Ancient trails and paths, river cuts altering its banks, surrounding marshland, fertile plains and bordering uplands, plus inconsistent Indian names: all subjects of this week’s narrative, again focused on components of the May 19, 1676 “Falls Fight” under ongoing scholarly scrutiny bankrolled by a U.S. National Parks Service Battlefield Grant.
The Battle of Peskeompscut/Great Falls research team led by UConn archaeologist Kevin McBride is nearing the end of a second grant’s funding, money paid by the feds to research and recreate the colonial, pre-dawn, riverside ambush and its daylight morning retreat. This daunting task is slowly taking shape after a careful reading of early narratives and piece-by-piece substantiation by a team of professional metal-detectors scanning the landscape for musket balls identifying the path of a protracted battle. The skulking skirmishes continued for several hours and approximately seven miles before crossing the Deerfield River into Old Deerfield’s North Meadows. This battle is generally credited with turning the tide of King Philip’s War, which ended three months later, after some 15 bloody months (June 1675 through August 1676).
As many as 110 of approximately 150 soldiers taking part in the Falls Fight massacre lived to see another day by retreating under fire along the north edge of White Ash Swamp and following the brook exiting nearby to the Nashs Mill ford across Green River and into the Greenfield Meadows. From there, survivors fled south along the west bank of the river, cut cross-lots over the Petty Plain/Wisdom overlap and down across Lower Road and the Deerfield River to freedom. Of the 110 or so who made it back to their Hatfield village destination, some 29 were wounded. The colonials suffered about 40 battle fatalities, the unsuspecting Indian fishing village perhaps 10 times as many.
When the first shots were fired that fateful morning at the Riverside/Gill encampment, the report of the muskets would have been detected at four villages within earshot: 1.) upstream at the mouth of the Millers River, 2.) across the falls around Unity Park, Turners Falls, 3.) downstream at the fishing island later called Smead Island, and 4.) at a yet unidentified Cheapside, Greenfield, site. We know the approximate sites of all the villages. What is unclear, and will likely remain so due to faded or destroyed physical evidence, is the intricate network of existing indigenous trails crisscrossing the terrain. There would have been some main arteries and many fingers branching off of them, particularly following stream corridors slicing up ravines into the hills on both sides of the Connecticut River. For our purposes, let’s focus on the west side, particularly the section west of the Picomegon or Green River known as the Greenfield Meadows, where I reside and walk daily. There, many bullets flew before, during and after commanding officer Capt. William Turner fell in the Green River not far from the Greenfield municipal pool on his May 19, 1676 retreat.
First a little digression into Indian place names, though, such as the aforementioned Picomegon, which varies slightly from source to source. The three Greenfield historians — Thompson, Kellogg and Jenkins — agree on Picomegan. Not so for other respected sources, starting with Wright’s “Indian Deeds of Hampden County,” the primary source, which lifts Puckcommegon from a Feb. 24, 1666 deed, probably the first attempt to spell a word spoken by people without a written language. Deerfield historian George Sheldon has his own spelling, that is Pocommegon, while Huden’s “Indian Place Names of New England (1962)” goes with Puckcommeagon, and William Bright, likely perplexed by the many variations, refuses to include it in his “Native American Place Names of the United States (2004).” On the other hand, Bright does list Peskeompskut (Turners Falls), a word that first surfaced in the mid-1870s in a newspaper, a weak reference indeed, yet today widely accepted. The fact remains that no one seems to know where that word or its Eastern Algonkian translation (“split-rock place”) came from.
As for the translation of Picomegan, according to Thompson and Kellogg, it’s “boring river,” as in a river whose course is continually changing due to bank-altering high-water events. This without question fits the winding Green River and its many old, bordering, river terraces between the Pumping Station and the Greenfield Pool. Take a look at the winding river snaking its way through the Meadows on a topographical map if you don’t believe it. Nonetheless, just to forever confuse public perception, Jenkins’ “Conservative Rebel” history of Greenfield (1982) interprets “boring river” not as one that’s continuously changing its path by boring into river banks but rather as “the kind that puts you to sleep.” … Huh? The man, an outsider who clearly didn’t know the Green River, is wrong. It’s a classic example of planting a misconception that can be difficult to uproot as it clings with a white-fisted grip to “conventional wisdom.”
Let’s conclude by returning to a discussion of the earliest trails from Deerfield to Green River, or Greenfield. We may have to revisit this topic in the future for more detailed exploration but, for now, let’s try to identify the key trails which sprouted many fingers in all directions, including up into the West or Sunsick Mountains for fall upland-hunting and nut-gathering activity. The main artery known in the early records as the Pocumtuck Trail (that is, trail to Pocumtuck/Deerfield) climbed Clay Hill out of Hatfield Village to the Hopewell Plain or Straits, which led north to Bloody Brook. At the Bloody Brook Monument, it merged with the lower trail from Hatfield, following River Road past Sugarloaf.
From that long-lost Bloody Brook fork, the path led up North Main Street, across Routes 5 and 10 to Mill Village Road, down Long Hill to the Bars and up into Old Deerfield. There, the lower road to Greenfield traversed the North Meadows and crossed the Deerfield River near its confluence with Green River, where the road split — one leg going up across Petty Plain, the other through Cheapside to Main Street, Greenfield, or around Sachems Head to Highland Avenue, High Street and Canada Hill.
Another path from Old Deerfield to the west side of the Deerfield River and Wisdom left the village by the Albany Road Burial Ground and dropped into the North Meadows, crossing the Deerfield near Red Rocks and leading north and west to pick up a main artery beginning at Stillwater and traveling along Upper Road, through Wisdom and the Greenfield Meadows to the Pumping Station. That path continued north-northeast through Leyden and Bernardston and on to what became Fort Dummer along the Connecticut River in south Brattleboro, Vt., continuing some three miles north to the West River outflow, in the midday shadow of Brattleboro Retreat. Then on to Lake Champlain and Canada, either by way of the Black or White River corridors, or by following the Connecticut River to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and across to upper Champlain and Canada.
The indigenous footpaths traversing Cheapside and the Greenfield Meadows, Riverside and White Ash Swamp, Nashs Mill and Trap Plain and beyond were many — all of them available to panicked, retreating Falls Fight soldiers fleeing in all-out survival mode.
Some made it, some didn’t. It was basically a game of chance, with, in many cases, dumb luck sitting in wilderness judgment. The smart ones likely avoided well-beaten paths, which only complicated a perilous journey home.
Recorder sports editor Gary Sanderson is a senior-active member of the outdoor-writers associations of America and New England. Blog: www.tavernfare.com. Email: gsand53@outlook.com.