Eunice Williams
During the Deerfield Massacre of 1704, the Massachusetts settlement of that name was raided on the night of February 29, by Mohawk and Abenaki warriors. More than fifty settlers were killed in the raid and were it not for the presence of French soldiers and missionaries there would have undoubtedly been more. The French wanted hostages, and forced the seizure of prisoners to be taken to posts near Quebec. Eunice was one hostage, along with her parents and those siblings which survived the attack. The Abenaki killed her mother during the march when she proved unable to keep up in the ice and deep snow.
Eunice was separated from her birth family after the survivors arrived near Quebec, and sent to a Catholic Mohawk village, where she was to be a replacement daughter to a woman who had lost her child to smallpox. In addition to being taught the ways of the Mohawk, the Puritan Eunice was indoctrinated into the catechism of the Catholic Church by French missionaries. Eventually baptized, she took the name Marguerite to supplement her Mohawk name of Waongote.
As the French hoped, though some of the captives were to remain with the Indians, willingly or reluctantly, the English soon entered negotiations to ransom as many as they could. Eunice was a descendant of Reverend Richard Mathers and her father was noted Puritan Minister John Williams, himself a hostage of the French. He attempted several times to negotiate with the Catholic French priests for her release, to no avail.
Once Williams himself was released, through a ransom paid to the French, he tried again to ransom his daughter, even visiting her on at least two occasions. He found to his undoubted dismay that his daughter, then in her mid-teens, was more Mohawk than English, and more Catholic than Protestant. He did not record his views on which was, in his opinion, worse.
When John Williams died in 1741, Eunice visited her birth relatives in Massachusetts, bringing with her an interpreter as by that time she could remember little English, speaking only French and Mohawk. Despite efforts by her surviving family to convince her to come home she never returned to live in the white settlements.