Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 416 - The Raid On Deerfield

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

USE CODE DONK50 AND GET 50% OFF YOUR FIRST MONTH ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys BUY THE HIGHLANDS BURN: https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QWHSPAADI07D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uLEY0I7D6t0IC9GWsF7SH1FKEgKqsqTLmV4PQ_lLi-wVUCYgTqIv0BWd9_-x3VzP.xn7v2CqU5MjngXmmSbYvVGsY_fxkvgsz-LA2tkhHHTs&dib_tag=se&keywords=joseph+kassabian&qid=1774247705&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C176&sr=1-1 CONTENT WARNING French and English colonies in North America go to war as a part of the larger War of Spanish Succession. Soon an allied force of French soldiers, militia, and Native Warriors are snowshoeing their way from New France to Massachusetts in order to destroy the town of Deerfield. SOURCES: Calloway, Colin Gordon. After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England P.G. Smith. "This Force of French and Allied Warriors Snowshoed 300 Miles to Terrorize a Small Town in Massachusetts." P.G. Smith https://historynet.com/deerfield-raid-massachusetts/ https://www.americanheritage.com/deerfield-massacre https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2024-02-28/320-years-ago-the-raid-in-deerfield-was-at-the-center-of-the-fight-for-control-of-north-america https://historyofmassachusetts.org/raid-on-deerfield/ https://deerfieldraid1704.org/

Hey everyone, Joe here. For the entire month of June, new patrons can get 50% off the first month of the Legion of the Old Crow tier on our Patreon. So if you're a new listener, an old friend, or maybe someone who's just been curious about what kind of fun we're having over on Patreon, you can check out our entire bat catalog from the past eight years, all for the price of a crisp white monster. So for the whole month of June, use code Donk 50 on Patreon to get 50% off your first month. To the crack of rifles in the acrid stench of sorcery, a sun invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syat's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amidst the smoking ruins of all that he held dear.

Siyat must make a choice, his pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him, worth becoming one himself. As his escape pushes him into the gruff and brace of the foundlings brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibility of his soldiers' life, even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle

force him to confront the terrible cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems clear as day, and Siat finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. My debut fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, is now out on e-book, audio book, and paperback.

Much like our podcast, this book is a totally independent production, and I hope you'll give it a try. As always, you can find the link, where you can get it in the show notes below. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Lions at Buy Donkeys Podcast, the only military history podcasts in the world, and notably not the other led by donkeys podcasts.

That you know, maybe I'm a member of Led by Donkeys and I was the one parking the LED van in front of loads of racists. We actually got some email kind of chiding us for the LED van being like, Great job humiliating Tommy Robinson, but you know, what's the actual point of your protests? And I was like, hi, we're actually a history podcast called Lions led by donkeys.

We're not led by donkeys. You're not the first person who mixes is up, though. Obviously, we'd appreciate it a lot of the other guys went away, but we can't really control that. Just FYI. And the guy respond, thanks for the info. Look, I know I'm like the one with the least connection to the UK on this show. So like the only time I ever remember the. exist and I know that they did something is when the show starts getting tagged and emailed and

stuff and like the last couple days, my shit's just been blowing up. So I was like, oh, what the fuck did they do now? They basically rented like a LED truck to do notionally pro-racism stuff at this Tommy Robinson March. And instead, everything was talking about how immigration makes Britain great. So it's like, we've done this to troll the racists, but it's like, sure. Okay, cool. So you just basically put a lot of pictures up of non-white British people so that white people can boo and jeer at them. Cool, man. Awesome. Fucking great. I always describe this stuff to Americans as like stuff my mom would think is cool. It's definitely got a sort of like forward, forward forward aOL email vibe to it. Yeah, which is like it does nothing fine, whatever. It does nothing good. It is nothing bad. It makes some rich people feel good. I don't give a shit. Stop emailing me about it. I mean like, I really don't care. Stop fucking emailing me about it.

That's all I ask. And like, we have a live show coming up next week. And I have learned that when the first things I do on stage is like, say, how many people are here for the first time? How many people think we are led by donkeys? And so far there's always been at least one person. Hey, listen, a ticket sale is a ticket sale? Like, I invite you to stay.

Like, I'm not going to kick you out. You bought your ticket. Take the ride. And to the credit of what very old couple that came to. see us last time we were at the venue that we're going to this time in shortage. They stayed the whole time, like out of politeness or something. But as soon as we were done, they were fucking gone. Like, you could almost see like a smoke trail going out the door.

I've had people get up and walk out of shows before in the middle where it's very, very obvious and you just get used to it. But thankfully, the venues we do these days, it's a little bit easier for people who just don't want to be there to get out. I've played some tiny-ass venues before where, you know. Yeah, that's right. come to the lines of my donkey's arena show baby. I went to last year when Tommy Robinson had his last

Unite the Kingdom March, I went to take photos out of because I was like, I don't know how many journalists are going to be baldy enough to like be in among the crowd of like these, you know, absolute brain slopping out of their nose people. And judging by the amount of a crusader flags, AI flags and the one guy who had the Georgian flag, mistaking it for the Crusader flag. I feel like

I could reasonably convince some of these people to listen to the podcast. It's like, oh yeah, it's about military history because these people love World War I. Yeah, we found the one group of Caucasians that the white people in Britain would hate. Yeah. And it was so funny because right before I saw the dude

with the actual Georgian flag, there was a guy who was like walking around like waving this massive crusader. flag and I had like my work camera on so I was like it's it's kind of a big camera and you can't really be nondescript with it and the thing I found is that every single one of them loved getting their photo taken they were like oh my god take your take my photo take my photo so I was like I had just come out of a co-op I had to get like a bottle of water and this guy was like oh take my phone take my phone bear in mind it's 12 o'clock in the day he's drinking a can't of stella and

I'm like you know what okay fair I took this photo of him and I showed it to him and he was like oh can you send it to me can send me and I was like yeah sure and he's like, oh, I'll give you my email. And I was like, how can I get out of this guy having my email? Because I'm explicitly going to post these photos. Give up the show email. Give up the show email. So I was like, thought on my feet.

It was like, oh, I'm just going to pull out my phone and use like the app for my camera to transfer to my phone. And I was like, oh, do you have an iPhone? He did luckily so I could air drop a tube. So he has none of my contact details because I am explicitly going to post this photo, making fun of you. Yeah, yeah. You should have given him the show email so it can be another.

person that emails Nate like he's my manager. But yeah, then saw the guy with the Georgian nation flag and then about 30 seconds later saw spray painted on a wall. Tommy Robinson is a Mossad. So just like a real amuse, boosh of morons. The last time I was in London, I was walking down the street across the bridge, actually, whichever one that is, I forget to meet Nate to go to the studio.

And someone had spray painted. Tommy Robinson is a cunt in really big block letters. I was like, all right. It was a Waterloo Bridge. Yeah, I remember. I remember. I was just laughing though, Tom. I mean, if you had gotten his email address, I'm sure it would have been something funny. It would have been like posh kitchens luten at yahoo.com.uk. This fella did actually have like the build of an electrician's apprentice. So, you know, that's all I'm going to say. So actually, this is a weird segue, but speaking of incredibly annoying racist, North America.

We're going to go back before the United States, before Canada, but most importantly, before Ohio. Judging from the response that we got from the time that we made

fun of the city of Albuquerque, I'm going to leave you guys out of this one. As a fellow guy who's from a shit hole who gets incredibly defensive when someone makes fun of it,

I see you, I hear you, hang out over there alone. Now, we're going to go to the great North American Imperial game

between the British and the French with the native people strapped in the middle. And in order to do all of that, we're going to go to a small subsistence farming settlement known as Deerfield, Massachusetts. Oh God. Subsistence farming, Massachusetts,

what period are we talking, Joe? We're talking early 1700s. I was going to say early 1700s. Yeah, baby. Yeah, I can't wait for the descendants of these people to end up creating the band hate breed. Oh, no, are they bad now? miss something again. They're good. There is like the problem of Jamie Jasta being extremely homophobic

in the late 90s. Well, it's less than ideal. Yeah, but it's like it's a ban from the greater Massachusetts area, although Jamie Joste is from Connecticut. Some people will make that argument. I don't recognize Connecticut as a state, though they do come up in this episode weirdly. Yeah, this is a water is wet situation. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Like I knew as soon as the words left about, oh no, are they bad now? I was like, yes, Joe. of course they fucking are. You listen to them growing up. Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoe are from the greater Massachusetts area. They're definitely fucking weird guys, but they're not insane. I don't know if you can really

be like Massachusetts by default. Boston by default problem. Yes, that I will give you. But that's for an entirely different reason. The only thing I know about Dinosaur Jr. is that they did heroin with Kirk Cobain. I mean, that describes a lot of people living and or dead. That's like 50% of the Greater Olympia area in the early 90s. But First, the Quebecwob context. I have some Capecois context, but go ahead, Joe. The raid on Deerfield takes place

in the middle of what is known as Queen Anne's War in 1702, which was the North American chapter of the War of Spanish Secession, and confusingly is sometimes the second French and Indian War, the first one being four years before it. I know for my fellow Americans, this is even more

confusing, because that name is generally held for what we call the French and Indian War, which happens 50 years after this one, and is the North American chapter of the Seven Years War. But you know what? Don't worry about it. We're sticking with Queen Anne's War on this one. White settlement of the area that we know today is New England, mostly because of a football team everybody hates and a really cool hockey team they took away from us, began in the 17th century. Spreading throughout the Connecticut River Valley, it was lush, it was fertile, and for white people, uninhabited because they didn't consider the native people as a population that needed to be considered.

The area is mostly populated by the Pocomtuk people who live there for generations, and their number one span the entire area. Also, despite native people in the American mind being nomadic hunter gatherers, like we think of Native peoples in the Great Plains, which admittedly we do talk about on this show more than the East Coast Native tribes, that was not the case with the Pekomtuk. They were farmers, mostly farming corn and squash, and are mostly the reason why white people didn't die

when they first showed up to the shores of America. Though before the English showed up, they had been going through some, let's say, some rough times, thanks to a combination of several factors. One big thing, probably the biggest thing, and the thing that made white settlement easier on the East Coast and arguably even possible,

was a massive outbreak of something. nobody is entirely sure what I love going to the doctor and he writes down on my chart question mark question mark question mark yeah your terminal of things we have no idea no one's ever been able to quite figure out

what it is there's a lot of competing theories but it's generally known as the great dying so you know ominous we've talked about this before on the show this heavily impacted the Wampanog people probably more than anyone else killing roughly 90% of their total population. But virtually no tribe in the area of what is the East Coast

escaped this era of great dying unscathed. Then came war, mostly thanks to the Mohawk people, the most eastern of the tribes that made up to Iroquois Confederacy. The Mohawk invaded, destroyed and displaced a great number of different tribes, wiping some off the map completely and absorbing others. anybody who wanted to escape these fates had to pull up stakes and get the fuck out of their way. And due to the location

the Potomtuk people, they were also some of the first tribes to make contact with the English when they arrived. And as a result, they were decimated by even newer, funner diseases that they had no resistance to. Imagine being a Native American person and interacting with someone from Yorkshire for the first time.

Like truly unique experience. Yeah, exactly. It's like you've learned trade English from the people you've encountered periodically and then someone comes up to and says, aop, lovely. And you're like, A-op me, doc. It's a demon from another planet,

from another dimension. I suddenly believe in Satan. The prophecy that we've long hoped would not come to pass is coming to pass. What's that I can smell on the wind, pork pies. Introducing a farming community to the smack parm and pee wet, and they just immediately die. Smack barm.

I'm sorry. and tried to introduce flavor with barbershot cheese. I mean, it's just bread and butter with a, was it, a hash brown in the middle, isn't it? Yeah, that's running right through me. I know it's oily as hell. You don't eat like that right now. You see, for those who eat like fucking dog shit,

that just sounds like a regular normal meal. But for you, you're like on some supreme health macro stuff. So you're right. If you had that, it would be like Hussein who had never been to America, going to America, and getting a chopped cheese from a bodegu in New York and getting a fever. Like, that's going to have,

like, I'm going to mission. to visit my family in June and that's going to happen to me again. Like, I was just there, well, I wasn't just there, but quite a few months ago. And I had, you know, a craving for Arby's. No.

I don't know why. I swear to God, I had not smoked any weed. Mm, wet beef. And I got precisely one beef and cheddar sandwich from an Arvies. And I was fucked, bro. Like, I thought for sure I had gotten food points.

reasoning. Yeah. No, you just ate Americans. Yeah. And my stepdad was like, can't be like that shit anymore, son. A lot of people don't know the, uh, the great dying was actually triggered by a guy from Wigan trying to open the first ever Greggs. Yeah, the great dying was actually someone decided to make a early 18th century version of a, what's it outback steakhouse blooming on you and everybody got fucking diphtheria. Now, Much like a disease, this allowed the English to spread. And by 1665, the colony of Dedham was getting a little cramped thanks to the influx of both new colonists from the outside, as well as their own birth rates. Because finally things were stable enough where it wasn't just a constant cycle of mass dying in the settlement and then repopulation.

Everything was beginning to kind of level off. In the absence of death, this is the time for combing. That's right. What else are you going to do? Like, the Nintendo Switch hadn't been invented yet. The only thing you could do is farm your fields and fuck. Surviving the plague is a great incentive to hitting it raw. What other option do you have at the time?

Much like Rod Dreher's Benedict option, there's also the Vesuvius option of shacking off until you die. Inventing the first Wadaladab goon game. It's a sound-sustaining structure. I make my own waddle and Dobb. So as more people came in, many of whom were younger couples and they wanted their own land, there just wasn't enough within the established settlement boundaries to go around. This was further complicated by just how colonies were run back then. They weren't run as a government extension of the British crown.

They were ran as holding companies. These were quite literally like, you know, what you see in a lot of, lot of science fiction today of like, oh, you know, the Mars Incorporated is now running the Mars settlement. Like that is how the colonization of America worked where independent companies would own a town and people would buy shares of it. It's the New World equivalent of a couple moving to like Harlow or Brentwood into like a new build house. That's like completely beige. I mean, a Watland Dobb house is also kind of completely beige as well. It will be when I'm done with it. God damn it.

So as new land was argued over, some men from Dedham discovered a nice plot of land over in the Pioneer Valley, and they tried to purchase it from the Potomac people that live there. They drew up a contract and handed it to a man they believed to be in charge, who had no understanding of contracts,

the English language signing land over. Also, he wasn't the guy in charge. So he signed it anyway, and the English were like, good enough, because this kind of shit happened from the time colonization started until the United States is born. The settlers then brought the contract with them back to Dedham and said, look, we got a place for a new settlement.

But the people of Dedham argued whether, you know, should we settle this or should we sell the land to new incoming settlers from England instead and make a fat profit? This argument went on for five years. Until a guy got pissed and simply moved in and squatted illegally on the land, More people soon followed, and the courts and dead and were like, sure, fine, we'll recognize you as a settlement, but you have to build a church and hire a minister. So they did, and thus, Deerfield, Massachusetts was born. New settlers quickly overpowered the few native people who had managed to survive around them after years of war against the Mohawk, waves of different diseases, and everything else that happens when white people move into the neighborhood. The Potomtuk, like many others, driven off by the English settlers, found a kind of sort of welcoming ally in the French, who built alliances with native tribes for their own purposes as their own imperial footprint spread throughout what is today roughly Quebec, what was then called New France.

In years after this, more death and destruction follow in the form of King Phillips War. We did a series on this, go and listen to it. And by the end of that, the settlers had lost a massive portion of their population, both. in war and disease and starvation, but had in turn wiped out virtually all of the native people who had once lived around them in a coordinated genocidal campaign throughout the colonized territories. Deerfield was one of several villages that had been to straight up abandoned by settlers during the war due to its location and what you could consider the English colonial frontier. And it had been the target of several raids. If you haven't listened to the series we did on that war,

you should, but also know that the Mohawk allied with the English colonists during their campaign. Though they originally tried to stay out of it, they were instead dragged kicking and screaming into the war after King Philip, the English name for the Wampanog chief leading the war, tried to provoke them into joining their side and then the whole plane blew up in the dude's face and he was murdered. Survivors of the people who were driven from the area built refugee villages in either New France or parts of New York that were considered safe. But the Mohawk who had been fighting wars against other

native people and the French for decades at this point began to get worn down. The Mohawk hated the French so much that the rest of the Iroquois Confederacy made peace with them, but they refused, owing to the fact that the first contact they made with the French had ended with a couple trappers, kidnapping and murdering several of their chiefs. But once the French got settled into their lands and militia began to burn crops and slaughter them, they were put into a position where peace was legitimately the only way the moment was the Mohawk people would survive. Part of the peace deal was, of course, the Mohawk become Catholics. Once again, the church.

Oh yeah, the Catholic Church is going to play a huge rule in a lot of this. As always. This is one of many things that kind of irreversibly changed Mohawk society amongst others. Another was how badly the tribe had been ravaged by war and disease. Traditionally, Mohawk population numbers were floated somewhere. what, by, let's say, mass kidnapping people and bringing them back into the tribe to be assimilated during something called mourning wars. This was to recoup their losses from both disease and war, and to bring mostly women back into the tribes to be forcefully married. This was done

explicitly to keep the tribe afloat. But their previous losses had been so bad that they had to kidnap more and more people than ever before. With the tribes slowly being turned culturally French and Catholic by missionaries. After all, that is the point of them being there. A terrible fate to become culturally French. It meant that rather than assimilating into Mohawk

society, these increasingly large numbers of new people adopted this strange combination of native French Catholic turbo believer, rather than the normal Mohawk way of life. Anything to do with their traditional belief structure or

society was kind of cast out and created a new kind of Mohawk person, which admittedly sounds very confusing. Yeah, it's Mohawk spelled with QU-E at the end. This caused a fracture within the Mohawk as the newer Catholic members who had no real connection to traditional beliefs or structures refuse to take part in pretty much any of them, leading to a lot of tension within the tribe. So the Catholic Mohawk packed. their shit up and moved to a new settlement near the St. Lawrence River that had of course been set up by a team of Catholic priests to weaken them. But the Mohawk weren't the only people trapped between their traditional societies and the encroaching religious and cultural imperial

efforts of the French. The Wendat people have been wrecked by years of war and disease as well. And thanks to the settlers and the Iroquois Confederacy, things were looking pretty bad. They began to fracture. They moved north with some of the tribes moving. into the Great Lakes region, where they're more commonly known today as the Wyandot people, which might sound more familiar to people from my area, and others moving into Quebec, with the French welcoming them with open arms, as long as they allowed the missionaries in. Which is a really interesting way that the French went about this. They weren't above mass slaughter.

We've already talked about that. But they would let people move in, you know, move into their own villages, whatever. But they're like, but you got to let Father Dickhead in. Otherwise, you got to move back south. Father Dickhead is just fucking shit. Yeah, as we've heard of the carrot and the stick. What if we had the stick and the stick? But the other stick has an incense sensor on it, you know.

You take communion from the stick. How would Father Dickhead be spelled in French? I think with another Q and you. Yeah. Yeah. D-I-Q-U-E-H-E-A-D, but it's pronounced Dick Ed. See, this is why we have a French expert on the show. Thank you, Nate.

The Catholic missionaries are like, We see that when you conduct your religious ceremonies, who seem very happy, you're singing and dancing, what if we took all that away and made you really sad and feel guilty about anything that makes you feel good? Does that appeal to you? It doesn't. What if we shot you instead?

Now that brings us to the next group of people, those driven into a pair of refugee villages, for a lack of a better term. One was in Odinoc, New France, and the other was in Scatacoke in New York. And New Yorkers, you should be happy. I looked up how to pronounce that right, because Jesus Christ are these spelled weird.

These populations include people from several different tribes all just kind of smash together for a lack of space, though they were related somewhat thanks to their somewhat common Algonquin language. They spoke different dialects. Some of those dialects were so severe. They were bordering on a different language. But they could at least kind of sort of communicate. So there were relations amongst them.

Not to mention their unifying experience of having to deal with the fucking English, making them largely pro-French. This is another wonderful example of our greater unifying theory of fuck that guy, because most of these tribes would have been killing each other removed from the situation. They didn't like each other just because they had cultural touchstones like a vaguely common language. They were driven together due to white dude fucking around down south. And this was a feeling that was heavily supported by the French but their continued conversion to Catholicism. though not every tribe became converts. For a lot of people, they didn't need that added juge of a religion to make them hate the English.

They were going to do that anyway. And that was something the French were also mostly okay with. Like, you can keep doing things your way. You still have to let the missionary hang around and just make sure you shoot the guy from York that lives in New York. Take aim at the guy who looks like a combination between the judge from Blood Meridian and Big John. Sir John Boschley God damn it Unfortunately this is not going to be the only time

That Blood Meridian could be compared to this episode And you all know what part I'm talking about The colonists in New York Hated the native people Surprise they distrusted them Conflict was commonplace As was trying to steal the land That they had just fled to

From the last land that had been stolen from them So there continues to be a building up of animosity between the native people and the people next door. Incredibly unfair deals are made. For example, miles and miles of land are in exchange for blankets and beads, famously. Sick of the pressure, many people in Skatakoke leave, moving into Odinac in New France, where they became known as the St. Francis Abanaki. They were in turn part of a larger alliance known as the Wabanaki Confederation, or the Wabanaki Confederacy.

Brackets, not the evil Confederacy. He had the only confederate, well, the handful of confederacy's brackets, good. Really, there's only the one bad one. All the other ones seem to be less bad at minimum. Not counting the Swiss. That confederacy gives confederacy as a concept, a bad name. Yeah, exactly. Now, the Wabanaki Confederacy spread throughout New France and would eventually become, you know, Canada.

Dominated by five tribes, though there were many other tribes, bands, and the like, mostly Algonquin speaking alliance. Similar to the Iroquois, over time, smaller groups were kind of assimilated by the more dominant ones. This is also a very quick explanation. This is not an exhaustive history

of the Wabanaki Confederacy or any of these tribes. It's just context. While all of this is happening, things keep developing in Europe, as they tend to do. Pretty soon, tensions between the French

and the English would spill over into the colonies, which in turn brought the various tribes back into their collection, imperative plans as the perfect proxies. In August 1701, the French called together all the tribes that either lived in the land that they had settled or had previously been invited in.

This included the people who had lived between the French and the British colonies around New York and Quebec, because the French had a feeling that when push came to shove, they're probably going to side with us. These people have been fighting one, both or everyone else involved in the peace meeting for generations at this point. But what is important to know here is the difference in how it was done and how it impacted the people involved. The English were, in short, fucking evil on face value. This is not to say you have to hand it to the French.

I should say that up front. Their kind of imperialism in the new world simply looked different. In comparison, they were better to deal with than the English. They're much less likely to fuck you over, at least to your face. they're much less likely to slaughter you in mass, again, at least to your face. They had a tendency to treat their native people and neighbors better. And by better, I do not mean good. That is important.

It's all a relative term here. Yes. There's the people who operate on the assumption that God wants us to exterminate you because you're heathens. And then there's the mild diet right version of that who's like, but we can trade with you and make money. And we'd rather make money than. dedicate our resources to

finding ways to fuck you over as efficiently or as comprehensively as possible. And the French tended to, not all of them, of course, but depending on your colonial administrator, whatever, they tended to believe you were cool as long as you converted. Which isn't great. Don't get me wrong.

That is cultural imperialism. It leads a cultural genocide. It's happened to multiple people. However, the English would try to say the same things. And then they were called like the praying Indians, the ones that converted to Christianity. They were just as likely to get slaughtered as anybody else,

not to mention enslaved. So, like, at face value, to the people that had to live through it, they would rather work with the French, is what it came down to. They were seen as, at least mostly trustworthy, and would stick to their word, which is a low fucking bar,

let me tell you. They were the classic, lesser of two evils. The English were seen as untrustworthy. Any deal that was signed with them was certain to fall through, even tribes had once backed the English turned against them

to the French. Though like any multi-sided alliance, everyone involved has their own reasoning for it. Damn, never felt I'd identify even more with the Native Americans getting fucked over by the English. And also becoming Catholic. For the French, their reasoning is very simple.

The war for the Spanish secession began in March of 1701. The native tribes made a great proxy and a buffer against any continued English expansion in the colonies, but also of course into new France. There's also the fur trade, the main engine of the French colonial enterprise, and they would need these alliances to safeguard it, as well as possibly expand it. For the native people, it was a lot more complex, depending on the tribe.

For some, like the Mohawk and the Iroquois Confederacy members, they'd fought the French for years, and they kind of knew, if we want to keep surviving, we need to stick with them. Because we know what happens if we fight the French and the English and everyone else all once. It doesn't mean good things for us. For others, it was trade, land deals, relative peace. War had ravaged everyone, and many of them had family members taken in mourning wars by the Iroquois people. Despite the bad blood between, well, literally everybody at the meeting, peace with the French and in turn peace with their neighbors, was just a better way forward.

The French in turn also knew that they had to make this worthwhile. So they made sure to tell their allies look, when we go to war against the English, steal whatever the fuck you want, to include people. If you fight with us, you can secure the fattest bag you've ever secured before in your life. And in that bag is people, mostly children. Sparking all of this was Charles the second, the Spanish king probably most famous for being so grotesquely inbred he couldn't chew his own food, let alone fuck dies in 1701 and sparks the war. We did a bonus episode. We did a bonus on him quite a few years ago. You can go listen to him on Patreon.

Oh, boy, is he in bread? Once again, bringing it back to chin so big you can do a money spread on it. Never thought I would have a Patreon sales pitch with, oh boy, is he in bread? Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where it's a chicken and the egg situation. Like, is it a complete happenstance that the statues on Easter Island look like that? Or did they see British royalty from this era? Is there some way that they experienced it?

It's like a cargo cult based around the Spanish king Charles II. Some kind of weird reflection. Atmospheric conditions created a sky reflection and they saw England and they said, thank God we're in the middle of the fucking Pacific and not there. They just look up and see the clouds part and just in the sky a giant apparition of Charles the second's head. And they're like, that's what we need to do. That's an ugly cloud.

Yeah, let's make lots of those statues to keep him away. Yeah. It's like a scarecrow for the imbred. Exactly. Yeah. At first, this war was confined to Europe, but in May 1702, England joined the shit show, declaring war on Spain and France in an effort to stop a possible royal union between them via Philip V. There's a lot going on here.

None of it important for the context of our episode, which is taking place to the other side of the ocean, just though the all has happened because the Habsburgs. Long story short. Once this kicks off, France, Spain, and England wanted to keep the war limited to Europe and keep their colonies neutral, which I know is very funny in. retrospect. Spain at the time was a minor power in the new world. They had Florida, pretty much, but within Florida, they only had about a thousand settlers. They're really only longed for the ride on this part of the war. The proposed colonial neutrality was in order to secure the bag

and the lines which the bags came from. But this lasted about as long as it took someone to point out, hey, not only can we use this war to secure thrones in Europe, but we can make that easier by stealing their shit in the new world, so neutrality went right out the fucking window. That being, said, nobody really has a real military footprint in North America, not like you would imagine, given the fact that we're talking about the empires of the two most powerful nations in the world at the time. Uniform military formations were rare, and in the case of the English colonies, completely non-existent. For the English, everything was done via militias. And this is the true foundational meaning of the term militia, not your weird racist uncle who owns one too many

guns. Like how many, in orders of magnitude of like tens of thousands of people, like how many people are actually on the continent at this stage? Not counting like indigenous people who are already there. The French have less than the English. The English have their population had bounced back a little bit from King's Phillips War. But, you know, I believe it's close to 100,000, maybe a little bit less. That is insane.

been to festivals with more people at it than the white is in North America. All of this is to suggest that the end goal of white colonization of the Americas was to create Coichella. Yeah, you know, this episode is really good so far. I'm excited to see how Queen Anne's War will lead to a strange follow-up to Wolfra Parade's best album. Except it's actually a wolf parade. Apologies to the Queen Anne's War.

Dudes got the most bare-bone level of training required to use their very out-of-date smoothbore muskets at best. Because weapons like pikes and swords are still commonplace as well. Your average militiaman had to purchase and maintain all of their own kit. Guns, ammo, whatever. And guns were not cheap.

Bullets were not cheap. There was also a few cannons kicking around. and a few people who had something resembling a basic education how to use them. But like at any point you get to that, it's not good, right? You don't want Jim the farmer having to remember like the trigonometry required to use a fucking canon.

Like that movie wanted gets a lot of stick for, you know, it's an accuracy in terms of ballistics and a lot of things. But back in this day, guns just did that. Like, yeah, your bullet just went sideways. Colonial wanted Twisting by Brown Bess

French colonies were much better off in this regard They still had their colonial militias of course But they also had the Troop de la Marine Which were created decades before This was a standardized military formation commanded by regular officers Trained in France As well as trained line troopers from France

Sent over from the Metropole With all of their standard weapons and support. Though because this is a colony in the 1700s we're talking about here, numbers are comparatively quite small. The Troop de la Marine numbered maybe a thousand regular soldiers in all of New France. And they were mostly kept to the large settlements, the large cities, so their numbers were quite spread out. That being said, you probably assume that the English colonies were somewhat prepared for a war. Like we talked about during our series and King Phillips' war, they had survived a nearly apocalyptic level war within lived memory.

You would assume they had learned a few things from this. No, they did not. This is a time remember where like, these settlements might be 20 miles away from one another, but that's a hard fucking 20 miles. You might as well be in a different country. Yeah, it's like 20 miles. There is at best, like muddy, wooded trail. in between them.

Yeah. At best, villages had a palisade wall made up of wood protecting them. But most didn't even have those.

And most of the time, the ones that did have the wall, that wall didn't even go all the way around the village. They needed to get Jimmy the buster

to work to build out the Wattland Dob. He's tired. The skin is spongy and bruised. We got a whole team busting 24-7.

The French are coming. Waddle and Dobb Fortnite. erotic fortnight. Goddama, we said we were going to play no build mode. Nobody Google that. No both mode. Please don't. God. Damn it. Now, at best, these villages out in the middle of nowhere would have those palisade walls like I talked about, but most didn't have those. Instead, they had what a

house was like a declared fighting position. These would have like boarded up windows. Some firing ports were cut into them. These were decided upon block houses, but also most of the time, they weren't reinforced at all. And it was just some dude's regular ass house. Like the trap house hadn't been invented yet. So instead we have the musket house.

I remember talking to the guy was talking about like, you know, we're from a generation of kids in America who like, obviously professional child care existed, but like not really when we were kids. And like so many of us come from. financial circumstances where like our parents couldn't have afford it even if they wanted to. So back in those days, if they needed childcare, you just got dropped off at some lady's house. That happened to me from time to time. Yeah. And it's just like that, that, but for warfare.

Getting dropped off at some lady's house, but for warfare. Instead of loading up into like the family's busted-ass car, you all get in the wagon, get dropped off at like weird Steve's house. Because latchkey hadn't been invented yet either. You could even be a latchkey kid like I was. circling back to Deerfield, the first hint of Queen Anne's war that the people of the village felt was something called the Northeast Campaign, when French soldiers, militia and their native allies raided Southern Maine between August and October 1703. This scared the militia of Deerfield into quickly repairing their palisade wall, which had been left out to rot in the weather for five years, which I know that doesn't sound like a long time. But remember, we're talking about New England weather. This is like an unsealed wooden wall, just left that. out in the snow and the rain and the heat.

Like, it's mostly falling apart at this point. They got to go unlock the cellar that Bustin Steve is in. And he's just lying on the floor chained up like a desiccated sponge. It's like... Feed that man, magnesium and bananas. He's like the... Look at like the world's most fucked up scrub daddy. Jebediah, we've invented the cum stack for this man.

He's nut maxing. They're chipping like magnesium. out of the rock wall and just shoving it in his mouth. Soon enough, spies and rumors kept bringing word back to the village at a large French and native warrior forests were gathering in Montreal, the nearest French settlement to Deerfield, which is about 265 miles away, which again, I need to reiterate here,

is longer than that sounds. It's not like they could just walk down the road. These are mostly like completely untouched forests and hills that people are walking through. and it's winter. Ooh. Leaders within Deerfield petitioned the colony administrator

in Massachusetts for protection. As Deerfield was considered the frontier at the time, they argued that deploying militiam into Deerfield was for the benefit of the entire Massachusetts colony, unless of course they wanted to end up fighting the French in the streets of Boston.

Massachusetts agreed and they send militia. So does Connecticut, but no attacks ever come. And then as the weather begins to get colder, most of the militiamen packed their shit up and they go home. leaving only 20 men behind. Because back in the day,

a military campaign in winter was considered simply unimaginable. And that went double for a place with a bunch of guys who were simply playing soldier for free down the street. Like, nobody's campaigning in winter in Massachusetts.

I'm just thinking about Boston before the Irish showed up must have been like the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve got cast out. Yeah, the Boston police department doesn't even exist yet. Yeah.

The real snake was the, Irish. I knew I should have never listened to you, Tom. Sort of like the oil, the oil, lamp, and coal fire version of the fantasy future utopia meme.

Steampunk, Boston. I'm just thinking about years ago, dealing with American soldiers in Korea who were like, oh, a place where they don't always enforce the laws because you're just supposed to follow them is like

all the rats getting off the ship on the island of Mauritius and finding the Dodo eggs and the fact that Dodo's had no, no defenses against predators because they'd never had them. And all the rats, be like, fuck, bro, this is so good.

You think they'd make this. illegal. I don't know if that's the Irish showing up in Boston, but I just like that metaphor. So think from that what you will. I like the voice that you chose is like the voice of the pollution monster from Fern Gullies. Mother's milk.

Oh my toxic love. Fucking Hexas. Exus is his name. God damn it. That's stupid. Hexas Omahony. Hexas Omahony was buried, was in scones and that fucked up tree. And then someone fucking cut it because they were greedy and wanted to do logging. And they let out the Irish and now look at this shit.

Now we got ultra cops. The Irish just reproduce like the orcs from 40K. We produced through the mycelium in the ground. If you just release us, then it's a problem. Or alternatively, the Irish are the tyranids. I support both of these theories. Everyone assumed that this war would just be paused until spring. You know, everything would thaw, and then they'd revisit this shit in March,

while everyone spent the next several months trying not to die of starvation and frostbite. As winter hit and dumped several feet of snow on everyone, everyone also assumed that they were safe. They were very, very wrong. Deerfield in the entire region it was in had long been thursday after by the French authorities. They had jotted it down as a raid target for years at this point. In fact, the scouts mentioning a buildup of French forces in Montreal had actually been completely right. They'd even put a man in command of a future raid on the village, Jean-Baptiste Urtel.

And it probably would have kicked off when the English militias were sitting around a Deerfield waiting for it, while I assume they were drawing dicks on the walls of their palisades, throwing rocks into a hat and playing spades. But the campaign got delayed thanks to rumors that a British Royal Navy squadron was going to raid up the St. Lawrence River. So they were kind of held back in preparation for that, but it never happened. The force that Urtel put together was just about as good as it could possibly be in the colonies. He himself had grown up fighting guerrilla wars with his father against both native peoples and the English in what has to be the world's most bucked up father-son bonding ritual I have ever heard of.

And you know that means a lot coming from me. The man who once bought heroin with my dad. I should clarify here that heroin was not for me. Urtel had been fighting with his father since he was like 13. Jesus.

The men under him were veterans of the same conflicts. Many of whom had been doing this for 20 years, both soldiers and militia. And then there were, of course, the native allies. There was a mix of men from tribes

that ran the list of people that the English had fucked over over the years. The Abanaki, the Mohawk, the Wyandotte. Some of the war. warriors were Catholic and others weren't. But in the build-up to the campaign, the French priests made sure to gather all of the Catholic believers and give sermons about how they were going to take part in a Great Crusade. While some other people there, some French included,

were definitely religious zealots. It was not all of them. For a lot of people, this was just practical. There are plenty of non-crucade ideas as to why they would join the attack. It gave them a chance to launch a mourning ward, to steal from people who had stolen from them, and of course, sweet succulent revenge. And that last part, the revenge, was a huge reason why the French were launching the attack in the first place. We've already talked about their militaries.

Nobody here has the military ability to actually conquer the other one. Like, that's not possible in the colonies. It would require a huge amount of reinforcement from the mainlands. But the French knew that the English had done a lot of legwork pissing off everyone around them.

And they thought if they attacked the English colonies, it might spur some kind of greater tribal uprising. and turn a lot of people who were staying out of the war onto their side, at which point they could leverage that into possibly wiping the English out. If you wanted to get on the fuck the English train, now was the time. For Ertel, there was a much more personal and selfish reason. He and his father had done a lot of work for the Crown, and by work, of course, I mean, running death squad since he was a preteen.

But while they petitioned to be elevated to the ranks of the nobility, they had been rejected. Ertel believed that another successful raid into English colonies might be enough to put him over the line, get a slice of that real good, good, you know what I mean? So as the snow began to pile up, the raiding forces moved out. As anyone who has ever tried walking through deep snow

could tell you, that shit sucks. But Ertel and his forces had a secret weapon. Snow shoes. Now there's some arguments who developed or invented snowshoes first, with some claiming that the Iroquois had done it before anybody else. Some evidence that was actually people in the Dolomites over in Europe. Either way, snowshoes are actually one of the very few culturally common elements to virtually

every native tribe in North America, most of whom never came in contact with one another. This is one of those classic cases of like parallel invention. Because obviously these people weren't fucking sending messages to people in the Dolomites to figure out how they built their sweet shoes. You know what I'm saying? Like, this is just something that anybody who had to struggle through snow eventually came to the conclusion about. They were all different shapes and sizes and whatnot, but they all had the same basic function. It's like over time we all kind of figured out,

our bare feet really suck for walking. We should put some leather on them motherfuckers. You know, we didn't need a committee to come up with this. Yeah, legacy of consequences, you know, adaptive footwear for the environment eventually led to the vibrant five-toe shoe.

That's actually what the Iroquois invented, yeah. Nobody gives them credit. So what you're basically implying is that the sort of necessity of the mother of all invention led to a direct line from this Native American slash colonist conflict to CrossFit. Yes. You owe all of your workouts of the day to the Urquois. Yeah. Unfortunately, I got twisted somewhere along the way.

And instead of working out to celebrate the deaths of colonizers, you're working out to mourn them. Yeah, it's a really fucked up bastardization of the Iroquois word that turned into the word kipping. Yeah, you can't do the ghost dance for time, unfortunately. Now, the French and the English would have learned about these things from their native contacts, and within a few years, and especially by the point that we're talking about, they all would have been commonly using these throughout the harsh winters of the colonies, by whites and natives alike. Hell, during the French and Indian War,

the American concept of the French and Indian War, entire battles were fought on both sides. everybody wearing snow shoes, which is very funny if you've ever walked in a pair of snow shoes. They're not, like, maybe it's just because I was not raised wearing them like these people would have been, but I had all of the agility of a drunk

penguin. It's better than getting stuck in the snow and be like, you know, fence posting into the snow with every step you take. But yeah, yeah, it's true. You gotta get used to them and it's awkward. This is why I just stick to fighting all my battles and my five fingers, which is also why I've lost every war I've ever fought. And I don't know if those two things are connected. Well, no, exactly. It must be really difficult. It's like, you're supposed to do

an approach march and instead shows just out there fucking doing burpees in the snow. Everyone's like, God damn it. I'm developing to the most annoying man anybody's ever met. Getting walked down by a militia in snow shoes that's doing like wanted bullet time stuff while taking comically large steps so they don't fence post in the snow would have been the funniest site ever. Yeah, like there's one battle called the Battle of the Snow Shoes where everybody involved is kind of sort of doing just that. So snowshoes strapped to their feet, they begin their awkward waddle south. And almost as soon as they set out, there's absolutely zero element of surprise here,

or at least there shouldn't have been. In January, right after they begin, some members of the Iroquois tribe run over and they warn New York's Indian agent that, hey, there's a whole lot of fucking French people going south. That seems concerning. You just hear ch, ch, ch, ch of hundreds of people on the, move and it's like the fringe are coming. I mean, it's one of those things.

You can laugh sometimes about like, okay, they may not have had the same technologies, but then it's like, you know, let's see the ice man got killed by someone who shot a bronze age arrow at him that went dead on point

into his shoulder blade and broke his cold like a bunch of bones and gave him a fatal injury. And it's like, it doesn't matter. They invented snow shoes. They had all sorts of things. Like,

they could take down huge animals with bows and arrows. Like, do you want to be on the receiving end of an arrow that can take down a buffalo? They're quite literally built different. Like I complain about, about walking in my like modern military equipment.

Like, oh, my feet hurt. Meanwhile, there's some like French dude who has not taken a solid shit in his entire life. It's like, oh, I'm walking 265 miles south in January in snow shoes. Let's go. A lot of people don't know. Aughtsy was the first victim of hollow points. I mean, crazy thing, though, is that they actually, and is, you know, they found it

his knapsack, like shoes that were made out of, I think, like, animal leather and straw, like the grass and they were fucking solid. They were really like, people were like, they thought they were forgeries at first because they were so amazingly well constructed. It's like, yeah, this dude, you know, 6,000 years ago, they had these badass shoes because like they needed them to not die. Similarly, a guy walking 20065 miles in January in his mind, he's like, at least I'm not in France.

Yeah. Well, it could be worse, I suppose. The Indian agent warned then both New York and Connecticut's governors, who then just kind of did absolutely nothing with this information. They didn't know where the French were going. where their target was. It's not like they had someone tailing them the whole way. So they decided there's no reason to raise any alarm because there's no way we could take action against them. This is despite the fact they kept getting warnings during all of their movements

as they crossed into the colonies and continued their nearly two-month-long snowbound journey towards Deerfield. By February 28th, the raiding party got to within 30 miles outside of Deerfield. At this point, they dumped all of the supplies they wouldn't need for immediate violence and then marched even closer, camping two miles away from Deerfield's walls. But then they couldn't build a fire, right? It would give away their position. So they just sat in the cold, several foot deep snow throughout the night, waiting until they attacked two hours before dawn. And normally the French would have had several obstacles to overcome here, right? They had the palisade walls, which are guarded by militiamen, or at least the French assumed they would be.

there's the block houses, the entrance to the town within the palisade is blocked via a gate. But French scouts reported some good news. Thanks to the blizzard, snow had simply piled up in snowdrifts so tall you could just walk right over the walls. Uh-oh.

You don't need to build a siege engine when God builds a snow siege engine for you. Yeah, who would have thought that like General Winter was actually General Wintang. Can you imagine if they invented snowboards by this point? Oh, they'd been so sick, bro. They were just doing 1080 on N60 poor, just going over the walls,

you know, upside down fucking shooting arrows of people. Yeah, man, or firing muskets. But then the English would smell them coming because they'd all just reek of weed. Actually, that's a pretty big difference. I've gone snowboarding in Europe and I've gone snowboarding in North America. And snowboarding in North America, everybody reeks like weed. And snowboarding in Europe, everyone is just rich. So I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. It's because you can't, there isn't a distinctive smell of cocaine. You can't tell the difference between European skiers and snowboarders. They're just vibrating slightly. And in turn, if you imported them all to the U.S., they would die. Well, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Not from sunny bono reasons.

Just because the cocaine has fentanyl in it. They're not ready for our cocaine supply. So the inch closer, finding a single militiamet on guard, asleep next to the stockade and just kind of slip on by them. Small groups of men just walk over the snowdrifts, get into the village, and open the gate, and let everyone else inside. After that, they broke into small squads. Each one sent outside of a house in the village, as was their standard surprise attack tactic.

They would try to hit every house at the same time, catch everybody off guard in order to stop any organized resistance from forming. But they had forgotten something. That sleeping guard in the stockade Yeah, he woke up. They didn't think to like stab him or anything. They just kind of let him take a nap, which honestly, they did him a solid.

They're like, this is bad sportsmanship if we just gut you while you're asleep on duty. They just put like one finger on his lips and went, shh, the guard wakes up, he shoots at them, he misses, but then he wakes up the village with his gunshot. And this happens all before all the small attack squads are in position. But it really doesn't matter.

They're already outside enough of, the village to do damage and everybody just starts kicking open doors. The people inside are only given like a split second to react. The town reverend, John Williams, grabs his gun from over his fireplace to like face off with the dudes raiding his house. He levels his musket and pulls the trigger only to remember that he does not store it loaded because he has children in the house, which crazy here because John Williams in 1700 is more responsible than most American gun owners

today. Unfortunately, this leads to several warriors to beat the ever unholy shit out of him. Like he's beaten with war clubs, hands and feet. He's tied up and then he's dragged off.

As we're going to find out here, this is the best possible outcome because he's a big content warning here. A lot of bad shit's about to happen. His six-year-old son is beaten to death with clubs. and his six-month-old baby is smashed against the wall. The warriors even stopped to kill his slave.

One of the militiamen, seeing that they're absolutely fucked, wrapped some rags around his feet, jumped out of a second-story window of the reverend's home, doing an assassin's creed dive into a snowbank, and then runs off into the woods, sprinting for the next town over, which is a full 12 miles away. Jesus Christ.

The other seven people, People in this house are all captured. Elsewhere, the teams kick open doors and slaughter everyone inside. Some people hide or try to hide, but soldiers and warriors just set the houses on fire when they're done searching them. Most people are burned alive. Anyone who was thought to be too much of a burden to kidnap were murdered. So the very old and the very young, especially if the very young were boys, were killed almost immediately. Livestock was even killed because it was considered too much of a pain in the ass to bring back.

bring back, and if you killed it, you denied it to the enemy. Only food that could be loaded safely into backpacks and carried were stolen. But the teams had only made it into the north of the town. By the time their element of surprise was ruined, the people in the south part of the town worn by gunshots and screaming and fires and whatnot, began to run towards their fortified blockhouses. One man, the wonderfully named Bononi Stebbins is an interesting case. Benoni Stebbins. Yes. That's an odd combination of names.

Yeah, he had to hide the fact he was culturally Italian or something. He'd actually been kidnapped by natives as a child and then got released before he went back to Deerfield. So he was like the only guy in the village was like, oh fuck, not again. He had happened to build his home out of something called gnaugging, which is unfired bricks, which not as good as it could be. But, you know, and the realm of this shitty tinder. home. The one with the

unfired bricks is king. Yeah, a lot of people don't really know that the three little pigs is based on this. Yeah. Yeah, nobody remembers the fourth pig Bononi Stebbin. Yeah, he was written out of the book. Exactly. He happened to have one of the few houses in the

village that could withstand any amount of gunfire thrown at it that the French had happened to bring. So he didn't run. And instead, Stebbins also happen to have a small cachet of firearms in his house. I'm starting to feel like Benoty Stebbins might be the first American prepper. He's like, no, I'm building my house out of, out of gnaugging. I'm filling my basement with just mountains of muskets and ammo.

I got my hard tack in here. Fuck everybody else. And like, he starts inviting anybody into the house that can come in to like women, children, anybody. He hands them all guns. And they start firing out of the windows. See, this is why he's not the first American prepper because American Preppers would absolutely under no circumstances help fucking anyone. That's true. He's like, no, all 20 of these guns are mine. I need them. I'm gonna eat this hard tack until I ship myself to death.

Fuck the rest of you. The other 18 guns I have are to kill myself when I inevitably run out of food or water. The volleys of gunfire coming from this frontier bunker house began to push the attackers back. Ertel ordered more and more people. It is a rating force to attack the house. But he doesn't have any weapons that can actually breach the wall, so instead they have to try to get through the windows and doors, which makes shooting them quite easy. Ertel himself gets winged by a musketball while personally leading an attack on the Stebbin's house.

And eventually, Ertel offers Stebbins terms of surrender, and Stebbins tells him to eat shit. Though only moments later, Stebbins has a skull blown apart by a musket ball. Even though he dies, his house holds, and he's the only person inside who dies defending it. He saves at least a dozen people's lives. Ertel calls off the attack as the sun begins to come up, and all this has been going on for about two and a half hours, roughly. But the only reason he does this is because he's losing control of his raiding force. Several people stole so much shit they couldn't carry it, so they just start dragging it off into the woods, never rejoining the battle. Others see people leaving and say, oh, I guess the fighting's over and just kind of wander off.

So the raiders weren't taking many casualties, but people were starting to abandon the fight to secure the loot, which is sure part of their objective, but it's not Ertel's objective. His objective is to destroy Deerfield, and arguably, he does kind of succeed there. Almost as soon as he leads his men back into the woods in the long road home, reinforcements arrive from the neighboring town. More trickle in and they go running off of the raiders leading to a running gun battle on snowshoes and horseback. But eventually the reinforcements get just a tad too eager and they run into an ambush set for them by a team of warriors. Ten militiamen are killed and the rest are forced to go back into the smoldering remains of Deerfield.

Speaking of which, of the 41 buildings that make up the entire settlement in Deerfield, 17 are completely destroyed. Deerfield only is a population of 291 people at the night of the end. attack. By the time the attack ended, only 126 remained. Forty-four are dead, half of which are children, the majority of people having been burned to death, while others are bludgeoned or stab. Another 109 people, a full 40% of the entire village of Deerfield, was kidnapped. What? Yeah. That seems insane. Well, to be fair, it was a pretty large objective of the attack for a lot of the people present. Like, yeah, we want to stick it to the English. We want to burn down Deerfield.

But also, we're mostly just going to steal people. Obviously, this forced march back towards New France, with 109 people in tow, ran into problems. The soldiers and warriors had taken their victims out of their beds in the middle of the night. It's not as though they had winter clothing or supplies with them. And it's not like their hardened soldiers used to long marches in the winter. Also, they don't have snow shoes. people soon to get very hungry and get very sick,

and as soon as anyone looked like they were slowing down, they were taken out back and beaten to death. Eventually, they make their way all the way back to Montreal in native camps. Catholic priests then tried to convert them while the French bartered with their native allies for trading goods to get their prisoners from them. Now, sometimes incorrectly, I should point out, that the story is told as the French knew, of course,

that their native allies were going to treat these people terribly, so they wanted to get them back into white captivity. That is not what happened. They were trying to trade with their native allies so they can in turn ransom these people back to the English. Right. They're fighting over resources. The native people don't want to ransom them back.

They want to forcefully assimilate them into their tribes. This is a mourning war. Traditionally, this is how they replenish their numbers during times of crisis. The French want them to turn a profit. That's the difference. This did not always go smoothly, and when deals went badly, several prisoners were murdered. The process to get most of the prisoners out of native hands and into French hands,

and then in return back to English hands, in exchange for coin, lasts years. Meanwhile, English raiding parties numbering in the hundreds and eventually thousands, raided their way into French settlements trying to collect their own prisoners to be traded in exchange. Governors of the colony doubled their bounty on native scalps, and everything enters whichever circle of hell you have to walk into to sell someone's head skin flaps for profit while your friends attempt to break into the now incredibly lucrative kidnapping industry. Our countries are founded by sin. We do like the sanitized version because one has only to open the first page of actual history of America to get stuff like this.

That's why I always like smile to myself whenever anybody's like, This isn't America turned page of history. Oh, God. Oh, no. Oh, fuck. It's like, I flipped into the golden era arc of berserk, but everybody's named George. Gord. Trat.

Blast. Bummer. Slowly deals are cut and the prisoners began to get ransomed back by 1706. So several years later. Not counting children, mostly girls, who are all kept and forcefully adopted into either the tribes or French Canadian families, because this is a practice that the French also adopted.

It's important to remember that more than this being a war against states, as much as they saw each other as states at the time, this is a war fueled by religion. In French Canadian families, they kept these people to raise them as Catholic, like good Catholic children in

Catholic families or child brides. That's also always a possibility. I was waiting for it. Not good. For the native adoption, almost exclusively child brides. All these people are terrible. This is just how things worked back then, not that that's an excuse.

This include the Reverend Williams' own daughter. Later, these kids grow up in these societies and it's not like they're kept in chains for the rest of their life. They're eventually allowed to go and visit their birth families with everybody acknowledging that they are birth families and you were kidnapped from them. But every single time,

they always return to the family that they had been trafficked into for a lack of a better term, they always went back. And like, Reverend Williams met his grandchildren and all of the complicated emotions and feelings and admittedly, incredibly fucked up shit that comes with that. I feel like there's some sort of symptoms

or syndrome named after a city in Sweden that might explain this a little bit. Yeah, there's a few things that explain a lot of this, all of them bad. For his part, Ertel got promoted, got some titles, but still was not elevated to nobility. That would only happen in 1716, about a decade later. Which, to be fair, I cannot think of anyone more fitting to become a noble than a mass-murdering serial child trafficker.

In the years since, there's been a lot of debate about the Deerfield raid. Was it a military operation with all the brutal tactics of the day that were considered normal? Was it a revenge mission partially led by people who had been ruthlessly fucked over by people who invaded them, stole everything from them, committed mass murder, and destroyed their way of life in a way that made sure it could never run. returned to normal. Was it a bloodthirsty act of terrorism? Well, yeah. It's literally all of those things. You really don't need to make this more complicated than it needs to be. Someone can be a murderous fucker. Someone else can be pushed and pushed and pushed until they commit unspeakable acts of violence. Understanding cause and effect does not equate to condoning it. It's simply how it works. Queen Anne's War and the other war in Europe that it sprouted from would continue until 17.

Thankfully, as we all know, this would be the last time an imperial war would blow up North America and drag everybody into a swirling torrent of violence, right? Yeah, it never happened again, actually. Yeah. North America is peaceful and doesn't have fucked up legacy as regards its relationships with colonialism or indigenous people. Yeah, that's why I went to public schools funded by the Iroquois Confederacy, right? Like, famously Michigan not quite colonized yet, but.

Yeah. In closing, I guess. That guy is staying and watched year the stock age should have probably stayed awake. The end. Yeah. Kind of fucked up that down Beckner would write an album about this.

It's not really what Queen Nair is about drunkenly burst into the ballroom to have a seance. So we apologize to the boat. But fellas, we do a thing called questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon.

Just five bucks a month gets you absolutely everything to include nearly a decade of back catalog stuff to include a lot of the stuff we just referenced in this episode. It also includes Discord access every regular episode a week early. First dibs on live show tickets and merch. It's you discounts on things that we sell in our Patreon store where we sell them other places. So do that.

This is also an independent show with no ads in the ever-shinking world of independent podcasts. And if you like to keep us that way, I know I would. that's how we do that. Or don't and leave us a review. It's your money you do with it what you want. Today's question is, you are being baptized into the Church of Eastern Horsodoxy. What are you being immersed in?

A, white monster. B, Fago. C. Buckfast. D. Some unholy combination of all of the above. Look, I want to say all of the above. But I also don't want to take Fago. That is truly the juggalo liquid.

We cannot take that. And Buckfast, the less we say about that, the better. I would also say white monster. You know what? I feel like it's got to be white monster. No, I disagree. You need to add a different one.

A different flavor of monster? No, you need apple cider. Alcoholic appric cider because horses love apples. Okay. Let's take a white monster. Let's add a cider to it. Calvedos can be your communion wine or something. It's got to be made out of apples.

Sorry. Well, if you add apple cider to white monster. Then you have the communion wine of Eastern Horsodoxy. Okay. This means that we're now going to have to try this in precisely one week, when I'm in London. Yeah. You will also get to

buy some Eastern Horstodoxy merch and you can float yourself into a sea of white monster. I would say I'll take a different track. I would think it will be the perfect ratio

to create the perfect salinity for you to float of original recipe Jack 3D mixed in a giant baptismal font. Jack 3D with white monster.

Yeah. Oh. If you, If you survive, you enter the priesthood. Speaking of things we'll get to try next week. I can't, yeah, exactly. I feel like the Jack 3D monster combination, that is for the priesthood.

Like, just to be a layperson and be baptized in, I'm with Nate. That has to be apple cider white monster. Because we got to have some horse flavor in there. We got to have white monster. Yeah, but you don't want it to be disgusting. So, you know, it's got to be tolerable. Makes in a scoop from the bucket of horse electrolyte.

It's just, original jacked 3D plus white monster. It's like someone's making gains, but it's not you or your muscles. It's your kidney stones. Hey, your heart's a muscle, Nate.

That is like the equivalent of Marlboro Reds being called cowboy killers. Like, that is the modern equivalent of Jimbrows, like just killing themselves unnecessarily. Yeah. I mean, look,

I'm not too into heroin. I got to find my own Casabian way out of this portal coil, right? This is like everyone's so into wellness. now nobody drinks anymore. Everyone's really into fitness. I'm just imagining your dad getting summoned in a seance and he's hoarding all his heroin like smog with his gold coins.

Who disturbs my slumber? Except the coins are also just like the coins with chocolate inside. I was going to say, when you went to with your dad to buy heroin is like, if he gave you loads of sugar, that kind of like post intense sugar rush crash that kids experience is the kid's equivalent of like taking hair. Yeah, weekends with dad was always special. Yeah, I don't know. I have memories of being a preteen and having sleepovers with my friends where we like drank

six cans of coke apiece and like the level of like weird fuckness you got off that. Like I don't think it's, it's less to do with opiates. It's more to do with a, it's sort of like, I don't know. I can't even think of an appropriate drug. So maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. Yeah, we would always do like a ton of caffeine in various forms. Like this is before energy drinks really, but jolt existed. Yeah, Joel.

Yeah. Surge also, because search was insanely caffeinated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You shouldn't let kids have that stuff. It's bad. I remember as a kid, staying up super late to watch Chuck LaDelle versus Rampage Jackson.

I think that was the fight or might have been like an earlier Chuck Ladell fight because my two brothers were watching it. And I drank like 12 cans of coke. And the feeling of that surging through my body and then the experience immediately afterwards is like a kid's version of doing a speedball. My memory is basically being like 10 or 11 and yeah, drinking about 64 ounces of caffeinated cola and staying up to watch the X-Files. And this other show they had called sightings that came on afterwards on Fox in New Mexico.

That was all about like paranormal shit and like alien abductions and haunted houses. And it was like that and sleeping on a foldout couch in this tiny ass house that I share with my family. So you know what? Deep down, maybe what I actually needed was something more dissociative. Maybe they should have given me child heroin. I would be less annoying. I might be better at podcasting. Speaking of podcasting,

you guys host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. Trash future. Killsenames Spahn. No gods, no mayors. And I'm in a band called Second Homes

and our first album is out on band camp. We'll link to it in the show notes as well. It's available to stream for free. But if you like it and you want to buy it, you can buy it on band camp.

Beneath skin, show about the history of everything told to the history of tattooing. Blood work. Show about the economy of violence. I have a studio in London. If you need a place to record or whatever, shoot me a message.

And I also have like a billion podcasts in pre-production. So keep an eye out for those. This is the only show that I host and I've already given you the pitch. If you've made it this far, I love you. Buy my book. It's out May 29th. If you like fantasy.

I feel like military stories. If you just like things that I work on, consider buying it. It's paperback ebook, audiobook. The audiobook is read by me. So you get to hear even more of my voice. And thank you so much for listening, making everything we do possible. And until next

time, strap on those snowshoes and don't do something evil. Use your snow shoes for good.