White Devil by Stephen Brumwell

Author:Stephen Brumwell [STEPHEN BRUMWELL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

In all, the newspapers reckoned the combined effects of lead, steel, fire and water had claimed the lives of three hundred or more Indians; Rogers himself informed Amherst that the raid had killed at least two hundred. But the major’s tally of the losses he had inflicted was wildly inaccurate: French reports compiled in the aftermath of the attack consistently numbered the dead at just thirty; and of these, two-thirds were women and children.

It was not unknown for Rogers to exaggerate his enemies’ casualties. In this instance, however, the major’s calculations may have reflected his own impression of the village’s population, based upon his risky personal reconnaissance of the previous evening; this was conducted before many of the villagers had heeded the tidings of an impending attack and sought refuge nearby. Rogers probably took that estimate, subtracted the twenty captives, and assumed the rest to be dead. But bickering over the butcher’s bill misses the point. Indians sought to wage war at minimum risk to their own people; they expected to inflict casualties, not suffer them – least of all on their home turf. Even if numbered in tens rather than hundreds, Rogers’ victims were numerous enough to be mourned – and avenged.

The raiders who descended upon St Francis that morning were impressed with the beautiful situation of the village. Those who had imagined a squalid conglomeration of fragile wigwams were also surprised to find that ‘it was regular built with Timber and Boards, in two Rows, with a fine large Church, at the Head of the Town.’ Houses and church alike had now been reduced to smouldering ruins; the village’s streets were strewn with the scalped bodies of its men, women and children; the very air polluted by the reek of their charred flesh.

Surveying the carnage that he had helped to create, Robert Kirkwood pronounced a grim epitaph: ‘thus the inhumanity of these savages was rewarded with a calamity, dreadful indeed, but justly deserved. This was I believe the bloodiest scene in all America, our revenge being completed.’

OF THE SCORE-STRONG HUDDLE of shocked and bewildered prisoners, many were elderly. According to Rogers, all save five – two Indian boys and three girls – were allowed to go their own way. In reality, six prisoners were retained by Rogers. They included no less than three members of the family of Chief Joseph-Louis Gill: his sons Xavier and Antoine, whom Susanna Johnson knew as Sabatis, and his wife, Marie-Jeanne. The relatives of such a prominent member of the St Francis tribe would make useful hostages and provide valuable bargaining counters in a crisis.

The raiders also recaptured five ‘English’ captives whom Rogers placed under his own care. Three of them were rangers, although their names are unknown. Another was a German girl aged about twenty; likewise unnamed, she had been taken prisoner when French and Indian raiders burned the Mohawk Valley settlement of German Flats in November 1757. The fifth of the liberated captives, described in newspaper reports simply as a poor Man, was actually George Barnes.

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