This is the true story of a kidnapping in Massachusetts that took place in 1704.
We learn about Queen Anne's War to begin, when England and France were fighting about who would be queen in Spain. In the American colonies, war had stirred up trouble among the Native Americans as well, and there were Natives on either side of the conflict. This story is about the Mohawk tribes that allied themselves with the French. In 1704, they raided the town of Deerfield, murdering and scalping their victims. Some were taken as prisoners, some were just killed.
John Williams was an important POW from the attack. He was supposed to be traded for an English POW, Captain Jean Baptiste Guyon. William's children were killed and scalped before his very eyes, but his wife and their five eldest children were taken as prisoners. After the negotiation, Eunice was kept by the Kahnawake natives—they would not release her. Williams continued his fight for her to be released, but when they finally revealed his daughter to him, ten years later, she was already married and integrated with Native life, and she was Roman Catholic.
In 1729, Demos tells us that Williams died, but Stephen continued his father's efforts to free his sister from captivity. After some time, though, he lost contact with the tribe, and it wasn't for twenty more years that Eunice reached out to him. By that time, she was old. She was already a grandmother, living in a community of Native Americans who settled in Canada. She lived to be eighty-five years old.
