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Florence Pluma Waters Orcutt
1871 - 1962
My great-grandmother Florence Orcutt recorded all she knew of her children’s history. Without her notes, I would never have discovered this story.
She gave flesh and blood to long forgotten names.
After my grandmother’s death, I was given a copy of the family history notes that her mother Florence Orcutt had recorded. Among these notes were three sentences about one of my grandmothers three centuries ago, a woman named Hannah Hawks Scott, a woman who has haunted me ever since.
These people ~ specifically Hawks, Mead, Sergeant John Hawks, Joseph Baldwin, Martha Baldwin, Hannah Hawks, Jonathan Scott Sr., and Jonathan Scott Jr. ~ are my grandparents many generations back, and as such the reader will surely see these people through the eyes of a descendant writing about her own family. Yet I have tried to shatter the illusions it is so easy to hold in regard to one’s own history. I wanted to know as deeply as I possibly could what our ancestors experienced, and I wanted to give that understanding, that empathy, to our future descendants as well.
Though based on actual events, this novel is first and foremost a work of fiction. Some places and events were merged or altered for the sake of flow and clarity while others are inventions of my imagination.
Ironically the most shocking events are those that actually happened. For instance, both the prologue and chapter three are based on very specific first hand accounts. See the Author’s Note in the back of the book for more.
The following elements of the story may be of interest to the reader:
FIRST NATIONS FAMILIES: Metacom, his family, Wequash, Uncas, and Awashonks were real people while Honors The Dead and his family are fictional. For the sake of clarity, Honors The Dead receives only one name in his lifetime. In reality, he would have had at least three names. The very name Honors The Dead is also fairly unrealistic, however it keeps the man’s story in the reader’s mind throughout the novel.
OF INTEREST TO GENEALOGISTS AND DESCENDANTS: The English characters were all real people. Modern descendants of the characters bearing the name Hawks spell their names both Hawks and Hawkes. In real life, Sergeant John Hawks and his brother Eliezer wrote their names Hawks, however the sergeant’s daughter Hannah’s name is recorded as Hawkes. It is all one family with the typical variations in spelling so common at the time. See Imogene Hawks Lane’s outstanding work John Hawks, A Founder of Hadley, Massachusetts for more on this family.
The family trees include only those individuals specifically mentioned in this novel. Most of the English families in this novel had many more children than those listed on the trees.
I have changed the name of one character who was a real person, the daughter of Sergeant and Alice Hawks. In this work, she is called Sarah Hawks though her real name was Elizabeth Hawks.
A PLETHORA OF JOHNS AND MARYS: Common sense would have advised me to change the names of many more English characters, however this book was written primarily to preserve for our children a story about real people whose names are important.
The tradition of colonial days was to name children after members of the family alternating back and forth between paternal and maternal lines. Hence in the four generations this book spans, there are no fewer than seven males named John and two named Jonathan. Where possible I drop first names (John Hawks I of the Prologue is simply Hawks.), use titles (John Hawks II is Sergeant John Hawks.), or nicknames (John Scott, son of Joseph Scott, is Cousin John.) to help with clarity.
MUSKETS AND MEN AT THE PEQUOT FORT: The presence of the flintlock musket at the Pequot Fort is a possible point of controversy. While the flintlock per se would not have been at the fort, its forerunners were. As there were many different varieties of flint weapons and as the flintlock arrived in the colonies not long after the Pequot War, I chose to merge the forerunners into their mature form, the flintlock.
Regarding the characters Hawks and Mead, there is no proof that either man was at the Pequot Fort, but it is a distinct possibility given their locations, ages, status, and the general feeling among the public toward the action. Though the involvement of Hawks and Mead is fictional, it sets the stage for the balance of the novel, for the attack on the Pequot Fort demonstrates how the English and Natives viewed one another.
It was at the Pequot Fort that the Natives and English first witnessed one another’s battle tactics in their fullness. The English found the Natives savage for their means of warfare ~ the Natives’ imaginative and personal cruelty. The Natives found the English barbarous for the extent of their warfare ~ the English colonists’ utter annihilation of a place as opposed to the killing of a score of people while taking the rest captive, and the colonists’ sense of superiority which precluded them from adopting Native children into their homes.
For an excellent resource on the differences in weaponry and warfare, see Patrick M. Malone’s The Skulking Way of War.
WORD CHOICE: I have used politically incorrect words like “barbarian” with regard to the English because that is what the First Nations called the English, and “savage” or “Indian” for the First Nations because they are words used by the colonists to describe the Native Peoples.
To some degree, I also tried to use the same inflammatory language that was used at the time. Without this, it is hard to see how people could do such horrible things to one another.
The word “nation” is used rather than “tribe” because that is how the First Nations viewed themselves ~ sovereign. In this early stage before the First Nations, some wittingly and some unwittingly, became subjects of the English Crown, the English colonists saw the First Nations as sovereign as well. In these early days, “nation” was the word both sides chose when referring to specific groups of Native Peoples.
GRAPHIC VIOLENCE: Though it was not my aim, this book became a study of the word “massacre,” for what the First Nations say is true. When white people slaughter hundreds of Indians, it is a battle. When Indians do the same, it is a massacre.
To our modern eyes, both the English and the First Nations appear barbaric. Both sides came to this conflict from warrior societies. Both sides trained for battle and expected to fight at some point in their lives. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the entire world was a barbaric place. Not to prepare to fight was to prepare to die.
To diminish the violence of the day would be a disservice to those who lived the pain and terror of these events. The horror of warfare, particularly eighteenth century warfare, is largely the point of the book.
These were frail and flawed, noble and beloved human beings just like us, but their world was vastly different from ours, and I suspect that very few of us, who today cannot imagine employing eighteenth century tactics, would have held then the same ideals we hold today. Ultimately the characters are simply human beings behaving quite normally in terms of their era.
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