The February 29, 1704 (old calendar) attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, was the October 7 and September 11 of colonial New England. Three hundred native warriors, with French officers, ordered by French Canada’s governor, surprised the frontier Puritan village at night, in the middle of Winter. The snow drifts carried them over the stockade, the night guard apparently asleep or distracted.
At least forty seven of 300 villagers (including African slaves) were slaughtered, mostly children, and 112, half of them under age 18, twelve of them under age five, were force marched 300 miles across two months towards Quebec, of whom 89 survived, two thirds of whom would eventually return home, the remainder staying with their new native “families.”
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