AUTHOR’S WORD
Book Three of The Watertown Chronicles is based on the life of the oldest of William Shattuck’s daughters, my ancestry now relived in the fictional Sherborn families. When I read that Susanna had moved to Groton, a small trading post at the northwestern edge of the Middlesex county in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I found her character most challenging. What would lead the daughter of a successfully established and prosperous man to move from the comforts she’d grown to expect, to pioneer in Indian lands? Her marriage, of course. While Joseph Morse, the man she married, was the landless son of a Watertown Puritan family, his uncle John Morse was a prominent land holder in Groton. The young couple might have moved to Groton to advance their standing. Joseph Morse could only achieve “freeman” status and emancipation if he owned land, which was becoming scarce (and therefore expensive) in Watertown.
From such a match, my fiction began to grow. Two factors might advance it. First, my fictional Sherborn daughter would need to be financially independent to marry a landless farmer with genteel leanings. This gave birth to Suzanne Sherborn-Morse, the midwife. One occupation open to women in a Puritan community would have been midwifery, and in communities where births averaged ten per woman, midwifery could support her in comfort. That independence would allow her a luxury denied other women in her community, the second factor. She could marry for love. She may have been passionately in love with the landless Joseph, at least, enough to follow him to the Massachusetts northwestern frontier.
This occupation would also ensure she’d not been a sheltered child but had been put out to apprentice at a tender age. Sending children to live with near relatives or putting them in apprenticeships was standard practice for English kin of the time, even the middle classes, and with such large families, it made sense. Being fostered would account for a thin veneer of connection to both her religion and her family. For my fiction, it could establish her character: independent, adventurous, open-to-the-new, mercurial. And, most importantly, alienated, given to bouts of loneliness and self-doubt.
At the book’s start, the fictional couple move with their first two children to Groton, Massachusetts in 1666, eleven years after The Plantation of Groton’s incorporation. Originally a trading post at the confluence of Nod Creek and the Nashua River in 1655, where peaceful Nashaway Indians have a summer plantation west of the river, liberal land grants assured the town’s fast growth. These facts are the foundations for a historical novel that shows the friction presented by colonial progression from trading post to annexed territory, the changes resisted by occupying tribes that led to war.
While I could access digitized texts of all the town council meetings in this period, that narrative source ends after the Indian attack in March 1676, not to be resumed until the town was rebuilt two years later. Because Joseph Morse’s uncle was the council clerk and responsible for recording the minutes of the council’s meetings, I had a source for information on the town business, taxes, garrisons and the like. However, my narrator and her clients, Puritan women bounded by the gendered restrictions of their time, are party to the town’s business only secondhand from their husbands. The fictional Dancing Light, as the powerful shaman and sauksqua (woman leader) of the Nashua, is the only exception to the gendered distribution of news. S I modeled this fictional character on texts describing the sauksqua Weetamoo.
I was also fortunate to have original texts regarding four other people of the time. Reverend Samuel Willard, his father, Major Simon Willard, the minister’s servant girl, Elizabeth Knapp, and Thomas Tarball all left tracks in recorded history. The minister also left texts for his sermons and an amazingly detailed account of Elizabeth’s bewitchment. Assuming that in a town comprising fifty families at the peak of its prosperity, Suzanne would know all four, I found ways to involve her in their histories. I took liberties with making the Tarball family Suzanne’s anathema. In history, Thomas Tarball, a Groton selectman, was convicted of selling alcohol to the Abenaki Indians near Groton and served as witness to a Penacook trading post murder (the guilty party was a drunken Indian). I thought he was a fitting enemy to the midwife and her friend Dancing Light. Ironically, in 1707, during the French and Indian War, when Indians again attack and burn Groton to the ground, Abenaki abduct three Tarball children and adopt them into the tribe. The Abenaki Indians have a branch that carries the last name Tarball.
Since Groton was one of the frontier towns that was obliterated in King Philip’s war, Suzanne’s story takes me to the heart of the Indian conflict. I, like most authors who write of this period of history, struggle to do justice to both sides in King Philip’s war. As Jill Lepore states in her work, In the Name of War, history is written from the biased viewpoint of the victors. In the case of wars with Natives, who left few written accounts beyond those connected to land deeds, writers must search eyewitness accounts, transcribed oral histories, and read between the lines to find the truth. Fortunately, I’ve found several histories that provide views from “other” viewpoints than white European settlers, in this case, a history of indigenous peoples.
Since many of these histories have been published since I began this project in 2014, I am caught up in a constant revision to my narratives. I am grateful to have read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s history, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which won the 2015 American Book Award. She models the progress of colonization in five steps that mirror the history of Groton, Massachusetts. She writes that colonies usually begin as trading posts, where traders and natives stand, if not on equal footing, at least where both groups need and benefit from one another. The two meet and exchange the shallowest knowledge of each other. In my novel, Suzanne stands in a similar relationship in her first encounter with the Native American medicine woman, Dancing Light. The two medicine women have mutually beneficial knowledge and initiate trades. Suzanne can offer white medicine for white men’s diseases; Dancing Light can introduce her to new cures and sources for herbals that they both use. These enlightened women seek knowledge beyond their extensive training that can benefit their respective communities.
In the second stage of colonization, once the transient and seasonal traders are followed by permanent settlers, the social dynamics shift. With the settlements now encroaching on native lands and threatening native ways and means, both communities begin to raise defenses. The natives are no longer trading on equal grounds as the trades become increasingly European goods for Indian land. However, the deeds show two understandings of the land use. The natives grant the settlers “kin” status; they allow the settlers to come and go freely, to plant and build. The settlers believe they own the land, can improve and sell it. The natives resist; the unsettled communities lose mutual trust, begin to arm. The Europeans drill militia to protect their new land holdings. The native warriors outfit themselves with English guns, learn to shoot and make ammunition, in debt to the overcharging English, debts paid with yet more land. Though Dancing Light can invite Suzanne to her Nashaway birth and naming rite, Suzanne cannot repay with an invitation to a christening unless she converts her. The wheels of separation begin to turn, reveal their diverging paths.
In stage three of colonization, the settlers and natives try to work through their differences with treaties and laws, the colonizers seeking control of the indigenous peoples, the Indians resisting. Incorporation brings laws banning the sale of guns and rum to natives. Once the settlers succeed in converting their neighbors to Christianity, the resistance escalates. Narratives on each side debase the “others.” Though Suzanne and Dancing Light try to work through their differences, the dehumanizing narratives of their respective communities dash their hopes. Still not breaking their bonds, the escalation of animosity in their communities’ tugs at their loyalties. The two women metaphorically swear a kind of fealty to each other. But just as treaties are broken, the feeblest attempts at protection turn into disaster for anyone resisting the rise of conflicts.
Step four is the outbreak of extreme violence. The Indians want to drive the Europeans to the sea and reclaim their territories. The European conquerors want to drive the Indians from their settlements and claim the land coast to coast. Both sides sink into savagery, no longer following the rules for warfare in their respective cultures that respect civilians. Caught in the throes of madness, the two women flee: Dancing Light journeys north with her tribe to avoid any alliance with the warring factions; Suzanne returns to Watertown to escape the censorship of the Groton townspeople on a trail of shame.
At the last and final step, the Indians are removed from their homelands and the settlers move back into the territories they’ve wrenched from them. That isn’t the end of Suzanne’s story, who is left to wrestle with her conscience, newly awakened by the devastation that surrounds her and the need to give up her alliances to embrace life in its raw possibility.
Book Three of The Watertown Chronicles is based on the life of the oldest of William Shattuck’s daughters, my ancestry now relived in the fictional Sherborn families. When I read that Susanna had moved to Groton, a small trading post at the northwestern edge of the Middlesex county in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I found her character most challenging. What would lead the daughter of a successfully established and prosperous man to move from the comforts she’d grown to expect, to pioneer in Indian lands? Her marriage, of course. While Joseph Morse, the man she married, was the landless son of a Watertown Puritan family, his uncle John Morse was a prominent land holder in Groton. The young couple might have moved to Groton to advance their standing. Joseph Morse could only achieve “freeman” status and emancipation if he owned land, which was becoming scarce (and therefore expensive) in Watertown.
From such a match, my fiction began to grow. Two factors might advance it. First, my fictional Sherborn daughter would need to be financially independent to marry a landless farmer with genteel leanings. This gave birth to Suzanne Sherborn-Morse, the midwife. One occupation open to women in a Puritan community would have been midwifery, and in communities where births averaged ten per woman, midwifery could support her in comfort. That independence would allow her a luxury denied other women in her community, the second factor. She could marry for love. She may have been passionately in love with the landless Joseph, at least, enough to follow him to the Massachusetts northwestern frontier.
This occupation would also ensure she’d not been a sheltered child but had been put out to apprentice at a tender age. Sending children to live with near relatives or putting them in apprenticeships was standard practice for English kin of the time, even the middle classes, and with such large families, it made sense. Being fostered would account for a thin veneer of connection to both her religion and her family. For my fiction, it could establish her character: independent, adventurous, open-to-the-new, mercurial. And, most importantly, alienated, given to bouts of loneliness and self-doubt.
At the book’s start, the fictional couple move with their first two children to Groton, Massachusetts in 1666, eleven years after The Plantation of Groton’s incorporation. Originally a trading post at the confluence of Nod Creek and the Nashua River in 1655, where peaceful Nashaway Indians have a summer plantation west of the river, liberal land grants assured the town’s fast growth. These facts are the foundations for a historical novel that shows the friction presented by colonial progression from trading post to annexed territory, the changes resisted by occupying tribes that led to war.
While I could access digitized texts of all the town council meetings in this period, that narrative source ends after the Indian attack in March 1676, not to be resumed until the town was rebuilt two years later. Because Joseph Morse’s uncle was the council clerk and responsible for recording the minutes of the council’s meetings, I had a source for information on the town business, taxes, garrisons and the like. However, my narrator and her clients, Puritan women bounded by the gendered restrictions of their time, are party to the town’s business only secondhand from their husbands. The fictional Dancing Light, as the powerful shaman and sauksqua (woman leader) of the Nashua, is the only exception to the gendered distribution of news. S I modeled this fictional character on texts describing the sauksqua Weetamoo.
I was also fortunate to have original texts regarding four other people of the time. Reverend Samuel Willard, his father, Major Simon Willard, the minister’s servant girl, Elizabeth Knapp, and Thomas Tarball all left tracks in recorded history. The minister also left texts for his sermons and an amazingly detailed account of Elizabeth’s bewitchment. Assuming that in a town comprising fifty families at the peak of its prosperity, Suzanne would know all four, I found ways to involve her in their histories. I took liberties with making the Tarball family Suzanne’s anathema. In history, Thomas Tarball, a Groton selectman, was convicted of selling alcohol to the Abenaki Indians near Groton and served as witness to a Penacook trading post murder (the guilty party was a drunken Indian). I thought he was a fitting enemy to the midwife and her friend Dancing Light. Ironically, in 1707, during the French and Indian War, when Indians again attack and burn Groton to the ground, Abenaki abduct three Tarball children and adopt them into the tribe. The Abenaki Indians have a branch that carries the last name Tarball.
Since Groton was one of the frontier towns that was obliterated in King Philip’s war, Suzanne’s story takes me to the heart of the Indian conflict. I, like most authors who write of this period of history, struggle to do justice to both sides in King Philip’s war. As Jill Lepore states in her work, In the Name of War, history is written from the biased viewpoint of the victors. In the case of wars with Natives, who left few written accounts beyond those connected to land deeds, writers must search eyewitness accounts, transcribed oral histories, and read between the lines to find the truth. Fortunately, I’ve found several histories that provide views from “other” viewpoints than white European settlers, in this case, a history of indigenous peoples.
Since many of these histories have been published since I began this project in 2014, I am caught up in a constant revision to my narratives. I am grateful to have read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s history, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which won the 2015 American Book Award. She models the progress of colonization in five steps that mirror the history of Groton, Massachusetts. She writes that colonies usually begin as trading posts, where traders and natives stand, if not on equal footing, at least where both groups need and benefit from one another. The two meet and exchange the shallowest knowledge of each other. In my novel, Suzanne stands in a similar relationship in her first encounter with the Native American medicine woman, Dancing Light. The two medicine women have mutually beneficial knowledge and initiate trades. Suzanne can offer white medicine for white men’s diseases; Dancing Light can introduce her to new cures and sources for herbals that they both use. These enlightened women seek knowledge beyond their extensive training that can benefit their respective communities.
In the second stage of colonization, once the transient and seasonal traders are followed by permanent settlers, the social dynamics shift. With the settlements now encroaching on native lands and threatening native ways and means, both communities begin to raise defenses. The natives are no longer trading on equal grounds as the trades become increasingly European goods for Indian land. However, the deeds show two understandings of the land use. The natives grant the settlers “kin” status; they allow the settlers to come and go freely, to plant and build. The settlers believe they own the land, can improve and sell it. The natives resist; the unsettled communities lose mutual trust, begin to arm. The Europeans drill militia to protect their new land holdings. The native warriors outfit themselves with English guns, learn to shoot and make ammunition, in debt to the overcharging English, debts paid with yet more land. Though Dancing Light can invite Suzanne to her Nashaway birth and naming rite, Suzanne cannot repay with an invitation to a christening unless she converts her. The wheels of separation begin to turn, reveal their diverging paths.
In stage three of colonization, the settlers and natives try to work through their differences with treaties and laws, the colonizers seeking control of the indigenous peoples, the Indians resisting. Incorporation brings laws banning the sale of guns and rum to natives. Once the settlers succeed in converting their neighbors to Christianity, the resistance escalates. Narratives on each side debase the “others.” Though Suzanne and Dancing Light try to work through their differences, the dehumanizing narratives of their respective communities dash their hopes. Still not breaking their bonds, the escalation of animosity in their communities’ tugs at their loyalties. The two women metaphorically swear a kind of fealty to each other. But just as treaties are broken, the feeblest attempts at protection turn into disaster for anyone resisting the rise of conflicts.
Step four is the outbreak of extreme violence. The Indians want to drive the Europeans to the sea and reclaim their territories. The European conquerors want to drive the Indians from their settlements and claim the land coast to coast. Both sides sink into savagery, no longer following the rules for warfare in their respective cultures that respect civilians. Caught in the throes of madness, the two women flee: Dancing Light journeys north with her tribe to avoid any alliance with the warring factions; Suzanne returns to Watertown to escape the censorship of the Groton townspeople on a trail of shame.
At the last and final step, the Indians are removed from their homelands and the settlers move back into the territories they’ve wrenched from them. That isn’t the end of Suzanne’s story, who is left to wrestle with her conscience, newly awakened by the devastation that surrounds her and the need to give up her alliances to embrace life in its raw possibility.
