In August of 1837, the Greenfield Gazette and Mercury reported that a group of Abenaki from St. Francis, (Odanak) Québec, were camped in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Their appearance, according to the Gazette, caused “considerable emotion” among Deerfield residents when they discovered that many of these visitors were descended from Eunice Williams. She was one of the many English inhabitants taken captive in a 1704 raid by French soldiers from Canada with their Indigenous allies. Her subsequent refusal to return to Deerfield and her marriage to a man from her village grieved her English father and gained her everlasting notoriety in Deerfield as an unredeemed captive.
According to the Reverend John Fessenden, members of the Williams family “were not slow to admit” the ties of kinship with the Abenaki and “uniformly called them, ‘our cousins.’” Of particular interest was the wish of the elderly granddaughter of Eunice Williams to visit the burial place of Eunice’s mother. The Gazette and Mercury reported that the “Williams Indians” departed for Canada by way of the Albany road, observing that they “will have become extensive tourists by the time they reach home.”
This last remark highlights a general lack of understanding among White observers regarding the broader purposes and context of why this group of Abenakis came to Deerfield. Except for the visit to the gravesite, neither this trip nor the route they took were unusual events for them. As with their ancestors, Abenaki and other Indigenous peoples traded, visited, and exchanged gifts as they moved through their traditional homelands along ancient routes. In this case, the St. Francis Abenaki had traveled through New York, Vermont, and down the Connecticut River to Deerfield. From there, they would go to Albany, traveling along the Hudson River to join other Indigenous people selling baskets in the thriving resort town of Saratoga Springs. Then they would make their way through Lake George, to Lake Champlain, and back to St. Francis.
The trip in 1837 thus was unusual only in the degree of attention it received from White observers intrigued by the visitors’ connection to the Williams family. An Abenaki descendent of Kanenstenhawi (Eunice Williams) gave this covered splint basket to Caroline Williams of Deerfield during that visit.
