“A war party of about fifty Canadians and two hundred Indians left Quebec about mid-winter, and arrived at Deerfield on the 28th of February, 1704.  Savage and hungry, they lay shivering under the pines till about two hours before dawn the following morning; then, leaving their packs and their snowshoes behind, they moved cautiously towards their prey.  The hideous din startled the minister, Williams, from his sleep.  Half naked, he sprang out of bed, and saw, dimly, a crowd of savages bursting through the shattered door.  With more valor than discretion he snatched a pistol that hung at the head of the bed, cocked it and snapped it at the breast of the foremost Indian.  It missed fire.  Amid the screams of his terrified children, three of the party seized him and bound him fast, for they came well provided with cords, as prisoners had a great market value.  Nevertheless, in the first fury of their attack, they dragged to the door and murdered two of the children.  They kept Williams shivering in his shirt for an hour, while a frightful uproar of yells, shrieks, and gunshots sounded from within.  At length they permitted him, his wife, and five remaining children to dress themselves.  After the entire village had been destroyed and the inhabitants either murdered or made captive, Williams and his wife and family were led from their burning house across the Connecticut River to the foot of the mountain, and the following day the march north began with the hundred or more prisoners.”

The hardships of the prisoners, and the crimes of the victors during that long and arduous march north through snow and ice, forms a chapter of pathos in the early history of those eastern states.

“At the mouth of the White River the party divided, and the Williams family were separated and carried off in various directions.  Eunice, the youngest daughter, about eight years old, was handed over by the Indians to the mission at St. Louis on their arrival there, and although many efforts were made on the part of the Governor, who had purchased and befriended Williams, to ransom her, the Jesuits flatly refused to give her up.  On one occasion he went himself with the minister to St. Louis.  This time the Jesuits, whose authority within their mission seemed almost to override that of the Governor himself, yielded so far as to allow the father to see his daughter, on condition that he spoke to no other English prisoner.  He spoke to her for an hour, exhorting her never to forget her catechism, which she had learned by rote.  The Governor and his wife afterwards did all in their power to procure her ransom, but of no avail.

“‘She is there still,’ writes Williams two years later, ’and has forgotten to speak English.’  What grieved him still more, Eunice had forgotten her catechism.”  But now we come to this strange transformation, unprecedented, we think, which made an Indian squaw out of a white woman.  “Eunice, reared among Indian children, learned their language and forgot her own; she lived in a wigwam of the Caughnawagas, forgot her catechism, was baptized in the Roman Catholic faith, and in due time married an Indian of the tribe, who henceforth called himself Williams.  Thus her hybrid children bore her family name.