He said that we forgot our coat and seemed to snap it, or slip it, in that we would keep their men in hold under pretence of being guilty, who were no ways culpable; which they had sufficiently demonstrated, and did add with vehemency that the God of Heaven knew that they spake truth in saying that these Indians now in custody at the time of the mischief at Deerfield, and when the guns went off at the houses, were then at that time and had been that night with the rest of their Indians on the northwest side of Deerfield River. This (said he) the God of Heaven knows, and we might know it, that they could not possibly do that murder, and that they would have served us against the French Indians, but we were jealous of them without cause which made all the Indians draw off; and, said he further, no more Maquas would come here any more.[4]

In their speeches, the Mohawk delegation invoked the Covenant Chain with the English colonists, and desired that the settlers of New England would “hold the chain fast,” even as the Mohawks had pledged to “hold firm their friendship” during this war.

Those settlers were dependent upon warriors from the Mohawk Valley, and the Confederacy as a whole, in their war against the French in Quebec and the “French Indians.” Haudenosaunee towns on the Mohawk River had been hit the previous year and the colonial towns in the Connecticut River Valley, like Deerfield, were on guard against the French and French-allied Indians, including Mohawks from Kahnawake as well as “Eastern Indians,” or Wabanaki people from northern territories. Thus, the Mohawk delegation’s explanations fit more squarely with the context of war in which they were embroiled. Yet, as in King Philip’s War, local settlers often feared, and accused, the Native people who were in closest proximity, particularly when the actual raiders were far beyond their reach and their view. In the same letter, Pynchon told Governor Phips that although “many of our people have been zealous for prosecution of these two Indians,” they had begun to admit that “the evidence against them” was “very doubtful” and the two witnesses were “much distempered in their heads,” including Thomas Broughton, who was “so extremely cut and wounded” that “he died within an hour or two” after making his accusation.”[5]

Another account from Pynchon’s correspondence demonstrates that Wabanaki people also understood this scenario, observing that the settlers of the Connecticut River Valley had entirely missed those who struck Deerfield, and instead imprisoned their own allies. At the end of July, another war party from the north came down and struck the settlement of Brookfield, or Quaboag. A captive taken by the Wabanaki party, known as “Mason’s wife,” conveyed, upon her escape, the Wabanaki people’s understanding of what had taken place at Deerfield, and their concern for the men who were held captive:

They told her that the Canada Indians had been at Deerfield above two months since and done mischief there, when they see the English there go against their own Indians, and the English suspected their Indians, and had imprisoned two of them, though the mischief done there was by Indians that came from Canada, who presently returned after they had done that mischief at Deerfield and were all got safe home to Canada. They inquired of her what was become of the Indians in prison; she answered them she knew not (for indeed that day they were in prison).

This Wabanaki party included warriors from as far away as Pemaquid, demonstrating the wide network of communication, alliance and exchange among Native people in the north. Like the Mohawk delegation, they fully understood that the raid had been carried out by warriors from the St. Lawrence, not the two men accused.

The Wabanaki party’s trail home, in 1693, also paralleled Ashpelon’s 1677 journey. One of their original targets had been Nashaway and, further, as they told Mrs. Mason, upon leaving Quaboag, their goal was to paddle toward “a great lake like the sea,” Betobakw (Lake Champlain). “They cared not if 200 English came after them in that place,” she reported, “it was such a place that they should there kill them all, that came to them; and indeed,” Pynchon confirmed, “it was a dangerous place for our men.” Places like Missisquoi and Winoskik on Betobakw emerged as key gathering places for families displaced by war, from which warriors would continue to launch strikes on settlements like Deerfield, Brookfield and Nashaway during the subsequent Anglo-Abenaki wars.[6]

Perhaps coincidentally, on the very same day as the Wabanaki raid on Brookfield, Chedaw and the Schaghticoke “captain” took their fate into their own hands. On July 27, Pynchon reported to Phips,” the two Indians in custody upon the account of the murder at Deerfield escaped out of prison.” The men cut the shackles that bound them using “some sharp thin file,” which was apparently smuggled in, then “pulled out some stones and got to the foundation and so crept out and are gone, probably irrecoverably,” Pynchon observed. Once in Mohawk territory and New York colony, the men would be protected and would have their own stories to pass on, which would travel through Native networks from the Mohawk Valley to the St. Lawrence River and down inland waterways to the Wabanaki coast.[7]

One of the reasons why the colonists of Kwinitekw were so suspicious of their Native neighbours was the ties Schaghticoke people maintained with their Wabanaki relations to the north. Yet, these kinship ties often provided refuge, allowing mobility in times of conflict and chaos. Moreover, such acts of colonial containment, like the imprisonment of Chedaw and “the young captain,” sometimes made enemies of allies, sending them toward kin in Wabanaki enclaves, who often returned to the Connecticut River valley not only to strike enemy settlements in war, as the “French Maquas” did, but to reclaim Indigenous homelands.