead. The Cooks were thereupon arrested, and tried at Springfield. One was convicted of manslaughter, and the other acquitted; which seems to have been what the law and the evidence required. But in the minds of the Schaghticokes, as in those of the exiled Pequots, murderous resentment against the English was always ready to be aroused; and this affair was used with the utmost success to exasperate the Indians. Its effect was soon apparent "in the surly behavior of several in whom it had not before been observed;" in the stealing of guns; in more frequent intercourse with distant tribes, and the consorting together of the worst-tempered and worst-behaved fellows, who had a drunken pow-wow, which was kept up, in the woods some six miles west of Stockbridge, with fresh supplies of rum from Kinderhook; and finally some negro slaves reported a plot, in which they had been invited to join, for the massacre of as many of the whites as possible, and flight to Canada. Upon this, the wildest excitement prevailed at Stockbridge, and not less, of course, in the more exposed outpost of Poontoosuck. The people of the former place wisely determined to call the Indians together, let them know their apprehensions, and endeavor to ascertain what foundation there was for them. It appeared, as had been anticipated, that "the great body of the tribe were entirely unacquainted with the secret plot, but that the thing was real with regard to so many that the authorities looked upon themselves as in a worse state than in an open war. » 2 'Jona. Edwards to Prov. Sec. Willard, May, 1754, Mass. Ar., vol. xxxii. 2 Gen. Dwight and Capt. Woodbridge to Gov. Shirley, March 26, 1754, Mass., Ar., vol. xxxii, p. 483. Gen. Dwight and Timo. Woodbridge, Esq., therefore represented this condition of the frontier to Gov. Shirley, adding that there seemed to be no pique against any person in particular, but against the English in general for the killing of Wampaumcorse; and, in order that the people "might not be exposed to the murderous strokes of savage resentment," they earnestly begged his Excellency to recommend to the General Court an increase of the sum of £6 which had been granted "to wipe away blood,"1 and that it might be sent by a special embassy; which would add to its efficiency as a peace-offering. This request was so far granted, on the 22d of April, as to vote £20, to be placed in the hands of Gen. Dwight, to be distributed among the relatives of Wampaumcorse. But, on the 22d of May, Jonathan Edwards, apparently in the greatest anxiety, found it necessary to write to Secretary Willard, requesting his influence that "the money which had been granted to Wanaubaugus, the uncle of the man that was killed, might be speedily delivered." "It was manifest," he said, "that it was a matter of the greatest importance, not only to the people in Stockbridge, but to all New England, that the Indians should be speedily quieted in that matter. It was evident that the illinfluence of that affair had a wide extent, reaching to tribes at a great distance, that it would be a handle of which the French at that juncture would make the utmost improvement." It "seemed to affect the Mohawks, no less than the other Indians." The money was accordingly paid, and the excitement among the natives in some degree subsided. The delegates of the Stockbridge Mohegans, as vassals of the Iroquois, attended the conference of that confederacy with the commissioners of the Provinces at Albany, in July, and joined in the league formed, very much through the influence of Sir William Johnson. The Stockbridge chiefs seized the opportunity to make the complaints given in the note on page 99; but alliance with the English was traditional with them, and doubtless their disposition was more favorable to it since the intimate relations created by the mission settlement. The influence of the French emissaries appears to have had effect 1 In accordance with the Indian custom of compounding for homicide by a fine to the relatives of the slain. |