This moving story, set in and around colonial Deerfield, MA., won the National Book Award for history as well as the Francis Parkman and Ray Allen Billington history prizes. In 1704, a French and Indian war party attacked the settlement of Deerfield, killing many inhabitants and capturing a minister, John Williams, and his five children. Most of the Willams family was eventually released, but Eunice Willams chose to remain with her captors, even converting to Catholicism and marrying a Mohawk tribesman. Despite the Williams's attempts to convince her to return to her family, she refused. This outstanding book examines the cultural and religious barriers that separated most colonial peoples, and the tumult caused by those who crossed them.

A family's decades long attempt to "redeem" a young girl abducted during the Deerfield massacre in 1704. A powerful human story showing the complexities of culture clash in frontier New England.

Religious hysteria, racial bigotry, cultural chauvanism, political expedience, economic insecurity-- salients of 21st century American imperial life? Indeed, but equally so of the experience of New Englanders in the early 1700s, as demonstrated convincingly in John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive. The eponymous abductee, Eunice Williams, is seized in a devastating French and Indian raid on Deerfield, carried north to Canada, and not only never repatriates but-- to the lasting horror of her Puritan minister father and her family-- assimilates into a French Catholic Indian enclave near Montreal, marries, bears children and eventually dies there at an advanced age. Around this girl as she grows to womanhood swirl and subside decades of arcane (ultimately futile) negotiations, in which the salients mentioned above hinder rapproachment and prevent understanding of The Other, all the while poorly cloistered behind the fig leaf of "family ties". The author's is a strong, even seductive style, but his speculations almost never seem ungrounded, and the incorporation into his text of substantial excerpts from primary sources bolsters the impression of authenticity. Lastly, this reader is struck by the extent to which the attitudes and assumptions Demos exposes in colonial America persist to this day, complicating and thwarting our relations with each other and with the world beyond our borders.

Nominated for the National Book Award, this book is set in colonial Massachusetts where, in 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.

"A masterpiece...recovering for us the poignant story of lives and families shattered and then painfully knitted together again in the complex cultural encounters between English, French, and Mohawk peoples in eighteenth-century America. There is nothing quite like it in our literature. It is a stunning achievement that should change forever the way we write and tell stories about the American past."--William Cronon

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Distributor: Random House, Inc.
Publication Date: 03-28-1995
Pages: 336
Measurements: 7.95in X 5.1in X .7in X .55lb