The Ransom of Mercy Carter (23 page)

When she finished speaking to the Lord, Deacon Sheldon was gone.

And so was Mercy Carter.

T
HE GIRL
who had been Mercy Carter stood for a long time watching the canoes disappear down the St.
Lawrence. She had waved after Daniel, had been too crushed to wave after Sarah and Eben, and never thought of waving after Deacon Sheldon.

Ransom, she thought. I didn’t take it.

Nistenha removed the hat, folded it and touched the heavy gold braids. “Daughter?”

It seemed to the girl that sky and wind and river held their peace and waited to hear. Mother, she thought, beloved mother in heaven, forgive me. I walk now into another life. “Nistenha,” she said.

“It is your choice? For if not, my daughter, we follow them.”

I follow where the world took me. Mother. Father. Love me anyhow. I shall always love you
.

“It is my choice,” said Nistenha’s daughter.

O
F THE 109 PRISONERS
taken from Deerfield, 88 survived the march; 59 eventually returned to Massachusetts; 29 stayed behind, every one less than twenty years old.

Mercy Carter married a Kahnawake Indian.

Her brother Ebenezer (Benny in this story) was ransomed in 1706.

Her brother Samuel remained Indian but did not live much longer. He drowned in the St. Lawrence River.

Her brother John became Jean Chartier and married Marie Courtemanche. They had eleven children.

Ruth Catlin was ransomed in 1707.

Eben Nims and his bride, Sarah Hoyt, were not ransomed until 1714.

Mr. Williams was ransomed, but not his daughter Eunice, who stayed with the Mohawks and married an Indian named Arosen—Squirrel.

Sally and Benjamin Burt had a second child on the voyage home after their ransom. The child was named Seaborn.

Joseph Kellogg stayed with both French and Indians for several years. In 1710 he may have been the first New Englander to reach the Mississippi River. He did not come home to Massachusetts until 1716, and for many years was the Indian interpreter for army forts on the frontier.

Joanna Kellogg married an Indian. So did her sister Rebecca.

Eliza, widow of the Indian Andrew Stevens, married a Frenchman and stayed in Canada.

Nobody ever knew what happened to Daniel.

W
HEN
I
WAS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
, I loved three books about Indian captives:
Sword of the Wilderness
by Elizabeth Coatsworth (who was a Newbery Award winner for another book),
Indian Captive
, a Newbery Honor Book by Lois Lenski, and
Black River Captive
by West Lathrop. I loved reading about the frontier, the settlers and the Indians. My children have a far-back grandmother from Massachusetts, an Indian named Welcome Mason. My nephew Ransom is descended from John Gillett, mentioned briefly in this book. He is named according to a family tradition in honor of the ransom paid to get John Gillett home.

Once when I was driving through Deerfield, I decided to research John Gillett. I got swept up in the story of 1704 instead.

John Williams, the minister, wrote a memoir:
The
Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion
. He told how Eunice was given rides on a sled and how many moccasins were provided. He was rough on his own captured children as they slid into being Catholic, and he wrote brutal letters to them. He did see Eunice eventually, but she never accepted ransom.

His son Stephen (whom I don’t mention in my story) was taken to Canada by a different route, and he also wrote a brief memoir.

There are family legends: that Ruth Catlin threw her pack at the Indians; that Eben Nims rescued Sarah Hoyt from marriage to a Frenchman.

There are objects: A prisoner leash, of the kind worn by Nathaniel Brooks, is on display in the Deerfield Museum, as is an Indian sash brought back by Stephen Williams.

There are official records in Boston, Montréal and Deerfield. Father Meriel, very unusual in his ability to speak English, recorded births, baptisms, marriages and deaths. These were researched a hundred years ago by Emma Coleman of Deerfield, who found out what happened to almost every captive from New England.

I used real Indian names where I could, although few are certain. Thorakwaneken is actually the name of a grandson of Eunice Williams. Gassinontie, Flying Legs, was her daughter. Tannhahorens was the owner of Mr. Williams, rather than Mercy, but his name does mean “He Splits the Door.” Aongote was the name given to
Eunice and does mean “Planted.” New England Indian vocabulary is poorly known, because language as it was spoken in 1704 has vanished. In early accounts, the spelling of Mercy’s Indian town is Caughnawaga; today historians prefer Kahnawake.

I chose Mercy Carter to write about because I wanted to make Mercy up, and we don’t know much except the names and birth dates of her family. I wanted to write about somebody who refused to be ransomed home.

Her real father was still alive. Having lost his entire family in 1704, Samuel Carter moved to Connecticut. When he died in 1728, his will left a large sum to Mercy if she and her Indian family would come to live there, but they never did. So he knew she was alive and hoped for her return.

Mercy’s brother Ebenezer (I call him Benny in this story to distinguish him from the other Ebenezers) accepted ransom and also moved to Connecticut. In 1751 two of Mercy’s half-Indian sons visited their uncle Ebenezer. So Mercy had not forgotten who she was, and had told her children, and somehow kept up with her redeemed brother and lonely father. Did letters go back and forth between them? If so, those letters don’t exist now.

But this we know: she chose not to be English again.

Deacon Sheldon and other Deerfielders came to Canada year after year, searching for captives and bringing some home each time. But even after the
French government agreed that every prisoner could go home (when the French and Indian war called Queen Anne’s War ended) some captives still refused. It does not appear that the Indians used force or deceit to keep them.

Some captives even said no to their own families. Joseph Kellogg, redeemed in 1713, went back to French Canada in 1718 to coax his sisters Rebecca and Joanna to come home with him. They refused. He tried again ten years later, and Rebecca did return, but Joanna still refused.

Many Indians who had to give up their adopted children later came to visit them in Deerfield. It is amazing to imagine these Indians arriving in the town they once burned, now camping in the fields and attending church with adults who once lived with them as children. Indians visited the Sheldons in Deerfield so often that the Sheldon family asked Boston to help pay the expense of feeding them.

So there was deep affection between these Indian families and their white children. There was love. Still, Mercy must have loved her birth family. Why wasn’t that love stronger? Shouldn’t she have chosen to return to them? How could she have preferred to stay with people who more or less kidnapped her?

This is the question every English colonist had. Why and how did captive English children so readily become Indians? Benjamin Franklin wrote that Indians have a
“life of ease, of freedom from care and labor … all wants supplied by nature.” Indians visit Boston, he added, and “see no reason to change. Going Rambling is so much more fun.” Ben Franklin wondered which life was better—an Indian’s or a settler’s—and answered himself, “Too much care and pain is necessary to support our type of life.”

But would Mercy stay in a different land with a different language, a different religion, a very different way of life—
and different parents!
—just to have fewer chores?

I believe Mercy chose to stay in Kahnawake because of love.