Raid On Deerfield - Background

Background

At the time of the arrival of European colonists in the middle reaches of the Connecticut River valley (where it presently flows through the state of Massachusetts), the area that is now Deerfield, Massachusetts was inhabited by the Algonquian-speaking Pocomtuc nation. In the early 1660s, the Pocumtuc were shattered as a nation due to conflict with the aggressive Mohawk nation. In 1665 villagers from the eastern Massachusetts town of Dedham were given a grant in the area, and acquired land titles of uncertain legality from a variety of Pocumtuc individuals. A village, at first called Pocumtuck, but later Deerfield, was established in the early 1670s.

The colonial outpost was a traditional New England subsistence farming community and the majority of Deerfield’s settlers were young families who had moved west in the search of land; it was not an outpost of rugged, frontier individuals, but English colonial families. Women were not a minority in the frontier community. Rather, women’s labor was essential to the survival of the settlement and its male inhabitants. Recurrent guerrilla-like border conflict did not target individual male combatants, but attacked and exploited communities of families and their settlements.

Located in a relatively isolated position on the edge of English settlement, Deerfield was involved in the inevitable frontier conflict between groups of other European settlers and Native Americans. The 1704 Raid and its aftermath reflect the challenges border communities faced negotiating cross-cultural exchange and access to resources.