Oyster River Raid - Background
Tradition has long held that this raid was an accident, some macabre trick of fate. This war-party was nothing more than a disgruntled band of outcasts collected from villages along the St. John's, Penobscot, and Kennebec Rivers. Led by the French officer Villieu and attended by a Jesuit priest, the party set out intending to strike at or near Boston.
[3]Through poor planning, the war-party exhausted its supplies before reaching its target. Hunger and fatigue forced them to pitch into the settlement closest at hand. According to the usual story, that settlement just happened to be Oyster River Plantation.
The origin of this tradition can be found within the work of Francis Parkman. In his 1877 work, Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, Parkman wrote of the decision to attack Oyster River: "Necessity decided them. Their provisions were gone, and Villieu says that he himself was dying from hunger. They therefore resolved to strike at the nearest settlement, that of Oyster River, now Durham, about twelve miles from Portsmouth."
[4]In his otherwise meticulous work, Parkman appears to have consulted only a few sources when writing about the attack on Oyster River. Instead he relied heavily upon an account of the expedition written by the Sieur de Villieu, the French officer credited with leading the raid. Villieu, a sixty-year-old career army officer, was ambitious and not above bending the truth to cast himself in a favorable light. His inept participation actually threatened the success of the expedition on more than one occasion.
Before Parkman, historians like Jeremy Belknap
[5]and Thomas Hutchinson
[6]had not viewed the attack as an accident. Both cited Cotton Mather who wrote, "the desolation of Oyster River was commonly talk'd in the streets of Quebec two months before it was effected."
[7]Not all contemporary historians agreed with Parkman's view of the attack. Everett S. Stackpole
[8]went back to Mather in his work. Samuel Adams Drake specifically stated that Oyster River was "singled out for fire and slaughter."
[9]However, as Parkman gained in popularity, so too did his view of the attack.
In 1966, University of New Hampshire graduate student Jan K. Herman made news in the town of Durham with his work on the massacre. Quoting heavily from Parkman and Villieu, Herman concluded in his master's thesis: "The attack on Oyster River was an accident, initiated on the spur of the moment by a band of starving Indians with no effective leadership. Poorly planned from the beginning, the expedition never had a chance to reach the outskirts of Boston, throw that region into turmoil and therefore be of lasting strategic importance."
[10]In 1976, Herman published an article based on his master's thesis in New Hampshire Profiles. Herman is the only recent scholar to have focused on the attack at Oyster River as his primary subject. Concluding as he did, Herman confirmed the theory originally advanced by Parkman, solidifying this as the popular view.
However, the attack on Oyster River was no accident. This raid was a joint military operation, conceived far in advance and launched in response to the Treaty of Pemaquid. Parkman and Herman failed to see the Abenaki as equals, and in doing so, portrayed them as tools or dupes of the French. Their work betrays a lack of understanding of the intricacies of Abenaki politics and the nature of their allegiance to the French. More recent historians have pointed out that, "although the tribes were quite willing to accept military assistance, they did not think of themselves as fighting a French war."
[11]The Abenaki regarded themselves as a sovereign power on equal footing with the Europeans, and conducted themselves as such. The Indians were fighting primarily to recover kinsmen taken by the English and to push back English encroachment on their land. Parkman and Herman trusted Villieu and, in doing so, overemphasized French participation in the expedition. "The Abenaki considered the French ineffectual allies and few if any of the war parties were truly French led."
[12]Because of the narrow range of sources available to them, Parkman and Herman relied heavily on the word of a single self-promoter. As a result, their view is incomplete and somewhat misleading. Only by examining the Abenaki role in the expedition can we gain a fuller understanding and ascertain the true nature of the Oyster River Massacre.
