Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
They had no warning, unless you count the dog that barked at something in the woods the day before. Probably wolves, his master had figured. So, when the attack came before daybreak on Oct. 16, 1780, the people of Royalton were caught off guard. A band of about 270 Indians and six British soldiers rampaged through the widely spread homesteads that made up the town. As they went, the Indians ransacked and burned houses and farm buildings, slaughtered livestock, took 26 prisoners and killed two male settlers.
The Indians were mostly Caughnawaga, or Kahnawake, Mohawks and some Abenaki. This was the third and most violent raid that summer and fall by combined forces of Native Americans and British troops against a Connecticut River Valley settlement. Barnard and Bethel had been hit in August and September, respectively. Now it was Royalton’s turn to suffer.
Why Royalton? Over the years, any number of answers have been offered. Royalton was one of the outposts that marked the northwest corner of New England. The line of settlements ran across Vermont roughly from current-day Addison County to Newbury on the Connecticut River. Forts located at Pittsford, Bethel, Barnard, and Royalton protected settlers from invasion forces coming south. Between colonists and the British was a wide swath of land inhabited by Native Americans, whom colonists hoped would serve as a buffer. So, the attack might have been purely strategic — a probe to test defenses in case the British force in Canada decided to invade the United States via Vermont.
Or, perhaps it was more personal.
One theory holds that the attack was payback, part of a tit-for-tat battle between Britain forces and the Americans. This particular feud had started with Indian raids, which like this one had been engineered by the British, in which women and children were killed. Outraged, Gen. George Washington responded by offering a major’s commission and pay to any American soldier who slipped into Canada and killed a British general. Killing a colonel would earn the assassin a captain’s commission.
Benjamin Whitcomb, a veteran Army scout of high regard, took Washington up on his offer, crossing stealthily into Canada in 1776 and shooting a British general as he rode by. Getting out of Canada proved harder than getting in. With British troops and Indian scouts in pursuit, Whitcomb managed to make his way through the wilderness of Quebec and Vermont to Royalton, where residents housed and fed him. Thus, the theory goes, the attack on Royalton was in response to what the British regarded as cold-blooded murder.
Royalton, however, was not the initial target of the raid. Lt. Richard Houghton of the British Indian Detachment and his men had orders to travel down Lake Champlain and cut across the state on the Winooski and other rivers. Their destination was to be Newbury, another key fort and where they hoped to find Whitcomb, who was attached to the unit stationed there.
But for some reason they changed their minds. Local militia had somehow gotten wind of their plans. One version of the story has it that Houghton mentioned his destination to a man the attackers met near what today is Montpelier. Houghton believed the man was a Loyalist, but in reality he was an American scout. Or perhaps less dramatically, the truth is that in those sparsely settled times, it was hard to sneak a group of nearly 300 men unnoticed down one of the state’s main thoroughfares. Once spotted, it took little guesswork to figure out that they probably planned another attack on one of the settlements upstream.
At some point, Houghton realized that American militia would be waiting for him in Newbury. Four years earlier, when they had feared an attack on Newbury, the local militia had rallied 300 to 400 men, and they built breastworks and a blockhouse to protect the settlement. Perhaps taking on Newbury would be too fair a fight. So Houghton changed course, ordering his men over the hills to Chelsea, down the First Branch of the White River, which runs through Tunbridge, and then into Royalton.
Shortly after the attack, a Royalton settler named Hannah Handy (sometimes written “Hendee”) caught up with the raiders and accosted Houghton, the British officer, demanding the return of her son, Michael, and the other boys who had been captured. Houghton insisted it was out of his power to tell the boys’ Indian captors to release them. Handy would have none of it. She excoriated the lieutenant, questioning whether he really was a gentleman and saying he would rot in hell if the children were not released. Houghton relented and conferred with the Indians, who agreed to free the boys.
After the devastating raid, the attackers retreated quickly through Randolph and Brookfield, where they captured a man named Zadock Steele, who would later write an autobiographical account titled “The Indian Captive, or a Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Zadock Steele.” (Such raids were so common during the period that “captivity narratives” became something of a literary genre.)
From Steele, we learn of the odd mix of cruelty and kindness captives experienced. Two of the captives were killed by the Indians, apparently in revenge for their earlier involvement in the murder of some Indians. The Indians also threatened to kill any captive who fell behind on the march north to Canada. But these threats stopped as soon as it was clear the pursuing militiamen had lost their trail. The captives found the Indians could be quite humane. If a captive stopped to eat berries along the hike, the Indians would assume he was hungry and offer him food.
It is not surprising that Native Americans would feel conflicted in their relations with the captives. The allegiance of the various tribes had been shifting for years. This “fickleness,” as the Americans called it, frustrated both sides in the conflict. British Gen. Guy Carleton complained that the Indians only supported whichever side seemed stronger. Indeed, the Caughnawagas had told American settlers that they helped the British only because the British had threatened to destroy them otherwise.
In playing each side against the other, the Native Americans were merely acting like Ethan and Ira Allen and other early Vermont rebels, who flitted between support for the American cause, cautious overtures to the British and fierce claims of independence. In short, they were keeping their options open during tumultuous times.
As they marched north, the captives faced an uncertain future. Others before them had met various fates. Some had been murdered in retaliation for the killing of warriors by whites. Others, however, had been washed in a river to rid them of their “whiteness” and then adopted into Indian families that had lost a warrior. Sometimes the adoption was complete and mutual. When some captives were ransomed, they refused to return, finding Native American life preferable to the one they had been torn from.
Once the Vermont captives reached Canada, British authorities jailed them, keeping them cold and hungry. One died while in jail. Steele recalls the Indians as far kinder captors than the British. The remaining prisoners were ransomed, exchanged and freed within two years and all opted to return to America, many of them settling again in Vermont.
British Gen. Frederick Haldimand apparently saw little hope in converting Vermont’s settlers into loyal subjects. He called Vermont settlers “a profligate Banditti” that had lately “become desperate” and ordered an end to such attacks in Vermont, figuring they might turn undecided settlers into rebels. The Royalton raid, he apparently decided, had been a mistake.
