The death of Rale by no means ended the hostilities during Dummer’s War. In early September of 1724, Pegwackets captured three Englishmen near Dunstable, Massachusetts (now Nasha, New Hampshire), and then killed most of a posse of ten sent to retrieve them. To rid this frontier region of this menace, the Massachusetts government authorized the organization of volunteer companies that would be paid by scalp bounties.
John Lovewell, whose maternal grandparents had been killed and scalped by Indians, offered to raise a militia to seek these bounties and was commissioned a captain. He would subsequently lead three bloody expeditions into Peqwacket territory, missions in which “New England’s prosecution of the war sank to a gristly low”.
In his first expedition in December 1724, Lovewell and a militia of 30 men trekked to the north of Lake Winnipesaukee in the White Mountains, where they came upon a wigwam and killed and scalped a man and took his son captive. In his second expedition, he led a militia of 87 again into the White Mountains, tromping through the snowy, winter forest for about a month until they came upon a group of ten men sleeping at the head of Salmon Falls River. These men were summarily shot and scalped as they awoke in horror. Upon the militia’s return to Boston, they paraded through town displaying their scalps, with Lovewell wearing a wig of several upon his head. It proved to be a very profitable trip, yielding £100 per scalp for a total of £1,000!
Now a hero, Lovewell’s luck would run out in his third expedition, celebrated as the “Fight at Pegwacket”. Lovewell and 46 volunteers headed out on April 16, 1725, towards the headwaters of the Saco River, where they knew a Pegwacket Village was. When the expedition had reached Ossipee Pond in New Hampshire, however, four of their group became quite ill. To let them recuperate, Lovewell had his men build a small fortification for them and left a surgeon and a portion of their supplies there, expecting to retrieve them on their return. They then continued on towards the village and camped about two miles away.
The next morning, they heard a lone gunshot in the distance, hid their packs in a patch of bracken ferns, and marched towards the sound, encountering a lone Indian heading back to his village. The man was killed and scalped by their chaplain, Frye, but before he died, he wounded Lowell and one other man.
While Lovewell and his men were chasing the lone Indian, a group of Pegwackets led by sagamore, Paugus, discovered their packs and hid in the weeds to wait for them to return. When Lovewell’s group headed back to retrieve their packs, they were ambushed by these Pegwackets, screaming and shooting. Lovewell and his men managed to drive them back, but the Indians regrouped and again charged, this time with greater success. Nine men were shot dead, including Lovewell, and several others were badly wounded. Seeing total victory within reach, the Indians tried to surround the survivors, but Ensign Wyman, now in charge, had the men fall back toward a pond, with an impenetrable bog protecting them on one side. The Indians then hid in the brush and kept up a siege for eight hours. ”They wailed, howled like wolves, and barked like dogs. The defenders answered back defiantly.”
The Pegwacket continued to pepper the group with sporadic fire, and in mid-afternoon, they managed to kill Frye. In retaliation, Ensign Wyman crept up near the Indians and fired upon them, killing their leader, Chief Paugus. Leaderless, the Amerindians left the battleground, carrying their wounded. Lovewell’s surviving men then began a painful retreat homeward; all told, ten of them had been killed, 14 were wounded, one was missing, and only nine were unharmed.
The missing man, Solomon Kies, had dragged himself badly wounded to the edge of a pond, where he hoped to immerse himself so that the Indians would not mutilate his body after his death. Miraculously, he discovered a birchbark canoe at the edge of the pond, traveled in it to its other side, and there gathered his strength, finally managing to walk back to the little fortress at Ossipee Pond.
As the other surviving men struggled forward, they left six mortally wounded men behind. It took them four days to reach Ossipee Pond, where they found that the men left behind, frightened by the report of Solomon Kies, had fled, leaving behind only a little bread and pork. The starving group gobbled it up and managed to limp the rest of the way home, where they were welcomed as heroes.
A large group of men would later return to the scene of the battle and bury the dead, carving their names on trees. The Pegwacket left for good, never to return.
Generations of New Englanders would romanticize Lovewell’s battle. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “The Battle of Lovewell Pond,” and Henry David Thoreau included a reference to the confrontation in his book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers.” Both accounts totally ignored the “little” detail that Lovewell and his men had been on a scalp-hunting mission.
Illustration: Paugus’ death during Lovewell’s fight at Peqwacket. Engraving from John Gilmary Shea, A Child’s History of the United States. Hess and McDavitt 1872.
Bibliography:
Kidd, T. S. (2002) “The devil and Father Rallee”: The narration of Father Rale’s war in provincial Massachusetts. Historical Journal of Massachusetts.
Seymore, T. (2015) Scalp Bounties and Lovewell’s War. Fisherman’s Voice 20:1.
Turmoil in Dawnland 