Makings of a Wing-Shooter

I remember my introduction to wing-shooting like it happened yesterday – occurring in my South Deerfield hometown, mostly along the base of North Sugarloaf between Graves Street and Hillside Road.

My late father was a sportsman of sorts, but not a hunter or fisherman. He loved team sports and was quite accomplished in football, basketball, and baseball – especially football, which carried him to the Boston American newspaper’s New England Unsung College Football Player of the Year award a year or two before my 1953 birth. He was a fleet, elusive halfback and a teammate of future NFL Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli at Arnold College in Milford, Connecticut.

Older local folks will remember the restaurant Robustelli owned on Barton’s Cove, a popular ’50s-’60s hangout. I remember meeting him and other New York Giants players at their preseason summer camp in Bridgeport. It was a big deal. I recognized their names from Sunday afternoon telecasts in the days of rooftop antennas and grainy black-and-white TV.

Never in my lifetime did my dad own a fishing rod or gun, but my mother’s brother Bob did, and he had introduced me as a young boy to fishing during summer Cape Cod and Nova Scotian vacations, and to skeet and trap shooting at a Minnesota sportsmen’s club. Prior to that I had honed my shooting skills with friends’ BB and pellet guns, then relied as a teen on some of their fathers’ beat-up shotguns and .22 caliber field guns, the use of which were accompanied by stern gun-safety rules. That laidback scenario wouldn’t fly in today’s world. Then it was tradition.

My wing-shooting adventures began most often in the company of my boyhood friends “Fast Eddie” Urkiel, who took his own life in recent years, and “The Count,” who’s alive and well as a 40-year veteran high-wire lineman at Utah’s Snowbird Ski Resort. We all had nicknames back then, and still use them today when we get together.

The Count lived on Eastern Avenue, a stone’s throw from a narrow secondary powerline we favored over all other partridge-hunting sites. At the time, old Yankee pasture along the forest’s edge was being overtaken by young growth with many seeds and berries. Perfect habitat for partridge, official name ruffed grouse.

The Count called grouse “grey ghosts” because of his dad’s admiration for their speed and escapability. If you walked our old hunting paths today, you wouldn’t get a single flush from mature forest.

The same holds true for woodcock. Back in the day, we’d flush occasional resident woodcock on summer days, then small flocks of flight birds in the fall. The Count called them “timberdoodles.” Their numbers, too, have dwindled greatly. Without a dog as kids, we flushed far fewer woodcock than partridge. Timberdoodles are small and tend to hold tighter when danger looms.

In the ideal 60’s habitat, partridge would regularly burst out of the undergrowth, providing quick, challenging shots before disappearing behind branchy obstructions. When they eluded us on the way in, we’d remember the location, and move in slowly on the way back. The strategy worked now and again, but less frequently than a similar back-and-forth trout-fishing routine on upland brooks and streams.

In later years, with better shotguns and more experience, I learned to bring partridge down with surprising success through naked apples, alder, poplars and tall, tangled wild roses. It’s a skill that takes a lot of convincing and time to master, aided by light, fast-pointing, side-by-side double-barrels with open chokes.

For my taste, the wide sight plane of my pre-World War II French 16-gauge double-barrel that shot 2½-inch shells produced far better results than my 12-gauge Browning Citori over-and-under with its 2¾-inch loads and modern removable choke tubes. The wider sight plane is faster and deadlier. Similar to other difficult challenges, efficiency is directly related to confidence. I always believed wing shooting and hitting a baseball shared many transferable skills.

These days, with the local partridge and woodcock population in noticeable decline, I choose not to kill them. Too much respect. Don’t need the meat.

That old childhood powerline along the base of North Sugarloaf isn’t the only covert where the decline is obvious. All my favorite grouse coverts are today barren. On the rare occasions when I flush one, my trusty shotgun still reflexively flinches upward, but I just don’t follow through. Instead, I tip my cap and let the bird escape, hoping it’ll establish a spring nest and brood.

In the old days, hunting without a dog, we’d hunt in small groups of two or three, and alternate walking five or 10 slow, alert steps before stopping to spook partridge into flight. In many cases I think that approach could sometimes be more productive than hunting with a dog, which produces more wild flushes.

A pointing dog can remedy that problem, but I never chose to own one. Personal preference, I guess. The big difference is that in the flush-and-retrieve game the hunter must read the dog and anticipate sudden flushes, while those hunting over pointers move in to flush birds themselves after their dog has locked on point. Give me the frenzied flush-and-retrieve game any day of the week. Gentlemanly shooting over pointers is, to me, too much like killing.

After I graduated high school, another friend who’s no longer with us introduced me to his personal style of pheasant hunting. The method was similar to my aforementioned partridge-hunting routine, except the pace was faster and busier. We’d get into heavy cover and walk three abreast, stopping often in unison to listen for fleeing footsteps in the undergrowth and watch for wiggling golden rod and other brush.

I must hand it to my late buddy. His was a highly productive game. We shot many pheasants, preferably flying, but often on the run like rabbit hunting. Myself, I always preferred a flush, but can’t say the same for my partners. I was a developing wing-shooter, and they were filling freezers.

Which brings us to another late friend, whose family owned a Whately produce farm liberally stocked with pheasants each year during the six-week season. The family owned a tagalong black Lab farm dog named Smokey, who loved the excitement of cackling ringneck-rooster flushes. Father and son encouraged me to “Take him anytime you want. Smokey loves to flush pheasants, and won’t run off.”

That was a year or two before I got married in 1979, and I took them up on the offer, hunting not only their vast acreage but many other bottomland coverts not far of. Those were the days when most pheasants were stocked on private land, spreading birds and hunting pressure thin. Today, most birds are stocked on state Wildlife Management Areas, which can be chaotic and potentially dangerous, with a lot of hunters and gun dogs working the same space.

When my South Deerfield grandfather died less than a year into my marriage, I bought his home, and within weeks purchased my first gun dog – a versatile black Lab named Sugarloaf Saro Jane, call name Sara. She had national-champion River Oaks Corky in her background and was a dynamo in the field.

As Sara aged out, a softball teammate and field-trialer introduced me to well-bred English springer spaniels, which I switched to in the early 90’s. Springers are smaller and an overall better dog for the type of bird-hunting I love. Sara was a better family pet.

Inevitably, it’s now me that’s aging out, and for the first time since I was a kid I’m without a dog. Meanwhile, the put-and-take pheasant-hunting game has changed dramatically – along with fall weather. I must say I find bird-hunting far less inviting when it involves sweating through tick-infested 60- and 70-degree November marshland.

Then again, if the day is right and the urge is there, I still have access to my friend’s experienced springers. But even that convenient arrangement won’t last forever. He recently put the demanding field-trial circuit in the rearview and will soon, more than likely, bury his last gun dog.

I have no concerns or regrets. Had my day. Many of them. And have now discovered new pursuits that fulfill my hunting instincts and keep me engaged.

I chase information.

Nope. Not a Patten Family in Patten District

As English speakers, we all know that “best laid plans” saying aimed at “mice and men.” Lifted from 18th-century Scotsman Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse, it reminds us that intentions can and “often” do “go awry.”

Chalk this up as one of those. Not unusual among history sleuths who, in the process of researching one topic, always keep their antennae sharp for “peripherals.” It’s akin to starting down one forest trail and swerving on a whim down another.

During a recent read of Charles E. Clark’s The Eastern Frontier: Settlement of Northern New England 1610-1763, published in 1970, I investigated an interesting footnote introducing a primary source previously unknown to me. It was The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H., 1754-1788 – opening a rare window into the daily travels of a colonial Scots-Irish pioneer of New Hampshire’s Merrimack River valley around today’s Granite State city of Manchester.

Miraculously, this journal detailing 34 years of an important man about town’s life survived to the modern day. Protected for more than a century in the Patten family and the care of a local doctor, it finally came to light at the turn of the 20th century. The Bedford, New Hampshire Historical Society received it as an assemblage of fastened loose pages and published it in 1903. Still in print, it is today valued by scholars and local historians alike exploring New Hampshire’s earliest inland settlements.

Patten wore many hats in the community – including but not limited to justice of the peace, carpenter and surveyor. What interested me most were his descriptions of the many shad- and Atlantic salmon-fishing activities at Manchester’s famed Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River and smaller neighborhood tributaries. Clark’s Eastern Frontier book gave me snippets. I wanted more.

So, I purchased a recent printing to discover what else it had to offer about fishing and did not come away disappointed. Well, except for the fact that my mission was complicated greatly by the absence of an index. Undeterred, I laboriously skimmed through 545 pages in search of anything related to fishing. Three days later, I had assembled my very own eight-page index for future reference.

The information Patten provides about fishing practices of his times would have mirrored 18th-century Connecticut River activity at the Great Falls between Turners Falls and Gill. The spring weeks during which it occurred would also have been in the same ballpark. The problem is that I know of no 18th-century diary detailing fishing activity at Turners’ or South Hadley’s falls. All we have is potentially unreliable second- and third-hand reports published by local historians who never participated in the annual fish-harvesting routine.

My original plan was to condense here what I had learned about Amoskeag Falls fishing and speculate what it meant to Turners Falls. Then, I hit a bump in road that threw me off course. I fell victim to a dangling peripheral thread of curiosity relating to our town of Shelburne. I tugged at it and a whole new story line unraveled.

I should have known better but couldn’t resist. So, here we sit, my intended topic tucked away for the near future.

At least our new subject is local. Far closer to home than Bedford, N.H. Our focus is the so-called Patten District resting in the northwest corner of Shelburne, some six miles west of my upper Greenfield Meadows homestead.

The voluminous Patten diary got me wondering if maybe there was a genealogical link between the Scots-Irish diarist of Londonderry, then Bedford, N.H., and our own Patten District on Patten Hill in Shelburne?

The likelihood seemed strong. The Patten, as it is known to locals, borders north with Colrain, which was settled by hardy Scots-Irish emigrants from the Londonderry area before 1740 – remarkably early for upland settlement here. Perhaps, I pondered, there were Pattens in the Chandler Hill Cemetery, the town’s oldest burial ground. A quick peek at Lois McClellan Patrie’s History of Colrain, however, proved fruitless. Nope. Not a whisper about any Colrain Pattens.

Undaunted, I went to Leila Stone Bardwell’s Vanished Pioneer Homes and Families of Shelburne, Massachusetts and found no mention of a Patten family and nothing explaining how the name Patten came to the town’s district or hill.

Hmmmm? Now, presuming easy answers, I had to dig deeper.

Enter energetic, worker-bee friend and always-accommodating Greenfield Historical Society President Carol Aleman, who grew up on her Wheeler parents’ East Shelburne farm along the Patten rim. If anyone would know how the name Patten came to the isolated northeast corner of Shelburne, I suspected she would. So, I dropped her an email.

Although Aleman had no immediate answer, she was certain her sister Joanne and husband John Herron would know. She’d query them and get back to me. The Herrons own an expansive dairy farm on Hawks Road in the southeast corner of town, and share a lively interest in Shelburne history.

Indeed, they had the answer. The name Patten had no connection to any family of that surname. The place was instead initially known as the “Pattern District,” which over time became Patten in the old, obsolete, hilltown Yankee dialect. Fancy that. A simple case of colloquial mispronunciation.

But why Pattern District? Well, there appears to be no simple answer, just varying interpretations based on the meaning of the word pattern: That is a description of a neighborhood built on a social, moral or physical template worth emulating; one, in fact, superior to the rest of town.

Little did I know that I could have found my answer at home with a little digging. With the new information in hand, I took a deeper dive into my own sources tucked into bookcases and cupboards and, sure enough, found it.

The first supportive source was Ellsworth Barnard’s A Hill Farm Boyhood, Volume 1 of his four-volume memoir Sunshine and Shadows: A Teacher’s Odyssey, published between 1983-91. Barnard (1907-2003) was a Patten Hill native and college English professor. I met him and his wife Mary many years ago at their rustic High Ledges cabin situated on family property left by the Barnards to The Audubon Society. He was then over 90. I wanted to see and discuss the small grove of immature, 10-foot American chestnut trees featured in his 1998 collection of essays In a Wild Place: A Natural History of High Ledges.

Intrigued by this gentle naturalist and gentleman, I promptly bought his memoirs but didn’t place him and the Patten District in the same mental bundle when first pondering sources that might explain how it was named. When I finally pulled A Hill Farm Boyhood out of my bookcase, there on the first page of Chapter 1 was his suggestion that Patten District was so named “perhaps because, as legend has it (supported by local pronunciation habits), the dwellers in that area provided an exemplary pattern for their less righteous fellow townsmen.”

Barnard would have known. He was born and raised in the Patten Hill farmhouse built by his ancestors in 1790.

Soon, I discovered in my collection of sources yet another written by a deep-rooted Shelburne author who confirmed the Aleman-Herron-Barnard explanation. Buried beneath rubble in a bottom bookcase cupboard was Elmer F. Davenport’s 1968 booklet As You Were Shelburne. There, the last three lines of “Chapter 7 – The Patten District,” he informs us that its residents “were so strict in their conduct that others called it the Pattern, later shortened to Patten, in a spirit of jealousy.”

Not surprisingly, just another tendril off the pattern concept.

 

 

 

Merrimack Shad Diary

In the research game, a chase can be quickly rewarded. Always nice. Then again, important information sometimes appears unexpectedly, from the clear blue sky. Even better.

Well, chalk up a recent discovery we’ll soon explore – pertaining to 18th-century migratory fish of the Merrimack River – as the latter.

What led to my new finding was enduring personal genealogical interest in “the Fort at Number 4,” once the Connecticut Valley’s northernmost 18th-century military outpost, built in 1743, in what is now the town of Charlestown, New Hampshire, established in 1753.

Nestled between Claremont and Walpole on the east bank of the Connecticut River across from Springfield, Vermont, early Charlestown helped sprinkle our slice of the valley with sturdy northwestern Middlesex County Massachusetts stock named Parker, Shattuck, Williard, Sartwell and Longley, to name some, all from the Groton area. Members of these Yankee military families occupied perilous outposts between forts Dummer and No. 4, and, during the most dangerous times there between 1740 and 1760, temporarily fled to safer places like Northfield, Deerfield, Sunderland, and Hatfield – the north part of which became Whately.

When the dust from the final French and Indian War settled in 1763, many of members of these hardy families settled here, particularly accumulating in Hawley after the Revolution and Shays Rebellion of 1786. Thus, the Fort at Number 4 gene pool is important to genealogists of all stripes researching these local families.

The problem is that, even in this day of Ancestry.com and other comprehensive online sources, the attempt to track them has become a vexing genealogical conundrum. I call it the black hole of Charlestown, New Hampshire – one left by a devastating downtown fire that destroyed the town’s vital records in 1842.

These days, the Charlestown vital records begin in 1842, nearly eliminating any hope of recovering birth, death, and marriage records from the town’s first 100 years. Oh sure, diaries and Bibles with hand-entered family-register forms do occasionally come to light at estate sales or on-site auctions. But time is sadly running out on such important discoveries that provide answers. Thus, the rest of the “answers” are conjectural.

I was nudged into this familiar Charlestown abyss by a Sanderson Genealogy Facebook post from a distant Connecticut relative I have not met. Identifying as a James and Sarah (Parker) Sanderson descendant of 18th-century Conway, I responded with a simple question: Did she know Sarah Parker’s lineage?

“No, do you?” was her rapid-fire answer.

So, the chase was on.

Not unexpectedly, my search led straight to Groton and Charlestown, eventually suggesting the strong but unprovable possibility of parentage by Isaac Parker, Jr. (1709-1760) and his second wife Mehitable. I had been down this road before with James’ three-years-older brother Joseph, who was born in 1741 and married the elusive Lois Fuller – undoubtedly, without hard evidence, the daughter of mysterious Micah Fuller, Fort Number 4’s first blacksmith.

By chance, the hunt for Sarah Parker’s lineage led me to a source that had somehow previously escaped me. I found it in a Fort Number 4 pamphlet footnote: Charles E. Clark’s The Eastern Frontier: Settlement of Northern New England 1610-1763, published in 1970, the year before I graduated high school. I found a reasonably priced copy in “very good” condition, bought it, read it, and gained new insight regarding migratory Merrimack River fishes of the colonial period.

Although as an annual tracker of Connecticut River anadromous fish runs for nearly a half-century I have always viewed Merrimack River fish migration as peripheral data, I have never ignored it. Quite the contrary, I remain alert for accurate assessments of the American shad and Atlantic salmon runs that greeted the first waves of colonial New England settlement.

Clark, a history professor who began as a newspaper reporter in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and Providence, Rhode Island, visited the subject of Merrimack Valley migratory fish four times in his work chronicling the settlement of colonial Maine and New Hampshire. Not surprisingly, his descriptions of fishing practices and harvests on the Merrimack River closely resemble contemporaneous accounts from the Connecticut River at present-day Turners Falls and Gill. All the data were gathered from second-hand reports gleaned from town histories. In Clark’s case, he relied upon the 1851 History of Bedford, N.H.

And, yes, there were salmon, albeit in far fewer numbers than shad, smaller herrings, and lampreys. Curiously, Clark doesn’t mention sturgeon – Atlantic or shortnose – which appear to have been less important to colonists than to Native Americans.

Clark reports early opposition, by Indians and colonials alike, to migratory-fish-obstructing millsite dams. River-obstruction grievances were addressed by colony regulations mandating New England’s first fish passageways past grist and sawmill dams. Examples are many on the rivers of coastal Maine and New Hampshire, and on the Merrimack River, which flows from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region (Winnipesauke) to Massachusetts’ North Shore.

The late 18th-century fishing practices and harvests described by Clark at Amoskeag Falls in Manchester, New Hampshire mirror those reported by Franklin County historians Epaphras Hoyt (Antiquarian Researches, 1824), Francis M. Thompson (History of Greenfield, 1904), and Edward P. Pressey (History of Montague, 1910). Unfortunately, such second-hand numbers published in town histories are not always reliable, but they’re all we have.

These sources describing two major New England river systems say that shad were harvested in great numbers by seines stretched across heavily-used migration channels, while fishermen employing long-handled dip-nets scooped up many shad and smaller herrings, such as bluebacks and alewives.

Clark doesn’t quantify the daily take of scoop-netters, but he does report individual 1762 seine harvests of 2,500 and 1,500 shad, which is remarkably similar to reports by the Franklin County historians focused on the same activity some 30 years later.

Pressey reports that seine-netters at present-day Turners Falls took “as many as 2,000 shad in one haul, often [with] a giant salmon or two floundering in their midst.” He also says that solitary scoop-netters took as many as 5,000 fish in a day at Turners Falls, without naming the fish.

It would, however, appear that Pressey is parroting Hoyt’s “upwards of 5,000 shad a day by dipping nets at Burnham’s Rock” – a well-known mass of bedrock jutting from the head of the falls on the Gill side to create an ideal fishing site.

As for Merrimack valley salmon, they were obviously there, according to Clark, and his source is airtight: The Diary of Matthew Patten, 1754-1788. An original Scots-Irish settler of Bedford, New Hampshire, Patten (1718-1795) was a man about town and neighboring villages. He records fishing at his Patterson friends’ brook on July 17, 1762 and catching four salmon weighing 66 pounds, an average of 16.5 pounds per fish; two days later he caught 11 more totaling 134 pounds, better than 12 pounds each.

So, yes, salmon existed in the Merrimack valley back then, and take it to the bank that they were here, too – though in far fewer numbers than the accompanying shad, and their smaller herring kin.

The proof’s in the puddin’.

Squirrel Hunting Ain’t What it Used To Be

The Harvest Moon has passed, ushering into the midnight sky a new Hunter’s Moon to greet our annual fall hunting seasons.

Well, actually, bear and squirrel hunters entered the woods a month ago, though I must say I’m not sure how many of either remain amongst us. Interest in squirrel hunting has waned, and bear hunting has always in the modern day appealed to only a small fraternity.

When I was a kid growing up in South Deerfield, there were no bears. Now there are many, some occasionally pestering my old, more densely populated village. Times have changed.

When I was young, and less so into adulthood, I knew squirrel hunters. Not what I’d call serious hunters. Just a few diehards looking for an excuse to get out in the nut groves early and assess what was happening. These early-bird nimrods also welcomed the opportunity to fine-tune their shooting skills while getting a sneak peek at pre-rut deer sign.

Nowadays serious concerns about dangerous tick- and mosquito-borne illness have greatly complicated matters. Can’t say I recall any such worries when I was young. If they existed, I surely would have been aware. Nope. Never a word about ticks and Lyme disease, or mosquitos and triple E or West Nile virus.

The squirrel-hunting weapon of choice among old-timers I knew was the old Savage or Stevens 22/410 over-and-under. If memory serves me right, some of these handy little long guns had two triggers. Later models had one trigger with a barrel selector on the receiver. Seems to me both versions had manual, pull-back hammers, but I may be wrong on that.

The bottom, full-choke, .410-gauge barrel was typically loaded with No. 4 or 6 shot that fired tight, dense patterns for acrobatic, skittering, leaping targets. The top, .22-caliber barrel held an accurate, high-speed long-rifle cartridge for precision accuracy aimed at stationary targets standing tall and straight on their hind legs, clutching a nut at mouth level between their front feet.

Squirrel hunters would move into a nut grove as quietly and possible and settle in, giving their quarry a chance to forget about their presence. Then, once the squirrels got back into their normal, rollicking routine, opportunities for kill shots increased. Some hunters even used mouth calls as aids to stop their quarry or bring it closer.

I suspect the potential for conflict between squirrel and bear hunters, because shagbark hickory groves are popular among them. That said, I can’t recall ever learning of any ugly, confrontational incident.

Although I myself never was never a squirrel hunter, I have eaten sweet, tender squirrel meat. I’ve sampled halves separated along the backbone and sauteed with onions, peppers, garlic, and wild mushrooms in a large, preferably covered cast-iron skillet; and I’ve also eaten it parboiled and picked clean from the bones in delicious casseroles and meat-and-veggie pies.

I can’t help but wonder how many local families still have their grandmothers’ Yankee recipes? My guess is not many. Maybe some hilltowners still know recipes by heart. If not, I’m sure they could find some good ones in old, soiled cast-iron or wild-game cookbooks or by Googling it.

In colonial New England, squirrels were ubiquitous, destructive nuisances that harmed home, garden, and orchard. Eventually, bounties were offered for squirrel “scalps” – that is, pelts used for inner and outing clothing and various accoutrements. In those days, times were hard and wastefulness was sinful. So, not only were squirrels valued for their salubrious meat, but their pelts became warm stockings, hats and earmuffs, handy bags and pouches, and other useful everyday items.

Also of interest, it is said that, due to marksmanship skills honed by colonial squirrel hunters, Revolutionary snipers could outshoot the best of their better trained, better disciplined, and better armed Redcoat adversaries. Thus, those furry, mischievous pests that got into chimneys, attics, and partitions, harmed crops, and chattered loud warnings of a deer hunter’s presence in the woods helped the colonies win the Revolution.

Imagine that. Despite old Chuckles’ destructive ways around home and farm, he kept our early settlers fed, provided a source of supplemental income, and helped free them of their oppressive colonial yoke.

Where Did Summer Go?

Towering cornfields obscure roadside sightlines, purple loosestrife and goldenrod color marshes and scalped-hayfield rims, festive midways are clogged, and Labor Day has passed.

Autumn is here. Wow! Where did summer go?

Not complaining. Fall has for many decades been my favorite season – ever since I hung up my spikes, glove and bat from the old American pastime that begins in spring, the season of optimism, mischievous youthful exuberance and nesting.

Now, with the crack of the bat far in my rearview, even my passion for the upland bird-hunting game that replaced it has greatly diminished. Attribute that to physical wear and tear brought by stubborn refusal to heed orthopedic surgeons’ warnings about my battered left knee and other things. Even with my trusty, old, 16-gauge, Jean Breuil side-by-side back in action – thanks to the People’ Republic of Montague Center’s gunmaker extraordinaire, Richard Colton – it’s not the same.

But why go there? Aging’s inevitable, and swamp-busting is not forever. I accepted that reality long ago. These days, I satisfy my strong hunting instinct by chasing information instead of pheasant, grouse and woodcock, turkeys and deer, trout and shad. It’s no less fulfilling. Same game, different playing field.

But why digress? Back to fall’s arrival.

It seems like yesterday I was watching and writing about that great horned owl nest up the road. Now those nestlings peering down at me from their temporary April home in a dead white pine are casting large, predatory shadows as they swoop down to my lawn for rabbits, squirrels and whatever else tickles their dietary fancy. So far, they’ve spared an animated black squirrel I’ve been watching since spring. While I do hope that little critter escapes those owls’ talons, I sure do wish they’d get a grip on those damn chipmunks that have thus far robbed me of every last one of my Roma tomatoes as they ripen.

I keep waiting for the pilfering to stop. The bold little rodents that have been staying just out of reach since spring are industrious, indeed. Secretive, too. They climb two tomato stalks tied to a 10-foot rebar pole pinned to my barn wall and, starting at the nippled base, devour the oblong tomatoes, leaving only a stem and thin cap. It’s annoying, to say the least. What remains resembles an inverted mushroom.

It’s a problem I’ve coped with for a few years now. I savor those heirloom tomatoes, whose storied past date back to the garden of an infamous Springfield mobster gunned down in the Mount Carmel Club parking lot. Ideal for spaghetti sauce and quick, stovetop marinara, they’re versatile and ain’t bad atall in salads, BLTs and whatever else you choose to use them for. Unlike Big Boys and other popular garden varieties, the seeds from this dense, meaty fruit don’t squirt out the side and onto your shirt when biting into a thick sandwich.

Chipmunks apparently appreciate them, too. Which reminds me. It was just this summer that I finally figured out they were the culprit. My neighbor told me chipmunks were eating her tomatoes, too In the past I had suspected squirrels and more so woodchucks, which seem to find their way to my property, taking refuge in the barn cellar, below the woodshed outhouse, and the crawlspaces under the front stone terrace and my home’s 18th-century western wing.

The last woodchuck I saw in my yard was way back in early April. So, I must assume something killed it. Maybe a neighbor’s domestic dog, a coyote, bobcat, fisher or, hey, perhaps even a great horned owl feeding its young. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the so-called tiger of the Northwoods is capable of killing a woodchuck.

Other than that, it was an unusually quiet summer on the wildlife-sighting front. Far fewer deer on my daybreak walks around the Upper Meadows of Greenfield, and no sign of bears since that close spring encounter I reported a couple of months ago. Plus, curiously, I have not seen a turkey here in months, none of the typical summer hens and broods I’m accustomed to seeing. I still suspect those great horned owls may have something to do with that.

Which doesn’t mean deer, bears and turkeys have dwindled in my wildlife-friendly neighborhood. Just that I, personally, haven’t seen as many as usual. Sometimes there’s no explanation for such things. Luck of the draw, perhaps?

Just the other day at the coffee shop I spoke to a fella I often bump into in the morning. He told me he had in recent days seen at least 10 deer, including a big, handsome buck in a field where I used to walk daily with my gun dogs. The sighting occurred a quarter-mile or so from the southern perimeter of my morning walk. So, the deer are never far away, whether or not I happen to see them.

My friend and near neighbor agrees with me that he’s seen fewer deer and turkeys in his expansive backyard thus far this year. Yes, he’s seen occasional deer and a few turkeys, but nothing of note compared to previous summers. That said, he did tell of his nextdoor neighbors returning from their Maine camp a couple of months ago and discovering bear damage to a birdfeeder and a vulture nibbling at something along the wood line.

Upon closer investigation the following day, one of the homeowners investigated the scene and found the picked-over remains of a fawn’s hindquarter. What killed it is anyone’s guess. The bear? A bobcat? Fisher? Coyotes? Then again, perhaps it was roadkill scavenged in a safe place.

That’s all for now. We’ll see what the leaf-peeping, woodstove season brings.

Falls River Has Become Fall River

A sharp, irritating, old thorn again found its way to my paw recently, placing me on a path I have previously traveled but never discussed in print.

I guess now is the time to go there. So, let’s venture off on a little discovery mission to set the record straight and put a vexing question in the rearview. I’ll try to keep it tight.

The topic is a trout stream that rises in the hills of Guilford, Vermont. Its path then meanders through Bernardston meadows, divides Greenfield and Gill, flows under Route 2 through the Factory Hollow gorge, and empties into the Connecticut River below the Turners Falls dam.

What we’re searching for is its proper name: Is it Fall River, or Falls River?

This issue has for me been a personal source of journalistic uncertainty for nearly a half-century. Whether writing about the stream from a fishing or historical perspective – both of which offer many interesting tendrils – my goal has always been to name it right. The problem is that the spoken word confuses matters, tangling the answer in doubt.

Which brings us to my most recent stumbling block, which popped up unexpectedly during map research unrelated to the Connecticut River tributary itself. It was just there, running down the periphery.

I was at the time attempting to plot the path through my Greenfield neighborhood of the so-called Seven-Mile Line, which had established Deerfield’s 12-mile western boundary in 1717. Viewing an 1894 topographical map, I noticed that the stream marking the town’s eastern border was spelled “Falls River,” plural form. This discovery immediately stirred my curiosity, compelling a deeper dive to a modern topo map that named it Fall River, singular form.

Hmmmmm, I pondered. Did I really have to go down that road again?

I thought the question was settled decades ago, when I decided upon “Fall River” without the s at the end. I had to choose a spelling for the sake of consistency because I often named the stream in columns about trout fishing and pheasant hunting, not to mention various historical subjects, such as but not limited to the fabled May 19, 1676 “Falls Fight” of King Philip’s War fame.

Despite making my Fall River decision out of professional necessity decades ago, I have had many informal conversations over the years with local yokels who grew up on the river and use the plural form, “Falls River.” Although our slightly different pronunciations were glaring to me but rarely discussed, I to this day find it awkward.

Who was I to argue in favor of the singular form, Fall River, when community language in Turners Falls, Gill, and beyond seemed to favor the plural form, “Falls River”? It was their river. Not mine. I grew up fishing primarily Southern Franklin County trout streams in the Deerfield and Mill River watersheds. Not Fall River.

So, when I recently read “Falls River” on that 1894 topo map, I revisited the issue to clear the air of uncertainty after six years of retirement and a lighter writing workload. I wasn’t sure how thorough my earlier investigation had been.

It never hurts to double-check. My latest fact-checking process began online, where I looked at the list of Connecticut Valley District trout streams stocked by MassWildlife. There it was in bold black letters: “Fall River,” confirming what I had already seen on the modern topo map.

But I wasn’t done yet. I had to back it up with additional proof.

I went to my bookcase and dug out the published histories of the three Franklin County towns the stream in question flows through – Bernardston (Lucy Cutler Kellogg), Greenfield (Francis M. Thompson), and Gill (Ralph M. Stoughton). All three agreed on the singular “Fall River,” without the s.

Deerfield historian George Sheldon also chose the singular form, “Fall River,” in his History of Deerfield. Maybe the other three historians, who published their works slightly later than Sheldon, followed his lead. That will never be known.

Although it appeared the case was closed and no additional fact-checking was needed, there is a little wrinkle.

Fall River was most likely first encountered by colonial scouts and fur-traders during the second half of the 17th century, when Northampton, Hadley, and Hatfield were being settled, and the stream had an important indigenous name that has not survived. Then came ancient Deerfield, which began as an 8,000-acre grant in 1663 and was expanded to seven miles square in 1673 – adding acreage that included Deerfield Fishing Falls and what would become the towns of Greenfield and Gill during the second half of the 18th century.

Although it’s unknown precisely when Fall River was named by colonials, most likely the name evolved over time, starting with the descriptive stream entering the Connecticut River below the falls, to Falls River, to today’s Fall River.

It’s important to note that although Deerfield was expanded in 1673, the seven-miles-square parcel wasn’t mapped until 1717. So, the river probably had no official European name before 1717, and most likely acquired one years later, sometime after 1750 when southern Gill, then referred to as the “nook of the falls,” was being cleared for settlement.

Greenfield split off from Deerfield in 1753 and Gill split off from Greenfield in 1793, and by that time the plural “Falls River” was probably in universal use. Still today that old plural form is alive and well in community memory, and widely used by deep-rooted “townies” and those who converse often with them.

So, who am I to challenge them? Though I intend to continue using the accepted, official, modern singular form, “Fall River,” in print, I’ll readily accept the plural form in informal conversation. In fact, I’ll probably even use it myself to keep the conversation rolling.

Locating First Encampment of Deerfield’s 1704 Captives

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.

Fawning Season

Father’s Day has dawned and I’m back in my study, where I’ll remain until the cold of winter shifts me to my kitchen writing nook near the woodstove. Facing two sun-splashed windows instead of sitting with one at my back, this seat can brighten my perspective some. Plus, my library is closer, which is a fact-checking convenience.

I returned yesterday afternoon from an overnight stay at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Montpelier, Vermont, where they’re still digging out from last summer’s devastating downtown flooding. We were in the Green Mountain State Capital to attend my grandson’s high school graduation in a bordering community.

Whew! How time flies.

As I sit here, thinking, there’s no time to malinger. I must buckle down to the task at hand, which is to crank out another column – this one addressing a topic I could have covered a couple of weeks ago, had not my focus been elsewhere.

So, let’s drift slightly back in time to the fawning season, right after Memorial Day, when wobbly fawns rise from their nests on spindly, unstable legs and quickly learn to run and dart and bound like deer. It just so happens that, lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, I got to witness a teaching moment between a doe and her spotted twins, and I want to describe it.

I remember that daybreak during the first full week of June as cool and refreshing – me clad in shorts and a t-shirt. It was breathlessly still, with grey skies suggesting rain as I rambled down the home stretch of my daily two-mile walk around Greenfield’s Upper Meadows neighborhood.

Though a few interesting events had unfolded, it had been, by recent standards, a largely uneventful spring on the wildlife-sighting front. Most salient was the absence of turkeys where they have been common. Curiously, I heard not so much as a distant gobble during the month of May and the weeks leading up to it. Strange indeed.

I attributed this void, in my May 9 column, to a great horned owl nest I watched in my friend’s yard up the road. It may or may not have been the reason why turkeys had vacated a place where typically there are many. Then, just when I had written it off as a wait-till-next-year scenario, on three or four days during the third week of June, like clockwork, between 7 and 9 a.m., gobbling from the woods south and west of me.

Hmmmm? The second mating of a hen that had lost her first nest? Hard to say. And truthfully, I can’t say I wasted much time evaluating it. It just happened.

Prior to those unexpected, phantom gobbles, the most extraordinary wildlife sighting of spring was a beautiful, large, shiny black bear – likely a solitary bruin in the 250- to 300-pound class, whose daybreak path I interrupted. He was headed for a Nichols Drive crossing as I passed through, up close and personal.

The burly beast detected me coming and froze like a statue, facing me from about 40 yards away. His nose and ears raised on high alert, he watched me approach before turning tail, sauntering three strides back and turning 180 degrees to face me as I headed toward Plain Road.

It was my first bear sighting in three or four years. Both were close encounters. This face-to-face was about twice as far from me as the previous one, but I’d say the first bear was larger. I can’t say I felt threatened on either occasion. Both bears were palpably cautious in my presence. I kept a peripheral fix on both of them and continued on my way without incident.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person who crossed that bear’s path that morning. A fella named Craig Franklin did, too. I learned that a week to the day later, when he stopped his grey Chevy pickup truck to report the sighting and the day it occurred. We often pass in our early-morning travels, and I always give him a friendly wave. He infrequently stops to report notable sightings.

Franklin must have seen that bear soon after I did that day. I wonder how many others neighbors saw it, or at least knew the beast had passed through. Probably not many, unless it left random calling cards.

OK – enough of the superfluous chatter. Back to the deer story I sat down to tell.

It unfolded less than a half-mile south and east from my home, along the eastern perimeter of a slim, 100-yard finger of woods partially dividing two hayfields. The timber stand shelters a spring that bubbles from the ground and trickles south, past a small burial ground and into another spring that connects with Allen Brook.

Walking west on Meadow Road, I was about 150 yards from a sighting that always leaves a warm impression when one is fortunate enough to bear witness.

Always, in passing, I carefully scan those hayfields for deer and often find them in varying numbers, this spring ranging from one to nine. This time it was three – obviously, given the size discrepancy, a doe and her fawns. I wasn’t surprised. Other does have nested in that midfield refuge over the years, and many more will likely choose it in the future. It’s a perfect birthing place.

Back when I routinely meandered the perimeter of those fields a doe once burst out of the tree line and bounded across the hayfield in front of me. She was obviously trying to distract my attention from her hidden nest by showing herself and romping through the field.

This time the fawns were on all fours, and from my vantage point they appeared to be nimble. Engaging their mother in an entertaining catch-us-if-you-can game, the little ones displayed remarkable agility for their young age. The frolicking fawns ran, darted, and jumped in tight half-circles around their mother, who feigned aggression by occasionally stomping in their direction, encouraging development of their agility and escape ability. I have seen an identical game played out many times between a bitch and her litter.

It was a joyous sight to behold – one I have witnessed less than a handful of times, and heard many others describe over the years. Come August and September, I will undoubtedly bump into this family unit many times, as the fawns lose their spots and continue to gain mobility.

Wildlife observation never gets old for an observant walking man who stays alert and knows where to look.

Shad-Run Surge

With fragrant pink weigelas in full bloom and mock orange buds opening into white flowers, I know the annual Connecticut River American shad run is near its end, typical with Memorial Day in the rearview.

Long ago were the days when I was among the eager anglers wading the margins of deep, narrow migration channels transporting these upstream-swimming anadromous fish to spawning grounds where they were born. I can’t say I miss battling these strong fish that are fun to catch. Nope. As they say in Chi-co-pee (emphasis on the middle syllable), “Been dere, done dat.”

Good ole Chi-co-pee, a mill and sports town where it seems every other dwelling contains an angler of some stripe. I’ve bumped into them on my favorite local trout streams – heaven forbid – as well as places like northern Vermont, western Maine, northwestern New York, and even freakin’ Wyoming, for Chrissakes.

Of course, the Chicopee fellas don’t refer to themselves as anglers. Uh-uh. They’re just plain fishermen, old style, thank you. No need to honor gender-neutral political correctness. No sir. Not in Chi-co-pee, or even Chicopee Falls for that matter – where fishing likely dates back to soon after the peopling of our fertile valley some 15,000 years before the present.

This year’s shad numbers, tracked weekly by the federal Connecticut River Coordinator’s office in Sunderland, reveal that by recent standards, it’s been a good year. Why not? We’ve experienced optimal river conditions for anadromous runs. Everything lined up to near perfection, beginning with a mild winter and little snowfall, followed by a favorable spring, without disruptive rain events unleashing torrents of heavy, run-altering, fish-passageway-closing flooding.

So, migrating fish had it easy this spring – a steady swelled flow and a gradual rise in water temperature, all favorable to spawning runs.

This year’s run past the Holyoke Dam counting station looks like it will top 400,000 for the second time in 10 years, though it pales in comparison to the last one to do so – the 2017 run brought more than 537,000.

The best year on record since the counting began in 1967 was 1992, when nearly 722,000 shad passed Holyoke. Back then, state and federal officials manned several other valley counting stations to compute an annual total-river run, a practice that ended in 2017.

The record 1992 total-river count was a whopping 1.628 million, one of four recorded runs exceeding a million. The others, in declining order, occurred in 1983 (1.574 million), 1984 (1.231 million), and 1991 (1.196 million). Holyoke counts in the same order for those other three banner years were 528,000, 497,000, and 523,000.

In the six-year span from 2012 to 2017, an average of some 350,000 shad – rounded off to the nearest thousand – passed Holyoke annually. In the six years since, excluding this year’s incomplete total, the annual figure dropped to 278,000. So this year’s little surge is good news, considering threats of a warming planet on which sea levels and temperatures are rising along with Northeastern river temps that govern spawning runs and behavior.

Shad start running up the Connecticut River once its water temps reach into the 50s Fahrenheit. The run peaks in the mid-60s and ends as optimal spawning temps rise to 70. That’s when shad stop their upstream migration and establish spawning lairs in the shallows. There spawning unfolds as females deposit eggs to be fertilized by males. At this stage of the annual run, shad are preoccupied with reproduction and will not strike anglers’ shiny, sparkling offerings.

I’m sure local shad anglers have, over the past couple of weeks, been enjoying great success at Rock Dam in Montague City and many other popular Franklin County fishing haunts. The best Franklin County fishing is always a little later than Holyoke’s, providing serious anglers with the opportunity to follow the run upriver and extend their recreational opportunities. Some devoted anglers, many employing boats, fish the entire month of May, and then some, by starting at Enfield Falls and following the run all the way to Turners Falls.

Too bad the power company maintaining the Turners Falls fish-passage facilities doesn’t take its role in the anadromous fish migration game more seriously. Improvements are sorely needed to optimize fish passage past the Turners Falls Dam. Yet, sadly, the power companies overseeing the operations have never strived for peak efficiency.

So, don’t hold your breath awaiting impactful – and costly – adjustments aimed at improving poor anadromous-fish passage through the Powertown. Though power officials will continue feigning altruistic concern and giving the toothless plight good lip service, our warming planet will likely kill the shad run before the passage issues are ever resolved.

 

Constant Bliss Ambush

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 18th-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.

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