Although it’s probably too late to prove the location of an important colonial Greenfield landmark, it never hurts to ponder the possibilities.

The place under consideration is the first overnight encampment occupied by captors and captives retreating from the surprise pre-dawn attack on Old Deerfield by French and Indian raiders on February 29, 1704. The aftermath left much of the small, isolated colonial settlement in smoking ruins, with 47 colonists dead and 112 missing. For the purpose of this probe, we’ll focus on the missing – captives, young and old, tattered and torn, marched to Canada in winter cold by their captors.

Experts and ancestors alike have concurred for centuries that the campsite touched down in the Greenfield Meadows. The question is where? In reviewing this question, I’ll use modern place and road names to avoid confusion.

Actually, during the first couple hundred years after the attack, people were secure on a location. Community memory placed the first campsite less than four miles from the Deerfield stockade in wetlands along the base of Greenfield Mountain – “west of the old Nims farm,” according to Greenfield historian Francis M. Thompson. The Nims farm he refers to was built by Revolutionary War veteran Hull Nims and is today, minus the old farmhouse, owned by the Butynski family at the Lower Meadows address of 370 Colrain Road.

Buttressing Thompson’s claim is an obscure Greenfield map on which an X marks the spot of “De Rouville’s Camp.” The site is between two spring brooks where now lies a small pond dug by the Butynskis for their cows in the mid-20th century. In 1704, the spot would have been ideal for an overnight stay, with a wetland providing thick shelter from the elements along with clean, sparkling water.

The map identifying this and other historic Greenfield sites appeared as a two-fold pullout in a now hard-to-find pamphlet published for the June 26, 1905 unveiling of the Capt. William Turner Monument at Nash’s Mills. Then a tidy neighborhood that included the North Parish Church, a silver factory, a large millpond, and Mill Brook Falls, the Nash’s Mills compound was erased in the early 1960s to clear the way for Interstate 91.

Indians killed Turner, the English Falls Fight commander of King Philip’s War fame, as he crossed the Green River below, just downstream from the so-called Greenfield Pool.

But let’s not confuse matters with Turner. He died a generation before the Deerfield attack. Back to 1704 and, for that matter, to the aforementioned Francis M. Thompson, who with the 1904 publication of his History of Greenfield introduced uncertainty into the previously-accepted location for the first campsite.

The Greenfield historian, who became a “Turner Monument Field Day” organizer the following year, offered this tidbit on Page 90:

“Until recently, the place of their encampment upon the night of the fatal day has been supposed to be in the swamp west of the old Nims farm, but later the discovery of an ancient broad axe (believed to be a portion of the Deerfield plunder) at the former junction of the Hinsdale and Punch brooks, makes it seem more probable that the first camp was made in the middle of the north meadows in Greenfield.”

More probable. Hmmmm? Really? On whose authority? But with that statement, the damage was done.

By now, Thompson’s hypothetical has been so often repeated in conversation and writing that it has grown from lean speculation to common knowledge. I have read of it elsewhere, including in a history of my own tavern home, and been informed of it by friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Until recently, I accepted it without further scrutiny. Took it hook, line and sinker. But when I revisited it recently, I realized Thompson’s off-the-cuff theory was thin indeed on justification.

Let me explain.

First of all, Hinsdale and Punch brooks did not meet in their original courses. They were violently joined by an 1843 flood that roared down from the western uplands to cut a new Hinsdale Brook channel to the Green River, picking up the Punch Brook bed for the final couple hundred yards. Punch Brook did, however, cross the major Indian trail leading through the Meadows to the Pumping Station and on to Leyden, Guilford, Vt., and the eventual site of Fort Dummer on the Connecticut River’s west bank.

Hinsdale and Punch brooks were then separated by nearly a half-mile at their closest point, with the former taking a sharp southern turn a short distance east of my home. From that sharp elbow, it sliced three-quarters of a mile down the Upper Meadows between Plain and Colrain roads, joining Allen Brook for their final half-mile run to the Green River. Before Mother Nature cut the 1843 channel, Allen Brook was thought of as a Hinsdale Brook tributary.

Thompson was aware of this, and even reported it in his Greenfield book. So, he must have forgotten or been confused in his inaccurate description of the axe-head-discovery site. Remember, Thompson was a native of Colrain, not Greenfield, and spent many adult years in Montana. He wasn’t nearly as familiar with Greenfield Meadows topography as his wife, Mary Nims, or her father Lucius Nims, heir to aforementioned Hull Nims farm.

Plus, even if the axe head did date back to 1704, the possibilities are many as to how and when it arrived at the discovery site. More likely than not it had no connection at all to the 1704 captors and captives. And even if it did, it wouldn’t necessarily mark the campsite.

Something else to evaluate when considering the veracity of the two possible encampment sites is sourcing. The best sources would have been captives old enough to remember where they slept in terror that first night. Thirty-one of them returned to live out their lives in Deerfield, and at least three of them were directly related to Hull Nims.

They were Nims’ grandmother, Elizabeth Hull Nims, who would have been 15 for the march, and his great-uncle and aunt, Ebenezer and Sarah Hoyt Nims, both 17 when captured. This trio of relatives died, in the same order listed above, in 1754, 1760, and 1761, and obviously would have been around long enough to identify the site.

Then again, Nims relatives weren’t essential. Community pillar Rev. John Williams was freed from Canadian captivity with four of his children in 1706 and returned to Deerfield, where he died 23 years later. That left him more than enough time to mark for posterity important sites along the march.

Does anyone honestly believe this man of the cloth never returned to the Pumping Station, some 3.5 miles away, where his wife Eunice met her maker? If so, he would surely have pointed out the first-encampment site in passing.

Even Williams’ valuable input was unnecessary. Five members of the Stebbins family who were 12 or older for the march returned to Deerfield with vivid memories, including husband and wife John and Dorothy, ages 56 and 42 in 1704. “Redeemed” sons John and Samuel were 19 and 15 when captured, thus could also have also offered helpful insight.

The reason I mention the Stebbins family – other than the fact that its eight hostages outnumbered all other captive Deerfield families – is that descendant Samuel Stebbins (1725-83) was an early Upper Meadows settler, breaking ground very near to or on the parcel where the axe was found. If the first encampment was there, within earshot of trickling Punch Brook, would he not have known it and told friends and neighbors?

Plus, how about searchers who followed the retreating raiding party’s tracks in the snow after the siege? They obviously would have seen the remnants of the first campsite. If not on the old Nims farm, would the eye witnesses not have quickly corrected the record?

When evaluating such questions, primary sources are always the best place to start. This is no exception. In my mind, the first encampment sat on the old Nims farm, which broke ground some 80 years after the Deerfield attack.

Gray, rainy, spring morning. Woodstove idle. Cool indoors. Still writing in my comfy winter kitchen nook.

I’m thinking about colonial New England soldier Constant Bliss, who, by chance, popped into view during recent local-history meanderings.

What a name, huh? Constant Bliss. Something to stive for. Perpetual joy. Very un-Puritanical.

Born to Reverend John and Anna Bliss in 1715, Constant hailed from Hebron, a small central-Connecticut town southeast of Hartford and below Manchester. Stationed in his 31st year as a Deerfield sentry under the command of a man recorded only as “Capt. Holson” on the fateful day of August 22, 1746, Bliss and nine comrades marched for Coleraine. (Note the obsolete spelling.) If there were horses involved, none are mentioned in published accounts.

The ongoing French and Indian War was aflame, and the times had taken a perilous turn for the English in this neck of the woods. Northern Indians from the Lake Champlain corridor – many of them carrying proud Connecticut Valley roots from between Springfield and Northfield – were on the warpath.

Yet the Connecticut soldiers were totally unaware that just two days earlier, in what is today North Adams, Deerfield favorite son John Hawks, vastly outnumbered by some 750 French and Indian attackers, had been forced to surrender Fort Massachusetts. Those on the northward march also had no clue that danger awaited where their trail would begin its upland ascent.

Historians don’t specify the precise marching orders for Bliss’ small party, but the destination was most likely Fort Morrison, also known as North Fort. Standing tall and strong in the northern part of the isolated colonial town, just below today’s Vermont line, Morrison was the most formidable of four Colrain strongholds. The other three all stood in East Colrain: Fort Morris, or South Fort, on the hill across the road from today’s Pine Hill Orchards store, and Fort Lucas and Fort McDowell, the fortified houses of Andrew Lucas and Reverend Alexander McDowell, nearer to the Chandler Hill Burial Ground.

Though the troop was undoubtedly sent to make sure all was well in Colrain, that we can only speculate. Documentary evidence, if there ever was any, apparently vanished long ago. Does it really matter now? No. They were soldiers doing what soldiers do.

What delivered me to this inquiry was a map I recently viewed that traces the soldiers’ path that day to within an underhand stone’s throw of my upper Greenfield Meadows home.

I discovered this interesting, hand-annotated, pullout map of Greenfield tucked into a rare Massachusetts Society of Colonial Wars pamphlet celebrating the dedication of a Greenfield monument to Capt. William Turner of King Philip’s War fame. This little paperback book, titled Capt. William Turner and the “Falls Fight,” May 19, 1676, was handed out at the July 26, 1905 ceremony memorializing a new stone salute to Turner and his fallen comrades.

The “Turner Monument” gala was a grand affair, brass bands and all, unfolding at the now largely forgotten North Parish Church Square at Nash’s Mills, which along with its tranquil pond enjoyed by many was removed to make way for Interstate 91 in the early 1960s. At that time the monument was also moved, down the hill and across Green River, to its current location beside Nash’s Mill Road below the outflow of the so-called “Greenfield Pool.”

As it turns out, the monument’s current placement is actually closer to the spot where Indians killed the fleeing Turner, as he crossed the Green River below the waterfalls cascading to Mill Brook’s mouth.

Though the creator of the pamphlet map goes unnamed, it’s a good bet contemporaneous local historians George Sheldon of Deerfield and Francis M. Thompson of Greenfield had a dominant hand in it, as well as the publication’s other fold-out map of “Nash’s Mills.” The two friends and Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association colleagues were repeatedly identified in the local press as leading voices behind the Turner commemoration. Their correspondence, housed at Deerfield’s Memorial Libraries, also clearly establishes a strong promotional relationship.

One annotated “X” on the Greenfield map immediately pulled me in. Not more than a quarter-mile above my house, the note accompanying it reads “Constance Bliss killed by Indians August 22, 1756.”

First of all, disregard the mistaken year – a very understandable transcription error. A few inches to the right of this marker lies another “X,” marking a later deadly neighborhood Indian skirmish known as the Country Farms attack, which claimed the lives of townsmen Shubal Atherton and Daniel Graves. This tragic event in Greenfield lore occurred on August 23, 1756, ten years and a day after the Bliss killing. Whoever wrote it was stuck on 1756.

As for the pamphlet’s spelling of Bliss’ first name – Constance – Sheldon and Thompson just had it wrong. Sheldon probably lifted it from 18^th-century Deerfield records, and Thompson copied his spelling. Remember, Bliss was a transient soldier stationed only briefly in Deerfield. An outsider. Thus, the confusion. Historians in Sheldon and Thompson’s day didn’t have the luxury of Ancestry.com and other online sources, which consistently use the gender-appropriate spelling – Constant – in birth, death, and probate records.

Bliss was the lone ambush casualty that dreadful day. Personal knowledge, which I’ll get into, tells me he was killed and scalped at a predictable site where the ancient Indian trail tilts uphill to Colrain. Although his nine companions aren’t named, one of them was presumably Capt. Holson.

Historians trust that the survivors escaped to Colrain – an assumption likely based on the fact that Colrain was closer than Deerfield. Terrain Navigator measurements bear this out. The closest Colrain bastion, Fort Lucas, was nearly four direct, wooded miles from the ambush site, while Deerfield was nearly six miles away on flatter, more exposed terrain.

The reason I call the upper Meadows site “predictable” for this ambush is that it’s located near three active springs, which still run pure today. Better still, the one closest to the ambush “X” came equipped with an ancient permanent trailside mortar, hollowed into sturdy ledge and used for millennia to grind nuts into gruel grain.

The mortar was there for good reason. Early records note a prolific butternut grove just north of my property during the colonial period, and there are still many butternut, walnut, and other edible-nut trees standing in the neighborhood and surrounding hills. That includes two huge black walnut trees in neighbors’ yards. Walnuts, butternuts, and white-oak acorns were among our indigenous people’s most valued nuts.

Some, if not all, of the Indians who killed Bliss also participated in a sneak attack three days later in what is known in Deerfield lore as the Bars Fight, also memorialized by a stone near Stillwater. By the time the dust had settled on August 25, 1746, five colonists were dead, one miraculously survived a fractured skull, and young Samuel Allen, 9, had been taken captive.

Sheldon identified those attackers as “St. Francis Indians,” and gets even more specific by calling one of them a Scatacook. Both designations suggest the strong possibility that some of the assailants had deep roots here and knew the old trails through community memory and elder guidance.

As for the trailside mortar stone in the woods behind my house, I have not seen it with my own eyes – just learned of it in independent conversation with two neighbors who had. One of my sources is a friend five years older than me. The other, older than my parents and long dead, would be well over 100 today.

Both men last visited the mortar stone more than a half-century ago. They agreed it was about knee- to hip-high, near a spring on the perimeter of an old orchard long ago choked off by reforestation.

Had I learned of this ancient indigenous site during my first 15 years of Meadows residence, I undoubtedly would have forced myself to find it during deer-hunting diversions. Although I no longer hunt deer, I did search for the stone once, maybe five years ago, with an archaeologist friend. When our search came up empty and I described the unsuccessful mission to my surviving source, he suspected we had focused too far south.

Oh well, I guess I’ll now have to take another poke at finding it. I’ll begin where the spring meets the road and scour both sides. Hopefully, the lay of the land and outcroppings will offer helpful hints.

So, stay tuned. I may return with a photo.