John Prescott deserted of all his original co-partners was sufficient for the emergency, a host in himself.  He sells his one hundred and twenty six acres and house at Watertown, puts his all into the venture, prepares a rude dwelling in the wilderness, moves thither his cattle, and chattels, and finally, mounting wife and children and his few remaining goods upon horses’ backs, bids his old neighbors good bye, and threads the narrow Indian trail through the forest westward.  The scorn of men high in authority is to follow him, but now the most formidable enemy in his path is the swollen Sudbury River and its bordering marsh.  We find the aristocratic scorn mingling with the story of Prescott’s dearly bought victory over this natural obstacle, told in Winthrop’s History of New England among what the author classes as remarkable “special providences.”

“Prescot another favorer of the Petitioners lost a horse and his loading in Sudbury river, and a week after his wife and children being upon another horse were hardly saved from drowning.”  That the kindly hearted Winthrop could coolly attribute the pitiable disaster of the brave pioneer to the wrath of God towards the political philosophy of Robert Child, pictures vividly the bigotry natural to the age and race, a bigotry which culminated in the horrors of the persecution for witchcraft.  This Sudbury swamp was the lion in the path from the bay westward during many a decade.  In 1645, an earnest petition went up to the council from Prescott and his associates, complaining that much time and means had been spent in discovering Nashaway and preparing for the settlement there, and that on account of the lack of bridge and causeway at the Sudbury River, the proprietors could not pass to and from the bay towns—­“without exposing our persons to perill and our cattell and goods to losse and spoyle; as yo’r petitioners are able to make prooffe of by sad experience of what wee suffered there within these few dayes.”  The General Court ordered the bridge and way to be made, “passable for loaden horse,” and allowed twenty pounds to Sudbury, “so it be donne w’thin a twelve monthe.”  The twelve month passed and no bridge spanned the stream.  That the dangers and difficulties of the crossing were not over-stated by the petitioners is proven by the fact that more than one hundred years afterwards, the bridge and causeway at this place “half a mile long”—­were represented to the General Court as dangerous and in time of floods impassable.  Between 1759 and 1761, the proceeds of special lotteries amounting to twelve hundred and twenty seven pounds were expended in the improvement of the crossing.

John Winthrop, writing of the Nashaway planters, tells us that “he whom they had called to be their minister, [Norcross] left them for their delays,” but omits mention of the fact recorded by the planters themselves in their petition, that the chief and sufficient cause of their slow progress was in the inability or unwillingness of the Governor and magistrates to afford effective aid in providing a passable crossing over a small river.