THE MOHAWK CAPTIVE

THE TREK

Seated beside her Mohawk husband, Eunice, at first, refuses to talk to the trader. He represents her father, John Williams, a notable New England pastor, who for nine years has tried to redeem his daughter. The situation has become political. There is a tenuous peace between the French and English colonies. Pressured by authorities in Canada, the village priests, and powerful officials in New England, who all want Eunice to return to her influential father, she has to speak her mind, so Eunice finally replies in her husband’s language, “Ya!” or in English, “No!”

The capture of Eunice, her father, mother, and brother during the midnight raid of the town of Deerfield was the ultimate colonial nightmare. The child of seven witnessed  her neighbors hatcheted and scalped. Afterwards, the captives were forced to march back in the snow to Canada. The Mohawks practiced their cruel mercies—dispatching quickly those who hadn’t the strength to keep up. When Eunice’s mother, who had just given birth, started to drown, a warrior split her skull. Her father whom Eunice would naturally consider her family’s protector could only look on helplessly.

A Mohawk brave carried Eunice on his shoulders during the long trek. He was gentle and good-humored with her. When he mocked the efforts of her father, she must have felt embarrassed and ashamed.

The Mohawks kept her because she was a pretty girl. I take that to mean the tribe fell in love with her. The seven-year-old Eunice Williams couldn’t be expected to resist for very long. Inevitably, she was drawn into the other world and fell in love with them.

JOHN WILLIAMS

Pastor John Williams finally sees his daughter for the first time in nine years. As a new captive, she had begged him to take her away when he was allowed to return. The Canadian Mohawk tribe wouldn’t let her go. Now she can’t even speak his language. He tries to understand what God had in mind in allowing his daughter to prefer savages and papists to the close-knit New England township where she had spent the first seven years of her life. The question he never asks, which is always simmering beneath the surface of his efforts, is: ‘Were we good enough?’

For those who preferred to stay with their Indian captors, being ‘good enough’ wasn’t the issue. Instead, it was that the tribe had become their people. We might see happier, smarter, and closer families than our family, but we love our family. We even fill our heavens with familiar objects and make them idealized versions of where we grew up.

As for Eunice? Most of us can trace a direct line from childhood to the present. Like a ladder into the past, we can climb down those events and recognize the person we were so many years ago. For Eunice, the ladder broke partway. Like the individual who suffers complete amnesia and becomes a different person, she confronts us with a puzzle and a challenge. Are our identities so fragile?

I don’t think so. There were other captives with different experiences. Most returned, but some stayed, becoming French or Indian. The difference is, like Eunice, their hearts were captured. Everything else that had to do with identity followed. I believe we can all understand that.

John Demos, the author of The Unredeemed Captive and the source of this blog, is, for me, the best sort of historian because of his efforts to penetrate the hearts and minds of the New England people he studies.