It was never an easy life–a seven-year-old on the edge of the Massachusetts wilderness at the beginning of the 18th century. Eunice Williams lived with her four brothers and sisters, mother and father in the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her father was the village minister. In the early morning of February 29, 1704, a French and Indian war party attacked the town and took 112 people captive, including Eunice’s family.

This program relates the story of Eunice’s captivity as she is separated from her family and grows up a Mohawk. When after nine years a British officer arrives to free her, Eunice, now Aiongote (Mohawk for, “She has been planted as a person”), can no longer speak English. A translator is required. When asked if she would leave the village and come with him back to Deerfield, she says, Jaghte oghte…“maybe not.”

In fact, of the 12 children from Deerfield taken into the village, five, all girls, remained for the rest of their lives. Women, it turned out, were an integral part of Mohawk culture. An 18th-century French anthropologist wrote of the Mohican culture, “Nothing is more real than the women’s superiority. It is they who really maintain the tribe, the nobility of blood, the genealogical tree, the order of generations, and conservation of families. In them resides all the real authority.” At the end of her life, Aigongote, through a translator, sent a letter to her brother in Deerfield, “I am now growing old and can have but little hopes of seeing you in this world. But I pray the Lord that he may give us grace to Live in this as to be prepared for a happy meeting in the world to Come.”

LESSONS: Eunice’s story, like the John Ford film, The Searchers, gives us a perspective both on white, pioneer culture as well as the culture of Native Americans. We gain an appreciation of the battle between two European nations, France and Great Britain, to gain control over North America–as well as the forces of freedom and liberty developing in those pioneers who were living on the edge of the colonial frontiers.

<Back to The Heroes