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The Raid on Hatfield
At eleven o’clock on the bright fall morning of September 19th, 1677, a group of about fifty natives attacked the north end of the frontier town of Hatfield, Massachusetts. Even though the colonists had built a defensive stockade the year before, they were caught off guard. The men were helping to frame a new house or working in the fields south of the palisade. The natives never even tried to enter the stockade, instead attacking the houses outside the twelve-foot walls. Some men standing on top of the new house were shot and fell; others were captured and bound. Thirteen homes were invaded; seven were burned. Women and children were killed or captured. The men in the fields saw the smoke and rushed back to the village, but by the time they got there, the Indians had marched their seventeen captives across the fields and turned north on the Poctumtuck path toward Deerfield. They were bound for Canada.
Aftermaths
From Rootsweb Project: Ancestral Tree - William Allis
William Allis was an officer in the fight at Great Falls and was joined in the engagement by three of his sons, one of whom, William Jr., was killed.
It was felt that a large force was needed to cope with the Indians. Major John Pynchon took command of a cavalry regiment called the Hampshire Troop, recruited from the various towns. William Allis was first Coronet and leter Lieutenant of the mounted troops. Garrisons were established in the various towns, that of Hatfield being made up of 36 men under Lieutenant William Allis, and he was put in charge of the fortifications at Hatfield in the winter of 1677-8.
The massacre of the Narragansett Indians in the Swamp Fight and the death of King Philip on Aug. 12, 1676, appeared to put an end to the war, but on Sep. 19, 1677, fifty Indians from Canada, led by their chief Ashpelon and encouraged by the French, attacked Hatfield without warning. Entering the town when mostof the men were harvesting corn in a distant field, they setfire to many buildings, killed 12 and captured 17 of the English, and hastened to Canada with their captives. Mary, the wife of William Allis, was one of those killed, and Abigail Allis, his granddaughter, was one of those taken captive. The prisoners were turned over to the French in Canada, and it was eight months before the survivors again saw their homes.
From “Collisions - Natives and Puritans in Early New England”
Wars have aftermaths, and King Philip’s War was no exception. Few families in Massachusetts Bay Colony were untouched by King Philip’s War and its aftermath. Although the English colonists considered the war over with the death of Metacomet in August of 1676, hostilities continued for years and bled into the French and Indian War. Recently, when I was researching my family history, I discovered that one of my own ancestors was a victim of the war’s aftermath.
From “The Journey South: the Raid on Hatfield and Deerfield”
The Raid
In total twenty-one captives were taken during Ashpelon’s raid, including four men, three women (of whom two were pregnant), and fourteen children. Ashpelon’s party traveled down Kwinitekw and hit Hatfield before midday, when “twelve persons were killed,” “seven dwellings burned and sundry barns full of corn,” which was probably stored from the summer’s recent harvest.[3] With its captives the party moved upriver to Pocumtuck, or Deerfield, at dusk to raid again, taking a few more captives, including Quinton Stockwell and Benoni Stebbins.
Stockwell’s recounting of his capture, that the Indians had burned his home the year before, reveals that Ashpelon’s raid was not an isolated event at the end of war, but rather the launch of a succession of Native acts of continuity and reclamation which endured long after King Philip’s War had been brought to a so-called close.
Resources
- link to 212th anniversary of the Indian attack on Hatfield, and field-day of the Pocumtuck valley memorial association, at Hatfield, Massachusetts, Thursday, Sept. 19th, 1889 by [Barton, Chester M.], [from old catalog] comp; Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association; Wells, Daniel White, 1842- [from old catalog] joint comp
- “Captured By Indians!” By Neal L. Smith Jacksonville, Oregon 2011
- “Ashpelon's Journey”
- “Pocumtuc History” Although forced to leave Massachusetts, the Pocumtuc continued, as part of the Sokoki and St. Francois Indians, to fight the English, and in the fall of 1677, a Norwottuck war chief named Ashpelon led a series of raids against Deerfield and Hatfield.
- link to “Captives, 1677: The Story of Benjamin and Martha Waite” By Stuart Vaughan
- link to “Quentin Stockwell’s Relation” in Captive Histories: English, French, and Native Narratives of the 1704 ... edited by Evan Haefeli, Kevin Sweeney