The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

This book is an example of petite histoire, the account of particular households and villages, set in the larger context of early colonial New England. Demos tells the story of an Indian raid of 1704, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and its aftermath. In the raid, prominent minister John Williams, his family, and many others are taken captive and transported to Quebec, near Montreal. Some die in transit; many others are returned or "redeemed" to their homes. Williams' daughter, Eunice, remains "unredeemed", a convert to Catholicism and a new way of life, now married to a member of the capturing tribe. Demos does a marvelous job in reading and explicating the meager original sources which survive, and applying a judicious historical imagination to reconstruct this story, both in the larger context of time and place and the smaller context of the Williams family. As a resident of Northern New York, close to both Quebec and the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation, this story has significant local interest for me. Despite these attributes, however, I found the book often lost my interest, I think because Demos tries too hard to be writerly, with his narrative devices (ellipsis, enjambment, etc.) getting in the way of the story. For this reason, I must qualify my recommendation, at least for this general reader. I must say, however, that my wife, Carol, loved this book, stayed up late reading it, and enthused about it for weeks after a late night conclusion. Other critics also have been very enthusiastic.

A walk through the shady streets of Old Deerfield, Massachusetts, presents many fine views -- the stately old homes, the colonial doorways, the lonely Union Army sentinel atop the town's sandstone monument, and Frank Boyden's splendid prep school, Deerfield Academy. A stroller then comes to the stone markers that recall moments of terror and bravery. On February 29, 1704, the tiny settlement at Deerfield was attacked by the French and the Indians. Many inhabitants, and not a few attackers, met their deaths from musket, tomahawk, blade, and fire.

Eunice Williams, 7, daughter of the settlement's minister, was one of the 112 captives seized by the raiding party. They were taken in an eight-week forced march through the snow across Vermont and south Quebec. Only 92 reached Canada; Eunice's mother was one of those killed along the way.

In Canada, many of the Deerfield children were placed with French Canadian families. They were ultimately ransomed ("redeemed") by the Massachusetts Bay Colony and returned home a few years later. Eunice, however, was one of those given to the Kahnawake Indians in a village not far from Montreal. The French could not peremptorily order the tribe to return her, so talks were delayed. When at least she sat face to face with a delegate from New England, in 1713, she refused to return to Massachusetts, for she had become a member of the tribe, been baptized a Catholic at the Kahnawake mission, and married. Her name was now Marguerite.

It was the lifetime work of her father and brother Stephen to seek her return to New England. Despite his prayers and exertions on her behalf, Eunice's father was never reconciled that his daughter had become an Indian and a Catholic. Stephen was in time accomodated to her decision, her marriage, and her honored station among the Kahnawake as the mother-in-law of a chief, and perhaps her conversion.

Professor Demos's book helps us recall that in the eighteenth century, immense chasms of national loyalty, religion, and form of government divided New England from Canada. One was English, Puritan, and congregational; the other French, Catholic, and feudal. The settlers in both colonies regarded the Indians as "savages." Even the modern reader can feel the agonies involved when Eunice crossed these great cultural divides.

Demos's scholarship is extraordinary. The primary source materials on the massacre, the exchanges, Eunice's life in Canada, and the efforts of her relatives to retrieve her -- the documents, the letters, the diaries -- would probably fit on the top of a desk. Yet from these spare materials, Demos has fleshed out an amazing human story. His use of the sociological and ethnographic materials on the Canadian tribes -- some relying on the Jesuit Relations -- is masterful.

Eunice's story ends with a notation in a Canadian parish register in 1785 -- Father Ducharme buried Marguerite, the mother-in-law of the chief Annasetegen. Demos then movingly portrays her death and her passage to another life through the lenses of the three faiths that touched her life -- Puritan, Catholic, and Indian.

There is an epilogue. In 1837, a group of Indians that included some of Eunice's grandchildren visited Deerfield to pay respects at the graves of her parents. Deerfield's pastor, John Fessenden, preached a sermon to his congregation and the visitors. Just a generation before the great struggle over slavery, Fessenden pondered the "gloomy, repulsive view" that races have fundamental differences. The view engenders in turn jealousy and aversion, enmity, and finally warfare, he said. Looking over the Indian and New England cousins seated before him, he blessed the "workings of that mysterious providence, which as mingled your blood with ours, and which ... admonishes that God ... hath made of one blood all nations of men."

Thanks to John Demos, Eunice Marguerite's soul -- like the stones at Deerfield -- reaches across the centuries with a message.

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The Unredeemed Captive (nonfiction) shows the path of abduction and adoption of American settlers by Indians. The book starts in 1704 when protestant pastor John Williams and his five children are taken captive at Deerfield, a small village in Massachusetts.

Two of Williams' children are murdered the night of the raid. The minister, along with his wife and other children (Samuel: age fourteen, Stephan: age twelve, Esther age eight, Eunice age six, and Warham age four), were herded along with 112 other Deerfield captives on a three hundred mile journey to Montreal that lasted for two months. During the journey the surviving Williams children are scattered amongst the various participating Indians tribes. As the family separates they all realize it may be the last time they ever see each other.

Indians assign the captives to a family in different tribes and places. After sometimes brutal initiation, the adopted captives in many cases are considered members of the Indian family. The Indians are led and indoctrinated by Jesuit Catholics. Rev. John Williams and his followers and the whole Protestant nation are horrified. Protesting against Catholic religion is the back bone of the Puritans' self-existence.

In many cases it was possible to "redeem" a captive by exchanging money with the tribe's captors, once found. Most of the Williams family were eventually "redeemed" and released, all except the youngest child "Eunice," who was only six when taken. First her adopted family refused to let her go, then she refused to leave them.

After ten years of fruitless attempts for Eunice's release, John Williams was deeply saddened by the news that Eunice had forgotten how to speak English, had been baptized to the Roman Catholic faith by Jesuit priests, took an Indian name and married a "savage," as he was referred to in the Williams family correspondence. Until his death in 1729, John Williams continued efforts to have Eunice freed and returned. After the father's death, his son Rev. Stephan Williams, carried on the c
rusade. When contact is finally made, it is interesting to learn Eunice's story.

The author has carefully documented his sources for this true story. I especially enjoyed this book because an "aunt" in my family was held captive for five years when she was a child. This helped me understand her life. The book would have benefitted by a good editor to present the story in a more readable format.

This book tells the story of an Iindian raid on a small Massachusetts town in the later 1600s and how one 7 year old girl, the daughter of a respected minister, was captured and eventually chose to live as an Indian and a Catholic. It is not clear which conversion was more troubling to her Puritan family.
Demos uses the story to paint a pentrating picture of three cultures living close together, Puritan New England, French Canada and Native-Americans. The research is very thorough.
The only limitation is that the book is not a particularly easy read. In the introduction Demos says that the book is a return to his first love, narrative history. While the book starts out that way, with the thrilling tale of a French/Indian raid on a frontier village and the tale of how the captives dealt with the situation, before long you are reading about Indian kinship systems and the average age that males and females marry in different cultures. Fascinating information, but not much of a story. Still, if you are interested in the New England colonial culture in the 18th century, this is a very worthwhile book to read.

John Demos tackles an interesting topic in writing the Unredeemed Captive, a story about a young Puritan girl who is captured and subsquently adopted by Mohawk Indians and her family's attempts to redeem her. Such a tale would strike one as intruiging and rife with historical detail. Indeed, Demos' research is superb. Demos spares no quarter in bombarding the reader with references to historical primary sources, which range from Puritan sermons to fur trader diaries yet in Demos' obsessive need to illustrate his narrative with these documents he loses the reader with his unredeemable writing style. An unbearably excessive use of the parentheses and colon are among Demos' cardinal sins in this book often throwing the reader off on tangents and unnecessary observations which end up obscuring the tale rather than magnifying it. This chaotic style makes the book an incredible drag for the detatched reader. In addition, Demos takes analysis of sources to the next level, often inserting his own narrative on the thoughts of various characters in the book without any backup evidence for these assumptions.
There is no doubt Demos has done his homework on this book, unfortuneatly that's not enough to keep the reader interested. This book is valuable as a historical analysis of a segment often unlooked at in American history yet its historical ferver loses the reader along the way.

The descriptions certainly seemed interesting. What was heralded as a beautifully achieved balance between native, French, and English cultures in eastern North America in the early 18th century became little less than a spiraling disappointment of an academic work. The book is largely composed of excerpts from 18th century correspondences and official government documents which were clearly not edited for easy comprehension by the contemporary reader. Furthermore, some of these quoted writings even remained in their original vernacular (Dutch and French).
Although Demos' ability to report on what was seemingly a routine and trivial capture of a colonial settler by native tribes was admirable in its tireless detail, the central story itself is lacking in any real depth or interest. After reaing the book and rereadin parts of it over, I cannot understand what compelled Demos to write any sort of summary or commentary on such a generally disinteresting and disengaging subject. Half the book was composed of predictable diplomatic jabber between the governors of Massachusetts and New France, whose behaviours were both highly patterned and not even confrontational. We may as well have been reading reams of routine documents on an embassy file.
Not to mention, in his quest to report in a detailed fashion every word bounced between Boston and Quebec City in the matter of the captive that ives the work its title, Demos generally fails to describe in any detail the cultural interactions between the English, the natives, and the French, which seemed to be the intended essence.

In writing about this interesting bit of colonial history, Demos focuses on Eunice Williams, the "unredeemed captive" who, unlike other family memory members, chose not to return to New England following her abduction in the 1704 Deerfield "Massacre. In addition, it is also a detailed look at the interfaces between Indian, French, and English cultures in colonial America. As Demos tells the story of the Williams family, he also relates the complexities of such things as Indian childrearing practices and spirituality, as well as the particular situation of the Kahnawake Indians, converted to Catholicism by the French but moving constantly back and forth across the shifting borders between English and French. Demos writes history that is impeccably researched but never tedious; this book can be read with great pleasure by anyone with an interest in history. In terms of its excellence as history that can be enjoyed by non-specialists, it is in the same class as Laurel Ulrich's "A Midwife's Tale."
M. Feldman

Normally, the genre of historical fiction is a very interesting read. However, in this book, it is, for lack of a better term, quite boring. If you're looking for a breezy read, this isn't the book you want. If you're looking for accuracy and a story that may be better in movie form, here's your screenplay. Demos' format of breaking up the flow of the book with actual quotes, manuscripts, and other correspondence really takes away from what could be an interesting and quite intriguing story of an upscale colonial Massachusetts family torn apart when a daughter is not "redeemed" from her savage captors and in fact assimilates their culture. Good story...Bad reading.

John Demos, the author, is in the upper echelon of academic and professional historians. As we general lay readers know all too well, far too few academic historians write history that is interesting to anyone other than (perhaps) their colleagues or a captive audience of students. From the Preface to THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE, it appears that Demos sought to do his small part to address that situation by writing an academically solid history of a fascinating episode from Colonial America yet doing so "yielding fully" to "a narrative voice."

While I commend the objective, the implementation falls short -- or maybe it is that I just don't care for Demos's particular "narrative voice." In much of THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE, the writing is far too choppy and informal. Demos also has a tendency to underscore and explain the obvious, which contributes to the overall impression that he is somewhat smug and condescending. His fellow academic historian of colonial times, David Hackett Fischer, was much more successful in "Paul Revere's Ride" (published around the same time as THE UNREDEEMED CAPITVE) in writing a highly readable, yet academically rigorous, work of history.

But withal, THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE is interesting. It tells the story of the Williams family, originally of Deerfield, Massachusetts. John Williams was the minister of the town in 1704, when it was raided by Indians and French from Canada, who killed 48 and captured 112, taking them back to Canada, including Williams and five of his children. Williams spent nearly three years in captivity before he was released ("redeemed" in the parlance of the time), and four of his five children also were released after varying periods of captivity. Williams resumed his career as a minister and he became the patriarch of an extended family that was one of the leading families in 18th-Century colonial Massachusetts.

"The Unredeemed Captive" was his daughter Eunice, who was seven at the time of the raid in 1704. She was taken to live in a large settlement of Catholicized Mohawk Indians near Montreal. As things developed, Eunice had no desire to return to her family or English (i.e., Puritan) life in Massachusetts. Instead, she married an Indian and spent the rest of her 89 years as a fully integrated and respected member of the Indian community. The central story and drama of the book revolve around the repeated efforts of the Williams family, and even Massachusetts society at large, to persuade and entice Eunice to return to Massachusetts and colonial English ways of life, including, of course, Puritan religious practices. Indeed, at times it appears that Eunice's adopted Catholic faith caused greater consternation among those back in Massachusetts than her "savage" marriage and lifestyle.

The cultural conflicts are quite intriguing. But part of the discussion of the Puritan side of those conflicts consists of extended and, to me, mind-numbingly boring analyses of Puritan sermons and writings. Curiously, the Puritans, with their religious conventions and tropes, are far stranger to me than the Mohawk Indians.

A tough read at times, but a good and interesting story, one well worth reading...meticulously and superbly researched, maybe to a fault a times, this book is a good, but tough read, telling the story of a piece of American History we seldom hear about and seldom think about....the dangers of living on the American frontier in the early days of settling America.

This is the story of a young New England girl, who when captured by the Indians and adopted by them, decides to stay with them rather than return home to her English and New England culture...A fascinating story of family relationships, governmental and diplomatic efforts to "redeem" her, and of life, real human life, on the frontier.

A tough read at times because of its meticulous research but a good and fascinating story nonetheless. Worth the effort if this part of history is your cup of tea...the story is a five-plus, the effort to read it brings it down to a three...read it anyway!! At times you will wonder who was civilized and who were the savages!!!