Episode Details

On a frozen leap-day morning in 1704, a French and Native war party came over the palisade of a sleeping Massachusetts town, and New England’s most famous minister woke to find warriors in his house and his pistol misfiring in his hand. This is the raid on Deerfield — the burning, the three-hundred-mile march to Canada where Reverend John Williams watched his world taken apart one person at a time, and then spent two years fighting off the Jesuits who wanted his soul and the souls of his children. It opens a season about wars within wars: a war declared in Europe over a Spanish throne but fought out on the New England frontier by colonists left to defend themselves, and beneath it the Native nations who were nobody’s pawns and had their own reasons to come over the wall. At its heart are two children of one family — a boy who came home and grew up to be a country minister, and a seven-year-old girl, carried off to replace a child lost to smallpox, who learned a new language, married into a new people, and gave New England the same answer every time it begged her to come home.