Framingham Legends & Lore (3 page)

The Indians interned on Deer Island suffered much that winter, but the disruptions and dislocations of war brought privations upon those natives who had fled Natick as well. On February 1, 1676, Netus assembled a party of about a dozen warriors (including Old Jacob) to retrieve the stores of corn from the abandoned village of Magunkook. But the granaries were empty. Suspecting the town had been pilfered by the English and unwilling to return empty-handed, Netus urged the party to continue three miles eastward on the path to the nearest white settlement to look for the missing corn. As they climbed the rise of Mount Wayte, they spotted two English children at the well a short distance from the Eames house.

T
HE
E
AMES
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ARM AT
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OUNT
W
AYTE

According to historian Stephen Herring, there were probably no more than seven English families settled within the bounds of present-day Framingham on the eve of King Philip's War. There were the Stones and their relatives who had long been established at what is now Saxonville; a little farther south were the Bent and Rice families not far from the ruins of the old Nipmuc village on the western shores of Lake Cochituate, the Bradish family at Nobscot and the Thomas Eames family on the southern slope of Mount Wayte. While the other families were clustered relatively close to each other, the Eames farm stood over three miles distant to the southwest. As Framingham had yet to be incorporated, the Eames family did not even think of themselves as living in the same town as the other settlers. All the other families attended Sunday services at the meetinghouse in Sudbury (located within present-day Wayland), but the Eameses traveled instead to Sherborn.

Thomas Eames had been born in England about 1618 and had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1636, when he served in the Pequot War, married a woman named Margaret and settled in Dedham by 1640. He resided in Medford from 1652 to 1659, and was living in Cambridge by the time he married his second wife, the widow Mary (Blandford) Paddleford, about 1662. Two years later they removed to Sudbury, where Mary's father had been among the original settlers, and leased the “Pelham farm” in what is now Wayland. In 1668, Thomas Eames, fifty years old and “maimed in his limbs,” appealed to the government of Massachusetts Bay to grant him land for his service in the Pequot War as a youth. The colony did not grant him his request, but his petition caught the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, who agreed to let Eames settle on part of his vast acreage at Framingham. By 1670, Thomas Eames set about building a homestead on Danforth's land on Mount Wayte.

Thomas Eames's 1668 petition that brought him to the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth.

Eames may have sought protection for his farm even before the Nipmuc raid on Mendon, as the council at Boston had sent four soldiers to be quartered at Framingham by July 22, 1675. On that date, two of the guards were reassigned to the Reverend Browne's house at Sudbury. Thomas Eames, already ineligible for the militia due to disability, further petitioned the council to prevent his horses, which he required to ensure his own family's safety, from being pressed into military service by the towns of Marlborough or Sudbury on the occasions when he and his family traveled there. “Divine providence having cast my lot in a place both remote from neighbors in the woods,” wrote Eames of his farm's vulnerable position, “and in a place of no small danger in this day of trouble, when God hath so signally let loose the heathens against his people everywhere.” Yet when the fall and early winter brought no new attacks on the region, the council at Boston, already struggling to pay for the war, decided to withdraw the soldiers altogether.

In late January came word from two praying Indians who had returned from infiltrating the Nipmuc at Menameset that the English towns of Lancaster, Groton, Marlborough, Sudbury and Medfield were liable to be attacked in the coming weeks. This news is probably what spurred Thomas Eames to travel to Boston to seek ammunition and further assistance for himself and other nearby settlers. He was still in Boston on February 1, when Netus and his party arrived at Mount Wayte looking for the missing corn from Magunkook.

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HE
E
AMES
M
ASSACRE

Netus's party seized the two Eames children at the well so that they would not alarm the others. Wannuckhow, also called William Jackstraw, one of the Magunkook Indians, later testified that he stayed back in the fields, probably guarding the two children, as the rest of the warriors approached the house. Inside, Thomas's wife, Mary (Blandford) (Paddleford) Eames, a woman in her mid-forties, was engaged in the manufacture of soap at the hearth. We shall never know whether Netus intended merely to subdue the family while his band took corn and other provisions, or to take the family prisoner for possible ransom. All we know is that Mary Eames was determined not to be taken without a fight and threw the cauldron of boiling lye at her attackers, then tried to fight them off with whatever implements she had beside her in the kitchen. The enraged warriors killed her, along with several of her children. William Jackstraw's sons Joseph and John later testified that they convinced Netus and Annecoeken, the two who had done the actual killing, to take the remainder prisoner, thus saving the lives of some of the children. Joseph further stated that he carried one of the Eames sons on his back. (How much credence one accords this testimony is open to conjecture, as it was given in a failed attempt to gain clemency for the three Jackstraws.) The warriors burned the house and barns, slaughtered the livestock and destroyed whatever stores they were unable to carry off with them.

Thomas Eames inventoried his loss as £330.012.00, a substantial sum for the time:

“An Inventory of the loss of Thomas Eames, when his house was fired by Indians at Framingham near unto Sudbury in the county of Middlesex, the first of February 1675–6.”

The accounts of that day are fragmentary and contradictory. Having said that, the nine children most likely at the Eames farm along with their ages and probable fates were: Mary Eames (age thirty, killed); Zachariah Paddleford (age eighteen, captured and escaped); Edward Paddleford (age fifteen, killed); Thomas Eames Jr. (age twelve, killed); Samuel Eames (age eleven, captured and escaped); Margaret (age nine, captured and ransomed); Nathaniel (age seven, captured and escaped); and Sarah (age five) and Lydia Eames (age three), one of whom was killed and the other captured and never redeemed. Mary was the daughter of Thomas Eames's first marriage and Zachariah and Edward Paddleford were the children of Mary (Blandford Paddleford) Eames's first marriage to Jonathan Paddleford of Cambridge, while the six youngest were the children of both Thomas and Mary. One particularly disturbing aspect of the whole incident was that the warriors and their victims were almost certainly well known to each other. They had lived in proximity prior to the war, and Netus had attended Sunday meeting at Sudbury with the Eameses' closest white neighbors, the Stones, Rices and Bents. By not killing all the children, the natives ensured the survivors would later be able to identify their attackers.

Nineteenth-century engraving depicting the Eames massacre.

One contemporary account mentions the wife of one of Thomas Eames's sons dying the day after the attack. This actually may have been Thomas's unmarried daughter Mary—it is possible she had been scalped and left for dead, only to survive for one more agonizing day. We do know that one of the sons was with the band of Nipmuc who attacked Sudbury on April 21, 1676. Samuel Eames escaped his captors, traveling across unfamiliar territory in the direction of the rising sun. On May 12, he came across plantains, an herb called “English Foot” by the natives because it was cultivated by settlers and did not grow wild, and realized he had arrived in the vicinity of an English settlement. Two days later, Margaret and either Sarah or Lydia Eames were seen at a native camp at Turner's Falls, Massachusetts; by June they were reported “at a great hill about middle way between Wachusett and Pennacook [Concord, New Hampshire].” Zachariah Paddleford had escaped by August 24, 1676, when he was listed as a soldier on the rolls of Captain Joseph Syll's company dispatched to fight the natives in western Massachusetts. Nathaniel also seems to have escaped, possibly in company with Zachariah. Margaret was eventually ransomed back from Indians in French Canada, a not uncommon occurrence, and reportedly later married one of the men who had participated in the expedition to redeem her. It is said that the youngest captive daughter remained with the tribe that took her in, content to continue living the only life she could remember. This was known to have happened in other instances and is entirely possible.

T
WILIGHT OF THE
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NDIANS

In the months following the attack on the Eames farm, the Indians seemed to grow bolder. On February 10, 1676, they attacked Lancaster and forced the abandonment of that town. The Nipmuc and Narragansett attacked Medfield eleven days later. Marlborough was attacked on March 16 and again on March 26, destroying much of the town. Perhaps the most impressive native victory was at Sudbury on April 21, the assault witnessed by one of the Eames boys, where the main English force had been routed. By the beginning of summer, eleven English towns had been abandoned altogether, including Lancaster and Groton, while Marlborough was maintained solely as a military base.

In truth, the natives were rapidly losing their ability to continue with the conflict. They had smaller populations, were less able to withstand the losses from combat and lacked the infrastructure to maintain large bands of warriors in the field for indefinite periods of time. Quite simply, food was running out. They also learned that when they withdrew farther inland away from the English, other tribes were ready to pounce on their newly vulnerable positions. King Philip himself discovered this when his band of warriors was set upon by the Mohawks near Albany, New York. By June, after a year of fighting, many of the tribes were looking to cut a deal with the settlers.