A Trip over Bloody Brook

This past weekend my wife Celia and I had the pleasure of traveling out to western Massachusetts to visit our dear friend from college Jared Rose. This is really a beautiful area and we spent much of our time traveling around Deerfield, one of the most picturesque and historic towns in the entire Bay State. However, some 333 years ago, Deerfield was the site of one of the most horrific encounters between Native peoples and English colonists in our history. On the morning of Saturday, September 18, 1675, about 80 colonial soldiers, nearly all of them from Essex County in Massachusetts (where I hail from) were traveling through the wilderness on their way to the settlement of Hadley, transporting threshed wheat sorely needed by the growing garrison there. As the soldiers crossed a small brook on that late summer day, they stopped to relax and pick some wild grapes that were growing nearby, fed by the pure cool water that would soon be flowing with their blood. Many of them had laid down their matchlock muskets, and were caught off guard when a band of several hundred Native American warriors ambushed them. The English troops stood little chance, and within a short time nearly all of them had been killed. A band of troops under the command of Thomas Mosely arrived at the scene to drive the Indians off, and the next day, they assumed the grim task of burying at least 64 dead colonists in a mass grave that now lies in the front yard of a house a short distance down the street. Looking at this old photo, the monument erected in 1838 marks the spot approximately where the massacre occurred is still there. The old house in the photo is long gone, and today oddly enough, a high school school stands near the spot of one of the bloodiest events in early American history. Bloody Brook, as it became known, flows clear today but only if it could talk, what stories it would tell!