Wheeler's Surprise and the Siege of Brookfield

DeWolf 1 Wheeler’s Surprise and the Siege of Brookfield Martha DeWolf HIS 791 SNHU Dr. David Byrne October 6, 2016 DeWolf 2 BROOKFIELD Settled in 1660 by Men from Ipswich on Indian Lands Called Quaboag. Attacked by Indians In 1675. One Garrison House Defended to the Last. Reoccupied Twelve Years Later.1 1 Brookfield Marker. Location: 42° 13.122′ N, 72° 7.178′ W. West Main Street, Brookfield, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Photo: The Historical Marker Database. Web http://www.hmdb.org/Marker.asp?Marker=48781. DeWolf 3 Detail from a nineteenth-century, hand-colored facsimile of Nikolaus J. Visscher’s 1660 Dutch map of New Netherland and New England. Note: in this particular map, the Connecticut River (lower left) forms part of the border between southern New England and New Netherland.2 2 Nickolaus J. Visscher, Novi Belgii, Catalog # 2000.0229, Little Compton Historical Society, 548 West Main Road (Route 77), Little Compton, RI 02837. Web https://lchistorical.wordpress.com. DeWolf 4 Acknowledgements I owe many, many thanks to Dr. Robert Denning for starting me on my academic journey and considering me a professional; to Dr. Bob Irvine thank you for your engagement, humor, tangents, kind support, and encouragement; thank you to Dr. Sun Yun Susie Chung for helping to focus my proposal; and thank you to Dr. David Byrne for prompt and gentle editing of my capstone paper. The friendship and camaraderie of my colleague Linda Kennedy, was an unexpected benefit of this journey. To my colleague and friend, Julia Dumas Wilks - more than you know - I appreciate your editing, encouragement, and support. Thank you to Cynthia Henshaw for walking me through the woods at Pynchon’s Quaboag mill site. Thank you to Fred Freeman, for so generously sharing indigenous philosophy and Nipmuc History - your patient help and guidance pointed me to the landscape. An astonished thank you, to Margaret R. Dakin, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College for so kindly finding the photo of the ‘Brookfield Pot.’ Many, many thanks to Cliff McCarthy, Archivist at the Lyman and Merrie Wood History of Springfield Museum, for the special privilege of studying John Pynchon’s seventeenth-century Waste Book. I am forever grateful to chemist, humanitarian, and my best friend since forever, Teddi Galligan, for continuing our lifelong conversation, and especially for making me stop typing long enough to go for a walk on the beach - and for taking me to the Little Compton Historical Society, where we found a copy of the Visscher map. Thank you to the staff at the Little Compton Historical Society for such spontaneously gracious help. Earl Heller, thank you for pointing out the Crichton quote, and Adrienne Morrison, thank you for always expanding my universe. To my father, Gordon P. DeWolf Jr., PhD, thank you for reading and correcting the several dozen iterations of this and other papers, for sharing your library, and your extensive knowledge of botany and agriculture. To my late mother, Ellen Kingsbury DeWolf (who went to college for the first time at age sixty), thank you for showing me how it’s done. A heartfelt thank you, to my daughter Madeline for mowing the lawn when you wanted to go swimming - your kindness, intelligence, and strength are always inspiring. Yakov, thank you for being a such a good guy. And finally, a special thank you, to Quaboag historian and free-lance editor Ed Londergan for volunteering (at the last minute, and out of the blue) to edit the paper - you are extraordinarily kind. DeWolf 5 Introduction If you don't know history you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.3 The history of the central Massachusetts town of West Brookfield is tangled up in the branches of the seventeenth-century settlement story of the English town of Quaboag/Brookfield. Over time, the destruction of the settlement in a minor battle between a small group of Indians and a smaller group of English colonists and militia, came to be called Wheeler’s Surprise and the Siege of Brookfield. This work corrects various misconceptions about and inconsistencies within the traditional story in order to demystify the first settlement, the town founders, the Quaboag Indians, the ambush, and the siege. Important to this discussion are concepts of civilization and wilderness, as well as the implications of language and livestock. Sometime after 1665, English settled on present-day Foster Hill in the Quaboag River Valley - then the heart of Nipmuc Country. They incorporated the settlement called Quaboag (or Squaboag) as the town of Brookfield, in 1673 - just two years prior to the outbreak of King Philip’s War. On Monday morning, August 2, 1675, Brookfield wives and daughters might ordinarily have started the weekly wash, but the venerable Captain Edward Hutchinson, Captain Thomas Wheeler with a mounted guard twenty-strong, and their guide, Ephraim Curtis, along with three Natick Indian interpreters, had arrived at noon, the day before. They were well-armed. At the end of July, the General Court at Boston assigned Hutchinson to ‘secure peace’ with the Nipmuc people in central Massachusetts, as he had recently done with the Narraganset people in Rhode Island. The Court ordered fifty-five year old Wheeler and part of his militia company to escort sixty-two year old Hutchinson and protect him, if necessary, from ‘belligerent’ Indians. Before Monday ended (according to Wheeler), the local Indians ‘broke their promise’ to meet with the English. Instead, well-armed and extremely angry Quaboag and Nipmuc warriors led by a man named Matoonas, ambushed the expedition, mortally wounded Hutchinson, chased the expedition back to Brookfield, and besieged the town. When the episode ended late Thursday night, English claimed eighty Indians died over the course of three days and three nights.4 Five English militiamen and five people from Brookfield were dead, and much of the town burned.5 English abandoned the area for more than a decade.6 Shortly after the event, Wheeler penned what is commonly understood as an eyewitness account of the episode. (See Appendix II) He called it, A Thankful Remembrance of God’s Mercy, A True Narrative of the Lord’s Providences in various dispensations towards Captain Edward Hutchinson of Boston & Myself, and those that went with us into the Nipmuck Country, and also to Quaboag, alias Brookfield: The Said Captain Hutchinson having a Commission from 3 Michael Crichton, Timeline, Alfred E. Knopf, 1999, p. 73. 4 Thomas Wheeler, A Thankful Remembrance of God’s Mercy..., Cambridge, 1676, in Joseph Ives Foote, An Historical Address Delivered at West Brookfield November 27, 1828, Merriam & Cooke, West Brookfield, 1843, pp. 34-5. 5 Ibid, p. 45. 6 Josiah H. Temple, The History of North Brookfield, Town of North Brookfield, 1887: Louis E. Roy, Quaboag Plantation alias Brookfeild [sic]: A seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Town, Heffernan Press, Inc., Worcester MA, 1965; Jeffrey H. Fiske, A History of West Brookfield, 1675-1990, West Brookfield Historical Commission, 2009. DeWolf 6 the Honored Council of this Colony to treat with several Sachems in those parts, in order to the public peace, and myself being also ordered by the said Council, to accompany him with part of my troop for security from any danger that might be from the Indians: and to assist him in the transaction of matters committed to him. For the purposes of this text, it will simply be referred to as Wheeler’s Narrative. What really happened in August 1675, was a bit more complicated than either Wheeler’s Narrative, or traditional interpretations indicate. Interpreting local history Often viewed as the realm of amateurs, the significance of local history should not be underestimated. After all, local history is the kind of history with which ordinary Americans have the most familiarity. Granville Hicks pointed out the importance of local history in the 1950s, when he advised local historians “to recognize the urgency of coming to terms with [a] town's past in order to deal with the present and have an influence upon the future.”7 Hicks’ statement is still relevant, today. And, because change often occurs at the ‘grass-roots’ level, local audiences are crucial to transforming perceptions about history. Yet, in some towns, local narratives are more disconnected from contemporary society and scholarly understanding than ever. Such narratives risk irrelevance. The idea of relevance makes teachers of history, historical researchers, and historical societies nervous because for many, relevance and financial security are inextricably linked. Historical societies, (in particular) are funded almost entirely by donations, thus, ‘relevance’ equals the willingness of potential donors to part with potential contributions. While twentieth- and twenty-first-century historical scholarship has transformed the way academia interprets American history, historical narratives at the local level often continue to inadvertently promote versions of Eurocentric nineteenth- century American exceptionalism. These kinds of historical narratives unintentionally “parochialize specific histories” and obscure “larger patterns and processes.”8 In West Brookfield, versions of what happened in August 1675 rely almost exclusively upon Wheeler’s Narrative, nineteenth- and mid-twentieth- century scholarship. Thus, the ambush and siege continue to be misrepresented as a two- dimensional, unprovoked wilderness encounter between hardy English colonists and treacherous Indians. Traditional interpretations

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